The Cemetery of Untold Stories

by Julia Alvarez

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Literary icon Julia Alvarez returns with an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling itself that will be an instant classic.
 
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
 
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
 
The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
 
Readers of Isabel Allende’s Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez’s extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity that reminds us the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

Release date: April 2, 2024

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Alma once had a friend, a writer, who for years before she died, relatively young, was always talking about this one story she had to write down.

Over the course of their thirty-plus-year friendship, Alma’s friend became quite famous, winning major prizes, garnering important interviews, awards left and right. A TV movie based on one of her novels was in the works with well-known names even Alma, not a big Hollywood person, had heard of. And yet her friend dismissed these achievements as “incidentals.” The real deal was this one story that would not be hurried.

The story possessed her. She could reel off its characters, complete with their names and histories. Periodically, they compelled her to go to one or another part of the world: a gravesite in Sweden, a fishing village in Liberia, the outer islands off South Carolina where she bought a house and lived for a spell. These characters had secrets she was listening for, and the reception was better in some places than others; their voices would break through, until she’d lose the connection and it was time to move on to some other place.

Alma had stopped counting her friend’s many addresses, switching to pencil in her address book. A migrant storyteller, to be sure, Alma told her. Her writer friend liked that description, and from then on, she used it for interviews and at readings, insisting she was not a writer, or a novelist, but a migrant storyteller.

Alma wasn’t so sure it was a great thing for her friend to be so rootless. A writer needs to be grounded or the force that through the green fuse drives the flower is going to incinerate it. But instead of pointing this out, Alma held back, celebrating her friend’s lilies-of-the-fields attitude. Her friend could be fierce, bristling at the slightest hint of criticism.

In one incident—and Alma was at the reading to verify it—a woman during the Q and A mentioned the difficulty of understanding some of the dialogue. Did the writer ever worry about her audience? Alma’s friend leveled one of those if-looks-could-kill looks at the woman. I’m not writing for white people, she said straight out. This before people were saying such things, except for Toni Morrison.

One of the protagonists in the unwritten story was a likeable white guy from Sweden (thus the trip to Sweden?), a sailor, with ropey arms like the rigging of a ship. Kristian, whose name changed over time—Kristofer, Anders, Nils—falls in love with the enslaved female protagonist, Clio—her name did not change over the many years her friend talked about the book.

Alma sometimes wondered if her friend had befriended her in part to find out more about white people. If so, Alma was not the best choice: she wasn’t 100 percent Caucasian, if such a critter even existed. Her family came from an island where, the popular saying goes, Everyone has a little Black behind the ears. Even the pale members of her mother’s clan who claimed their ancestors had come over on the Niña, Pinta, or Santa Maria would occasionally spawn a dark seed they blamed on the in-laws. Her father’s family couldn’t hide their racial mixture: the dark-skinned matriarch with the French surname, Rochet, meant roots in Haiti; probably a slave owner helping himself to his property.

Whatever her friend’s reasons for befriending her, Alma was flattered. Being the chosen one was something that rarely happened to her. It was as if a bad-tempered toddler who bawled when others approached had smiled and lifted their little arms to her. The two women spoke often by phone, exchanged long, thoughtful letters. After Alma moved to Vermont for a teaching job, her friend would take the train from the city every summer. Before one visit, Alma asked Luke, her then boyfriend, to plant some sunflowers, knowing her friend had a thing for them. He didn’t sow just one or two, but the whole back pasture—a bumper crop of yellow suns.

Alma took her friend out to the back deck and gestured grandly. Your welcome bouquet!

Her friend kept shaking her head with wonder. Did you do that? Alma gave credit where credit was due.

You keep this one, you hear, her friend said bossily.

Along with a green thumb, Luke also had cool tattoos. Her friend spent the afternoon sketching them in her journal. They’re perfect for my Kristian, she said.

But it takes more than a green thumb to keep love growing. Several months later, Alma discovered Luke was sowing his wild seed in other fields. When she broke up with him, her friend was pissed at Alma.

Over the years, Alma began to feel anxious before each visit. Her friend had fallen out with most of her friends as well as with her family. She was mistrustful, increasingly paranoid. She was being watched. The Feds were after her. Her sister was hitting her up for money for drugs. She had pulled all her titles from her publisher. She recounted angry scenes. Alma began to wonder when her own banishment would come.

