Don Goyo by Demetrio Aguilera Malta

First published: 1933 (English translation, 1942)

Type of plot: Realism and fantasy

Time of work: Undefined

Locale: A group of islands on the coast of Ecuador, near Guayaquil

Principal Characters:

• Don Goyo, the legendary protagonist, a 150-year-old man whom everybody in the region obeys and respects
• Cusumbo, a young highlander who becomes a fisherman and mangrove cutter after misfortune befalls him
• Gertru, his love interest and future wife
• Don Carlos, an archetype of the white man who exploits the islands and the cholos
• Don Leiton, the leader of the mangrove cutters and the opposition to Don Goyo
• Ña Andrea, Don Goyo’s last wife

The Novel

This work combines the realism of the life of the cholos in the coastal areas of Ecuador with the fantastic elements of the legends that prevail in those tropical regions. The action evolves around two central characters, Don Goyo and Cusumbo. The former is the patriarch of the island region and of the town of Cerrito de Morreños, which he founded after leaving his native town and which he helped develop into a peaceful and harmonious community. During the action of the novel, Don Goyo, nearly 150 years old, is still the virile man and the authority figure that makes the inhabitants listen and obey. He is admired for his manly qualities, which have yielded for him many children. He has stood up to the white man and has prevented him from abusing his people, cohabiting with him side by side in a cordial but uncompromising relationship. Misfortunes come to the region, however, when, after having a vision in which a mangrove tree tells him that the white man will ultimately ruin and own the land, Don Goyo orders the mangrove cutters to turn their livelihood to fishing. This proves to be disastrous since they do not have the skills or the interest to succeed. When they disobey and go back to cutting, the largest and oldest mangrove tree falls to the ground, and Don Goyo is found tangled among its branches.

Cusumbo, the other main character, is Don Goyo’s counterpart, in that he represents the average man of the region. When the novel begins, Cusumbo reminisces about his life in the highlands before he emigrated to the islands. There, after inheriting his drunken father’s never-ending debt to the white man, he had become a drunk himself. Rehabilitated by Nica, his wife, he had gone back to work, only to realize that he would never pay his debt in full; the white bosses cheat the workers mercilessly, taking advantage of their illiteracy. The final blow came when he found his wife in bed with a white man; killing them both with his machete, he fled to the islands, where he settled as a fisherman. In the course of the novel, he falls in love with Gertru, Don Goyo’s daughter, and decides to become a mangrove cutter, only to go back to fishing on Don Goyo’s orders. At the end of the novel, Cusumbo sees the specter of Don Goyo at the exact time the dead man’s coffin, which the men transport in a canoe, falls in the river. Although it is clear that Cusumbo will never achieve the old man’s legendary status, he will carry on his traditions as well as his line, since the reader is led to believe that he and Gertru will marry.

The Characters

The novel is an interplay of the two main characters, Don Goyo and Cusumbo. The old man, besides being a mixture of fantasy and reality, represents all the qualities of the Latin American myth of the natural man. Don Goyo, who fears no man and stands up to the white man to defend his people, is humbled before nature. When the mangrove tree speaks to him in a vision, he immediately proceeds to take action. The men’s defiance and refusal to defer to his vision for the future of the land makes him an alien to the things he has always known how to control. His death, it appears, comes from this alienation, since nature becomes vengeful and tears at his flesh.

Although Don Goyo is portrayed as a flesh-and-blood man, lusty and virile, solitary and taciturn, he is elusive and difficult to visualize. At the beginning of the novel, he is seen almost as an apparition who emerges from the lush, tropical settings at odd times. It is not until the last chapter that he is described fully as a man, with flashbacks depicting his arrival and the founding of Cerrito. The significance of this late introduction is that Aguilera Malta very clearly wanted to establish Don Goyo’s mythic status before portraying the man himself. As an impressionistic force who permeated the life of the region, Don Goyo is as vital to its inhabitants as the natural elements that surround them.

Cusumbo, in contrast, is developed from the beginning as a hot-blooded, physical, young coastal inhabitant. Forced to violence by tragic and deterministic circumstances, Cusumbo, nevertheless, remains a pure and uncorrupted example of the common man. His development, poeticized by a lyric style, elevates him from the lowly circumstances in which he lives. Not clearly distinguishable from the other men in the village, he nevertheless displays a sensitivity that belies his origins and his environment. His relationship with Don Goyo and his belief in the old man’s qualities make the myth come alive. In Cusumbo, moreover, one sees the rites of passage of a young man in any society, from birth to nascent sexuality to first love. Although there is not great depth in the characterization of Cusumbo, Aguilera Malta communicates with poignancy a young man’s struggle to survive in a difficult environment.

Because the islanders’ society is centered on the most rudimentary elements of human life (men work, eat, drink, and seek sexual gratification), the rest of the characters have little development. The white man is seen as a stranger who demands much and gives nothing, an alien who speaks an unknown language and whose presence serves only one purpose: to exploit the region and its inhabitants. The cholos are hardworking, illiterate men who allow themselves to be abused and who seek only to have food on the table and a woman on their deerskin bed. The women characters are portrayed only as the creatures who provide that food and who fulfill the men’s desires with their ripe bodies.

The secondary role of character development in this novel, however, rather than being a flaw, serves to enrich the impact of the poetic qualities of the regional lore. By de-emphasizing the psychological traits of his characters, the author stresses the importance of myth to the islanders. He reminds the reader that there are some phenomena that can never be explained and that the people are subordinate to the magical qualities of their reality.

Critical Context

Don Goyo was one of Aguilera Malta’s early novels in a career that spanned four decades. Representative of the works of a group of writers of the 1930’s, the Guayaquil Group, to which Aguilera Malta belonged before leaving Ecuador for Mexico, Don Goyo also bears many typical characteristics of the writer’s style. It is a short, impressionistic work which seeks to convey a powerful message through understatement. The absence of anecdotal detail, the precise descriptions of the region, and the social message placed Aguilera Malta with his group stylistically and politically.

While drawing attention to their country’s social problems, the writers of the Guayaquil Group also wanted to preserve the characteristics of their native region in detailed and precise descriptions of flora, fauna, and native customs. In this sense, Don Goyo fulfilled its mission but ultimately stood out among the rest, as it is the best-known work of the entire group’s production.

Bibliography

Brushwood, John S. The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth Century Survey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Includes a discussion of Aguilera Malta’s major novels.

Carrabino, Victor, ed. The Power of Myth in Literature and Film. Tallahassee: University of Florida Presses, 1980. Explores mythic elements on Aguilera Malta’s fiction.

Rabassa, Clementine. Demetrio Aguilera-Malta and Social Justice: The Tertiary Phase of Epic Tradition in Latin American Literature. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1980. Rabassa examines the theme of social justice in Aguilera Malta’s works.

Ryan, Bryan, ed. Hispanic Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Entry on Malta gives an overview of his life, writing, and critical reaction to his work.