Battles in the desert during history
In the battles in the desert, José Emilio Pacheco tells the story from the perspective of a child, approximately twelve years, who operates from the memory of a mature man nostalgically remembering an ancient Mexico. The novel is about the children’s game, narrated in the first person by Carlitos, the main character. Carlitos is a child who lived in the Roma neighborhood in the CD. From Mexico during the government of Miguel Alemán in the year of 1948. Its history embarks on a social, cultural and political context where the problems of corruption of the country, post -war problems, the influence of the United States on culture and the idea of social progress of the traditional city ofMexico that begins to fade.
Through history, Pacheco’s deep concern for recovering the past of a Mexico that no longer exists, which was lost because of the modernization of the country.The novel begins with the search for a Mexico lost in the chapter "an ancient world" in which the change that the country is going through is presented: "I remember, I do not remember: what year was that? There were already supermarkets, but not television, radio alone: the adventures of Carlos Lacroix, Tarzan, the lone llanero, the legion of the early risers, the professors, legends of the streets of Mexico, Ponseco, Dr. I.Q., Dr. Corazón from her soul clinic (…) The first cars produced after the war circulated: Packard, Cadillac, Buick, Chrysler, Mercury, Hudson, Pontiac, Dodge, Plymouth, by Soto. We were going to watch Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power movies, a full episodes: Mongo’s invasion was my favorite."
The beginning is uncertain: a proceeding and going back in memory, making, with direct style, reference to the memories of the narrator of Mexico City that, around 1950, experienced an accelerated change that almost everything described. This recreates a nearby past, still fresh in memory, but already turned into a period portrait of the other Mexico City, which at that time was traveled by yellow trams and buses of different colors, the soft drinks displaced the fruit waters, passersby wore a hat, you could buy a sausage cake, two tenderloin and a soda with less than ten pesos, the pens replaced the inkwell, maguillo and drying in schools, a large number of porphyrian houses, foolsXIX century.
Carlos’s story is, therefore, the story of the transition between childhood and adolescence with the first love. Likewise, the history of Carlitos is the history of a Mexico that falls in love with the modernization promulgated to the "American style," as Hugo J described it. Summer in his article “Before criticism.”The Mexico that occurs in the novel is a country that, based on the descriptions, is in the process of an economic and cultural transformation. To this country, to the country of memory, Pacheco presents as a lost and strange Mexico. ‘The Past is a Foreign Country. They do Things Differently There ’(L. P. Hartley: The Go-Between), opening the novel with such an epigraph, Pacheco presents the theme of the novel in which Carlitos’s memories are somehow, the message between the past Mexico and the present present. As Beatriz Barrantes-Martin mentions in his article, "from the present space in which the narrator tells the story, the US model has taken over such force that I erase the portraits of the past".
That is why Carlitos says in the end: “That city is over. I finish that country ”(Barrantes) in the battles in the desert, the loving memory that Carlitos has as Mariana forms a fundamental part in the nostalgic memory of Mexico City. At the time he falls in love with MarianThis moment because everything that exists right now will never be the same. One day I will see it as the most remote prehistory. I’m going to keep it whole because today I fell in love with Mariana …" . Mariana became an obsession for Carlitos that manages to hide, until a day comes when she can’t keep holding. Carlitos came to escape class to go to Mariana’s house to tell him everything. After everyone finds out the impossible love of Carlitos, his parents end up taking him out of school, they change from neighborhood, and never see or know from anyone again until he meets Rosales, a former partner who invites to eatand ends up revealing what nobody had told him.
