I'm going to make my announcements
very quickly because I know how eager you
are to hear Mrs. Doerr.
We have two readings scheduled for next week.
Wednesday night, in the University Art museum,
six students will read, Lolly Butler, Anne Heed,
Harry Kressler, Kim Kuykendall, Kevin Lanoue and Holly Welker.
And on Friday afternoon, in the--
in Student Union 283, Navajo poet, Luci Tapahonso will read.
That's at 4 o'clock, Student Union 283.
Two weeks from tonight, Writers at Work
will present the first in their series of readings and--
presenting the novelist, essayist, nonfiction writer,
Edward Abbey, in this auditorium.
Oh, copies of Sonora Review, the university's literary magazine,
are on sale tonight.
And also, we have a few copies of Stones for Ibarra on sale.
I hope you'll stay and have some punch and cookies
and tell Harriet how wonderful she is.
I mean, you already know, but you've got to tell her too.
Harriet Doerr comes to us from Pasadena.
She went back to school after a long time
away, and finished her work at Stanford
and stayed on as a Stegner Fellow
in their fiction program, and received a Henfield award
for the writing that she was doing,
which was later put together as the novel,
Stones for Ibarra, which she will read some of for us
tonight.
But she's also consented to read some newer work.
It's been such a pleasure to have her with us
and I wish all of you could have heard her
speak with classes yesterday.
It's my great pleasure and privilege
to introduce Harriet Doerr.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Screams at you.
Knew you wouldn't like that.
I won't be able to see the book if I'm back here.
Is that all right?
It's very sensitive, so you don't have to go closer.
Oh, OK.
It's a new [INAUDIBLE] that's what [INAUDIBLE]..
I have a clipping.
It's a record, oldest authoress.
The oldest female author was Mrs. Alice Pollock
of Haslemere, Surrey, England, whose
book, Portrait of My Victorian Youth,
was published when she was 102 years, eight months.
So I'd like to start with this because it gives me
hope and courage.
You know, it makes you feel rather young.
People do say, why wait so long?
And it's absolutely true that being 32
is quite a lot better than being 77,
and you have all that future in front of you.
But the reason I waited so long was
that I wasn't at all convinced I could do it,
and I didn't try seriously until quite late on when I went back
to school.
I was not like Truman Capote who said, I've known all my life,
I can toss a bunch of words up in the air
and they'd come down just right.
I didn't know that, and I wasn't like EB White either
who said this--
later on, not when he was a boy.
I think he was writing to his brother, yes, in 1947.
I'm glad to report that even now, at this late day,
a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement
there is for me.
More promising than a silver cloud,
prettier than the little red wagon,
it holds all the hope there is, all fears.
I can remember really quite distinctly
looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when
I was seven or eight years old and thinking,
this is where I belong.
This is it.
So how wonderful to know that and at the same time,
have the talent of EB White.
Only a fool would read any word or four or five or two
sentences of EB White before they
were about to read themselves.
That puts me in my place.
And people say, is it ever too late to start?
Well, I don't think it is.
I don't think it is.
I think old age can be terribly tiresome,
but I don't think there's any reason for it to be boring.
I'm going to tell you about a friend of mine who
retired from his business at the age of 65,
and soon after that, a friend of his retired.
So my friend gave his friend advice
about how to spend retirement.
And this was his advice, never go to the bank
and get a haircut the same day.
So I don't think that's absolutely necessary.
I think that there must be something else.
It seems to me that there's so little time.
From the moment we're born, it starts running out.
Then they say, how is publishing--
being published once?
It changed my life.
Well, it's changed my life utterly,
and that's one reason I'm not getting on with the next thing
I'm trying to write.
Lots of things happen extremely unexpectedly.
Well, you get telephone calls, you get visitors
and you get lots of interesting mail.
The only thing I don't have is a glass of water.
It's underneath.
Oh, there it is.
Thank you.
I'll tell you about one or two letters.
I had a wonderful letter from [? Supopic-- ?] [? Niwalar ?]
yeah, [? Supopic. ?] From someone I didn't know at all,
quite soon after the book came out.
This woman is an anthropologist.
And she was studying the Huichol Indians there.
And had lived there for years and years and years,
and I suppose was going to live there forever because she
loved it so much.
And she said please come and just
stay with me whenever you want.
I kept her letter so maybe I can still go.
And then I have a friend who's constantly
making reservations for me in a hotel in Asunción,
Paraguay for three months.
And she writes me, says dear Harriet,
the manager has changed, but I think I will find you a room
anyway.
The hotel hasn't changed that much.
I'd never said a word to her about going there.
She thinks if I go to Asunción--
I don't know why--
that there, I will finish the book
in three months in this place.
And has a constant correspondence
about what's happening, with what the view is now
and how the rooms are and--
then probably my best letter came from someone
in the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California, who
wrote a letter to say that he didn't have-- he'd read reviews
of the book in the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal in the penitentiary.
And he said he didn't have any money
and he was coming begging.
So of course, I sent him a book immediately.
And in his letter, he said this--
this is what moved me to do it.
He said, being in jail isn't the worst thing in the world.
Being broke and in jail isn't the worst thing in the world.
