“Her eyes swept the surrounding hills,” Antonio, the novel’s narrator, says of his first meeting with Ultima, “and through them I saw for the first time the wild beauty of our hills and the magic of the green river.” With Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Rudolfo Anaya achieves a similar effect on the reader through his portrayal of New Mexico’s beauty and the magic of growing up and forging an identity at the intersection of two cultures.
Set near the end of World War II, the story is told by the adult Antonio (Tony) and spans his sixth year to his eighth in the small, fictional town of Guadalupe. In that brief time, Tony grapples with difficult yet beautiful truths about his heritage(s). His patronymic is Márez, which translates to son of the sea, while the name he takes from his mother is Luna. Tony’s father, Gabriel, comes from the vaquero tradition, which is rough, roaming, and wild, like the ocean. His mother Maria’s family history is just the opposite: tranquil, fixed, and forgiving, like the moon. The youngest son of the union of these two traditions, Tony will have to choose to either follow in his father’s footsteps and work in the vineyards of California or please his mother by settling down and becoming a Catholic priest. This conflict drives the narrative, and its potential reconciliation is embodied in the character of Ultima, a patient and wise curandera.
Trained in indigenous, pre-Christian ways and secrets, Ultima possesses “powers” of healing and sight, which some of the townsfolk interpret as witchcraft, others as miracles. For Tony, she and her ever-present owl symbolize ultimate wisdom and goodness. The reasons for this are beyond language, but her impression on Tony is immediate. Here’s Tony again on the first time they meet:
She took my hand, and I felt the power of a whirlwind sweep around me. … My nostrils quivered as I felt the song of the mockingbirds and the drone of the grasshoppers mingle with the pulse of the earth. The four directions of the llano [New Mexican plain] met in me, and the white sun shone on my soul. The granules of sand at my feet and the sun and sky above me seemed to dissolve into one strange, complete being.
But Ultima’s influence is more than aesthetic. She also serves as a much-needed model for Tony. His three older brothers used to awe and inspire him, but they’ve left to fight in the war. When they return, their appetite for alcohol and prostitutes confuses him. Though they’re back home, they’re rarely at home, and in their absence, Tony turns to Ultima for guidance, finding a worthy example in even her gait. Exploring the hills while searching for herbs, he says,
I watched her carefully and imitated her walk, and when I did I found that I was no longer lost in the enormous landscape of hills and sky. I was a very important part of the teeming life of the llano and the river.
In her presence, he wants to be good, and in following her example, he learns of the critical role he will play in his world.
The river, too, has a “presence.” Alive and “holy,” it observes everything in silence like the “brooding” God of the Old Testament. But the water is, dualistically, also home to the golden carp, which, some have argued, alludes to a symbol from Aztec mythology. In one of his several rites of passage (the novel’s full of them), when Tony learns from his friend Samuel that the golden carp is a deity, his spiritual foundations are “shaken” to the core: “If the golden carp was a god,” he asks himself, “who was the man on the cross? The Virgin? Was my mother praying to the wrong God?” It’s telling that just prior to this incident, it dawns on Tony that he’s “growing up and becoming a man and…could make decisions” of his own. The choices he’ll need to make concern questions of faith and tradition.
One of the novel’s funniest and most moving episodes sees Tony and his young classmates debating these difficult questions. Tony assumes the role of a Christian apologist, discoursing on sin and salvation, imitating his priest like a cub mimicking his mother. But theology proves inadequate to answer his friend Florence’s question about why God allows sadness and evil to exist in the world, so Tony seeks an explanation by way of the other tradition:
“[W]hat if there were different gods to rule in his absence?” Florence could not have been more surprised by what I said than I. I grabbed him by the collar and shouted, “What if the Virgin Mary or the Golden Carp ruled instead of — !”
In that moment of blasphemy the wind swirled around me and drowned my words, and the heavens trembled with thunder.
The fear of divine retribution is as pervasive as Ultima’s owl, but Tony’s doubts are genuine and natural. He sees the beauty in both ways of thinking. Asking questions and looking for truth, especially at such a young age, should be encouraged, not punished.
Ultima understands this. She embodies all the goodness of the old traditions, but she also sees the value of Christian beliefs and rituals. This makes her a sort of reconciling agent, proof that it’s possible to straddle both cultures. She hints at this at novel’s close, telling Tony it was never her purpose “to interfere with the destiny of any man” but rather to restore “harmony” to the llano. Here, she’s specifically referring to her dealings with Tenorio, the novel’s (almost too obvious) manifestation of evil. But she might just as well be speaking of Tony’s conflicting traditions. Though she does say, earlier on, that Tony will become a priest, her parting message to him isn’t Christian, but more universal:
Her hand touched my forehead and her last words were, “I bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful, Antonio. Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills. I shall be with you — ”
Tony never reveals what he’s become as an adult. Is he now a priest? A worker in the Californian vineyards? Or is he something else, a writer, maybe, or a teacher, or an anthropologist? He leaves us to speculate and decide for ourselves. One thing is certain, however: whatever he is, he writes with love about the two worlds of his youth and thus succeeds in passing on Ultima’s message and spirit of goodness.
Bless Me, Ultima was Anaya’s first novel. In its introduction, he writes, “I didn’t take creative writing classes while attending the [U]niversity [of New Mexico], so my effort was self-taught.” This works both to its benefit and detriment. On the one hand, it’s nice to read fiction that hasn’t been heavily workshopped. There’s a rawness, an unpolished sincerity, in its storytelling that leads one to think there’s no way any publisher today would pick it up — or would at least demand substantial edits that would, for instance, move the plot forward more quickly and compress the number of characters (Tony has so many classmates that keeping track of them is challenging). On the other hand, there are moments in the text where Anaya violates creative writing’s cardinal rule of show, don’t tell. Constructing scenes that reveal character and push the plot ahead through actions and dialogue would’ve helped in areas, such as the part where Tony describes being laughed at in school for his lunch of “a small jar of hot beans and some good, green chile wrapped in tortillas.” Unsettled, he slinks away, wanting to be by himself:
But no, I was not alone. Down the wall near the corner I saw two other boys who had sneaked out of the room. They were George and Willy. They were big boys; I knew they were from the farms of Delia. We banded together and in our union found strength.
This is the kind of event — as is the one just preceding it — that warrants special attention in fiction. Scenes do a much better job of focusing that attention in a way that makes the reader feel what a character is going through.
Even with these small flaws, Bless Me, Ultima remains a classic of Chicano literature. Its exploration of various binaries (good/evil, colonial/indigenous, sea/moon, among others), its deep layers of symbolism, and its gentle treatment of conflicting cultures invite multiple readings. It gives voice to one of the many varieties of the American experience that even today remain undervalued. These voices deserve to be heard for their beauty and truth.
