How poetry can change a life

We never learn exactly why Edwardo lost his driver’s license and was sentenced to a year of community service (there was an accident) but thanks to his sister’s confessor who knew the mayor personally he was assigned to reading books to the elderly and the infirm in their homes rather than scrubbing toilets in some hospital or prison.

Eduardo, unmarried, in his early thirties, lives with his dying father in Cuernavaca, the “City of Eternal Spring,” fifty miles south of Mexico City. His has mother died seven years earlier, and Celeste, a faithful caregiver, an important character in the novel, is the only person who can communicate with Papá.

Edwardo’s family has owned and operates a small furniture store with one employee, so Edwardo is free to drink coffee in the middle of the work day. The story pay protection money to an ex-employee, Güero, picks up the cash while a more senior member of the gang stays watches guard outside. The criminality sounds so pervasive and established in the society that going to the police would mean only that your business would be burned out.

Edwardo is required to read for an hour a week to a rich cast of characters: a retired Colonel who loves the readings, even though he’s only awake for a few pages; a deaf family who reads Edwardo’s lips not realizing their children can hear; a pair of brothers who pull bizarre pranks; and a stunning, wheelchair-bound opera singer with an aggressively flirty housekeeper.

The book jacket tells us that the author, Fabio Morábito is a writer, translator, and professor. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Italy, and relocated to Mexico when he was fifteen. He has published four books of poetry, four short-story collections, a book of essays, and two novels. He has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes including Mexico’s highest literary award, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, for Home Reading Service. He lives in Mexico City.

The translator, Curtis Bauer, is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University. The translation here is smooth and engaging and I was particularly taken by Bauer’s translation of a poem by Isabel Fraire, a Mexican poet who died in 2015, a poem that plays a key role in Edwardo’s growth.

Although he reads great (or not so great) literature to the elderly and the disabled, Edwardo does not listen to a word he reads. But when he comes across a Fraire poem that his father, now dying of cancer, had once copied out, it affects him as no literature has affected him before: “Your skin, like sheets of sand, and sheets of water swirling/your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance . . .” (The book includes the Spanish original as an appendix.) In sharing the poem, Edwardo is astonished at what the words are capable of bringing out in others.

Complications ensue. Edwardo, a man who’s spent most of his thirty-four-plus years on earth simply allowing things to happen to him, has to cope with a dying father, a dying retail furniture business, and the demands of the people to whom he must read for an hour a week or find himself scrubbing toilets. And, of course, there’s the “protection” he’s paying and the gangsters behind it.

Home Reading Service is a fascinating picture of contemporary middle-class (?) Mexican life. Without knowing better, I accept Morábito’s picture of how things work. That a man can be sentenced to a year of community service and that the service be to read for an hour a week to a variety of shut-ins. Moreover, that the act of reading and being read to can change your life. An interesting and satisfying book.