The worst thing in the world is being broke and in jail
with nothing to read.
So naturally, he couldn't wait to get
the book in the post office.
This is a question I was asked in class yesterday,
am I wiser now than before?
No, of course not.
I'm not wiser.
More experienced, yes.
Wiser, no.
I think what people in this age have is the long view.
You remember everything.
You remember Maude Adams, Houdini, Lindbergh, learning
how to drive in a Model T Ford.
Another thing you remember is what war
this day is commemorating.
There was a quiz--
maybe this was only in California schools,
I don't know whether it was nationwide or not--
and very, very few people knew the difference
between World War I and World War II.
Well, I think that's quite good of the students, that's
proof it's all for nothing.
Nobody can remember the numbers so--
so from a writer's standpoint of, in your old age,
you have these things, perspective, experience.
And unless you've somehow found out all the answers,
you still have curiosity.
And if things still make you wonder, you have imagination.
And with all this, assuming you love words,
you have a lot of what you need to write a story.
I don't think age has terribly much to do with it.
But as for wisdom, that's a completely different thing.
It's like the story probably apocryphal
about Gertrude Stein dying with Alice B. Toklas at her bedside.
And Alice, wanting to get the final important word,
said to Gertrude, what is the answer?
And Gertrude Stein, with her last breath said,
what is the question?
I'm sure you all know that.
But that's absolutely, absolutely true
because the questions proliferate.
So you think you have one sort of solved
and then 10 more come along.
And that keeps you from being wise very effectively.
And what made you do it?
Well, I was encouraged by a teacher at Scripps College,
and by someone else at Stanford.
And without that, I'm sure I would have been convinced,
I couldn't do it.
I didn't have that much faith in myself.
And I think what it's all about is
a matter of spying and eavesdropping
and seeing and hearing.
And you happen to see small things on the street corner,
in the elevator, where you're eating,
or as you drive along looking out the window of your car.
And just for a second, those things
strike you as being Earth-shattering.
They strike you as being terribly important.
And everything-- every single thing, including man's fate--
seems to depend on your getting it
down exactly right on the page.
I think that's why you do it, probably.
Now I'm going--
Lois said I was going to read out of the book.
My intention was to read you a slightly newer story.
I don't dare say new, but a newer story that was published
in The New Yorker last year.
And then if there's time left over,
I was just going to read a short excerpt
from the book of a page and a half,
which is very important to me.
But we can see how the time goes.
This is called, "Picnic at Amapolas."
"A number of years ago, in the town of La Luz,
on an August day, half of hot sun, half of rain,
Don Enrique Ortiz prepared to sell his ancestral estate
to an American gentleman and an American lady.
The economy of Mexico compels me,
he explained, facing his two buyers across a desk littered
with legal briefs.
Taxes, said Don Enrique.
On the wall behind him under his grandmother's portrait,
hung a calendar dark with inked out days.
Taxes, he repeated, they're becoming insupportable.
The American gentleman who was using the false name of Bud
Loomis nodded.
Like other travelers, he had come to Mexico
for the sake of new surroundings, to get away,
particularly to get away.
His own taxes were under investigation in Arizona.
In his pocket was a summons to appear in a Phoenix court that
day. 'I know what you mean,' Bud said in border Spanish.
He drummed his blunt fingers on the arm of his chair
and stared at Don Enrique's calendar.
'So I'm selling the land that came to me through my mother,
all four hectares of the land in Amapolas.'
As he spoke these words, Don Enrique--
Don Enrique Cesar Ortiz de Leon apologized silently
to that Castilian ancestor of his
who had stepped just behind Cortez out of Mexican soil.
He drew his bare frame taller in order to stiffen his pride.
'How much is an hectare?'
I asked the woman in slow, precise Spanish.
From her shoulder bag, she removed a pencil
and a notepad on which her name, Susanna Ames,
was printed at the top.
She pulled her chair closer and made space
at a corner of Don Enrique's crowded desk.
'Susanna Ames,' Don Enrique pronounced phonetically
to himself.
'Her name is Susanna Ames.'
He repeated it like a soundless chant.
And answer to her question, he said an hectare
is 10,000 square meters.
Bud Loomis, who had reduced her name to one syllable on the day
they met, said, 'the whole thing's 10 acres, Sue,
give or take.'
Then added without speaking, this is going to be a steal.
10 acres, as much as that.
She was clearly surprised.
At this, an identical notion entered the minds of both men.
They believed they were in the presence of a helpless female.
This Susanna Ames, Don Enrique supposed, was in need of a man,
perhaps one her own age, about 30,
or better, an older man, one who understood
business and the law.
Bud retained his original impression of her.
When he and Sue Ames had met for the first time
by coincidence in the property agent's office,
he noticed her looks.
And her reckless attitude toward land
concluded that all she needed was shaping up.
Further acquaintance only reinforced his opinion.
Now with the two men observing her,
Susanna Ames began to draw for the first time in years.
She sketched on her notepad a long rise
of ground, which dropped to a lake at one end
and met the steep slope of a hill at the other.
Beyond it, she drew in the whole landscape of cornfields,
and beyond them, a range of mountains
that climbed to a peak.
