Jay's 'H' IS FOR HOLIDAY READING Post - Alice Munro's Runaway - Pedro Almovodar - Adriana Ugarte - Hache - Heroine - Heroin

   These days, en estos dias, I devote a chunk of each day to follow a Spanish-language telenovela on Netflix.  This one is called Hache.  From Spanish,  Hache translates to the letter ‘H.’  In this case,  H is for Helena, the protagonist of the series, a desperate single mother, who will do anything to provide a safe and meaningful life for her young daughter. Helena lives in the city of Barcelona, Spain in the 1960s. Her labor union leader husband has been wrongfully sentenced to prison for alleged communist activities.  With little chance of taking care of herself or her daughter, Helena fatefully hooks up with a local Mafia leader.  His name is Malpica and he controls the (H for) Heroin that is smuggled into the port of Barcelona. Helena finds herself up to her Head in drugs and murder.

But my title refers to my READING.  I bring up this series Hache for my appreciation of the principle actress, Adriana Ugarte.  She plays the desperate young mother who is forced by circumstance to enter a sleazy and violent underworld. Man, I want so bad to learn Spanish.  I've never been much of a television viewer or moviegoer, but I've developed my own system of learning to suppement my Spanish-reading with my viewing of Spanish-language telenovelas.  I enjoy watching Hache on Netflix, for I can stop the computer to replay anything I don't understand.  I've seen Adriana  U. before, maybe twenty years ago.  She starred in a World War II spy series called El Tiempo entre las costuras.   I found the novel in both English - The Time Between - and Spanish.   I read them both as I watched the series. Later, I did the same with another Adriana U. series, Las Palmeras en la nieve, based on a novel by Luz Gabas. In this story, Adriana U. is a young woman who takes a dangerous journey to Central Africa to find the truth of her family history.  For me learning Spanish is difícil.  My progress is painstaikingly slow.  I'm so happy I've found a Spanish-speaking actor to follow.  Often, in my classes, I ask my students to share their film knowledge in group discussions and activities.  They write about their favorite actors, and explain to me WHY and HOW they connect.  They share poignant scenes they remember featuring Michael J. Fox, Scarlett Johanssen, Jennifer Lawrence.  When they ask me about my favorite actor, my go-to now is Adriana Ugarte.   

I feel my Spanish-speaking self has grown up with Adriana U.  Recently, I came across her name in a Spanish-language Almodóvar film, Julieta. I don't know or understand much about Pedro Almodóvar, but this was a good find for me because I have the Alice Munro short-story collection on my shelves, Runaway, that inspired this movie.  Jaja.  If you thought Almodóvar's films come from Spain, you are correct.  Alice Munro and her stories are based in Canada.  I read that Almodóvar originally began production of his film in Vancouver, but he soon realized that his English skills were not advanced enough to capture the trauma of a Canadian protagonist.  He soon retreated to España.  That's where he picked up Adriana U.  I suppose Pedro M watches the same telenovelas I do.  Adriana U. is a brilliant actor.  I've never heard her speak in English, but she knows how to exude despair on multiple levels. In Julieta, she plays a classics literature professor that loses both her husband and daughter.  Her fisherman husband dies in boating tragedy.  Soon thereafter, her teen-age daughter leaves her behind, runs away, without a word or a trace, never to return.  Almodóvar chose to base his film on three consecutive short-stories from Alice M's work: "Chance," "Soon," and "Silence."  I find the title of the third story the most meaningful.   As a PhD in the classics,  Julieta is obviously a deep and complex woman. This may be one reason she feels so lonely from the beginning of the film to the end.    She's so passionate about her work, she may be numb to everything else around her.   Julieta's deep hearbreak comes from the silence that overcomes her character when she enters emotional confrontations.  When her husband cheats on her with her best friend, she has nothing to say to him, and when he washes up dead on shore, it's way too late to say anything at all.   Her daughter seems adverse to this part of Julieta's personality.  Like many teenagers she doesn't feel she gets the attention she deserves from her mother.  At a certain point, she runs away to join a cult where her she can satisfy her spiratual needs. 

I’m pleasantly surprised for the enjoyment I get in re-reading books off my shelves here in Mexicali.  I guess I have become  older and wiser.  I feel I connect better with the characters in Alice Munro stories than ever I have before.  Maybe it’s the SPANISH in me.  One of my students this semester wrote a research paper about the benefits of language acquisition. He argued that learning a foreign language helps you develop muscles in your brain you may rarely use. I probably will be the last one to know if I am any SMARTER.  My head doesn’t feel any BIGGER.  But, I can tell you I like Alice Munro MORE twenty years after I first read her.  I read her this time before I watched the movie.  B.A. Before Angela.   My favorite story in the book comes after the Julieta triology.  It’s called “Passion.”  It's about a young girl's quest for a "taste" of life.  She's kind of cute, real smart, and here is the most important point: she's really bored with who she is, but she doesn't know who she wants to be. I'm stunned an old man  like me can relate with young Grace, the girl who didn't want to be the way girls were supposed to be like. In fact  - as a young boy of her age - I could have related to her stubborness. Munro gives us the best of both worlds. She has the ability to take us in and out of time. In doing so her writing touches both our heads and our hearts.

In "Passion," Grace goes back to a scene in her life that she is never going to get back. That seems pretty clear. From the time she is an ambitious high school student thinking about teaching herself Spanish, Italian and German, to the time she brazenly chooses a sloppy alcoholic love affair, Grace had shown a courage to go her own way.
The story ends with the insight of an older woman. The older Grace retraces a key event in her life when she was able to leave her farmtown and work as a waitress in a lakeside restaurant. Grace paints a picture of a young girl soon to become a woman. She learns a new culture from the family she lives with. She learns of love from her first serious relationship. She approaches a sense of self-identity through the process. After all these years, we learn that Grace doesn't go back to this scene for any great memory of love or fufullment. She goes back to realize finally what her high school principal once told her before she began her adventure: what does learning have to do with life?

In this story she learns the hard way when at a crucial turning point in her life she abandons the reliable, lover in exchange for his sad, but drugged-out doctor brother. One was predictable. The other offered a "taste" of life. What does Grace know.  What did she know. Everybody who reads the story knows what was going to happen when chooses to hop in the car with the drunk and leave the other brother behind. My favorite part is the end of the story. The older Grace narrates with such sharp disappointment that it turns the landscape gray. No matter how smart she is now, she can't go back... She's lucky to be alive, and he's dead.

At my age, I can now say I can connect much better with the characters Alice M offers in her stories.  They are smart and beautiful, but they are hardly free.  In the story “Chance,”  the author writes, “In the town where she [Julieta] grew up, her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or extra thumb and people had been quick to point out the expected accompanying drawbacks.”  In “Passion,” Grace scores very high marks in high-school Chemistry, Trigonometry, Geometry and Biology.  Her school doesn’t offer Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German, but in each, she learns to speak compentenly on her own!   Her parents loved her, and her teachers admired her, but no one was pushing her to seek out high-level academic education.  Alice M's characters grow up at a time where real success is to be sought out in  marriage and motherhood.

I feel the depth of depression in both Julieta and Grace.  Alice M deftly brings us inside her characters.  Pedro A paints  a story on their faces. My Spanish had deepened my empathy for other cultures and perspectives.  There are a lot of scenes in these stories where women characters in all stages of their lives sit alone on busses and trains, and stare out the windows at their lives passing them by.  It doesn't matter if it's in Canada or Spain.   I think I get it now.  These women  want to feel some control of their own destinies,  but their lives won't allow it.  Their only place to run away is inside themselves.