Entertainment
Two Sisters Take On the 20th Century, With Ghosts in Tow
A new novel recalls a dark period of El Salvador’s history, as well as Hollywood’s Golden Age and the art salons of Paris.
THE VOLCANO DAUGHTERS, by Gina María Balibrera
Gina María Balibrera’s debut novel, “The Volcano Daughters,” spits fire from its very first page just as the fevered mountain of Izalco has flung brimstone for much of El Salvador’s volatile history. This is an epic story, a remarkable achievement for a writer making her first foray into the literary landscape. Balibrera demonstrates a fearlessness that is rare.
The humble pueblo of Izalco, which lies at the foot of the volcano in El Salvador’s far northwest, is where our story begins, but our heroines, Graciela and Consuelo, two Pipil sisters from the pueblo, soon find themselves in the capital’s corridors of power. Before long, life’s fickle wheel of fortune will hurl them to more distant harbors: San Francisco, Hollywood, Paris, Marseille, New York.
It is 1932. Hitler is ascendant, a genocide is brewing in El Salvador, the Indigenous Pipil are targeted for extermination and a generalissimo contemptuously known as El Gran Pendejo is plotting his rise to presidential power. Obsessed with whiteness, the general is intent — like his hero, Hitler — on forging blood “purity” in his homeland. By the end of his purge, 30,000 indios will be tossed into mass graves, including four lifelong friends of our heroines.
To be dead, however, is not to be silent. The hazards Graciela and Consuelo face, all of them hallucinatory, hair-raising, altogether Dickensian, are spunkily reported by their dead compañeras, spirited ghosts whose personalities we come to know along with the living’s.
As they recount it, Graciela is a 9-year-old girl when El Gran Pendejo summons her to the capital, suspecting she may be the spiritual oracle he needs. There, she becomes the dictator’s Scheherezade, his innocent muse, a pint-size mystical adviser. And there she also meets her older sister, Consuelo, who was abducted from home long before Graciela was born.
There is nothing implausible in this; in fact, the tale is startlingly close to history. The cruel, maniacal Salvadoran strongman of the 1930s, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, kidnapped and murdered his subjects at will, conducted séances in the presidential palace and believed in the magic of color — white being “the color of heaven.” In this land where dictators rule and perversions become rules of law, nothing is outlandish.