She lined one shore of the lake with a neat row
of houses and a church.
She left empty the flat, extended surface of the rise,
though she might have penciled in a dream.
For in the corner of her mind that excluded reason,
she had already constructed a low adobe house
and a separate studio looking North,
and had planted four apricot trees, a small vineyard
and an alfalfa field simply for the green of it.
Though this house did not appear on the page,
Don Enrique noticed that she was exaggerating everything,
the fields, the mountains, the good order of the dwellings
that faced the pond.
He had never seen so elegant a small church as the one that
took rough shape on her page.
He became concerned. 'Have you visited the property?'
Sue continued to draw.
Now at the center of the rise, she
was building a Stonehenge of tilting columns and broken
pediments.
All that was left of Don Enrique's
centuries-old hacienda.
Don Enrique persisted, 'were you there long enough to walk
about?'
Is he crazy?
Bud asked himself.
We've already told him we'd buy.
Sue said, 'we spent an afternoon there with the agent.'
Bud corrected her. 'An hour and a half,' he said,
'just before dark.'
But even in that brief period, he
had found time to walk about.
Once satisfied in respect to connections
for electricity and water, he had started pacing
off the land.
On that occasion, Sue Ames had gazed
after his short, thick figure as it moved away,
stepping out straight lines and corners in the distance.
It pleased her to think he was drawn as she
was to the serene, empty place.
Even so, it had taken her 10 days to reach a decision.
Between calls to her lawyer and her bank,
Sue considered alternatives, each morning on a sunny bench
in the plaza-- in the principal plaza of La Luz,
each rainy evening on a stiff chair in her hotel room.
Actually, the matter had been settled the day
she chose La Luz as a stopping place partly because
of the sweep of landscape that surrounded it
and partly because no one she knew had recommended it.
Neither her friends nor her family in California
could be aware of this settlement, remote
as it was from any airport and from both coasts.
Sue, divorced two months ago, believed that in rural Mexico,
she might at last be let alone.
People here would hardly expect her
to live wisely, marry happily.
A middle-sized town of no particular architectural or
archaeological interest, La Luz rested quietly
on the plain between a winery on the east and a railway
line on the west.
Trains bound north and south stopped
at the red-plastered station twice a day
to load and unload freight and a passenger or two.
The plaza of La Luz, shaded green by Indian laurels,
faced on one side the entrance to the town's main hotel.
This was the Posada Del Sol, a hostelry of 30 rooms,
cold and bare cells.
Sue took one of these first for three nights, then a week,
and eventually for a number of months.
At first, her days were all alike.
She sat each morning in the plaza,
ate a lunch of thick soup and bread in the hotel,
and spent her afternoons outside the town,
driving whenever any road would take her.
It may have been the intensity of light
or the transparency of air or simply
the illusion of unlimited space that brought her to a decision.
On her third evening at the hotel,
she spoke to the manager.
'I believe I will remain in Mexico,' she said,
'perhaps in La Luz.
Do you know of a house?'
The manager was also the owner of the hotel, a man worn thin
by lack of trade.
He contemplated the American woman, one
of his 14 registered guests.
His examination revealed nothing except that she
appeared more determined than other women he had known
and richer.
He gave her the name of the property agent
whose office was around the corner between a notion
shop and a bakery.
The following morning, Sue entered the agent's ground
floor room, only to find someone else, a stranger,
already there.
'Another American client,' said the agent.
'Bud Loomis,' said the man.
She waited on a chair against the wall for Bud
to transact his business.
Time went by.
It became clear to her that an impasse had been reached.
Bud finally turned away from the agent's desk.
'You go ahead,' he told her. 'I've got to do some figuring.'
Then, as though preordained, it all
began to happen step by step.
Sue inquired about a house to rent, then about one to buy.
She said, 'but there must be something.'
A silence fell, and she rose to leave.
Then, Bud turned from the window.
He said, 'wait a minute.'
Sue sat again and listened to him say,
'there's a piece of land we could split up.'
Before the day was over, arrangements
had been made to visit the property at Amapolas.
The agent requested credentials, and Bud
produced a deposit slip verifying a substantial cash
balance in the local bank.
Sue said she would have to call her lawyer in California
and also her bank.
She displayed documents, a passport and a driver's
license, but the agent had already
noticed about her an air of absent-minded integrity,
which by itself inspired trust.
That was 10 days ago.
Now in Don Enrique's office, the back
of his high-ceilinged house, Sue went on drawing.
She outlined a stand of pines behind the ruined walls.
'I have something to suggest,' interposed the lawyer,
'that we visit the property together to avoid
a misunderstanding.
Please be my guest on Sunday.
We will eat lunch in the fresh air.'
'No need to bother with all that,' said Bud.
'We're ready to settle now.'
But Sue was accepting the invitation.
'Then we will meet at Amapolas.'
Don Enrique examined his two buyers.
Their indifference to each other puzzled him.
'You're related, are you not,' he asked. 'Brother and sister?'
Though this seemed impossible.
There was no resemblance.
'Or cousins?' The impatient man across from him shook his head.
The lovely Susanna Ames shook hers.
Don Enrique lifted a hand to warn her,
a guileless woman entering into a costly negotiation
with a stranger who was in a hurry.
