Caramelo

by Sandra Cisneros

I found this book one evening with B., post-book binge weekend. And I've been meaning to read another book by the author, The House on Mango Street. It's a coming of age story, a generational story, and a story of migration. All fun things. I guess I was expecting a cross between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Love in the Time of Cholera.

This is a great book. A great way with words, not too spare with them, like other books I've read. And a great story as well. The relationship with the grandmother was not like mine, but it did make me miss her. And wish that there were some way that we could hear all of the stories, the scandals and excuses, the things that are hard to explain and tell while there's still time for them to be told. The hard part about this book is that there is a sprinkling of Spanish words throughout the novel, and I don't speak a whole lot of Spanish. I did have the Internet resources handy, but some slang still escaped me. Ah well... I have lots of quotes, to make up for the books didn't pluck little strings inside me like violins.

"It was a shame that narciso had not read that illustrious and educational book of his great-great-grand-other Ibn Hazm and paid close attention to the chapter "On the Vileness of Sinning." Had he been fortunate enough to have been schooled by his early ancestor, then perhaps Narciso Reyes would have saved himself a lifetime of grief. But it is true we are but an extension of our ancestors, our several fathers and many mothers, so that if one thinks about it seriously and calculates, at one times hundreds of years ago, thousands of people were relatives-to-be walking across villages, passing each other unknowingly in and out of tavern doorways or over bridges where barges rolled quietly beneath, without knowing that in years to come their own lives and those of contemporary strangesr would merge several generations later to produce a single descendant and twine them all as a family. Thus, in the words of old, we are all brothers.
But who listens to what is said of old? It was youth, that amnesia, lke a wave sliding forward and then sliding back, that kept humanity tethered to eternal foolishness, as if a spell was cast on mankind and each generation was forced to disbelieve what the previous generation had learned a trancazos, as they say."

"-So that the woman who wears the crown of iguanas wil come back and love only you, no?
-How did you know?
-You want her to fall under your spell?
-With all my heart I desire it.
-Well, then, it's obvious what you have to do. Forget her.
-Forget her!
-Yes, forget her. Abandon her. The more you let someone go, the more they fly back to you. The more you cage them, them more they try to escape. The worse you treat them, the crazier in love they are with you. Isn't that so? That's all. That's my love medicine for you today."

"The talk in the night, that luxurious little talk about nothing, about everything before falling asleep: - And then what happened?
-And then I said to the butcher, this doesn't look like beef, this looks like dog cutlets if you ask me...
-You're kidding!
-No, that's what I said...
How sometimes he fell asleep with her talking. The heat of his body, furious little furnace. The softness of his belly, soft swirl of hair that began in the belly button and ended below in that vortex of his sex. All this was hard to put into language. It took a while for the mind to catch up with the body, which already and always remembered.
Everyone complains about marriage, but no one remembers to praise its wonderful extravagances, lik sleeping next to a warm body, like sandwiching one's feet with somebody else's feet. To talk at night and share what has happened in a day. To put some order to one's thoughts. How could she not help but think - happiness."

"'Normita, you're better off,' everyone said to me. 'You're young, you find yourself another to erase the pain of the last one; like the saying goes, one nail drives out another.' Sure, but unless you're Christ who wants to be pierced with nails, right?
For a lng time after, I'd just burst into tears if anyone even touched me. Sometimes it's like that when somebody touches you and you haven't been touched in a long time. Has that ever happened to you? No? Well, for me it was like that. Anybody touched me, by accident or on purpose, I cried. I was like a little piece of bread sopped with gravy. Wo whenever anything squeezed me, I started to cry and couldn't stop. Have you ever been that sad? Like a donut dunked in coffee. Like a book left in the rain. No, never? Well, that's because you're young. Your time will come."