MARY

CRISTINA GARCIA

Cristina Garcia has stopped taking pictures.
    In the nineties, Garcia traveled her native Cuba frequently. Her first visit to the island as an adult had inspired her, in part, to write her debut novel Dreaming in Cuban, a National Book Award nominee in 1992. Fed by a continuing obsession and bursts of immersion in the life of Cubans, Garcia used Cuba as the heart of her next two novels The Aguero Sisters (1997) and Monkey Hunting (2003).
    And as she visited, like most tourists, she took pictures. Pictures of everything—the family, the faces, the landscape where she might have grown up amongst had her parents not left during the tumult that followed the Revolution. When she returned to the United States, she had rolls of film. But when the pictures came back, Garcia was disappointed. Not just disappointed—depressed. Not by the color, lighting, poor wardrobe choices, or bad angles. It was what she didn't see that hurt. Flat images failed to live up to this new thing—the amalgam of visuals, memories, and distortions—that she had brought back in her mind.
    Today Garcia is preparing to release her fourth novel A Handbook for Luck (2007). It's her first novel in four years, a period in which she also authored a children's book, a young adult novel, and edited a new anthology, Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicana and Chicano Literature.
    A Handbook for Luck weaves together narratives and families from Cuba, El Salvador, and Iran. Garcia creates a Tolstoy-like plot that examines the bonds of family, the power of regret, and the split-second decisions that can bring people together or tear them apart.
    Jason Sattler, who was a student in Garcia's workshop at St. Mary's College of California (probably her favorite student, but he didn't ask), spoke to Cristina Garcia about her writing process, Cuba, Iran, and the magical way her fiction merges desire, culture, and character to create something new.

Jason Sattler
February 2007
Moraga, California

MARY Magazine: Structurally, how does A Handbook for Luck differ from your last novel Monkey Hunting, your intergenerational epic about immigration and emigration between Cuba and the continent of Asia?

"You just have to be there to receive. You're not standing over things with a whip."

Christina Garcia: During Monkey Hunting, I was intrigued by this notion of essentiality. I wanted to tell a story with only what you needed to know and nothing more, not an extra word. Not one sentence more that you needed to understand this character in this sort of minimalist way. I was taken with the notion of a minimalist epic.
    And with A Handbook for Luck, I wanted it to be a little bit more random to deal with notions of chance and luck. I wanted to drop in on crucial days, but also on ordinary days. In the opening, we're kind of dropped in on a typical day in Marta's life, kind of a typical day in Enrique's life, a not-typical day in Leila's life. I wanted to almost have this random slipping into their lives and trying to glean the rest from what we are able to learn from one exposure. I wanted to see what I could deal out by trusting my intuition about where that would go rather than having some grand scheme for it, which was my approach for Monkey Hunting. There it was more that concept of essentiality. Here it's more about chance and even bluffing. There are a lot of poker terms for what's happening in this book, the folding and the bluffing.

MM: As I was reading, I was amazed by what was going on in the character Enrique's mind. It's this gambler's mind, but in a very disciplined way. He's so intense and yet his father, who is this outlandish character, is oblivious to it. He never knows what his child is thinking.

CG: He thinks what's going on with him is enough for everybody.

MM: Does the way Fernando, Enrique's father, adopts the persona of this Chinese court magician, was this a comment on immigration? This sense of recreating who you are when you are already fully formed as an adult?

CG: Yes, he is a bit of a typical immigrant that way. Even though he's going back to the nineteenth century and conjuring up this new self, this new American self. I like that. I hadn't quite thought of it that way, but this is a book of immigrants. Immigrant tales. Immigrant reinvention. Immigrant reconnections. But I also think he's kind of the quintessential American, living in Las Vegas, the quintessential made-up city in the desert. Las Vegas was made up out of nothing. And here's this guy who finds a home there. There is that delusion or illusion of America offering this chance to become a new person.

MM: Whereas his son is almost the opposite. He seems to not want to have any personality.

CG: Almost in reaction to his father, who is so bombastic. He's almost a ballast to his father, to some extent.

MM: Evaristo, this character in A Handbook for Luck, he's such a sensitive guy, he basically climbs a tree to escape this horrible life around him. And his sister Marta is so tough. I love that we get these peeks into Evaristo's perspectives throughout the story. I wondered if any of the pieces came to you in different perspectives.