But in the end, addressing them both, he only said,
'you have a car?'
As if that as well as the land were something
they would share.
Each, however, had a car and nodded.
'Next Sunday at 2:00,' said Don Enrique.
He turned to the calendar, circled the proposed date,
and at the same time, crossed out yesterday,
which had slipped by unnoticed.
On Sunday, the three cars converged almost simultaneously
at the picnic place, having turned in close succession
from the highway at a sign that said Amapolas del Lago,
one kilometer.
Don Enrique's ancient Buick sedan,
packed with baskets and folding furniture,
led the way along two ruts between thickets of weeds.
Still in single file, they were almost inside of the lake
when a new sign, hand-lettered, appeared on their ride.
Lomas de Amapolas, it read, and indicated the way
across a narrow ditch and up an abrupt slope.
Bud was the first to jump out of his car,
a Mustang so new it still lacked license plates.
He walked over to a huisache tree in whose sparse shade Sue
had parked her station wagon.
It held a number of flat wooden boxes and an easel in the back.
Looking in, Bud foresaw art that would never sell.
He asked if she had noticed the new sign at the turnoff.
'Lomas de Amapolis, what a name for a place to live,' he said,
'Poppy Heights.'
Sue directed her attention to Don Enrique
who stood next to his car offering his arm to the oldest
man she had ever seen.
When this person was finally on his feet
outside and drawn up to his full crooked stature,
Don Enrique introduced him as Pepe Gomez, who
had been born on this land and was
the grandson of his own great grandfather's major domo.
Then, Don Enrique introduced the Americans to Pepe.
'These are the people who are buying the property,' he
informed the aged man, 'Señor Loomis and Señorita Susanna
Ames.'
Don Enrique went on to say that he and Pepe usually
drove out here on Sundays.
'Though I never lived here, this was always my home.'
He pointed to the ruins and Sue imagined
that for him, the massive house rose up again each time he
came, its roof and walls intact, its doors deep set,
its carved cornices in place.
The picnic party gathered in the shadow of an arch,
and everyone helped Pepe set up the chairs and table,
arrange the cloth, and extract five glasses from a basket.
Into four of these, the old man, with remarkable agility,
poured red wine.
Don Enrique explained the fifth glass.
'The padre from the village often joins us.
You may meet him.'
Bud looked at Sue and shook his head.
She saw him think, another waste of time.
Before seating his guests, Don Enrique proposed a toast.
'To the lives we have lived,' he said.
The others raised their glasses.
'And to the one ahead,' he continued,
and all drank to this immediate simplification
of their futures.
Then, Don Enrique kicked away an anthill and some thorny stalks,
drew out a chair for Sue at his right.
Pepe meanwhile laid four plates and an earthenware dish
on the table.
'Who made these good tacos?'
Sue asked, and found that Pepe's elderly daughter
was in charge of Don Enrique's kitchen in La Luz.
Bud swallowed a small green chile whole, choked,
said 'Jesus,' reached for his wine glass.
Don Enrique pondered his two guests.
How can they afford it?
He wondered.
How pay for this exceptional land?
'Now that you see Amapolas again,
you are disappointed,' he declared in a statement
directed mainly to Sue, though it was Bud who responded
in English, 'Hell no.'
'I don't expect to change my mind,' said Sue.
But she had in fact noticed for the first time
the depleted look of the earth on which her house would stand,
the dangerous drop where the rise fell away
at one end above the village and the lake.
She had observed the rugged terrain, the absence of trees
except for a scattering of scrub oaks.
The surrounding hills were lower than she remembered,
the cornfields fewer, the distant mountain peaks
scaled down.
'That is a volcanic cone,' said Don Enrique,
following her gaze.
'What do you think of the lake?'
'It's a little smaller than I remembered it.'
'And it is larger now and deeper than it will be next spring
during the dry season.'
'Do poppies ever grow here?' she asked.
'I think my mother said so.
I've never seen them for myself.'
Then Pepe brought grapes and cheese,
opened another bottle of wine.
And Don Enrique, urged on by the old man's nods,
began to an outline of family history.
Sue leaned forward at the first mention of a 16th century
Spanish count.
Bud pushed back from the table, upsetting his chair
and before long could be seen at some distance,
stepping off great squares.
'On my father's side,' Don Enrique went on, 'a governor,
a conductor of the National Symphony,
rector of the university.
On my mother's, a foreign minister and two bishops.'
The three still at the table sat a moment
in silence, warmed by the splendor that
radiated from the Ortiz de Leon genealogies.
'Many of them born in the house that once stood here,' Don
Enrique waved toward the collapsed pillars,
strewn rubble of his ancestors' former bastion and country
seat.
'There were generals on both sides,' he added,
'and recognized scholars.'
Sue sank without resistance into the past.
'And the house,' she said, 'I suppose it was destroyed
in the revolution.'
At this, Pepe gathered his waning reserves
and rose joint by joint to describe
the revolution of 1910, a good deal of which he remembered.
But his teeth were so few and the images
he sought so reluctant to come that of all he said,
Sue understood only two words, burn and kill.
