Review of “Flame Trees in May” by Karla Marrufo
- Editor
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
By Nidia Cuan (trans. by Allison A. deFreese)
Many years ago, when I first started reading, my mother said something quite ordinary that she may well have heard on T.V. There are certain books, she told me, which will change your life forever; books that will not leave you unscathed. Perhaps you won’t be any better or worse off than you were before reading them, but nonetheless, you will be changed.
Flame Trees in May (originally published as Mayo in Spanish) is exactly such a book, and reading it is an experience that will certainly not leave any reader unaffected. As is often the case with books that startle us, arousing a sense of unease as they kiss or caress us, Mayo is a work that we cannot simply set aside after we read it for the first time. In these pages we find a sun covered with spots that threaten our earth with a slow death; walls full of bubbles and a dampness from the past; and an ordinary family—a family that could just as easily have been any of ours—whose members are tormented by people who whisper behind their backs, talking about their shady and unscrupulous origins.
With an intricate and carefully conceived narrative structure and written in a dazzlingly poetic prose—the language sometimes sweet or tender, and other times subtly sharp and jagged like the memory of past pain— Mayo is a dialogue (or perhaps a monologue) between a woman and the son she addresses as she tells him his own story. This is a story about being a lover, mother, and daughter. In short, it’s a story about bloodlines or lineage; a tale that could have been, instead, “the simple story of a simple family that lived in an extremely hot, flat city.” And in a way it is this story. Yet Karla Marrufo presents us with this illusion of simplicity—that of our own lives, in order to show us that, in these small, negligible, daily things, the ones that perhaps stick in our memory and come to mind when we realize we only have a few years, a few days, a few hours left; perhaps because there is beauty in them, but also the horrors and indecipherable mysteries of life and death.
The woman in Mayo, facing a destiny she knows is inevitable, finds comfort through words and in her memories. Considering the prophetic, tomblike silence of her son, she warns him, more than once:
we need to talk, to tell each other our dreams, our memories,
even if they may not be true
what we think about when we think about nothing. that’s it, you should be giving thought to the small things, so they won’t disappear.
And so she stops to consider the “fancy paper napkins, the little drawings on disposable cups, the tiny flowers on plastic cutlery,” all monuments to an ephemeral beauty. She also reflects on the flame trees “blazing in the middle of the street” and thinks about a time before her son went silent, but when words still weren’t sufficient—days of green grass and an unquestioning belief in happiness, far, still so far away, from their destiny. She even thinks about cutting up that “gigantic” melon:
i had to [ . . .] scoop out all the seeds from each little square—the hulls of those seeds felt rough to the touch as I removed them; each was unique and alive, and they kept covering my hands like homicidal blood [ . . .] and that meant getting coated in the melon’s round and sweet death, its juice running onto the floor until I ended up crying—holding the knife in my hand—about all the times i hadn’t known how to relish the thought of death.
Mayo is also a love story, a story about lost love and loving: the love between a mother and son, but at the same time, the love of life and its fleeting moments of happiness—drop by drop, tuc y gluc. Of course, this isn’t the sugary sweet love that usually comes to mind when the words “love story” or “mother and son” are spoken. The love in this story can be tender or violent, “the same love with which one runs over a cat” that lies suffering on the roadway; because, after all, a love worth experiencing never follows a comfortable or conventional path. In Mayo words are a refuge, spells that evoke those small loves that have been lost, but are also a riddle, a maze, a stamp that marks us forever with its ink.
Names, “those handful of letters from the alphabet that stays bound to the heart all our lives [. . .] are extremely dangerous; they trace lines leading to our destinies.” And here we find the endearing cast of characters that Karla gives us in this book: a cat named Tiresias, who possesses the prophetic innocence of animals; or a daughter named Dolores [i.e., Lola, literarily, “Pain”], who grew into someone with artificial beauty and fake laugh; a bloodied grandfather who, like Glauco, “felt the calling to become a fish, or some crazy impulse to turn himself into a reptile” and held onto his seafaring or maritime last name. Then there are, of course, the mother, and the son whose name alternatively seems to resemble different words that mean “memory,” “forgotten” and “forgetfulness.”
And if names are destiny in Mayo—as well as perhaps in actual life—the same thing is true of all words, including the words of the stories from which our lives were created—be they our words or those of the ancestors who preceded us, be their memories feverish or legendary in our imagination.
The fact that our memories betray us is of the least importance here. The protagonists’ fates include distant stories, echoes, ancient voices, epic tragedies, truth and lies, the allegory of Oedipus, Orestes, and Penelope. The mother wears, or unravels, her memories in order to survive; but even more so, they’re stories she’s heard from her own mother, father, Tiresias the cat with his exceedingly green stare, and, of course, from religious figures like Ochun who must be kept happy by making sure their altars are “well-stocked with flowers, sweets, rum, copper coins, open scissors, photographs and shells.”
Knowing the power of words, the protagonist of Mayo speaks out, begging her son to answer, but really, she is telling herself these stories, embellishing past events, as is only possible through memory; she speaks of rain when really there were only melted tires, irritated skin, and heat in their lives. Meanwhile, her son has changed his name in an attempt to change the ending of his story and avoid the bloody history of open wounds he has inherited. But as we all know, changing names is not enough to turn us into someone new, much less to erase the lines of fate that cover our palms or rewrite our DNA. The characters in Mayo, as well as each of us, play word games, create riddles, and recite tongue twisters—line the words repeated by this mother and son:
paradise bird white angel cloud heaven dream blood
words which inevitably bind us to our family lineage.
And so, thinking back to my own mother today, I want to believe it is true (and not something that I’ve made up), that it was in fact my mother—and not some teacher—who told me with the familiar voice of home those words about how a book can change us forever. She said it knowing that an obsession with books would be my fate, a destiny that would also lead me ever further away from her. And, with this in mind she also gave me a nidifugous name that would always connect me to her nest. I want to believe that my mother, like all mothers, understood something about my destiny even if I did not, that she shared these words with me not to sow mystery, but so I would be ready when I discovered a book that—in a thousand different ways—would allow me to fly home again, so I would repeat (with the grimace or half smile I also inherited from her) that some stories cannot help but change us forever. Mayo, with its showers of golden rain, its flame trees on fire, its dark sun and the drips and drops that form bubbles, is one of them.
Nidia Cuan is a Mexican author who holds degrees from the Universidad Veracruzana and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She has taught courses in oral literary tradition, contemporary linguistics, and creative writing at several universities, and published research articles in anthologies and academic journals. In 2016, she was recipient of Mexico's National Dolores Castro Prize for Women (Premio Nacional de Narrativa “Dolores Castro”) in fiction (2016).
Allison A. deFreese is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Her work appears in Crazyhorse/swamp pink, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and Hunger Mountain. Her book-length translations include: María Negroni's Elegy for Joseph Cornell (Dalkey Archive Press, 2020), José M. Hernández's Soaring to New Heights: Story of a Child Migrant Farmworker Who Became a NASA Astronaut (Renuevo, 2022/José M. Hernández’s story is now a major motion picture, A Million Miles Away), Verónica González Arredondo's Green Fires of the Spirits (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla's University Press, 2022), and Carolina Esses' Winter Season (Entre Ríos Books, 2023).
Copy editor: Nancy He
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