Book 5: Trying to Understand Ernesto in “Deep Rivers”

Reading “Deep Rivers” was a challenge for me, possibly the most difficult read so far. I still liked it a lot. But Ernesto was impenetrable to me; he didn’t fit into my preconceived notions of what a protagonist should be like or like. Especially compared to previous books in this course I read like the excerpt of Swann’s Way, Mad Toy or Agostino; the teenage male protagonists there were easy to understand, and noticeably more “teenager” to me. Possibly it is because their motivations were more easily linked to the expected desires of “coming of age”, like trying to escape poverty, achieve sexual satisfacation, and enter society/manhood.

But Ernesto to me seems to not be concerned with that at all. Like with the mentally disabled woman; while the other boys in the school viciously bully and even sexually assault her, he doesn’t participate at all. He shows her grace by calling her “Dona Marcelina” when she dies from typhus, with Dona being an honorific title of address (245). Despite the boarding school setting, I don’t remember any major scenes of him studying or it being a learning environment, but just as a place with the other boys of the story. Similarly, he participates, seemingly sympathizes with the women’s revolt.

I guess I’m hung up on how eloquent and descriptive Ernesto is. Markask’a describes Ernesto as a poet; the scene where he writes the letter for him is in my opinion one of the most beautiful scenes in the novel. Not just the romantic descriptions invoking nature, “in the sun, in the breeze, in the rainbow that glistens beneath bridges, in my dreams”, or the message conveyed through the “emerald hummingbird” and so on, but how he weeps from joy or overwhelming beauty after finishing (74-75).  And the memorable descriptions of the zumbayllu scene is very different from what I expected. The inquistive beginning, “What did this word, whose last syllables reminded me of beautiful and mysterious objects, mean?” (67) or his description of the top as “a new kind of being, an apparition in a hostile world, a tie that bound me to the courtyard I hated, to that vale of sorrow, to the school” (69) is far beyond what I would expect how a teenager would react to the spinning top, as magical as it is, in the beautiful descriptions. Or maybe it’s just how straightforwardly honest and poetic he is that he seems more “mature” to me. While Proust’s protagonist is also lyrical, I processed more as through an older, reflective lens, compared to the lyrical and melodious odes to nature, insects, and small things like the top that just naturally comes from Ernesto. It already feels like Ernesto has reached a deeper understanding of things and their beauty, and also combined with his natural curiosity for everything in the world.

Question: What is the role of the morphing of people and concepts in Ernesto’s descriptions; how much of it can be metaphorical, or fantastically real? (e.g. the plague as a face, or as a horde, or Lleras becoming a monstrous mass)