Don Enrique, middle-aged and childless,
listened as though for the first time
until at last Pepe stopped in mid-sentence and sat down.
Sue glanced behind her at the scattered traces
of the former house.
'So now there is nothing left.
One bed,' said Don Enrique.
But he did not describe this bed, tall-posted and canopied,
cradle of illustrious infants that had by some special grace
survived or mentioned it was there on a hair mattress
that he himself now spent his lengthening nights.
He turned his aquiline profile to Sue
and looked into the distance where Bud was tramping
back and forth across the land.
'What's he doing, the Señor Loomis?' he asked.
'Is he disoriented?'
'I'm not sure,' she said.
But it was precisely at this moment
with clouds darkening the day, the plates and glasses still
to be packed, that Sue noticed a cold wind
from the east and the sudden presence of a stone in her shoe
and finally understood that Bud meant to subdivide the land.
Now Don Enrique was waving in the direction
of the village and the lake.
Sue watched as first the head, then the shoulders,
then all of a black-robed priest came into sight
at the edge of the mesa where a path led up the bluff.
His ascent was so steady and inexorable that even after he
was entirely in view, it seemed he might rise a few inches more
and approach the picnic party with his feet
not touching the ground.
But he made his way toward them in an ordinary manner,
his shoes crushing spiders and ants, his habit collecting
nettles.
As he approached, Sue saw that the priest was young,
younger than she.
'Here's my friend, Padre Miguel,' said Don Enrique.
And to the priest, 'May I present the Señorita Susana
Ames?
She is one of the new owners and plans to build a house
on the spot where we stand.'
'Oh no,' Sue said. 'Not here,' at the far end.'
She pointed to the place where Padre Miguel had first
been seen.
The priest, who saw no difference between the north,
south, and center of this strip of land
allowed his gaze to rest on Sue's face.
'Is this woman a Catholic?' he wondered.
But he doubted she was.
Of the two or three priests Sue had met in her lifetime,
Padre Miguel impressed her as the only one entirely suited
to his calling.
His eyes burned, and he appeared to have been fasting.
'And here comes Señor Loomis.'
Don Enrique might have been announcing the players
on a soccer team.
'He will be joint owner of this land.'
Padre Miguel looked into Bud's square coarse-grained face,
believed he saw a troubled man.
'Two irresolute Americans,' thought the priest,
but acknowledged the introduction with a nod.
Pulled Sue to one side, 'I've got an idea,' he said.
She refused to listen, saying, 'Let me tell you where I want
my house,' and indicating the bluff beyond which appeared
the top of a bell tower, half a church dome,
and the outer rim of the lake, which had faded to slate gray
under the massing clouds.
Don Enrique overheard. 'Not too close to the edge,' he warned
her. 'There's danger of erosion.'
'From that point, you will look straight down
on the cemetery,' said the priest in a voice unexpectedly
deep for a man his age.
Bud took Sue's arm and propelled her
toward the leaning portico of the old house.
'This is my idea,' he said.
And while he spoke of selling lots,
Sue studied the volcanic cone whose sheer sides were faintly
green with terraced corn.
Eventually she heard him say, 'It's a deal made in heaven.'
He went on to speak of land as collateral,
of cheap labor, of doubling or tripling their money,
of a joint reserve in Mexican securities.
'These damn bonds pay 40%,' said Bud.
'There's no way we can lose.
No way.'
Sue, pinned against a crumbling plaster,
confronted her own common sense.
It's not too late to get out of this,
to say my funds are insufficient,
my lawyer has strong objections.
I'm homesick for the sea in Mendocino, California.
Then neither of us will have the land
since it's being sold as a single piece and neither of us
can pay for it all.
'May I still build my house over there?'
She pointed.
'Why not?' said Bud.
Sue turned in a slow circle.
The hills, the fields, some stretches
of pure desert revolved around her.
Far away, a dog barked.
A burro carrying two boys raised dust on the road
to the village.
A cow waded into the lake.
And all at once, she surrendered her orchard, her vineyard,
and half of her view.
She said, 'All right, yes.'
As soon as they rejoined the others,
Padre Miguel invited them to visit
the village in the church.
'I've got to get back to the motel,' said Bud.
'Next time, Padre,' said Don Enrique, 'rain is coming,
but have some wine.'
When they raised their glasses this time,
they simply wished each other health.
Pepe, not sure how old he was, drank with relish to this toast
and to the years or perhaps the months he still
had left to live.
Soon, light rain began to fall.
The picnickers and the priest were
about to separate when a figure came into sight
at the top of the bluff.
Skirt flapping, shawl dragging, a little girl
ran toward them through the drizzle.
'What now?' said Bud.
He gathered up chairs and moved in the direction of the cars.
The barefoot child crossed the stretch of land
with astonishing speed.
Once arrived, she quickly kissed the Padre's ring,
then went to Pepe and took his bony hand in hers.
Sue felt a pang.
She began to mourn the child's future in advance.
There were never eyes so shadowed
as these, never cheek so scabbed,
neck so stem like, hair so clotted.
When the girl lifted her head to smile at Pepe,
she exposed baby and second teeth
at odds competing for space in her mouth.
Don Enrique led her to Sue.
