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Biographical Essay
Carlos Fuentes, born November 11, 1928, is considered the greatest author to ever come
out of Mexico. Funnily enough, he didn’t actually “come out” of this North American country,
but rather was born in Panama City to a family of diplomats. Fuentes spent much of his
childhood moving around to other countries in Latin America as well as the U.S. He was pushed
by his parents to follow in his father’s footsteps with several diplomatic careers beginning in
1950, but with the publication of his first novel Where the Air is clear in 1958, he decided to
pursue his youthful desires as a writer. Some famous pieces include The Death of Artemio Cruz
(1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), and The Old Gringo (1985). He was known as one of
the most influential people of his era in both his written masterpieces and his reputation for being
incredibly outspoken in domestic and international politics such as Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.
He won several awards, including The Xavier Villaurrutia Award for his esteemed literary work,
The Miguel de Cervantes Prize for his continuous involvement in Spanish literature, and the
Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor for being such a national influence. Fuentes unfortunately
lived longer than his two children with his late wife and journalist Sylvia Lemus, but was
survived by a daughter from a previous marriage with actress Rita Macedo. He died from a
severe hemorrhage on May 15, 2012 at the nice old age of 83.
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Summary
The Doll Queen begins with the narrator rearranging his library. He comes across an old
note from the past, given to him when he was fourteen by a young girl named Amilamia. She had
drawn a map from a park to her house, and now fifteen years later he decides to discover what
has happened to her. When he finally gains passage into the house, he is led by her parents to a
dark room where there is a porcelain doll in a coffin, leading him to assume Amilamia is dead.
He returns some time later and is surprised when Amilamia answers the door in a wheelchair,
with her father threatening to beat her in the background
In the Flemish Garden is written in diary form of a young man who moves into an
ancient mansion for his boss to liven it up a bit. There is a walled-in garden in the back and he
finds something mystical about it, something to where he can’t quite leave it alone. He becomes
frightened by an old lady who repeatedly appears and disappears in the garden, and one day
when he tries to run away from her through the front door, he hasn’t the strength to get through.
He is stuck there for life by the old lady who calls him Max and whose coat of arms reads
“Charlotte, Kaiserin von Mexiko”, referring to a powerful European couple who lived in Mexico
centuries before, during the time of Napoleon of France.
The Cost of Living is about a day, probably the last, in the life of Salvador Rentería. He
awakes early, kisses his dying wife, and goes to see his father to ask for a job that could help him
pay the bills. He gets the job of a taxi driver in addition to his teaching job, though his career as a
teacher doesn’t have a bright future. He has drinks with his friends who reminisce on their youth
and on his walk he meets a girl with whom he plans a date. That night, his first customer in the
taxi is a fellow schoolteacher, and Salvador takes him to a printing press to pick up some strike
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flyers, most likely about the teachers losing their pensions. Salvador walks out into the dark
alley, runs into some thieves, and winds up getting stabbed.
Analysis
Being a child of two cultures, Fuentes creates a phenomenal sense of place using
elements of Mexican culture from a standpoint that not only Mexicans and Latin Americans but
also Europeans, North Americans, and other nationalities can understand, or at least enough to
get an idea of what is going on. We saw this in Chac Mool, where even those who did not know
anything about the representation of the water god of the Aztecs would understand that there is
something seriously creepy about a statue moaning and coming to life in someone’s basement.
The same eeriness is felt in the story In a Flemish Garden, which also incorporates Mexican
history into the plotline. The house originally belonged to a Belgian empress (later discussed)
and there are several references in the story to European origins: “built at the time of the French
Intervention…”, “some [hallways] in the Flemish style of Viet Stoss”, or the French doors that
open up to the garden. The garden is the strongest place here because it is there that he discovers
the old lady and on a more literary note it is here where Fuentes dips into more mystical imagery,
with describing flowers and plants that were not typical of Mexico (“… this was a different, soft,
green shading into blue in the distant treetops...”). He captures the essence of standing in an outof-place garden in such descriptions.
Other more realistic and relatable settings for the reader can be found in The Cost of
Living and The Doll Queen. While the reader may not have ever been to a city like the one in The
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Cost of Living, Fuentes brings it to life with descriptions about the apartment, the bar, and the
streets. He adds in little bits of detail such as “thirty centavos” and “Life En Español” to signal a
Spanish-speaking country, but other than that the reader can all see the bar in which his group of
friends meet or the dark alleyway between buildings that is only asking for trouble. In The Doll
Queen, Fuentes shows the reader the park not only through visual imagery but also other sensory
clues, such as “the sound of the light steps… running down the graveled garden path”. When the
protagonist makes it to Amilamia’s house, Fuentes creates again an eerie element to it by
describing the “bare-walled” rooms with barely any furniture and most especially the upstairs
room that holds the porcelain doll that looks very similar to Amilamia. The reader can see
everything in these short stories, and that is why Fuentes has established such a solid sense of
place.