Of course, her friend had reason to be wary. All sorts of people courted her, their motives never completely free of that pursuit of celebrities that her writer friend considered an affliction in the culture. Don’t ever forget, she often coached Alma, we’re just the literary flavor of the month or at most the year. More and more, publishing houses were being bought by huge conglomerates who also dealt in fossil fuels and breakfast cereals and pharmaceuticals. Like all their other assets, their writers had expiration dates.

Alma listened, but she was not yet ready to dismiss fame and fortune. Easy enough for her friend, already a big deal. Just you wait, she kept saying to Alma. But Alma didn’t want to wait. They were the same age, and Alma was still struggling. Her friend was super generous, inviting Alma along as her sidekick at conferences where she was giving the keynote, introducing her as “one of my favorite writers,” advising Alma about where to send her work and whom to trust, this latter a very short list, and getting shorter.

Finally, Alma’s writing started gaining some traction, but this caused fallout she hadn’t foreseen. Her mother took issue with her daughter’s “lies” and threatened to sue if Alma didn’t stop publishing her shameful stories, defaming the family name (naughty girls having sex, using drugs). She was going to disown Alma and write her own version of events. Since Mami was not speaking to her, these ultimatums were delivered to Alma via her sisters.

Alma was distraught. How could her own mother attack her? Even hardened criminals had mothers who said, He’s an axe murderer, but he’s my baby.

So, change your name, her writer friend suggested. You’re always talking about The Arabian Nights. You can be Scheherazade from now on.

No one will be able to spell it, Alma noted.

Their problem. You’re not writing for them, are you?

Who is them? Alma didn’t ask, for fear she’d get an earful.

It’s all settled, her friend said, ignoring Alma’s reluctance. Only two months older and her friend was bossier than Amparo, the eldest of Alma’s three sisters.

At a conference where her friend was giving the keynote, Alma overheard a writer on the staff describe her friend as “a piece of work.” Alma might have dismissed the comment as typical of what happens at these conferences—contributors and staff afloat in alcohol to get through all that contained intensity and ambition—but Alma was especially sensitive to the phrase. Both Luke and, before him, Philip, Alma’s former husband, had said the same thing about her. The idiom always sounded off. Didn’t anything worthwhile involve work?

A number of such expressions still eluded her. She knew their dictionary meanings, but she didn’t get that Ah ha! feeling that came from a word or idiom touching bottom inside her. Perhaps because English wasn’t her original language, its root system didn’t go deep enough in her psyche, a troubling thought for a writer.

Of course, Alma knew the term wasn’t intended as a compliment, especially when used by a man toward a woman he’s losing interest in. The end is nigh. Her friend had never met Philip, but she had a lot to say about men in general, not usually positive, which was why it had been unusual when she advised Alma to keep her sunflower fellow.

For her part, her friend never mentioned any passionate attachments, male or female. She did leave a message one time on Alma’s answering machine. She was in Paris, engaged to be married. By then, both women were in their mid-forties and single. I want you to be my maid of honor. I’ll send more details soon. The promised details never came. At their next meeting (another conference where this time they were both keynote speakers—Alma was coming up in the world) her friend never mentioned the fiancée. So, did you just elope with this guy? Alma asked. What guy? her friend batted back. Alma brought up the phone message from a few months ago. A fly-by-night, her friend waved the fly away. But what about the wedding band on her left hand? Just a protective measure, her friend replied. Protection against what? Again, Alma didn’t ask.

Her friend seemed to treat her life like drafts of a novel. This plot isn’t working. Okay, no problem. Let’s take out the marriage and rearrange the sequence, see what happens. Some troubling confusion between art and life.

At a subsequent reunion, her friend cornered her. Will you promise me something?

Depends on the promise, Alma answered in a jokey voice her friend did not appreciate.

This is serious. If something happens to me, promise you’ll tell Clio’s story.

Alma balked. I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to do it justice, she added, a compliment to mollify her refusal.

Of course, you can. You’ve heard me talking about her for years.

One thing is hearing a story, another is writing it down. Besides, it’s not for one person to tell another’s story. (Like Alma hadn’t been doing this left and right in her own writing.) And nothing’s going to happen to you, she assured her friend.

I guess you haven’t heard the news that none of us is getting out of here alive.

Ha, ha, Alma said the words, too uneasy for genuine laughter. Any moment now her friend might go off the deep end and drag Alma along with her.