'This is Altagracia Gomez,' he said,
'Pepe's great granddaughter.
After you are settled here, she will come to work for you.'
'But she's only a child.'
'She's 12.
By the time your home is built, she will be 13.
That's old enough.' 'How do you know?'
Sue wanted to ask.
Everyone is old enough for something, and too old or young
for something else.
A few weeks later on another rainy afternoon,
the contract was signed in Don Enrique's office
under the portrait of his grandmother, a young woman
almost too satined, jeweled, ribboned and combed ever
to have lived.
The lawyer had failed to keep his calendar current.
The last day checked off was the day before the picnic.
While Don Enrique sorted documents,
Bud smoked, crossed and uncrossed his legs.
During the pause, Sue spoke.
'I can't believe our good fortune,' she said.
'This must be the most beautiful piece of land in Mexico.'
'She's a fool,' thought Bud.
'Any more of this and even now when we're almost under
the wire, will drive up the price.'
'It's a large property for two people,' said Don Enrique.
'You will have a pair of ranches.'
At this, Bud, abandoning caution, disclosed his project.
'Twenty fine lots,' he told Don Enrique.
'I thought it was 10,' said Sue.
Her words were lost in Bud's recital of building plans,
street lamps and paved walks, cesspools,
and in time, telephones.
Don Enrique, foolishly neglecting
to claim a share of the enterprise,
seemed to welcome it anyway.
'My godson is an architect,' he informed the Americans.
'He can help you.
His wife may also be of use.
She is a weaver, a designer of cloth.'
Now, each of the three people in the room
separately saw a sample house.
Its individual shape, its sala and patio,
its textured curtains and handloom spreads.
Simultaneously, it occurred to Don Enrique
that the town of La Luz was growing too fast.
Each day found it noisier and more crowded
than the day before.
'Country air,' he began to think,
and only a 30 minute drive from Amapolas to his office.
'Why not?' thought Don Enrique.
There was a knock at the door, and Bud
started as if even here a federal agent might track him
down.
But it was only Pepe, trembling under a silver tray, a bottle,
and four glasses.
Don Enrique held up his hand.
He looked from one to the other of his clients.
'Are you Catholics?' he asked, as though we were about
to impose an condition of purchase.
"No.
Why?' said Bud.
'I used to be an Episcopalian,' said Sue.
But Don Enrique had merely been remembering holy days
in the village by the lake.
He named a few of them, Corpus Christi, Guadalupe,
San Juan, Asunción.
'These are colorful festivals,' he went on.
'Perhaps even as Protestants, you might wish to see,' here he
stopped.
'Oh, yes,' said Sue.
Bud has his eye on Pepe and the quivering tray.
'My God, how old can you get?' he wondered.
Then it was done, the agreement signed, the tray set down,
the brandy poured, the toast proposed and drunk.
At this moment, in Amapolas del Lago,
Altagracia Gomez entered the church
to kneel at the back, offer prayers for a necklace
and high heeled shoes.
At the same time, Padre Miguel on his knees at the altar
prayed to be assigned to another parish, a larger place where
he could be in the company of people who talked well, had
talents, examined ideas.
Then for having asked this, he prayed to be forgiven.
As soon as dark came, night animals
began to occupy the four hectáreas of long, flat ground
above the village.
Each creature followed a purpose of its own, to eat, to mate,
to dig a burrow, or simply run from north to south
by moonlight.
Heedless of approaching change, they
traced the lengths of walls and paths to come.
They paused in doorways not yet raised,
circled trees not planted.
Their footprints webbed the dust of unmarked building sites.
Three gophers meeting on Sue Ames' plot of land
anticipated her rows of lettuce, beans, and corn,
and began to tunnel underground.
Slow workers in the dark, they would not
find her roses until May."
I probably should explain to you that The New Yorker took
this story as a story, but actually it
is the first chapter of a new book.
So that explains all these people left--
I hope a little--
these people left dangling there with many situations
and problems ahead of them to be solved.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Is there time?
You have all the time you want.
I just wanted to read a page and a half out of Stones.
It's from a chapter called, "Immense Distances,
Extraordinary Events."
And this-- I don't know if you've read it,
but this woman goes back after her husband dies
and has to sort out things.
And so she starts going through cupboards.
And every time she takes things out, she looks at them
and puts them all back again, sometimes adding to them.
So she has been going through things.
"That evening, Sara sat at the sala window
as long as she could see leaves drip and flower pots overflow.
Then, instead of listening to another record in the dark,
she went to the north bedroom, lit a lamp,
turned the brass wreath to open the cómoda.
She took out a shoebox together with a pile of letters
and papers that lay on top of it,
an accumulation she had gathered since her March arrival.
Depositing it all on the nearest bed, she began to sort.
She first picked up a fertilizing schedule
she had made for Paco.
This, she set aside for Luis although she
knew his true persuasion lay in the circle of the seasons
and the direction of the wind.
She pulled out a black-bordered newspaper clipping.
It was an announcement of Richard's death
placed in the Concepción Heraldo by a committee of miners.
With grief, said the clipping, in esteem.
There were three prescriptions signed by the hematologist
in California.
Here, a packet of seeds marked flocks.
