A Manual for Cleaning Women Read Free Page B

Babel, García Márquez come to mind.
    When prose fiction is as expansive as hers, the result is that the world gets celebrated. Out through the work, a joy radiating off the world. It is writing continuous with the irrepressibility of—humanity, place, food, smells, color, language. The world seen in all its perpetual motion, its penchant to surprise and even delight.
    It has nothing to do with whether the author is pessimistic or not, whether the events or feelings evoked are cheerful. The palpability of what we’re shown is affirmative:
    People in cars around us were eating sloppy things. Watermelons, pomegranates, bruised bananas. Bottles of beer spurted on ceilings, suds cascaded on the sides of cars … I’m hungry, I whined. Mrs. Snowden had foreseen that. Her gloved hand passed me fig newtons wrapped in talcumy Kleenex. The cookie expanded in my mouth like Japanese flowers.
    About this “joy”: no, it is not omnipresent. Yes, there are stories of unalloyed bleakness. What I have in mind is the overriding effect.
    Consider “Strays.” Its ending is as poignant as a Janis Joplin ballad. The addict-girl, ratted out by a ne’er-do-well lover who’s a cook and trustee, has stuck to the program, gone to group, and been good. And then she flees. In a truck, alongside an old gaffer from a TV production crew, she heads toward the city:
    We got to the rise, with the wide valley and the Rio Grande below us, the Sandia Mountains lovely above.
    “Mister, what I need is money for a ticket home to Baton Rouge. Can you spare it, about sixty dollars?”
    “Easy. You need a ticket. I need a drink. It will all work out.”
    Also like a Janis Joplin ballad, that ending has lilt .
    *   *   *
    Of course, at the same time, a riotous humor animates Lucia’s work. To the topic of joy, it is germane.
    Example: the humor of “502,” which is an account of drunk driving that occurs—with no one behind the wheel. (The driver is asleep upstairs, drunk, as the parked car rolls down the hill.) Fellow drunk Mo says, “Thank the Lord you wasn’t in it, sister … First thing I did, I opened the door and said, ‘Where she be?’”
    In another story, the mother: “‘She hated children. I met her once at an airport when all four of my kids were little. She yelled “Call them off!” as if they were a pack of Dobermans.’”
    Unsurprisingly, readers of Lucia’s work have sometimes used the term “black humor.” I don’t see it that way. Her humor was too funny, and it had no axe to grind. Céline and Nathanael West, Kafka—theirs is a different territory. Besides, Lucia’s humor is bouncy.
    But if her writing has a secret ingredient, it is suddenness. In the prose itself, shift and surprise produce a liveliness that is a mark of her art.
    Her prose syncopates and hops, changes cadences, changes the subject. That’s where a lot of its crackle is.
    Speed in prose is not something you hear much about. Certainly not enough.
    Lucia’s “Panteón de Dolores” is a wide-ranging story with great emotional depth. But it also has her alacrity. Read the passage that begins “Not listening though” and continues through “because of the pollution level.” *
    Or this: “Mama, you saw ugliness and evil everywhere, in everyone, in each place. Were you crazy or a seer?”
    The last story Lucia wrote, “B.F. and Me,” is a small one. It has no wallop or big themes, no infanticides, no smuggling, no mother-daughter or reconciliation. In a way, that’s why its art is so remarkable. It’s gentle; but it’s fast.
    She introduces the creaky old handyman who comes to work on her trailer, as follows:
    [B.F. was] gasping and coughing after he climbed the three steps. He was an enormous man, tall, very fat and very old. Even when he was still outside catching his breath, I could smell him. Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. He had bloodshot baby-blue eyes that smiled. I liked him right away.
    That “I liked him right