Another powerful element employed by Fuentes is his language. His descriptions are just
beautiful and his word choice is so unique that he forms his own voice as an author. In The Doll
Queen, it opens up with what is a very ordinary activity (rearranging books) and immediately the
reader is on this ride of childhood memories where he remembers meeting Amilamia but the
memories are “fixed forever in time, as in a photograph album.” The sentences that follow that
line are captivating and clear: “Amilamia frozen in her flight down the hill, her white skirt
ballooning… Amilamia lying on her stomach with a flower in her hand… Amilamia in the
thousand postures she affected around my bench…” The repetition of her name at the beginning
of these fragmented sentences drives the importance of this girl to the protagonist, which is
another piece of wordplay because Amilamia is the name given to women who have reached
feminine perfection and who men can’t stop thinking about. Later when the protagonist has
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entered the upstairs room of the porcelain doll, the sentence continues for almost a page,
describing the sights and scents he’s taking in. It pulls the reader right into the narrative.
While his flowery and lengthy sentences are beautiful, they are sometimes tiring to get
through. Fuentes makes up for this by including punctual phrases full of concrete imagery that
have just as much an impact. The Cost of Living is full of such phrases, perhaps partially because
of the perspective but also because of the atmosphere created by his language. It’s not a very
descriptive piece, but through these simple sentences, such as the one that has its own line after
the paragraph about Salvador’s friend’s death (“They paid their bill and said goodbye.”), the
reader is experiencing another form of emotion that doesn’t need to be evoked by pretty details.
It only adds to the evidence of the diverse writing style of Carlos Fuentes.
Fuentes builds his characters very gradually, but he reveals so much to the reader about
the characters in so little space or he gives the reader enough information to where one Google
search will answer any questions the reader might have. The case of gradual immersion to the
character is well depicted in the example of Salvador Rentería in The Cost of Living. In eleven
pages, the reader watches this character interact with his wife and father, go to a job interview,
reminisce about his youth, cheat on his wife, struggle with work, aid in the startup of a strike,
and then be murdered. Anyone can throw these things together in a mixing bowl, but only
successful authors can throw these in the mixing bowl and produce a fine meal.
As for leaving uncultured souls in the dark such as in In a Flemish Garden, Fuentes drops
enough context clues to key the readers into the true significance of his story and the significance
of his characters. The ancient mansion in this story is haunted by a mysterious old woman who is
revealed at the end to be the ghost of Carlota of Mexico (or Charlotte of Belgium). She was the
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wife of Maximilian I, who was sent by Napoleon in the late 1800s to govern the region of
Mexico and bring the Native Americans there to become European. It is said she died of insanity
and sadness over her husband’s death, which Fuentes introduces to the reader in the last couple
of paragraphs as the old woman confuses the protagonist for her dead husband (“Oh Max,
answer me…”) and confines him to the mansion for the duration of his life. Reading it the first
time might not make much sense for someone who knows nothing of Mexican history, but
Wikipedia who “Charlotte, Kaiserin von Mexiko” and what “Tlactocatzine” is and reading that
story a second time will open the eyes and drop the mouths of any who didn’t understand it
before.
Fuentes mostly utilizes the first-person point-of-view. The reader sees it in both The Doll
Queen and In a Flemish Garden. The reader feels the confusion of the protagonist in The Doll
Queen as he searches to uncover the truth behind his missing childhood friend. They are with
him, or rather, they are him as he remembers her when he finds the book and the note in the
beginning, they are sad when he believes Amilamia to be dead, and they are shocked when he
returns to find her in a wheelchair answering the door. Fuentes does a marvelous job in ensuring
that the readers never escape from the inside of the protagonist’s head here. In a Flemish
Garden, the reader is also seeing the supernatural unfold in front of our eyes, which makes the
story much more unnerving and bewildering, especially because the protagonist is just as
confused and frightened as the reader is. Fuentes is a master at meshing the reader and the
protagonist in the first-person view. Fuentes is also a wonderful storyteller, something the reader
picks up on in the third-person perspective of The Cost of Living. He takes the reader through the
last day of this one man, carrying them along as he goes about his daily routine, and although it’s
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full of activity, the reader never feels lost. Fuentes establishes this perspective and then follows
through, making it credible for the reader.
Though the reader stays in the head of his protagonists in his first-person narrative and
respectively follows the actions of his protagonist in his third-person, Fuentes applies the use of
dialogue in these three pieces to move the story along and to reveal significant pieces of
information to the reader. In the Flemish Garden would not be nearly as interesting if the old
lady-ghost calls him “Max” repeatedly at the end of the story. Even if her coat of arms gave us
clue enough to search the internet about Charlotte, we would not necessarily know why the
protagonist is forever trapped. It takes on a whole new level to know that she believes the
protagonist to be her husband instead of just her being paranormal, unexplainable, and perhaps
just crazy enough to hold humans forever in her mansion. In The Cost of Living, it gives us
insight into the depressing condition of his wife through their conversation about the doctor and
also into the respectful relationship he holds with his father about money. The reader can form
speculation behind the thought process of Salvador much more easily with dialogue. Fuentes
reveals much about his characters in this manner.
To review, Carlos Fuentes is an accomplished author of all genres of writing. These short
stories all come from his book Burnt Water: Stories. His sense of place is easily recognizable
and arguably his strong point in his literature, as he can frame plots and produce stories that are
appropriate for readers of all over the world, mixing history and culture from Mexico, Europe,
and the States. His language is inspirational and perfectly worded, whether long-winded or
prompt, and his perspective choices are always done so that the reader reads and believes this
happened, whether to him or someone else, because the storytelling and the characters are
reliable to the reader. His dialogue is not always needed, yet Fuentes utilizes it to enhance his
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story. He uses everything to enhance his story. He truly is a wonderful author and perhaps he is
indeed the greatest author Mexico has ever had.