CG: It's interesting you bring this up because the end of the book was originally the beginning of the book. What's now the epilogue was the prologue, and it's one of the only bits that did not change at all. Evaristo was the one that came to me first. But I think I see him—to the extent I understand it—I think I see him as a testigo, a witness. In his crazy, little prose poemy pieces that he's trying to give voice to the inexplicable, to this violence and this horror. And he absorbs it, and that's part of what contributes to his instability. But I think we hear him in the first person all throughout, but when he goes to the third person at the end, it almost authenticates the history and the incomprehensible to some degree. Even though he himself can't give language, he's trapped in this little four-door house in the woods. It's like someone else has taken his story. Told in the third person, it becomes a part of history.
    Now, I can't pretend that I thought this all through as I was writing. It just kind of comes together intuitively.

MM: There are these hilarious scenes where you have the nanny of the house forced to take swimming lessons. That seemed so LA to me. Was that based on something you heard?

CG: I hadn't heard of that specifically. But there are so many pools and so much anxiety about drowning kids. It's something I lived with. We had a pool, and I was a wreck. Pilar at four was having swimming lessons. You know, a lot of Salvadorian women I knew who were babysitters, a lot of them didn't swim. They went to the river to wash clothes; they weren't practicing the butterfly stroke. Suddenly they're in charge of these kids. But I'd never heard of anyone who was forced to take swimming lessons.

MM: I love the little gem-like aphorisms that your characters think in. And then Leila's doctor seems to speak to her in aphorisms. I wonder how you tie these generalized insights so closely to your characters.

CG: It's part of immersion into character and the things that sort of bubble up when you're way below the surface with them. You just have to be there to receive. You're not standing over things with a whip. It's not that heavy-duty consciousness at work. It's a lot of unconsciousness, a lot of surrender. It's a lot of mystery that goes on. With these other cultures, it's a tremendous amount of reading. I read everything I could about Iran, contemporary and older stuff to late 1800s. Persian history. Firouzeh, she's a poet with a tragic history. A little bit of an Anne Sexton-type for Iran. I read oral histories and memoirs, all these things to build upon. I just immersed myself. At one point in this novel, I was just writing one character at a time, so each could feel like a novella and stand on its own. I would spend months only on Leila's restaurants. I was only eating in Persian restaurants and watching Persian movies. It's really an experiment in international living, especially because I couldn't go there. I tried. I tried to get international visas three times. So when you're living it that way, the characters do come out. You just have to have that catcher's mitt.

MM: Is that catcher's mitt on only when you're at the desk or all day?

CG: Mostly when I'm in it. Because when I'm out in the world I'm tucking things away. I'm not really taking notes out in the world. I trust my own distortions. Or I hope to trust them. It's like me. I stopped taking photographs years ago, because nothing ever . . . Like I'd go to Cuba and take all these photographs. I'd bring them home, and I'd just be devastated. It was so disappointing. It was nothing like the way I remembered it.

MM: When I was watching Almodovar's film, Volver, I couldn't help but think about your book and how there's almost a new thing happening in Magical Realism, where characters, like Fernando who is explicitly a magician, are appropriating the sense of magic and using it to their advantage.

CG: I saw that. I loved the mother, who's pretending to be a ghost for years. All the characters are invested in it in one way or another.

MM: Do you see this conscious use of magic by characters in real life as Post-Magical Realism?

CG: In a way, it might be. I was going to say that I think I'm moving away from that. That kind of Eastern European, South American Magical Realism, that there's a lot of in Dreaming in Cuban and the Aguero Sisters and a little bit in Monkey Hunting. But then I realized that in this new book I'm working on I have this waitress who speaks to her dead brother. So, I haven't gone away from it completely.
    I like the notion of co-opting the idea and turning it into something else that you don't particularly expect. There aren't any flying chickens here or ghosts. Everything is from their imagination, yet it's as vivid and surreal as anything you can come up with. There's talking trees. I mean, there's a lot of strange stuff. So, I don't know. I have this sort of notion of really adhering closely to the edges of worlds, borderlands, where things become remotely possible to impossible. I love those lines, and I think of them as perforated, a little bit how I think of language. There's this sort of meeting ground of English and Spanish, which is where things kind of cross over and become something else, where a new entity is formed.

MM: Now, if you'll indulge me a bit, I keep thinking about the main romance in the book, Leila and Enrique. Would you tell me if you think Leila would have been better off if she never met Enrique?

CG: Probably. Sadly, probably. Regrets are complicated affairs. But I don't know you live fully without a certain number of them. Would it have been better for her if she never had the trip to Baja and known that happiness ever? Would she have conformed to her life with this physicist fully? I don't really know. Or the fact that she's tormented by what could have been, at least what she thought of it at the time? Was the suffering worth it? I don't really know. It's so brief.
    How did you feel about it?

