arts
Courtesy of Octavio Solis
Stations of the Border Cross Self-discovery and smoldering epiphanies in Octavio Solis’ memoir Retablos BY ROBERTO ONTIVEROS
I
n his literary debut Retablos: Stories From a Life Lived Along the Border, El Paso native Octavio Solis invites his audience to consider the ephemera of one’s adolescence as the essence of identity. The playwright-turned-memoirist accomplishes this by employing a folk Catholic tool for self-reflection: the retablo, the framed art behind an altar or, as he tells readers, “a devotional painting, usually laid on a small, thin plate 28
CURRENT | October 3-9, 2018 | sacurrent.com
of cheap, repurposed metal, in which a dire event is depicted — an accident, a crime, an illness, a calamity, some terrible rift in a person’s life, which they survive thanks to the intercession of the Divine.” Retablos offers a world wherein brown kids risk deportation when clowning around near the Rio Grande and aspirations of assimilation are shaped by the whipped-cream fantasies of a Herb Alpert album cover.
Solis sets all the secular stresses of border life on saintly display: the indignities masked in the dignity of work, the supermarket panic of spilled soda running down the leg of a bleeding woman trying to return Coke bottles for credit, petty candy-store theft and dirty disco clothes drying out for another sweaty night on the dance floor. In Retablos, undocumented immigrants weep in the sanctuary of a kitchen while legal Latinos covertly canoodle in the cotton fields. The most affecting character in Retablos, a book which features a pregnant streetwalker on Christmas Eve, is a recurring wraith called Demon, a Chicano changeling who haunts this morphic memoir as a symbol of refuse, refusal, and in the end, righteousness. Like a welfare state revision of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Demon explains that “his mother didn’t want him and it was his aunt that raised him from a baby, but she didn’t take care of him like she was supposed to. He had some checks coming every month from technology: “At once visual and literary, they record the crisis, the divine methe government and tía kept all the diation and the offering of thanks in money. Now she’s gone too and all he a single frame, thus forming a kind of has is her grave to visit.” flash-fiction account of an electrifying, The stories in Retablos are invigorating in their unapologetic economy and life-altering event. Solis makes it clear that he is meant intoxicating in the poetry of their morto learn from the retablos he has set al excesses. For the tales explore the up, to understand the mysteries of taboo of shame, the ultimate owning the mundane as both motivation to up — to crime, to lust, to envy, to innorise and incentive to make peace with cence turned evil, to classic Cain and Abel animosity, to disgust at poverty, to where he stands. On his understanding of the boranger over the limits of language and der, Solis writes: “One thing I have the fate of family and the meretricious learned from writing these retablos: pride of avoiding one’s past to better the shit on the border never changes. fake a future. There will always be those who want In a recurring section centered on a to come across, and those who want nameless runner, a local crazy who is to keep them where they are. The push dashing his life away and providing cuand pull, the friction rious self-discovery for between the tectonic our author, Solis writes: plates that are Mexico “Without turning his Retablos: Stories and the U.S. will always head, I feel his eyes blur From a Life Lived create mountains of in my direction for an Along the Border stress, dislocation and instant. This is my city, by Octavio Solis upheaval among the they seem to say. I run City Lights people who live there. and run but here I am. Maybe this is political, Where are you? What $15.95 after all, but I think it’s are you running from? 176 pages really a condition of Who left you behind?” our culture: it’s how we In sobering revelation live now, it is our parSolis understands the ticular mythology, replete with gods double-edged nature of self-regarding. and monsters, heroes and fallen angels, “It is then I see that pride and shame are troubadours and exiles.” the same sin. One diminishes my family There has never been a border book and the life they gave me, the other like Retablos, a collection of smolderdiminishes me.” ing epiphanies suffering the baptizing The author describes the religious waters of recall. art of retablos as a kind of instructive
