Notes on ‘Ysidro’
I began writing Ysidro a day after completing The Stench. The tonal discrepancies between the two works are obvious down to the marrow: one is a suffocating, breathless, desperate cry out from the coal mines of Raton, wherein the protagonist descends towards unbreakable darkness. The other—the subject of this little essay—exists in direct contrast: it is a boy’s journey from the mud into the light, and most intrusions of mortality are consigned to the background. Where The Stench is barren and bleak, Ysidro is lush, even warm. To me—and to the reader, I bet—the whiplash between these two pieces is striking and near-painful, and their connection is central to Shall My West Hurt Me? as a single experience. Perhaps I wanted the reader to feel the pain of reading these stories, one after the other, which mimics the pain I felt in writing these stories, one after the other—and trust me, it was painful. Unlike the disciplined sessions, contained and concise, that I employed for The Stench, my sessions for this story were often six hours long, and even these augmented, drawn-out spells would produce middling or quantitatively less work. I was frustrated, and my often poorly-wrought prose in those sessions would certainly not ameliorate that feeling.
The first of these challenges came from Ysidro’s perspective; it is one of two stories in this collection told from the limited third person, a decision I made to structure this story much like a fable or children’s tale, with the appropriate distance required to set the scene. I’d venture to assert that my own work deals often with the complications and beauties inherent to a myopic, ignorant perspective—to take the place of an external narrator, able to describe thoughts and objects in as much detail as needed, was an alien task for me, and one that required many hours of deliberate restructuring to my style. As a crutch, I inserted some internal monologues or soliloquies belonging to Ysidro, in an effort to still telegraph his more intimate feelings while leaving room for the setting to unfold.
This happens to lead into the second challenge I faced, being the setting itself—Corrales, New Mexico. I’ve lived in Corrales for seven years, so more than anywhere else in the state I am closely familiar with its geography. The narrative itself became heavily reliant—at least, in my mind—upon this geography, as Ysidro floated down the Rio Grande down towards the South Valley. Much of New Mexico’s greenery and plant life—as well as the associated human endeavours—are sustained by this river, and the land only grows more verdant the closer one gets to its many fords. Corrales happens to be situated right along the riverbank, and the multitudinous bosques contained therein make for some of utmost marvels of the great desert that is the state. The challenge, then, became to depict such a lush environment with geographical precision as an amateur writer with little experience in such matters as grounded as these. Of the many trials that I associated with Ysidro, this one was by far the most profitable. I’d say I managed both to depict the Rio Grande with dignified precision, while being carried through the mind of a child—or at least a story related to a child. To substantiate this resolution, here’s an excerpt from the final product:
“It was all teeming with wisps of burgeoning, overwhelming life, passing in and out of view like the shadows of great buildings along the back of some wagon driver plowing through. A dungeon beautiful, the glints off the surface only lighting more like them, ready please, yes it will. Flashes of jumping mice in the shade of golden brown hopped from stones and splashed in the water, careful not to tempt it into swallowing them. Like flowing lilies they teemed and moved, and in his Somnus-enchanted state with half his eyes Ysidro rocked back from Tusa to the scene, the boy like a white vein of quartz jutting out of a canyon, so envigored by the light he was. Go to bed, now, yes, get ready for bed.”
Looking again upon it, I am again reminded of where I sit, near the place where Ysidro (a name derived from the San Ysidro Church, and furthermore Isidore the Laborer, patron saint of the farmer. Thus, I feel I realized my ambition to some degree.
All of this has not yet touched on the supernatural aspect of the story, being Tusa. And to be completely honest, I am a bit strapped for words to give him, as may have been evident in Vertices, because I remain unsure as to his nature. In the interest of being completely honest, I’ll divulge to you that I’m not sure I’d include him as a character if I were to write the story a second time. He is a glob of uncertainty on an otherwise rather straightforward canvas.
Reflecting on Ysidro in hindsight, I find it to be the most obviously flawed story in Shall My West Hurt Me?, and even now I struggle to discuss it in any meaningful way, if not solely due to its effusive themes. I think I, or anybody that read it, would struggle to come away from Ysidro with some memorable theme or passage that elucidated some new mode of living or thinking; this is not the expectation that every story must live up to (no matter what Tolstoy says), but I feel for such a stripped back narrative in all means of character and plot, the theme should have compensated more than it ended up doing.
This leads nicely into what I learned from my shortcomings and successes here, which I’ll now take some time to discuss. As for my shortcomings, which I’ve already talked a little bit about, I mainly felt that in my efforts to structurally reevaluate my style into something different, only days after finishing The Stench, I got caught in the weeds, so to speak; I lost what makes a story interesting and compelling in service of an exercise, and in this way what could have been a much more cohesive and concise story was lost, for now. This is not to say I didn’t create something worthwhile, however: I’m still proud of Ysidro as a piece in this collection, and the lessons I learned in description of the senses, and the history of Corrales necessary to construct the piece were invaluable going forward, and I would utilize the skills gained again in the titular piece of this collection.