MM: Surprised. Everything surprised me. Especially the way it works out with Leila's mother. Which was especially poignant because she's such a willful woman and you could feel how it impacts Leila.
     It made me think of Thomas P. M. Barnett, the author of The Pentagon's New Map, this book that is huge right now for both the Right and the Left because he points out how big of a gap there is between Western cultures and the rest of the world. He thinks capitalism is the answer, but mostly because it forces cultures to have economic equality for women. He says, to me, the strength of a country's economy is usually aligned with the way they treat women.
    I feel when you have Leila think that men are judged by the risks they take while women are judged by the risks they don't take, you explain how bias is manifested in every move we make.
    It made me think about chance. And how the biggest role of chance relates to birthplace. Was that part of what you were addressing with the multiple narratives of people born in drastically different places?

CG: It's such a spectrum of things. It can be purely haphazard and have nothing to do with who you are. But I also think it's interestingly hooked to a sense of adventure and risk. So, the riskier you live, the more adventures you embark on, the more chance you bring into your life. It's almost about statistics; Enrique is constantly figuring out the odds, the probabilities. I think the odds are higher if you live a bigger life. More will happen to you, both good and bad. You risk failure that much more spectacularly. But you also have the opportunity for bigger payoffs.
    For me, this is kind of a crazy exploration of the myriad degrees and approaches and cohabitations and reconciliations with this notion of chance and destiny. Then, of course, once things happen, I'll look back and think, "Ah, you know, there's so many serious mistakes." But then you're at a juncture and you think, "Oh, I wouldn't have had Pilar [Garcia's teenage daughter]." Some things that seem inviolate, you can't imagine your life without. So, I think regret is just part of progress.

MM: How did you get interested in Iran?

CG: Where I lived in Westwood, I was very near a Persian neighborhood, and as a teenager, I spent a semester in France. There I had an Iranian roommate and a friend who lived across the hall.
    I've always felt that there are a lot of affinities between the traditional Cuban exile community and the Iranian exile community. They consider themselves more exiles than immigrant, for instance. Their move was politically motivated, not economically motivated. They set themselves apart, for better or worse. We're not like the rest. That's why all the other Latin Americans hate the Cubans.
    And there's a sense of looking somewhere else. For the Cubans, it was looking to Spain. For Iranians of a certain class and orientation, it was to France. At the same time that there's this kind of pumped up pride, there's this kind of tremendous cultural insecurity.
    For many of those reasons, I have been interested in following and reading about Iranian culture for many years. And that's how this came about. Some of Leila's story is very loosely based on this one friend of mine, who is actually back in Iran.

MM: I was fascinated in your book by some of the cultural details, like this idea of a temporary marriage in Muslim culture, where a man can take another wife for an arranged amount of time.

CG: Well, also the legal marrying age for girls' in Iran is nine years old. So, it's a pretty arcane situation.

MM: Leila's father never loses his love for the country of Iran. This fascinated me because he is someone who saw the horrors of both life under the Shahs and life under the Ayatollahs.

CG: There's an allegiance to the land that has nothing to do with whomever is ruling the place, the politicians. But there's something for Leila's father . . . There's something for many Cuban exiles about the island itself, all of the sensory details of the place that transcend the politics of the place. I may be wrong in saying this, but I think my father is more attached to the island of Cuba than to the notion of democracy.
    For Leila's father it's about the land, about the people, about something being able to be fulfilled and evolved. But he's not attached to the politics. In fact, he's extremely cantankerous about it.

MM: Every year people say this, but it looks like this will be the year that Fidel Castro goes. What do you think?

CG: I never say this, but it looks like it. You know a lot of his relatives have lived to over a hundred years old. But he's looking pretty bad.

MM: Some people have said Cuba will be the fifty-first state in five years; some people say it will get worse.

CG: I don't really know. For the last five to seven years, he's been taking his mortality a little more seriously than before. I think he's set in place kind of a transition team. But nobody has the power, the charisma, the persuasive ability. It would take thirty people, handpicked people of his, to do what he does and still maybe not pull it off. So I think it just depends on where his act is, if they have it together to really push this through. But I could also see it really easily unraveling, maybe not right away, fading out after two, three years. Although the Cuban exiles will be completely activated, they're actually kind of old too.

MM: Have their children inherited their vehemence?

