The style that Urrea has adopted to tell Teresita’s — and Mexico’s —story in his book "The Hummingbird’s Daughter" partakes of this politics as well, being simultaneously dreamy, telegraphic and quietly lyrical. Like a vast mural, the book displays a huge cast of workers, whores, cowboys, rich men, bandits and saints while simultaneously making them seem to float on the page. Urrea’s sentences are simple, short and muscular; he mixes low humor with metaphysics, bodily functions with deep and mysterious stirrings of the soul. These 500 pages -- though they could have been fewer -- slip past effortlessly, with the amber glow of slides in a magic lantern, each one a tableau of the progress of earthy grace: Teresita crouched in the dirt praying over the souls of ants, Teresita having a vision of God’s messenger not as the fabled white dove but as an indigenous hummingbird, Teresita plucking lice from the hair of a battered Indian orphan in a "pus-shellacked jacket."
Ferociously female though curiously asexual, Teresita has a particular ability to deliver babies while soothing the pains of laboring mothers. This, Urrea is saying, is what matters. "Miracles," Teresita realizes as she learns mid- wifery, "are bloody and sometimes come with mud sticking to them." The salty cradle of life is the true church. Urrea’s love for Teresita, "the Mexican Joan of Arc," and for the world she helps bring into existence is one of the strongest elements of the book. He is unstintingly, unironically and unselfconsciously tender. He is a partisan.
With such passion and care in abundant evidence, one wishes to believe. Teresita is a saint we could really use right now, and I fervently hope she can be summoned to save the galaxy. But there is a quality to Urrea’s novel that,
for all the salt and blood and childbirth, is somehow a bit distant. "The Hummingbird’s Daughter" has the woodcut feeling of a bedtime story, or of family legends that have been told so many times they’ve gone smooth, like the lettering on old gravestones.
Teresita is the motherland and the mother of us all, an emissary from the Time Before, permanently encircled by butterflies and hummingbirds and the upraised rifles of revolutionaries. She is, according to the precepts of a certain perspective, entirely perfect. Her "flaws" -- her love of the lowly and the sick, her unladylike strength, her uncouth habits -- are clearly marks of virtue to anyone but the most bloodless capitalist. Even after she’s declared dead, she manages to win.
Myths, of course, both defy and rebuke this sort of quibbling: the gods always arise from a time much larger and deeper than the present moment, and we invent them because we need to believe in someone --or something --greater than ourselves. In Vargas Llosa’s scheme of things, isn’t Teresita the invention we need to ignite a better world
But it is exactly this aspect of "The Hummingbird’s Daughter" that makes it seem sealed off from the kaleidoscopic, indeterminate, loss-riven borderlands of modernity that Urrea has written about in earlier books with such depth. Toward the end of the novel, as some of the main characters flee to "great, dark North America," they feel as if the country they’ve left is "a strange dream." As beautiful as that dream --that notion of the unbroken whole -- may be, at this late date none of us live there. We’re all citizens of a haunted, mongrel terrain where nothing, not even the most appealing saint, is that simple.
As for the sentence in the second paragraph, "The salty cradle of life is the true church", which of the following statement is true