Behind a recipe for oyster stew, use fresh blue point oysters,
she found a twice doubled piece of pink paper.
'What's this?' she said aloud.
The residual dust of dry leaves lay in its folds.
Sara lifted one of the veined, scented skeletons.
'Chamomile,' she said, and knew it was from Lourdes,
knew it was meant to ensure impossible things, long life,
a forgiving nature, faith.
There was too much here to sort in a single night.
She began to refill the shoebox.
When she found the accumulations more than it could hold,
she went to the closet for another box.
She left the room in order, the doors of the cómoda
closed, the shelves full.
But she had taken something with her.
And later on in the kitchen, she spread it on the table.
It was a roadmap so worn that the creases and the torn edges
had been taped.
On it, an automobile route through the southwest United
States and central Mexico had been lined in red,
stop overs circled.
One end of the road in San Francisco
was Richard's specialist.
At the other, the Malagueña mine.
The mountains and deserts and plains
that the map without illustration implied
had been climbed and sanded and traversed
so often that Sara, years later and 1,000 miles away,
without needing to close her eyes,
could see the village with the ocotillo fences,
the vine-covered boxcars switched
onto sidings for family homes, the grazing
land, the settlement without a well, the broken hacienda
reflected in the lake.
She could put her finger on the map and say,
here's a blind curve.
Here's a great crossing.
This is where we saw the Tarahumara
Indian running beside the road.
She knew the distance in miles and kilometers
between gas stations, between places to spend the night.
All these motels, Sarah thought.
Were there rooms waiting to be brought
to life with toothbrushes, the local paper, slippers
beside the bed?
There had been occurrences in these places that at the time
seemed scarcely memorable.
But from this distance, from the kitchen of the house in Ibarra,
where she stood alone on a rainy night,
they were exposed as remarkable.
One morning in Durango while the Evertons were eating breakfast
in their hotel, a man rode a horse into the vestibule,
dismounted, took out a knife, and chased their waiter
from the dining room.
Once in Chihuahua, Sara heard music long
before daybreak, pulled Richard awake
and outside to listen to a mariachi band of 12
serenade a pair of shutters that remained latched and bolted.
From the beginning to the end of an hour, songs.
She moved her finger on the map and remembered
Assumption Day in Morelia.
On that occasion, there had been no need for her
to wake her husband.
The rockets that seemed to explode under their pillows
at midnight lifted them simultaneously from sleep
onto a balcony.
Between the detonations, shouts and cheers racked the night.
'It's like the end of a war,' said Richard.
Above the church, spotlight shown
on a painted figure of the Virgin attached
to an upright pole.
In the midst of a succession of blasts, human screams, howls
of dogs, police whistles, and a siren,
bells began to toll for mass.
Tracing the marked route, Sara recalled the motel
where Richard killed a cockroach, the one where
he crushed two scorpions.
She folded the maps.
She foresaw that future sorting might prove difficult.
So faint and uncertain was a line
that separated the significant from the trivial.
It occurred to her this evening in Ibarra
with rain at the window and Richard four months dead,
that nothing ever happened on either numbered
or unnumbered roads that could be classified as unimportant.
All of it, observed by dark, observed by day,
was extraordinary."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I don't know what Lois decided about questions.
It's up to you.
Should we have questions or no question?
Should we have one or two?
I better put on my long distance glasses so I can see any hands.
I'll try to repeat the question so people
can know what it's all about.
No hands?
No question?
Oh, there's one.
Did this book come from--
mostly from your imagination or is there some truth in it
from your life?
There are three things.
Experience, observation, and imagination.
Every single thing, I think, that
goes through a writer's mind and gets on the page
is some sort of combination of those three things.
I think imagination is terribly important in that trio
of things, so I would say it's all three.
I'll say I couldn't have written it if I hadn't lived in Mexico.
That answer your question?
Yeah?
You said that you were going to read that particular page
and a half because it was especially significant to you,
and I would like to know why.
Because I believe it.
I believe that every single thing in the world
is extraordinary, that there's scarcely anything
you could just walk by.
Occasionally true, some things a little bit more.
But you can find an extraordinary thing
where you least expect it.
And when put into perspective and against other things, then
its importance and its extraordinary-ness increases,
I think.
I think everything is awfully interesting, almost always.
I agree.
Yeah, yeah.
You have to listen a lot.
That's what Grace Paley said, listen a lot, look a lot.
See what's happening.
Yes?
Had you lived in this part of the country?
Which part?
This part, the background of the book.
Yeah, I lived in Mexico City for a while,
and I did live in the country for a while.
That part of Mexico is the whole length of Mexico, practically.
It's the central plateau, and it's like the spine of Mexico
and goes all the way down.
And there are mines along the length of it.
And Ibarra is an imagined name.
Ibarra came with Cortez, and he was in charge of finding mines.
And he went with his men from one end of Mexico to the other.
And I think 20 years--
perhaps you'll have to correct me--
20 years.
In that period of time, they found every mine
in Mexico, all the silver mines.
I don't know-- well, I may be exaggerating a little.
I don't know of any mine that is still
operating that even after a long, long, long space of time
when it wasn't being worked, the Spaniards didn't find.
