The Futile Life of Pito Perez by José Rubé;n Romero

First published:La vida inútil de Pito Pérez, 1938 (English translation, 1942)

Type of plot: Picaresque

Time of work: The 1920’s and 1930’s

Locale: Michoacan and Morelia, two provinces in western Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Pito Perez, (Jesús Pérez Gaona, nicknamed “Waxy Cord” ), the protagonist, the town drunk and a street peddler
• Caneca, his wife, a skeleton
• Irene,
• Chucha, and
• Soledad, three potential wives
• Father Pureco, an illiterate parish priest to whom Pito teaches the nonliturgical Latin then used in Mass
• José de Jesús Jiménez, an apothecary
• José Vásquez, a scribe
• The unnamed narrator, to whom Pito recounts his life story

The Novel

José Rubén Romero’s purpose in writing The Futile Life of Pito Perez was to observe, judge, and criticize Mexican society of the 1920’s and 1930’s, and he realized this goal by casting his story in the form of a picaresque novel, of which a primary characteristic is that the narrative is told in the first-person voice. Appropriately, this novel comprises a series of anecdotes in which Pito tells the unnamed narrator of the various escapades he unwittingly suffers from childhood until the day of his death. Given this structure, the reader is advised to ignore signs of the traditional plot and rather should imagine himself listening to a good storyteller chatting about the high and low points of his life.

As the town drunk, sardonically, Pito sees himself as life’s loser, a pattern established early in his life when his mother adopts a child and ensures he has more food, comfort, and love than does her own son: “. . . the day I was born, there was another child who had been left without a mother so mine gave him her full breasts. The stranger grew strong and robust and I was left weak and sickly because there wasn’t enough milk for the two of us.” By his own account, his life has been “downhill” ever since.

To survive, he assumes any disguise which permits him to close upon his two most enduring friends, food and liquor. With a local, uninstructed, pompous priest, he spouts Latin. With a gross, abject apothecary, he “reformulizes” the prescriptions, keeps the change, drinks the profits, and entertains the ignored wife. With the escribano (a public writer for the illiterate), his imagination transforms the inarticulate into the most worthy of prose.

As Pito makes his way through these and similar “offices,” his character becomes clear. He maintains a gentle and optimistic demeanor which blinds him to the unerring devastation which greets his every turn. That he should happen to select unworthy friends is a paltry second to his uncanny instinct for becoming love’s foil and fool. Repeatedly, he risks all to better his lovers’ lives. His prize unfailingly is to watch them marry someone deemed more socially acceptable.

With each devastation, Pito increases both his hopes for a better future and his expectation of even more cruel results. He finally strikes upon his solution to life’s inconstancy: to betroth himself to Caneca, a female skeleton for whom he now works in his last office, that of a street peddler. He says that she is “the most faithful love I have had in all my life,” and to her he composes his last verse: “Caneca, my sweet,/ she roams not the street./ And never does she want something to eat!”

The novel ends with Pito’s death. His body, significantly, is found on a rubbish heap. In his pocket, Pito has placed his last will and testament, a bitter document which he asks his readers to accept as accurate, since he was mad and therefore able to perceive the truth. In it, he denounces most of the highly held human sentiments of liberty, equality, fraternity, humanity, friendship, and love. In their lieu, he extols thievery, dishonesty, greed, and ambition.

The Characters

By turns, Pito is the raging critic, the forlorn lover, the astute manipulator, and the ingenuous traveler in a world not of his making and for whom there is no resting place, no key, so apparently available to others, with which to unlock its mystery. He is, then, the epitome of the powerless victim of the capricious, aggressive, unfathomable, and ultimately destructive game of life.

His failure rests not on a weakness of will. No character has tried harder to understand this alien place and to empower himself with sufficient control to find a few stolen hours of respite. There is no more telling example of his yearning to be in this world and his resultant failure than that of his bewildering love affair with Chucha, his cousin, one of five daughters whose common paternity Pito questions. His description of her as she with the “darkest complexion,” with a face like a “devilish little monkey, covered all over with fuzz” and with “small white teeth, like a rat” suggests more about Pito’s naïveté than it does about her ugliness. He sees through love’s barrier no better for his abetting of her daily raids on her father’s cash register. His purchase of an oversized bed (for which he is roundly mocked by his friends) and his tolerance of her public disdain toward him garner for him neither happiness nor success.

Increasingly frustrated, he becomes emboldened to seek Chucha’s father’s permission to marry her and asks his good friend, Santiago, to intercede and represent him. Renowned for his courtesy, gentility, wit, élan, and wealth, Santiago accedes, meets with Chucha’s father, and proposes for himself. With mocking dignity, Pito calmly accepts the news and loses himself in the arms of Bacchus as “in the arms of a loving father.”

As Pito continues through lesser highs and increasing lows, he maintains a relentlessly unreconciled attitude toward life’s mediocrity. He turns his back on it and chooses to become insane; his anecdotes move from the societal scenario to an inner, hallucinatory world rendered in an apocalyptic, allegorical style. It is with relief, then, that the reader welcomes Pito’s death before his spirit is broken.

The secondary characters are appropriately unidimensional for their purpose of representing groups or classes of people and/or as foils to Pito. Within these limits, however, Romero infuses each with felicitous uniqueness and energy and with varied style, ranging from those who belong to the realistic social milieu—the priest, the apothecary, his family—to the extreme of stick-figure caricature—the judge, Pito’s fellow inmates in jail, and the symbolic figures which inhabit his hallucinations. It is noteworthy that this stylistic progression from realism to caricature matches Pito’s progression toward final alienation and madness.

Critical Context

The critics look at Romero’s work in a historical context. At the time the novel was written, the Mexican Revolution, fought to free the individual from the caste system, had recently ended, and it was becoming increasingly apparent to the literati that the early promises of change were illusory; vested interests maintained their power while the disenfranchised were measurably more miserable, since their fresh hope had been destroyed. The general response of Mexican writers to this engaño/desengaño process was to write novels of content and theme directly taken from the Revolution itself. In contrast, Romero took only the process he observed from the deterioration of the Revolution’s idealism and infused his picaresque narrative with this disillusionment. His novel is regarded, then, as an oblique, ironic exegesis of the Revolution, the failure of which accounts for the withering attitude of the author toward Mexico’s institutions and values.

Romero’s masterpiece was unique for its time and anticipated the exploration of form and content notable in post-World War II Latin American narrative. It remains among the finest novels produced in Mexico.

Bibliography

Brushwood, John S. Mexico in Its Novel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. An analysis of the novel in Mexican literature, including a profile and overview of the work of José Rubén Romero.

Chandler, Richard E., and Kessel Schwartz. A New History of Spanish American Fiction. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. A survey of Spanish American fiction, with a discussion of Romero’s novels.

Foster, David W., ed. Modern Latin American Literature. 2 vols. New York: Ungar, 1975. Includes a discussion of Romero and his writings.

Leal, Luis. “José Rubén Romero.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An essay on the life and career of Romero. Includes analysis of his works and a bibliography.