The Golden Serpent by Ciro Alegría

First published:La serpiente de oro, 1935 (English translation, 1943)

Type of plot: Composite description of a way of life

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: Marañon River, northern Peru

Principal Characters:

• Lucas Vilca, the narrator and a villager in the Calemar Valley
• Matías Romero, a Calemar villager and raftsman
• Rogelio (Roge), and
• Arturo, his sons, both raftsmen
• Lucinda, Arturo’s wife
• Osvaldo Martínez de Calderón, an engineer from Lima
• Mariana Chinguala, a villager who cooks for the narrator
• Juan Plaza, a rancher of Marcapata, host and friend of Osvaldo

The Novel

The Golden Serpent is a poetic description of the daily life of a small village on the bank of the mighty Marañon River in north-central Peru. Rather than having a single central plot, the nineteen chapters are a series of stories or related episodes told by the narrator, Lucas Vilca, a raftsman and farmer of the Calemar Valley. Lucas Vilca both participates in the incidents recounted and serves as an omniscient narrator who chronicles and generalizes. The stories that Lucas Vilca tells include many adventures on the river, descriptions of festivals and religious celebrations, encounters with state troopers, intense dramas of survival amid natural dangers, and accounts of superstitions, customs, and folklore. Many of the episodes are complete short stories in themselves, but their effect is also cumulative: They are all lyric depictions of the unity of man and nature in the Calemar Valley.

The Marañon River dominates the lives of the villagers who live beside it. The cholos (part Indian, part Spanish) of Calemar are fishermen and raftsmen who earn their living by ferrying travelers and cattle across the river. They respect and exult in the power of the huge river as it rushes by them, roaring against the cliffs, churning over the rocks, gliding expansively through open stretches, carrying men and animals to their destinations or to their deaths. Years are measured in terms of rainy seasons, which cause the river to swell and flood, and dry seasons, when the rapids are treacherous and fish are easy to trap in shallow pools. Men live in close harmony with the natural rhythms of the great river, appreciative of the extraordinary beauty of their surroundings and wary of the dangers of this way of life.

Calemar is depicted as a primitive Garden of Eden where bananas, avocados, oranges, and coca grow in profusion. It is a fragile paradise, a utopian community dependent upon the continuous hard work, positive spirit, and adaptability of the men and women who choose this life. Both natural dangers (snakes, diseases, rapids, landslides) and human threats (state troopers, the inevitability of commercial development on a national scale) menace the autonomous survival of this small, isolated community, yet throughout The Golden Serpent the villagers are seen triumphing over one peril after another, not only surviving difficulties but also celebrating their ingenuity, valor, persistence, and good fortune in joyful rituals and tales. As the raftsmen cross back and forth over the raging waters of the Marañon, they sing a song to the river, acknowledging its strength and power but asserting man’s right to live and thrive in this environment: “River Marañon, let me cross . . ./ River Marañon, I have to cross,/ You have your waters,/ I, my heart.” The Golden Serpent is a song of celebration of the beauty and nobility of both man and nature.

The Characters

Within a framework of interwoven descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of the river and of the Calemar Valley, a series of human incidents are recounted, which feature many of the villagers and their visitors. Although most characters are not developed very fully, and it is the river itself (the golden serpent, as seen from above) which predominates, the story is structured around the adventures and personalities of a few individuals: An engineer, the raftsmen (Arturo, Roge, and the narrator), and the wise older folk (Matías, Juan Plaza, and others) are recurrent characters in the series of episodes.

The first major character introduced, the engineer from Lima, Osvaldo Martínez de Calderón, passes through the village on his way to explore the region, and his visit is an occasion for descriptions and explanations of customs that are strange to him (and to the reader). The stranger asks questions, and his host, Don Matías, tells of their lives as ferrymen, their exploits and myths, of Colluash the river monster, and of Roge’s foolhardy swim across the swollen river. Introduced in the second chapter, Osvaldo begins his survey of the region in the fourth. His new city clothes and life-style begin to seem insufficient, his belief that modern science has mastered everything is shaken, and he begins to understand native ways; he even chews coca to overcome high altitude sickness, although he previously rejected it with revulsion. Osvaldo returns in the fifteenth chapter, tattered and matured by his experiences yet still unadapted to the harsh environment. He suffers from mosquitoes, is made nervous by coca. He seems closer to the villagers, a man more like them, more able now to cope with the ferocity of the land, yet still a harbinger of unwelcome modernization and change.

