A Good Map of All Things Read online

  Praise for Alberto Álvaro Ríos

  A Small Story About the Sky

  “Rios evokes the mysterious and unexpected forces that dwell inside the familiar.”

  —Washington Post

  The Dangerous Shirt

  “Rios continually surprises us in the way he stretches the meaning of words, turning them this way and that.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Alberto Ríos is . . . arguably the best Latino poet writing in English today.”

  —Prairie Schooner

  The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body

  “Alberto Ríos is a poet of reverie and magical perception, and of the threshold between this world and the world just beyond.”

  —National Book Award Judges’ comments

  “Alberto Ríos is a poet of reverie. . . . Whether talking about the smell of food, the essence of a crow or a bear’s character or of hard-won human wisdom, Ríos writes in a serenely clear manner that enhances the drama in the quick scenes he summons up.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Alberto Ríos is the man you want to sit next to when it is time to hear a story.”

  —Southwest BookViews

  Other Books by Alberto Álvaro Ríos

  POETRY

  Not Go Away Is My Name

  A Small Story about the Sky

  The Dangerous Shirt

  The Theater of Night

  The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body

  Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses

  The Lime Orchard Woman

  Five Indiscretions

  Whispering to Fool the Wind

  Fiction

  The Curtain of Trees

  Pig Cookies

  The Iguana Killer

  Memoir

  Capirotada

  Limited Editions

  The Warrington Poems

  Sleeping on Fists

  Elk Heads on the Wall

  A Good Map of All Things

  Camino del Sol

  A Latina and Latino Literary Series

  A Good Map of All Things

  A Picaresque Novel

  Alberto Álvaro Ríos

  The University of Arizona Press

  www.uapress.arizona.edu

  © 2020 by Alberto Álvaro Ríos

  All rights reserved. Published 2020

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4103-4 (paper)

  Cover design by Leigh McDonald

  Cover photo by Dennis Alvear Perez

  Designed and typeset by Leigh McDonald in Acie WF (display) and Bell MT 10.5/15

  Illustrations on pp. viii, 106, and 139 by Jacqueline Balderrama; all other images are the author’s own.

  Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ríos, Alberto, author.

  Title: A good map of all things : a picaresque novel / Alberto Álvaro Ríos.

  Other titles: Camino del sol.

  Description: Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 2020. | Series: Camino del sol: a latina/latino literary series

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020010933 | ISBN 9780816541034 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns—Mexico—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | LCGFT: Picaresque fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.I587 G66 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010933

  Printed in the United States of America

  ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  For Lupita

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  The Business Card

  1. Dr. Bartolomeo’s Cure

  The Newspaper Story

  2. Lent and Given

  The Marriage Certificate

  3. Butter, Oranges, and Pink Coconut Candy

  The Poem

  4. A Century of Tears

  The Prayer

  5. The Asterisk Company

  The Obituary, the Proclamation of a Death

  6. The Night Miguel Torres Died

  The Song on the Radio

  7. Two Small Crimes

  Civil Registration

  8. Ten Seconds in Two Lives

  The Map

  9. Bernardo’s Corrido

  The Green Card

  10. One Tuesday in the Early Afternoon

  The Bill

  11. Licenciado Ubaldo Dos Santos, at Your Service

  The Birth Certificate

  12. Curandera

  The Photograph

  13. The History of History

  The Telegram

  14. The Five Visits of Archbishop Oswaldo Calderón

  The Letter

  Acknowledgments

  The following appeared in earlier versions:

  “A Century of Tears,” Indiana Review.

  “Un siglo de lágrimas,” La Palabra (Spanish).

  “Bernardo’s Corrido,” Orion.

  “El corrido de Bernardo,” La Palabra (Spanish).

  “Butter, Oranges, and Pink Coconut Candy,” Lake Effect.

  “Curandera,” Connecticut Review.

  “Dr. Bartolomeo’s Cure,” Lake Effect.

  “One Tuesday in the Early Afternoon,” Colorado Review.

  “Licenciado Ubaldo Dos Santos, at Your Service,” La Palabra (Spanish).

  “Ten Seconds in Two Lives,” New Letters.

  “The Asterisk Company,” Orion.

  “The Five Visits of Archbishop Oswaldo Calderón,” Connecticut Review.

  “The Night Miguel Torres Died,” Lake Effect.

  “Two Small Crimes,” Orion.

  I would like to sincerely thank the dedicated early readers, journal editors, and translators of the various segments in this book for their comments and gracious encouragement, and Arizona State University. Thanks especially to Jacqueline Balderrama and Irena Praitis.

  The Business Card

  So simple, we hand ourselves over to someone else, hoping to speak with them even when we are not in the room.