Alma began to hang back, afraid of an intimacy that had always been so singular, unsettling. She’d let a few days go by before answering letters or calls. That summer there was no invitation for a Vermont visit. For one thing there was no boyfriend with alluring tattoos and property out in the country. And Alma herself was on the move. After a spate of publications, she’d gotten tenure and purchased a “starter home,” so the Realtor called it, though Alma meant the modest cottage to be the house they carried her out of feet first. It’s tiny, Alma remarked to her friend, leaving a guest room vague. She would be spending most of the summer away; length and location of her stay she also left vague.

Alma was at the airport, headed for the Dominican Republic, the island she still called home. Her parents had moved back in their old age, and it was Alma’s turn to spell Amparo, who had moved down to manage their care. At her gate waiting for the delayed flight, Alma heard the ringing in her handbag. Her friend’s name flashed on the screen. Alma debated whether to answer. She didn’t need one more piece of work with a whole month of heart-wrenching eldercare ahead of her. But Alma had rarely been able to refuse her friend. Soon she’d be in a whole other country for over a month, so it’s not like her friend could easily land on her doorstep.

Her friend didn’t greet Alma but launched right into her story. She was locked up in a facility—no, not a prison, but it might as well be—a looney bin somewhere in the city. A family member had obtained a power of attorney, claiming she was a danger to herself. Lies, all lies! You have to get me out of here. It wasn’t a request so much as a command.

Alma hesitated, thinking over all the ways she had seen this coming. The signs had been there: over two decades working on that novel, her characters driving her all over the face of creation. Alma had listened patiently to her friend’s wild suspicions about outrageous plots to silence her.

It was time to take a stand. Alma couched her refusal in a way that her friend might find acceptable. By getting well, that long-awaited novel might come. We both know, Alma reminded her friend, that we don’t get free until we write our stories down. She quoted a passage she often used to rally her students stuck on a piece of writing: “If you bring forth what is inside you, what is inside you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside, what is inside you will destroy you.”

An unsettling silence had fallen on the other end of the line. It’s from the Bible, Alma added, knowing her friend had once been a Jehovah’s Witness and was still enough of a believer that she didn’t like for people to celebrate her birthday. And then, what a mother might say to a daughter or a woman to her lover, Do it for me. I need you to write that story. And no, I can’t do it for you, no one can.

I see. Her friend’s voice had turned to ice. They’ve gotten to you, too. And here I thought you wouldn’t betray me.

Alma defended herself. It’s because I care. I love you! Alma would never know if her friend heard these last words. There was more silence. Then the screen went dark.

Alma tried calling back, but no answer. For weeks, months, Alma kept trying. Her friend’s voicemail wasn’t set up, her old landline number had been disconnected. Alma didn’t know whom to contact. She had never met anyone in her friend’s family. She did manage to reach her friend’s former agent, who confessed concern about her author’s psychosis. The first Alma heard of a diagnosis.

Alma didn’t go into the details of their last call. She told herself she had to protect her friend’s dignity, her privacy. But it was her own failure Alma was most ashamed of. Not about declining to spring her friend from the mental ward, but about remaining silent all those years when Alma suspected her friend wasn’t well. Back in Catholic school, the nuns had called these sins of omission.

For several years, Alma kept an eye out. She’d type her friend’s name in search engines. No recent novels, readings, lectures. She had vanished. It was as if Alma had imagined her friend along with the other characters in her books.

The end came as no surprise. The former agent let Alma know.

The official word was that her friend had suffered a massive heart attack. There were conjectures about what had caused it: too high a dosage of some substance or other; a contraindicated mix of medications; overexertion that crashed her burdened vessels. But Alma didn’t believe any of these explanations. What killed her friend was that novel she could neither write nor put aside.

Alma vowed that when the time came, she wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to her. It didn’t seem likely. She was going at a fast clip—a book every other year, articles, talks. It seemed her friend had passed the fame baton on to her.

Years passed. The great mortal migration began

Every month, Alma would get a call: this tío or that tía or older cousin had died. Then came her parents’ turn. First, Mami began showing signs of dementia. Surprisingly the erasure of memory brought out the best in her. For the only time any of her daughters could remember, their dragon-lady mother was tender and affectionate, patting her lap for her daughters to come sit and play kissy games and sing clapping songs together. Alma finally understood what years of writing hadn’t unraveled. Her mother needed a mother, too.

She died with her four girls taking turns cradling her like their child.