Through the character of Osvaldo, Ciro Alegría is able to explain the attraction of Calemar without seeming pedantic or judgmental. Osvaldo is appalled by the violence and superstition of the region, yet, too, he is fascinated. He dreams of organizing a company, to be called The Golden Serpent, with financial backing from Lima, which will dredge the Marañon and extract its gold. It seems to the narrator that Osvaldo is no longer the stranger he once was nor a man in true harmony with the elemental forces and temperament of Calemar. He is a man who thinks he can seduce the golden-faced shepherdess, Hormelinda, yet still go back and marry the aristocrat from Lima. He wants both worlds and loses both. The golden girl and the golden river with its yellow banks have their hold on him; he is bitten and killed by the yellow snake, the intiwaraka, seen as a ribbon of gold against forest leaves. It is part of the lyric power of the book that no explicit moral is offered: Osvaldo’s death, like other deaths, is accepted as a part of the life cycle of nature, and the story, like the river, continues.

The other important characters are Calemar inhabitants: the raftsmen, Arturo, Roge, and the narrator; their father, Don Matías; and the wise rancher, Don Juan Plaza. The young men are impetuous and brave on the river, fun-loving and somewhat reckless. Their adventure in the La Escalera rapids dominates the first half of the book. Arturo is revealed as competent and levelheaded, but not immune to passion (he falls in love with and carries off Lucinda), to vigorous self-defense (when mistreated by the state troopers), and to personal challenges. Even though he knows that it is foolish to risk the rapids at dusk, he allows Roge’s dare to provoke him and is thus partially responsible for his brother’s death. Arturo is the idealized denizen of this paradisiacal valley, admirable even in his faults and excesses. Roge is weaker, less lucky, and less deeply in touch with the natural world around him. A moment’s carelessness can be fatal in the fragile balance of skills and forces on the Marañon.

Don Matías, Don Juan, and other older storytellers represent the accumulated wisdom of those who have long survived the rigors of the Andes, the jungle, and the river, and their tales tell of disasters befallen unwary men of the past, of spirits and omens, and of successful survival techniques. They are kind, generous, and wise, aware of their own limitations.

The women of Calemar are resilient frontierswomen, protected and admired by their men but often forced to live and act independently, like Mariana Chinguala, who kills the puma that has been menacing the village. The younger women, Lucinda, Florinda, and Hormelinda, are most often seen in traditional roles as they cook, bear children, do the laundry in the river, and tend the goats. They are appropriate women for this Garden of Eden: strong, beautiful, unselfconscious, and sensual.

Critical Context

Ciro Alegría was born in 1909, on a ranch in the Peruvian province of Huamachuco, and he spent his childhood in that region, which is depicted in The Golden Serpent. He grew up with people like the Calemar villagers, and from his parents and ranch hands he heard the songs and stories that he retells in this book. He says that these people and these tales “made me understand their sorrows, their joys, their great and overlooked gifts of intelligence and fortitude, their creative ability, their capacity for endurance.” Exiled to Chile because of his political activities, Alegría supported himself as a journalist and writer. In 1935, poor, ill, and homesick for Peru, Alegría expanded a short story, “The Raft,” into the manuscript of The Golden Serpent, which won for him first prize in a contest sponsored by a publisher in Santiago, Chile. His second novel, Los perros hambrientos (1938), and his third novel, El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941; Broad and Alien Is the World, 1941), were also prizewinners. These novels also portray the native people of northern Peru, but they are primarily concerned with the plight of Indians in mountainous areas. Like The Golden Serpent, they depict communal village life in harmony with natural forces, but while The Golden Serpent reveals the strengths and beauties of traditional values, often shown in contrast to the motives and actions of outsiders such as the state troopers or the engineer, Osvaldo Martínez de Calderón, Alegría’s subsequent two novels portray Indian communities which are seriously threatened by greedy landowners, exploiters, and twentieth century development. They are much more critical and more political in their focus.

Although The Golden Serpent describes the life of cholos rather than Indians, it is often considered as part of the Indianist literature of the 1920’s and 1930’s, fiction which is also associated with regionalism and social protest. Much of this fiction is primarily documentary expose of the miserable conditions of Indian life, as seen in the stories of the Peruvian Enrique López Albújar (Cuentos andinos, 1920) and novels by the Mexican Gregorio López y Fuentes (El indio, 1935; English translation, 1937) and the Ecuadorian Jorge Icaza (Huasipungo, 1934; The Villagers, 1936). Ciro Alegría’s fiction represents an effort to comprehend the lives of Indians (and, in The Golden Serpent, the cholos) through an understanding of their values, myths, legends, and daily lives. A few of the other novelists in this tradition are the Peruvian José María Arguedas (Los ríos profundos, 1958; Deep Rivers, 1978), the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (Mulata de tal, 1963; Mulata, 1967), and the Mexican Rosario Castellanos (Balún Canán, 1957; The Nine Guardians, 1959).

Bibliography

Early, Eileen. Joy in Exile: Ciro Alegría’s Narrative Art. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980. Early analyzes Alegría’s narrative style.

Rodríguez Peralta, Phyllis. “Ciro Alegría: Culmination of Indigenist-Regionalism in Peru.” Journal of Spanish Studies Twentieth Century 7 (1979): 337-352. An interesting look at Alegría’s regionalist tendencies.

Urrello, Antonio. “Ciro Alegría.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Alegría’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.