  When it works, it is equal to a trick of magic.

  1

  Dr. Bartolomeo’s Cure

  Narciso Bartolomeo did not start out wanting to be a doctor. He wanted to be something more enjoyable, suffering the belief that doctors only hurt people, which had been his own experience. He was born in a time when doctors did not have as many answers as degrees and certificates on their walls, and were mistrusted by almost everyone. An occasional cure—everyone expected that but ascribed it to luck. Doctors, they would say, as if it were a foul word, and shake their heads in disgust.

  A doctor’s lot had not much improved in the middle of this century as from the previous one. The twentieth century had promised everything, but once it got to work, the new century was just one more in a long line of disappointments. By its middle, it had brought war and promises. Some people thought of this as a century of tears. Narciso Bartolomeo, however, was of the opposite opinion, although he understood the vagaries of the wars in Europe and civil war here. But Narciso liked the new century’s ideas and was especially fond of its promises. His hope, in fact, was to live even into the next century, and to then be cured himself of whatever might ail him at the time. It was a strong loyalty he bore to the future, and he tried to give that feeling over to others whenever he could.

  Unfortunately, the workaday business of a doctor’s office had little patience for promises. A cut, an infection, some pain, broken bones, colds, aching muscles, more pain
—these made for a full day. And the larger issues, the chronic diseases and long deaths, the conditions people suffered, and big decisions that had to be made, all of this, all of it so regular—this began to define the years, like it or not.

  On the other hand, there were babies being born, and they would get to see so much of what he imagined. He took good care of them and understood that they would be the ones to take care of him, that somewhere among them all would be another Dr. Bartolomeo, and the thought excited him.

  In later years it became a tradition of Dr. Bartolomeo’s to stand before his office and announce the event on the day a baby was born. He took great pride in this, and his flourishes of description and destiny became increasingly grand. While Dr. Bartolomeo knew that the child would most likely be taken to Padre Nacho to be baptized, he thought of what he himself did as a kind of baptism as well, a baptism into the new century, so that he always made sure to find some way to mention the future and science in his proclamations. A small crowd would invariably gather, people coming home from work or simply in the vicinity doing errands, or even purposefully, and when he stopped speaking there would be applause. The baby’s father would sometimes follow, speaking his heart, his tongue perhaps loosened from having been already celebrating earlier in the day. It was a tradition that lasted for many years.

  Dr. Bartolomeo himself did not have time for creating his own child, or rather did not have time for the person who would bear him this child. His hours had grown exponentially through the years, and his hope for a normal life diminished at the same rate. With that understanding in mind, though it was not a bargain he had understood at the beginning, he worked all the more.

  Whenever he felt sorry for himself, he brought a new patient in, one more than he thought he could bear. This was not altogether an altruistic act, however. It was medicine he administered to himself in the sense that it was still irritation and resentment that he felt at that moment, but at least it was split between the two of them, and the patient got to see him who otherwise would have had to come back the next day. If he was a little brusque, he did not mean it, and the truth of that showed itself easily enough over the years. But it was a brusqueness, sometimes, that found its way into those long hours.

  More than that, however, was the other feeling, which guided him so much more happily, and that was the demeanor his patients had come to expect and look for, even in the brusqueness, and they were right to look for it. That was the medicine for him, their looking for it, their asking about the future of things. Their asking him to tell them where science stood on their personal and particular matter, or how long did he himself think a cure would take, and what would it be, did he have an idea—these questions were curatives for him, and sometimes for them as well, since simply talking about something sometimes helped. It might not be immediately clear, but everything had an answer. He believed it so much that they did, too.

  * * *

  Narciso had wanted to be a truck driver. He understood even as a child that taking things from one place and moving them to another made the world work. Taking watermelons from the field and delivering them to the mercado fixed the world—the watermelons were big and green and bursting, and by moving them, now people would get to eat them and get red all over their faces and spit seeds into the wind, which would make more watermelons. It made so much sense. Who would not want to be a truck driver?

  Soon enough Narciso saw that strategy at work in other things, in letters being carried from one person to the mail office, through Sr. Castillo, who carried these letters to people’s houses, and then to the people themselves. Narciso, at the moment he understood that connection, wanted to deliver mail and began to follow Sr. Castillo around town to see how things got done. One thing, he could see, led to another.

