WASHINGTON POST 2002

Pages on Life's Way

10/20/2002

THE CONQUEST

By Yxta Maya Murray

HarperCollins. 288 pp. $24.95

Books provide a lush backdrop for Sara Rosario Gonzales, the protagonist of Yxta Maya Murray's hypnotic new novel, The Conquest. Sara is a rare book restorer at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. A more complete job description would note her tenure as Scheherazade to her on-again/off-again boyfriend and former high school sweetheart, Karl, a U.S. Marine who dreams of becoming an astronaut. For 16 years, Sara has been unable to commit to Karl, but her storytelling ability, combined with her sexual expertise, has kept the poor guy on tenterhooks.

Now, however, her hunky Marine is getting married to someone else. And not even Sara's extravagant bedside accounts of her latest discovery, a 16th-century manuscript attributed to a Hieronymite monk named Miguel Santiago de Pasamonte, can bind Karl to her. Or can they?

The Getty's entry for de Pasamonte's untitled folio reads, "A fanciful novel set in the era of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V." The folio tells the story of the daughter of an Aztec prince, a young woman "destined to become one of Montezuma's thousand wives." Yet her ambitions are loftier still: She wishes to become a juggler as great as Maxixa, who not only could spin a hundred silver balls in the air but in a command performance for Montezuma summons a greater globe, the moon.

Alas, only men are permitted to learn such artistry, but when the terrible Corte{acute}s arrives to slaughter her people, the young girl disguises herself as a juggler. In her masculine garb, she is captured by Corte{acute}s and brought to Italy as a gift for Pope Clement VII. After she has arrived safely in Rome, her female identity is revealed -- but not her true name, which she keeps secret. She also conceals her real objective, which is to kill the Emperor Charles to avenge the destruction of Tenochtitlan and its inhabitants. The Europeans, oblivious to anything save her beauty, call her Helen.

Sara, reading of Helen's exploits, determines that this manuscript and others attributed to de Pasamonte are actually the work of the Aztec woman herself. Sara titles the manuscript "The Conquest," and Yxta Maya Murray's account of Helen's adventures alternates with Sara's efforts to establish a provenance for the document, even as she attempts her own romantic conquest of Karl.

Helen's journeys across Europe are picaresque in the best sense of the word, evoking both Cervantes (among the characters in Don Quixote is an author named de Pasamonte) and Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Helen's desire for revenge vies with her search for her true love, a learned and lovely nun named Caterina. This quest takes Helen from Rome to Venice, where she nearly blinds Titian with her beauty; to a Spanish galleon, where she becomes the royal saucier; to a stronghold in the Ottoman Empire; and, at last, to the abbey where the Emperor Charles lies dying.

Meanwhile, back in present-day California, Sara stages one last siege upon Karl's beleaguered heart. The scenes featuring this pair, unfortunately, are the weakest parts of The Conquest. The earnest Karl, while sympathetically drawn, seems spectacularly ill-matched for the feisty, sexy bibliophile Sara, who seems most at home in the Getty's marvelously described galleries and archives. Murray's secondary characters are far more compelling. There is Sara's father, Reynaldo, a successful businessman who long ago left Chihuahua to build skyscrapers in Long Beach; and her mother, Beatrice, who during the course of a museum visit with the 9-year-old Sara stole a leaf from an ancient Mesoamerican manuscript, firing her daughter's heart and mind with tales of their Aztec heritage.

"Why'd I take it?" Beatrice asks her daughter. "Because it didn't belong to them, that's why . . . those people, their eyes have no idea what they're looking at when they see the pretty pictures. They are looking at me, and they don't know it. They are looking at you."

As The Conquest draws to a close, Sara and the fictional Helen struggle to find a place in worlds that do not immediately welcome them, as women, as lovers, or as artists. Yet in the end both do triumph, romantically and otherwise. Some readers may wish that the willful, passionate Sara had chosen the more unconventional route followed by her 16th-century counterpart, but few readers will be disappointed in Murray's clever and spellbinding account of their journeys. *

Elizabeth Hand's seventh novel is the forthcoming "Mortal Love."

Cast Away

05/19/2002

THE LETO BUNDLE

By Marina Warner

Farrar Straus Giroux. 407 pp. $26

Marina Warner's expansive and entertaining explorations of folklore, sexuality, storytelling and pop culture have given her bestseller status in the somewhat rarefied world of cultural historians, along with writers such as Carlo Ginzburg, Angela Carter, Camille Paglia and Bruno Bettelheim. Warner's best-known works -- From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, Alone of All Her Sex -- are feminist exegeses of fairy tales, popular and classical myths, and religious icons, couched in a lyrical prose that makes genre-defying leaps among topics as disparate as Hesiod's Theogeny, the brutally hilarious excesses of Struwwelpeter, Nintendo games and The Odyssey.