When Rosales tells him that Mariana in an outburst for the depreciation of Jim’s father committed suicide, Carlitos, as he was seen did not believe him and decided to confirm him by himself but reality is blurred: no one has ever seen any Mariana and any Jim. But Carlitos, now Carlos, knows that she existed, that this whole story that he wanted to fix in his memory existed, and now he is tried to rebuild her. Obviously nothing happened, but Carlitos tries to show us that story that, apparently, really happened. In this way, the history of Carlitos becomes existentially valid, which allows us to look at the memory of that Mexico close to the end. This is what will allow that Mexico "to be summoned in presence," as described by Antonio Saborit, who prevented all the possibilities of stability "I remember, I do not remember" (Saborit). Thus, what allows mexico to become as such is the fact of Carlos’s love for Mariana, while Mariana Dura’s memory, the memory for the city will continue. It is at this point that the appointment referred above is acquired much more sense: ‘I will keep intact the memory of this moment because everything that exists right now will never be the same again …’. On the one hand, predict what will happen.
Following the structure of a Mexico full of memories, there is evidence that gives rise to see that events occurred in a different order from that apparently happened in reality. This results in confusion between reality or fantasy, especially at the end of the story where Carlitos wants to verify Mariana’s death, but nevertheless everything that seems to be true seems to get lost. When he goes to the building nobody says to know Mariana or Jim, and this whole story gives rise to a fantasy: ‘I am in this building since 1939 and, that I know, no lady Mariana has never lived here. Jim? Neither do we know him … things you imagine a child. It must be on another street, in another building ’(Pacheco). ‘I remember, I don’t even remember the year,’ says the narrator again to close his speech. So did it happen, it didn’t happen? An incognita of which Matías Rebolledo speaks in his article. He only has an indication that this whole story was true: he is still in love with Mariana. Then, ‘Mariana existed, Jim existed, there was how much I have repeated after so long to refuse to face him’
This story is validated as soon as the memory of Mariana and Jim continues to summon memories. And as soon as that memory is summoned, Mexico can be reconstituted in its memory. And, this being the case, Mariana existed, Jim existed, the battles in the desert occurred, at least in that Mexico that the author remembers. It is not possible to mention the present of the narrated at the end of the story that is marked by the "Ya-No-Ser" as Matías Rebolledo describes it with greater breadth in his article. It is perhaps one of the most controversial facts of this story. But finally there is a textual check, the last text of the novel where Mariana is referring: "If I lived today, I would be eighty years old.".
Matías Rebolledo argues about the author’s spoken point where, with simple calculations, the time in which the author is speaking at the end of the story can be determined, since Mariana was 28 years old at the time she happensThe story, and based on the course of the time on which the narrator is talking can calculate that the end of the story is taking place in 2000, about twenty years after the novel was written. Which means that the Mexico that the narrator remembers, in time when the novel was written effectively no longer exists: ’They demolished the school, demolished the building of Mariana, demolished my house, demolished the Roma neighborhood. That city is over, that country ended. There is no memory of Mexico of those years. And nobody cares: of that horror who can have nostalgia. Everything happened as the discs pass in the Sinfonola. I will never know if Mariana still lives. If I lived today, I will be eighty years old ’. This is what leads to the hypothesis that was raised at the beginning of the novel: “The Past is a Foreign Country. They do Things Differently There ” . Everything that was previously presented can be compared to the Mexico presented by the narrator, the Mexico that is no longer, the Mexico that no longer exists, and that only exists as soon as it is "convened by him".
All this Mexico City that the narrator remembers, is that care that precisely does not exist, that care that has vanished in the memory. Matías Rebolledo says “that care that is convened in presence by the narrator, reconfigures it, but it can be thought that everything that is presented is a memory, from Mexico before, in which the world in which the narrator is installed, whichIt is the world marked by the non-being ". Which means that only with the demonstration of that Mexico lost in the memory, you can think of the existence of Mexico before.
Finally, the same bond that allows to bring all those fragments of Mexico to existence before. Thus, its existence is validated, and validating that existence is capable of bringing that `ancient Mexico’ but that was erased, which disappeared. But there is still something that allows you to cover that world of meaning. All this ends up configuring a story full of nostalgia, but not necessarily for that Mexico and that story that was. The love he once had for Mariana is the only thing that can face that care that falls apart without knowing it, under the name of growth and progress. And memory, as the only way to bring it to the presence, even what could not be.
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