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Crossing Borders
Volume 8, Number 1 - Fall 2009
Mothers Meet in Plaza of Ideas
Photographs of grinning babies crowd the walls, and one woman has brought her own daughter, a seven-month old who squirms quietly in her mother’s arms.
But for the most part, the women gathered at the Children’s Home Society in Trenton are taking a break from the relentless work of mothering; for the duration of Gente y Cuentos, they are readers and thinkers, women from different places who meet in the plaza of ideas.
Alma Concepcíon unfurls a large map: there are the women’s homelands of Mexico and Guatemala, and there—a wedge with a Pacific coastline—is Ecuador, where today’s story originates.
Concepcíon reviews some vocabulary, including “garboso,” a word in the story’s title that means “una persona que tiene presencia,”—a person with presence.
Then she reads “Gabriel Garboso,” by Iván Egüez, the tragi-comic tale of a man whose job is to chauffeur the mayor’s family. He is smitten by an elegant young woman he sees on the street, but so intimidated when she rides in his taxi that he can’t speak. Pretending to be mute, he writes her messages instead, claiming he will soon travel to the United States for an operation to restore his speech.
Then, before he can see the young woman again, he has a car accident in which he bites his tongue and truly is rendered mute “al modelo del sirviente perfecto”—in the manner of the perfect, wordless servant.
Concepcíon asks, “Why is he nervous during his first encounter with the young woman?”
Brenda Ramirez says the chauffeur doesn’t know what to do with such an elegant person; Carolina Morales says, “because I’m a person who’s basically timid, I sympathize with him, with his problem.”
Concepcíon invites the women to consider the story’s urban setting by asking, “Could Gabriel invent the same lie in a small town?” No, Karyn Hernandez responds; in a small town, the chauffeur and his passenger would no doubt have friends in common.
The women talk about nicknames, about lost loves, about how easy it is to deceive someone during an initial encounter, and about whether there is necessarily a conflict between a woman’s ambition and her desire for intimacy. Hernandez describes herself as “independent and not interested in conforming,” and agrees that some men might not take kindly to such a stance.
Afterward, she says the best thing about Gente y Cuentos is the chance to talk about ideas. “At home, with two children, there is no time to study.”
Ramirez loves learning “palabras nuevas,” new words that surface in the stories. For Silvia Corado, the best part of Gente y Cuentos is “hearing the life experiences of other people…Me encanta la literatura,” she says.
“I used to be in some groups where I would never open my mouth,” says Morales. “I have a fear of being wrong. But here, there is no right and wrong. You can express yourself without feeling stupid.”
For Concepcíon, the women’s passionate responses to stories including “Two Words,” by Isabel Allende and “Eveline,” by James Joyce, have been fascinating and rewarding. In “Two Words,” one character notes that, in her struggle to survive, “I didn’t have any time for compassion.” One woman in the group said her experience was different: when she crossed the border into the United States; even though no one had helped her, she helped protect a 14-year-old girl who was emigrating alone.
“The participant began to cry,” Concepcíon remembers. “That was a very tender moment.”