Down to the Caesar Salad

A Place Where the Sea Remembers

By Sandra Benitez

Coffee House Press

163 pp. $19-95

A Place Where the Sea Remembers is Sandra Benitez's first novel, and although this tale of a tiny seaside village named Santiago in Mexico is beautifully crafted and absorbing, it still has the feel of a first novel about it.

Benitez does not appear to have developed a style of her own, relying far too much on the Isabel Allende school of magical realism. The frequent references to the power of Story--"In her hut, Remedios listens to someone's story, and the teller is revived"--is reminiscent of Allende's story-telling Eva Luna.

A Place Where the Sea Remembers begins with a wonderful evocation of the sea, as Remedios, a healer-woman, meditates on its shores, contemplating its ability to hold memories of lives past. To make the sea yield up its stories, she touches its saltiness to her tongue, and lets it speak through her in an extended flashback that makes up the novel.

The artificial circularity created by this ploy is echoed by Benitez's laborious progress through all possible rites of passage--births, weddings, funerals, feasts--in an obvious attempt to show the circularity of life from death to rebirth, tragedy to hope, etc. Another grand theme of this novel is the attempt to use the sea as a link between the little village and the world at large, using the notion of the sea as a universal constant to extrapolate this story into a commentary on human Existence. To quote the blurb on the jacket of this book, Benitez is trying to create "a picture of life that is both a universal portrait and an insider's look at life in Latin America."

Benitez should have left the book as a jigsaw puzzle of touching, observant portraits of characters with charming names: Candelario Marroquin, the salad-maker who loses his job when he makes a tragic, comically botched Caesar salad, Fulgencio Llanos the photographer, Rafael Beltran the teacher, Cesar Burgos the fisherman. The theme of funny little people with funny little lives and little dreams--Marta Rodriguez, a chambermaid in a hotel, dreams of leaving Mexico for El Paso and working in a house--was strong enough to sustain the story.

Instead, Benitez links the characters together by setting their stories against the background tale of the improbable Remedios, who performs short rituals every so often, each time summoning one of the four elements of tierra, fuego, agua, aire to her, to remind us of her latent existence. Remedios provides a superficial and irritating Great Earth Mother feel to A Place Where the Sea Remembers, the blurb on the book's jacket waxes fulsome over the "secret dreams and desires known only to the omniscient sea and to the curandera Remedios' a healer who hears them all." Remedios' chants sound like the most simplistic of goddess workshop: "I am she who knows. I am bone woman. I am bird woman. I am she-woman. He-woman. I am moon woman. Sun woman. Star woman. I am she who weeps. She who bleeds."

Nevertheless, the book is a "good read" in the best sense of that overused phrase. It sustains the reader's interest, it has pleasantly rich descriptions of the blueness of seas and skies, and the vignettes of life in the village of Santiago are absorbing. Best of all, it is entirely possible to revel in the dainty perfection of the symbolism contained in Benitez's flowers, stars, soil and smoke without considering the triteness of it all.