Papi was bereft. Every day, he’d ask, ¿Y Mami? and every day suffer the fresh blow of hearing that she had died. Did he also have dementia, the sisters wondered, or was this his usual disconnect? He’d been detached for years—nothing new there. But after his wife’s death, he seemed to sink into a deeper silence. He stopped talking altogether, except for occasional sallies, and then they couldn’t get him to stop—like he only had an on and off switch—reciting long passages of Dante, Rubén Darío, Cervantes, recounting canned incidents of his life, everything airbrushed, a firewall Alma could never seem to get through.

After Mami died, Amparo volunteered to stay on managing Papi’s care. Management had never been Amparo’s strong suit, however. She didn’t believe in keeping a budget, a stingy way to live, draining her parents’ savings instead. She picked up men, buying them lavish gifts, expensive colognes and clothes, a motorcycle, a washing machine for one man’s mother. She fell for every tear-jerking story: my sister is dying of cancer, my brother needs a prosthesis, his kids don’t have school supplies. She had a heart of gold, but it was not her gold to give away.

How do we solve a problem like Amparo? became her younger sisters’ theme song from The Sound of Music for Amparo. What a misnomer of a name: “Refuge,” really? ¡Por favor!

Amparo was furious at her sisters’ lack of appreciation for her sacrifices, giving up her life to take care of their father. You think you can do it better, go ahead! She was off to Cuba with her new boyfriend. Cuba?! What new boyfriend? Amparo’s lips were sealed. She could be as elusive as Papi.

Papi’s care now fell on the three younger sisters, all living in the States. The most practical solution, therefore, was to bring their father to live with one of them or in a nearby facility. Yes, they had promised both parents never to bring them back or put them in a nursing home, but what difference would it make? Half the time Papi didn’t even know where he was. What was the harm in pretending? We’re going to Alfa Calenda, they told him as they packed up his belongings, put the house on the market, and boarded the Jet Blue flight to JFK. Just the mention of that fantasy place he’d invented with his mother in childhood seemed to soothe him. His personal Shangri-la-la land, his daughters had dubbed it.

As the second oldest, next in line to be the “honorary son,” Alma took charge of Papi’s care. Although the sisters decried the patriarchy in the Dominican Republic, primogeniture and succession still held sway in their psyches. Alma had every intention of keeping Papi at home, but that plan soon proved untenable. Her little cottage with its narrow doorways and steep staircases was not accessible. Her father was not a big man, but he was twice her weight, and a dead weight at that. No way Alma could handle him by herself. In her rural community, round-the-clock care was expensive and hard to find. Sunset Manor was less than five minutes away. It was full of old Vermonters, mostly women who didn’t know what to make of this tanned, foreign man, a cigar-store Indian in their midst. Dr. Manuel Cruz became a favorite of the aides, an exotic creature in his Panama hat, gallantly kissing their hands, complimenting them. The women soaked it up, spoiling him with double portions of dessert. His blood sugar was through the roof.

You like it here, eh, Papi? Alma kept asking, trying to assuage her guilt.

He’d scowl at her. Did he realize his daughters had tricked him? Maybe he was just trying to figure out who she was. Amparo? Consuelo? Piedad? He always did this growing up: run through all their names before landing on the daughter in question. It hurt their feelings. Now, he was adding new names to the roll call. Mami? (Did he mean their mother or his?) Belén? (A sister Alma was supposed to resemble.) Tatica?

Who is Tatica, Papi?

Papi shook his head, but his eyes were bright with memories.

Come on, Babinchi, Alma coaxed, using his childhood nickname. You know you can tell me anything? She stroked the hand on her hand tenderly.

Papi patted her hand back, a gesture of affection or was he tamping down her questions? These moments of lucidity were rare. Alma kept trying. Bendición, she greeted him in the old-fashioned way he had taught them. She spoke of Alfa Calenda as if she’d been there. Tricks that almost always roused him. Tatica, she tried several times, which seemed to stir him as well.

Do any of you know who Tatica is? Alma asked her sisters. Papi keeps mentioning her.

Probably someone from Alfa Calenda, Piedad offered. Their code way of referring to all their father’s backstory none of them needed to know more about, except for Alma.

Fuck Alfa Calenda. Papi was probably getting something on the side. Consuelo’s telenovela imagination had a tendency to go into overdrive.

Amparo, back Stateside after her boyfriend dumped her in Cuba, fumed. So, they were really going to smear their father with conjectures now that he was incapable of defending himself. And for their information, Tatica was the nickname for Altagracia, the national virgencita. It. . .