The Volcano Daughters: A Novel - Softcover

Balibrera, Gina María

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593469135 ISBN 13: 9780593469132

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A searingly original debut about two sisters and their flight from genocide—which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to San Francisco’s Cannery Row—each haunted along the way by the ghosts of their murdered friends, who are not yet done telling their stories

“Epic…[Balibrera] is a gifted new storyteller with a nose for history and a prodigious imagination.” —The New York Times

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo’s regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail. Each believing the other to be dead, they escape, fleeing across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate ultimately brings them back together in the most unlikely of ways…

Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GINA MARÍA BALIBRERA earned an MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers' Program. She’s been awarded grants from Aspen Words, Tin House, the Rackham Foundation, and the Periplus Collective, as well as a Tyson Award, the Aura Estrada Prize, and the Under the Volcano Sandra Cisneros Fellowship.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Our mothers carried us on their backs until we kicked in the noontime heat. In the afternoons, they untied us, babies all born in the same season, and let us crawl beneath the ceiba tree as they worked. In those early days, before we could walk, before María was born, las faldas of the ceiba were high and wide enough to contain us. We ate earthworms and licked the ceiba’s bark. We waved at the birds and sprouted teeth while our mothers took turns running over from the coffee fields to count that we were all still there, quickly pointing at each of us as they did. Lourdes, Cora, Lucía, Graciela. They took turns making sure that none of us were choking or hungry or covered in shit. They took turns nursing us, two at once to save time. They took turns, patting all of our little bellies, rubbing our backs, wiping caca from our fat little butts with a rag, rocking us to sleep and setting us down again between the skirts of the roots. We were safe.

During the rainy months, in the late afternoons, our mothers piled us together like sacks of yucca inside the sorting room. We napped as rain soaked the roof, awakened the smell of the building’s history—­the sharp stink of last year’s cherry harvest, the bitterness of indigo. In that room we crawled over one another’s baby legs and patted one another’s cheeks, not knowing where one of us began and another ended. In that room, we took our first tumbling steps. María was born in the rainy season, and then we were five: Lourdes, María, Cora, Lucía, and Graciela.

Later, when we were older, we went to the nuns, who dressed us, who taught us to read and write, who cared for us during the day while our mothers worked. The nuns dressed us from bins that arrived from abroad. We had our own clothes, refajos that our grandmothers had made, long woven skirts, tops with the smallest embroidered starflowers lining an open collar, but these became nightgowns in favor of the pastel dresses from the nuns, ruffled dresses that rapidly grew too short for our growing legs, too tight around our bellies, dresses with puffed sleeves made of tulle, lace, and starched cotton. On our feet we wore soft leather sandals like our mothers—­we called them caites—­but María always kicked hers off, said she ran so fast they burned her heels.

Somewhere on the volcano there were men, driving carts, working beside our mothers, guiding animals uphill, but we rarely spoke with them, nor did we sense or mourn their absence from our daily lives. We took turns imagining our fathers because we thought an understanding of who they were might unravel the mystery of who we were. It didn’t. We were of our mothers.

Our mothers talked to us about the fathers of our friends, but never about our own. But from their chambre, we pieced together some stories. Graciela’s father was much older and had once lived here. His name was Germán and he was a colono—­he’d risen in the ranks at the finca until he’d owned his own plot of land. At the time he had chosen Socorrito, Graciela’s mother, Germán was the most powerful man on the finca after the old patrón. He pursued her, leaving her gifts that were entirely impractical for the life that she lived, but told a story about who he was becoming, and the kind of life that he might offer her—­silk stockings, a perfume oil that smelled of lavender, a velvet hat with a little net, a purse made of glittering beads.

As a boy, he’d met a gringo railroad man who drank special water—­water in all sorts of colors—­that he said made him more powerful, allowed him to listen to the dead and control the future. This crazy gringo was rich and promised Germán he’d purify his soul with that special water, with his potions of color and light. He swore that he could raise Germán out of the circumstances he was living in, out of the colo­nato, the system that bound him to labor on the coffee finca on the mountain. Germán, fatherless, poor, had listened to the gringo, who promised him a future in the railroad he was building to bring the coffee crop to the coast, and sent him abroad to study economics in Switzerland. His coursework and experience in the shadow of the Alps eventually proved irrelevant to his later position as the General’s oracle, but afforded him a refined sense and understanding of the improbable.

The gringo, Brannon was his name, was obsessed with colors—­thought some healed, some gave vitality. And when he saw Socorrito, whom he knew Germán liked, he encouraged the match, for, as we understand now, the color of her skin, fairer than any of our mothers’, was exactly what he was after.

Transmission. Stories all have masters who control how they’re told and to whom. Thanks to the rich gringo, Germán had become a master. And as a teenager, he transmitted the gringo’s stories to his best friend, a man we came to know as el genera­lísimo, El Gran Pendejo. They were boys together, you see. El Gran Pendejo was from the volcanoes too, though later he did everything he could to erase that history, believed this bullshit from the gringo could help him do it, could help him erase any trace of where he came from, to separate our stories from his own.

By the time that Socorrito’s first pregnancy, with Graciela’s older sister, Consuelo, had begun to show, Germán had already left the finca to live in the capital. The General was rising in the ranks there and found Germán a post as his spiritual adviser. Soon, Germán married in the capital as well. Socorrito hoped that even though Germán had left her, she might still have rights to his land, but while he had been freed from el colonato, she was fixed in place.

Then, when Consuelo was four, a man, a thug from the capital, came to our village and took Consuelo from her mother’s arms, after knocking Socorrito unconscious.

He left a note on the ground, which Socorrito discovered when she awoke, and considered destroying its fine seal, its delicate paper, its blot of indigo ink, in the fury of her rage and grief. Instead, reasoning that this was perhaps the only way she might find her daughter, she brought the paper directly to the gringa nuns to decipher for her, moving through her thick pain like a sleepwalker, because Socorrito could not read the lavish penstrokes of her child’s father.

Germán had Consuelo and he intended to keep her in the capital. You see, this new wife of Germán’s was barren and Consuelo was to be a gift for this barren woman, who yearned to be a mother. She would be una consolación; she would live up to her name.

In the capital, Consuelo would receive an education. She would live there not as a servant, but as a daughter. She would not be made to work; she’d already been removed from el colonato, which we’d all been born into, which our mothers and grandmothers had been born into. El colo­nato, which tethered us to the finca, where we would work until we died. Instead, Consuelo would become “civilized”—­that was the word Germán used in the letter. And when she was an adult, she could choose to leave the capital and return to the volcano, if she so wanted.

This was all written on the piece of paper that Socorrito had received. Sister Iris had slowed over the word “civilized” as she read.

After that Socorrito slept with the paper—­the promise, she called it—­under her head. This small scrap may have been the only thing tethering her to the earth, now that her daughter was gone.

Our mothers comforted her with laughter, when it became clear that their...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593469135
• ISBN 13: 9780593469132
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 369
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland