Now, this past April 18, at the age of 92, she passed away, less than a month after adding the Jorge Ibargüengoitia Prize to her list of literary awards. She made a name for herself as a writer in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s, then fell out of sight sometime after the 1970s, only to be rediscovered and lauded, at the beginning of the new millennium, as one of the country’s great masters of the short story. Both Reyes and Roncal were “Virgils” to her, leading her like Dante through and out of the circles of hell. These night terrors didn’t dissipate when she grew up: she credits a Spanish psychiatrist named Federico Pascual del Roncal, to whom the author Alfonso Reyes introduced her in Mexico City, with helping her deal with them. She was often housebound with sickness and terrorized by nocturnal parades of phantoms and frights. The sight of corpses brought from nearby towns that had no cemeteries, “sprawled in the bed of a cart, draped over the back of a mule, or in a rough-hewn box,” left a lifelong impression on her. Her brother died as a child, and in the disorder caused by her mother’s grief, she was left to wander the hills and play at being an alchemist. Pinos, in the cold, foggy heights of Zacatecas state in Mexico, was a mining town whose mines had fallen into dereliction by the time she was born, in 1928. Shadows coming and going, murmurs, footsteps, the rustle of monks’ habits, flutterings, dragging chains, whispered prayers, low moans, an icy wind cutting me to the bone, and then the bishop without a face before me, his face gone, his eyes gone, empty …ĪMPARO DÁVILA’S CHILDHOOD, as she describes it, was freighted with death and fear. Time slows down, and the nights are eternal. I try to think about Christmas or my birthday, about school prizes, but it’s useless, nothing can distract me or calm my fears. I shrink into my bed until I’m curled into a ball and pull the blankets up to my nose. cold and sticky sweat trickles down my forehead, my heart beats loudly, and a thousand shadows stir.
“Notes Toward an Autobiographical Essay”
So the night would go by many nights of my childhood went by this way. A woman dressed in white, holding a lighted candle, pale and eyeless, searched for something throughout the long night, the doors and windows and furniture creaked, shapes and shadows moved past, there came voices, whispers, moans, and the sound of a man with a wooden leg thumping dully by, amid the howling wind, the phonograph music, and the laughter of the prostitutes in the alley. Oftentimes during the day I cried with the cold, and at night with cold and fear.
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