CG: A lot of the Miami ones have. I mean it's somewhat diluted. In some cases, not terribly diluted. I have cousins who grew up there, and I'm just appalled at their politics and perspectives and so on. But it's still not the same, they're still living in the wake of dislocation, which is very different than losing your own home. So for them, it's not the life or death situation it is, say, for my parents. But is my father at seventy-two going to take up arms and try to reclaim his house? I don't think so. So, I don't know. The combination of the energy waning on the Cuban exile community and depending on what happens structurally, governmentally, in Cuba, it could go any number of ways. But I have a feeling it will be kind of stable for two or three years, and then it might collapse, if someone put a gun to my head.

MM: Did you grow up feeling like you were fortunate to have gotten out of Cuba?

CG: Well, it's funny. My parents, unlike a lot of the Miami exile community, didn't indulge that much in that. It's kind of a big industry in Miami, this nostalgia business. But once in a while, my father in particular would go on about how we would have been raised, the opportunities we would have had. He thinks back not to the Cuba that exists; he thinks of the Cuba that was interrupted, the Cuba that would exist had it gone forward uninterrupted. That's what he was nostalgic about: me being twelve riding horses in the countryside. To them it was unthinkable to stay there once the revolution happened. For them, it was a past that didn't exist. It no longer existed, but they were still kind of forwarding it into the future even though it no longer existed, if that makes any sense. Magical thinking, basically.

MM: I was very excited when I saw that your class was titled "Narrative Strategies." It seemed perfect to me, since you are so accomplished and ambitious in your use of a variety of perspectives telling, and almost competing to tell, the same story. Do you feel like growing up in a multicultural and somewhat estranged environment led to your desire to tell stories from so many different points of view?

CG: Oh yeah, absolutely. In the Pilar section of Dreaming in Cuban, she talks about how history is made. She says something to the effect of how resentful she is of the politicians who take away her history. [Garcia finds the passage in the book.]
    Pilar at fifteen says, "I resent the hell out of the politicians and generals who force events on us that structure our lives. That dictate the memories that we'll have when we're old. Every day Cuba fades a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside me and there is only my imagination where our history should be."
    Harkening back to what I was saying about my father, about this sort of fictitious, this sort of parallel imaginary history that goes on, for me, writing the book, after spending all of two weeks in Cuba—aside from being a baby there, which I have no memory of—it is an act of imagination. What do I really know of the daily life of Cubans there? The kind of dog-eared coupons to get this much milk a day? The four eggs you get a week? I never lived that. So, for me this work was a work of imagination and projection and distortion and wishful thinking. You know all these things that aren't necessarily factually based, but they're emotionally based, emotionally relevant and resonant. But that's where a lot of Cubans live.
    When I went to Cuba, it was almost as if they were speaking about two completely different islands. My grandmother would speak about the poverty and how terrible things were before the revolution. My mother was talking about how there was no racism and nobody was poor and there was a high literacy rate. These are completely disparate ideas, nothing factual about either side. It was what they wanted to believe. And that's why I became so interested in this notion of competing stories. How stories get told, how history gets made. That's kind of what Aguero Sisters is about, the making of history in one way or another.

MM: Even the science and botany in a way.

CG: Definitely.

MM: When you were writing Monkey Hunting, how much did you play with the order?

CG: Tremendously, because of all of that back and forth. It was one of the biggest challenges, and I wrote so much that didn't end up in the book. Hundreds of pages. Mostly on the guy in Vietnam. I had chapters and chapters of him growing up in Guantanamo. I had this whole postscript that I threw out, maybe eighty pages, where he ends up in a Navajo reservation and married. Actually it was longer than that because it went into the future. He had a nightclub, and he had children. It was this crazy saga, and I just started hacking away at it.

MM: I saved my dumbest question for last: Do you believe in luck?

CG: I do. I think I would talk about luck in a broader sense. I believe in the undecipherable, the mysterious, the unexpected, the possibility. For me, luck isn't just, "Oh, I found a penny on the street." It's a broader sense of possibilities. You can't plan it all. You can barely plan your day, as far as I'm concerned. Just leave a lot of air for change.
    Today I was on the Internet looking for property in Mexico—not that I can even afford it or anything. But I like the idea. I suddenly know all about real estate in Puerto Vallarta today. I don't know why. There are just these things we constantly return to. I don't know why. Like I have this thing that I want to go to Istanbul. I don't know why. But sometimes a new book will begin like that with these burgeoning obsessions that I just can't explain. This was burning for me for five years before I got a chance to write it. It took me forever to finish Monkey Hunting. So everything sort of encroaches on everything. And I can usually tell by what I'm reading and what I'm gravitating toward that something new is beginning to coalesce. I'm at the beginning of some kind of new obsession.