But Warner is also a very fine fiction writer, with five novels to her credit. Her newest, The Leto Bundle, blends classical scholarship with more recent history -- the ongoing misery of the Bosnian conflict -- to create a powerful contemporary myth of refugees, statelessness and the most primal legend of all, that of the Divine Mother and her children.

Most contemporary fabulists plunder the Greek pantheon for its heroic or picaresque values. With The Leto Bundle, Marina Warner has taken on a more challenging task, that of reinvigorating a lesser-known myth and making it both her own and timeless.

In the classical tale, the Titan Leto coupled with Zeus, who promised to protect her and her twin children when they were born. Dismayed by his wife's wrath when she discovered his infidelity, Zeus abandoned his pregnant lover. Fearful of Hera's revenge, even the very earth rejected her.

Poor Leto -- who is about 14 in Warner's retelling -- is driven from one place to the next. She finally finds sanctuary on the desolate isle of Delos, where her twins, Apollo and Artemis, are born. A wolf, herself a mother, is the only creature who aids the hapless little family as they are beaten and driven out of hiding by those who hate the very sight of powerless outsiders with no man to protect them.

Thousands of years later, Leto's story is rediscovered by a museum curator, Hortense Fernly, "the deputy keeper of Classical Antiquities at the National Museum of Albion." Fernly is in charge of an ancient bit of flotsam recently put on display: "Cartonnage, gilded and painted, high relief, glass eyes and braided wig. Mummified body inside wrapped in coffering style of weave. Linen, papyrus, horsehair, glass, human remains. Found in sarcophagus . . . lid with scene of Bacchic frenzy? Nativity scene."

Within days of its appearance in the museum, this bundle of oddments begins to draw attention, not just from serious museum goers or curatorial staff but from the less desirable human flotsam -- homeless people, students and schoolchildren, assorted eccentrics -- who also make museums their homes, especially on rainy afternoons. It is these folks who start leaving notes and offerings to the mummified figure later known as Leto. One of them, an idealistic schoolteacher named Kim McQuy, becomes increasingly obsessed with the archaeological remains. Kim has visions of Leto talking to him; he wants to incorporate her into his Web site, History Starts With Us, as a symbol of the refugee's plight in modern Europe.

Kim begins corresponding with Dr. Fernly, who arranges for him to read the translations of the papyrus scrolls found with the Leto bundle. The scrolls, and the journal kept by their 19th-century plunderer, tell tales that intersect across time and place, from ancient Greece through the 12th century and into the Victorian era. Yet all the stories feature the same central character, known variously as Laetitia, Lettice, Nellie -- a very young unmarried woman with twin children, a boy and a girl, all three gaunt and near starvation, all three forever seeking refuge, forever cast back into a maelstrom of unceasing violence between religious and ethnic factions that continues down through the centuries.

Warner's depiction of the childish Leto is heartbreaking. Uneducated, still bound by filaments of desire and affection for the men who use and then abandon her, Leto feeds and comforts her children as a wild thing does, nursing them until they're 5 or 6 years old, seeking always to find a better life for them, though without hope for one herself. Only a small miracle concerning the twins gives them any standing at all: Neither possesses a navel; this symbolizes their divine origin.

When Leto's wanderings bring her to Tirzah, a place very like present-day Bosnia, the story takes on even more ominous overtones, for Leto and for Kim McQuy. Because Kim himself is a displaced person: As a toddler in Tirzah, he was sold by his mother to a middle-class English couple. The adult Kim has almost no memory of his mother, now called Ella or Ellie; but she has not forgotten him, and neither has Kim's twin sister, Phoebe. Years later Ella and Phoebe make their way to England (called Albion by Warner), where their lives and Kim's once more intersect.

The Leto Bundle is strongest in this portrayal of a woman who, through all her desperate incarnations, remains a recognizable and sympathetic figure, not just a pathetic symbol of the dispossessed. Leto's sojourn as a menial hotel worker in contemporary Tirzah is extremely powerful. Less successful are the assorted plotlines woven through the modern sections of the story, especially those involving a self-absorbed folk singer named Gramercy Poule.

Marina Warner understands that myths, unlike movies or novels, never truly come to an end. And so in its closing pages The Leto Bundle circles back upon itself. Its haunting final image, that of a homeless woman wandering alone across 21st-century Europe, is redeemed by the small hope generated by the fragile web of human contacts Leto/Ella has left behind in Albion. Perhaps, this time, someone will come after her, and she will at last find a home. *

Elizabeth Hand is at work on her seventh novel, "Mortal Love."