  In later years, when he was learning the science and medicine that would be his life, when he was being taught about blood in the body, he always imagined it—and all the other things the body circulated around itself—he imagined all of it as Sr. Castillo walking around town. It made his studies easier because he could see everything so clearly. He simply assigned the names of people’s houses and businesses to different parts of the body—the head was the post office itself, which luckily enough was next to the telephone company, the ears. The brain was his own office, an indulgence that he said to himself simply gave him his bearings in this mapping endeavor. Ubaldo Dos Santos’s house, the neck. The lungs were all of Miguel Torres’s work, all those places to live, those small houses and connecting streets. And so on. The feet, so far away, those were Cayetano Belmares’s lands, the orchard on one side and the dairy and crop fields on the other.

  It was a good map of all things, and it helped him to remember both the workings of the body and something of the workings of the town itself. For a while, he believed that he was onto his first discovery, that there was something bigger, a bigger idea in all of this, a town like a body, but he hadn’t had time yet to work it out. The circulation itself of both the body and the town quickly took up the time he thought he would have for such thinking.

  But soon enough Narciso saw the importance of that movement in all things, and how things needed to be connected and in good repair in order to keep the energy and meaning of that movement. Towns needed roads and workers and the post office. In people, when things stopped moving that were expected to arrive elsewhere—blood, for example, well, trouble began. And if a body were like a town, then perhaps it was like a country, or like a hemisphere, or the world itself. The idea made him giddy when he thought about it, and tongue-tied when he tried to explain it to anyone else.

  City planning, thought Narciso—perhaps that would be another thing he should investigate.

  * * *

  It was science and cities, the future, everything getting clearer, as if a great cloud were rising off the landscape, letting everyone see into the encroaching distance.

  Narciso often had such conversations with the only other person who understood these things and thought this way, Ignacio Belmares, who went about building things and solving problems for the town. Narciso saw his own work in a similar light, building healthy bodies and solving medical problems. Both men fixed things and made the world work better.

  When they reached this point in conversation, as they invariably did, the delight Narciso and Ignacio both felt was palpable, but the sanctity and decorum of science itself kept them from bursting out into joyous laughter. Reserve was of utmost importance—manners, the proper ways to do things. Otherwise, people in a hurry, or too loud or inattentive, made mistakes.

  Narciso and Ignacio were invariably drawn to what made them happy as that particular night wore on, but reluctant—the felicitous moment once reached—to do much more than nod in a knowing way, smile, and take a drink of liqueur, preferably something from a faraway place, which helped them to dream of bigger things.

  To that end, they formed a public science society, the first of its kind in town, and the first in the whole region as well, for that matter. At its height, the society counted nine members, though Narciso and Ignacio were the only two who showed up with regularity. For the others, apparently, so many things came up—you know how it is, they would say—that regular meetings proved difficult.

  Of course, everyone wanted to be part of this enterprise, now called the Forward Science Society, not being able to agree on a single scientist to honor but all in agreement about the modern sensibility they were discussing. And many more than nine claimed to be part of the group because it clearly spoke to the intelligence of the town.

  The activity of the society, however, most often came down to a conversation between Narciso and Ignacio, to which the others in attendance would defer with small agreements and raised eyebrows as their part of the conversation. Most of them would leave early, but these conversations between Narciso and Ignacio often went well into the late hours of darkness and never bored the two main participants, even as they were surprised to find
themselves the only two shaking hands to say good night for the evening.

  * * *

  Narciso’s family came from another place, his grandparents first from Italy, then his parents from South America, coming north slowly, one town at a time, doing work as tailors but always getting restless, making their way finally to this northern frontier, this wild Sonoran north that they had heard about, where everything was possible—and that was part of Narciso’s story, part of how he was made. Perhaps it explained everything. His family came to this town to make things better for themselves, much the same way that Narciso now felt the echo of that effort, trying in his case to make things better in all ways.

  His parents had passed away some years ago now, together. They left him enough so that he could pursue his schooling, but that was it. He was not related to anybody, so there was nobody either to help him or to hinder him. This was his life, alone, for good or for bad.

  Narciso did not dwell on the past and made the most of what was offered, learning the lessons his parents had passed on to him. His family, it seemed to him, was from everywhere and knew a little bit about everything, which had been exciting to him. But small things, new things, things that his parents talked about that they had seen in their travels, these were what interested Narciso most of all. Machines to make coffee better or contraptions that helped a person sleep more comfortably or huge, golden hot-air balloons that carried people underneath them as if they were in cars but in the sky. Recipes and maps and hundred-color quilts his parents made from materials they had gathered over all these years—all these small bits of flotsam and jetsam, the sparkling gleanings gathered from a world that tantalized Narciso with their small stories and big promises: all this made him.

  But paying attention, paying attention when there was something worthy, even if someone else thought it inconsequential, that is what drew him to science, and as one of its offshoots, medicine. Narciso’s incessant questions about places on maps or how particular ingredients combined to make exact tastes and memorable flavors, all of this drew him down a pathway.