And some of them just have never stopped,
like the Valenciana in Guanajuato.
They've gone forever, yeah.
Very interesting.
I mean, they didn't have the instruments
that people have now.
And I don't know exactly what their technique was,
but they found it and then they sent it back
to the kings of Spain.
All that's over.
Yeah?
Do you keep diaries?
I didn't in Mexico, and it a terrible crime.
I castigate myself for it all the time.
So this was all from memory then?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, most of it from memory.
And people threw away the letters I wrote them.
I wish they hadn't.
[LAUGHTER]
They threw away the letters.
Nobody can keep all those letters that friends send you
from here and there.
And so one friend found a letter when she was moving,
and so she sent it to me.
And it had three things I'd totally forgotten about.
They weren't stories.
They were just episodes.
But out of each one of those, a story could be made.
And I'd forgotten them absolutely completely.
I recommend journals to everybody.
End of questions?
Oh.
Are you a [INAUDIBLE]?
You mentioned correspondence.
Do you correspond with a lot of people?
If you correspond a great deal, it
makes a big hole in your writing time.
I got some letters, and I answered those letters.
I don't know if you call that correspondence.
I mean with friends.
Do you have a lot of friends which
were corresponding [INAUDIBLE] before you became published?
Oh, before I became published?
Well, not especially.
I mean, you know, every now and then
I'd write a friend a letter.
I didn't do it all the time, no.
I ask because I know there's letter writers in the world.
And I wonder if I'm wasting my talent writing letters
to people.
I think you are if you want to do something else.
Unless those letters-- people are keeping
and you can put them together in a book.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I think that's wonderful.
If they're such wonderful letters that your friends
are keeping them.
And suddenly they'll put them together
and you put a title on, I think that's a marvelous thing.
You may be writing something you don't know.
But if you're thinking of what you put on the page of a story
or trying to write a novel, if you write a good letter,
it takes a while.
And if you run out of time, like everybody seems to,
I don't know if you have time to be prolific in both.
Yeah?
I don't know which hand I'm looking at.
In the novel, the relationship with Sara and Richard,
how did you know what to tell us and give us and not
give us and let us--
in our own imagination?
I don't think I thought of that.
I didn't decide.
I think it was the only way I could do it, probably.
I probably shouldn't tell you this,
but I wrote the book in segments because I kept turning parts
of it in to writing class.
And only after I'd been doing that for, oh, more than a year,
someone in the class said, why don't you
think of making this into a novel
because everything is happening in the same place
and the same characters are reoccurring?
And that's when I put the Americans in.
I'd started with just the Mexican people in the village.
I don't think that's a very scientific way
to write a novel.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't think anybody should copy that idea.
That's how it just happened.
I don't think it's the right way at all.
Yeah?
Did you service a consultant for the film
being made out in Old Tucson?
No.
I don't know how to write a script,
and I couldn't have done it without going
to school for five more years and learn
how to write a script.
[LAUGHTER]
However, yes.
I mean, yes, they did call me a consultant
and very kindly sent me the script
in all its various phases.
And I did have a few suggestions, mostly about facts
and occasionally about words.
And they were always very kind to me,
so I really can't complain about anything.
And I must tell you that I like the way it's turning out.
Before you come and see, I didn't
know all the wonderful people I was going to meet.
I'll have to tell you one thing.
They were-- this will probably be the end because everybody
wants to go home.
But they were filming on a mountain west of Tucson.
I guess it's in the Tucson Mountains, they told me.
And we went past the ranch and past some trailer places
and so forth.
Then we went up a mountain, halfway up a large mountain
with very jagged peaks at the top, beautiful mountain,
and all the desert plants were there,
all the native plants all around.
And the film company had built this house--
part of it.
They built part of a porch in an angle,
nail-shaped thing with the roof over the porch, tile,
and a roof over the house so that the roofs came this way,
you know.
One was higher than the other.
And the floors were tile, inside and outside the house.
It wasn't adobe, naturally, which
would take a million years, but it was white plaster.
And when I saw that house on that mountain and those desert
plants around, I truly thought I'd gone home.
And I don't know if any of you have read the book, but--
[LAUGHTER]
In the very first chapter, they get there,
and they're exhausted at night.
And they put up camp cots and sleep
in sleeping bags on the porch because they're too
worn out to do anything else.
And so dawn comes, and these two wonderful actors who are in it,
Glenn Close and Keith Carradine, were
saying these few words they say when they wake up
about the cenzontle bird.
I was sitting there quietly, not wanting to make a single sound.
Suddenly behind me came this voice
with a very slight accent saying, 'Good morning, señor.
Did you sleep well?
There are 12 men waiting at the gate.
They want jobs at the mine.'
And I was that close to bursting into tears.
It was terrible, terrible.
I thought I was there.
This was happening.
And so when there a little space,
I turned around and said, 'Are you playing the part
of Domingo?'
And he said, yes, he was.
So after that, I met everybody, everybody,
and they said, I'm Lourdes, and I'm Manuel, and all that.
And I practically wept.
Didn't I, practically?
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks a lot for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks a lot.
Well, we kept everybody over time.
No, you didn't.