Georgia
Review by Paul Willis
Amy Muia’s richly entangled grouping of fourteen short stories, A Desert Between Two Seas, explores the afterlife of the Spanish missions in Baja California. While I live just a stone’s throw in Santa Barbara from one of the twenty-one missions in what was formerly known as Alta California, I have to admit I was unfamiliar with the history of the thirty missions in Baja. While the Alta missions were established by the Franciscans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Baja missions established by the Jesuits were begun much earlier, in the late seventeenth century. After the Jesuits were ordered out of the Spanish colonies in 1767, the Dominicans eventually took over, only to see the missions disbanded by Mexico in 1833.
Muia’s main character (or at least her progenitive character), Father Espín, is the resident priest at Mulegé, on the east coast of the peninsula, in the waning years of Spanish rule. The mission there is adorned with pearls brought from the depths of the Vermillion Sea, better known today as the Gulf of California. Father Espín becomes obsessed with the pearls in the church, especially those delivered to him by a native orphan boy, José Maria, who is devoted to the priest and therefore takes great risks in diving for them. When José Maria drowns while retrieving an especially large, pink pearl, Father Espín is overcome with remorse and exiles himself to wander like Cain. The rest of the novel keeps returning to this pearl of great price. It is the original sin of the stories that works its effects through generations for more than a century.
A Desert Between Two Seas won the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2024. Though in style the stories are unlike O’Connor’s (more on that later), the characters themselves bear a strong resemblance to hers. For the people of both writers are, in a word, afflicted. In addition to Father Espín, who spends most of the rest of his life in ragged flight from his spiritual pain, we meet the second-most principal character, Dolores, born without ears and harboring hatred for all who have wronged her. We meet Pablo, a boy unable to speak and thus nearly stoned to death by his neighbors. We meet Barros the gravedigger, who cannot escape his past sins of murder and abandonment. And Chema the prisoner, who can calm other prisoners on his harp but cannot keep himself from attacking the rival suitors of the woman he loves.
As these examples suggest, Muia’s characters, like O’Connor’s, are both perpetrators and victims of violence. Dolores gains a mythic reputation as La Pistolera for her willingness to use a revolver against the men who threaten her, only to have her own son wrongfully killed by a firing squad. Early in his wanderings, Father Espín frees a donkey caught in a thicket, only to see it killed and eaten by a band of men who threaten him. He already feels responsible for the death of his adoptive son. Now, as if to add insult to moral injury, the ram in the thicket is sacrificed as well.
But amid these spiritual and moral afflictions, amid these eruptions of violence, a hidden power does healing work, and this is the real point of the novel. Father Espín, though running away from his vocation, cares for Dolores when she is abandoned as a child and places her with foster parents. He in turn is confronted and cared for by a woman who knows his secret sins, and later he is nursed to health by another woman, a maker of images of saints, and offers a blessing to her son in spite of himself. And a traveling trader, though shot through the shoulder by Dolores, does his best to look out for her for the rest of his life.
Perhaps the master image of the collection is an ancient pictograph on a canyon wall of a giant figure pierced with arrows. Noni, a ranch woman who has borne a child by the careless love of the traveling trader, lights a votive candle under this native painting and tells her son “of a mystery. Why someone full of arrows does not fall. Why such a person might even stand with hands in the air. How this kind of power is nothing to despise. How one pierced with arrows, with many arrows, can live.” As another story in the novel would have it: “El Santo Christo. . . . You sly thing.” And, in the end, this is who Father Espín encounters: “—He has come to me, the priest wept. Oh my Lord, he has come.”
As these quotations from the novel suggest, Muia’s style can be as spare and elemental as the desert setting of her stories. Hers are not the knowing ironies of O’Connor’s narrators but the earnest and sincere voice of a teller who gets out of the way of her unfolding tales. In this manner, Muia reminds me of Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Cormac McCarthy, elemental writers all. Her redemptive purposes, however, are far from the existential despair of Hemingway and the seemingly gratuitous violence of McCarthy. In spirit the book is closer to Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, though her focus is not, like Cather’s, on church politics, but, like O’Connor’s, on the more mysterious ways in which the spirit of the divine moves among broken people.
Muia herself is no stranger to the broken. In her home state of Washington she facilitates writing workshops with youth in juvenile detention, and with her husband operates a residential program for those recovering from substance use disorder. She has served as a chaplain in the Skagit County Jail, and for many years she worked as an advocate for Mexican immigrant farm workers in Skagit Valley. Far from being a Joycean artist who stands apart and calmly pares her fingernails, she knows the suffering of which she writes, and she has served the sufferers.
Perhaps that is part of the reason that Amy Muia, in her distinctive way with words, casts such an unusual spell. As José Maria descends on his last dive in the Vermillion Sea, “a strange music surrounded him, clicking winds and the heavy hum of quietness, and he heard the beating of his own slow heart and the creak of held breath.” As you read her, you will feel the beating of your own slow heart and will hold your breath. And this breath you will share with the breath of a redeeming spirit.
