Atdtda33: Some sorcery, 927-929

[Paul Nightingale]

The chapter thus far as tied El Espinero and Wren together insofar as they
each appear to Frank as he is waking, regaining consciousness, on 919 and
922 respectively. Here, Wren returns, having been absent from the previous
section: the appearance of the biplane has interrupted her relationship with
Frank, the passage emphasising the role played by local mythmaking. She is
now back to, as Frank has it, question "native magic" (927) and, in effect,
challenge El Espinero. Frank mocks her failure to appreciate the powers of
the walking/running sorcery stick: is he perhaps accusing her of
ethnocentrism, even situating her among the tourists? On 928 Wren indicates
what "a professorial person" would want to know; Frank immediately says
he'll "talk to El Espinero".

When Wren says she "ha[s] to go back to work" (927), it implies some kind of
separation or transformation of their relationship, and end, perhaps, to the
idyll. Cf Ewball's "sort of vacation I guess" (926). She has waited until
his recovery is complete: he can "sit a horse again" (927) and, of course,
El Espinero has intervened. However, Frank accompanies her: that he can now
ride a horse means he can go with her, rather than being confined, which
might be what she has been waiting for.

Evidently, this is a going back to a time before she appeared to him on 922,
"[t]he site still [bearing] the signs of abrupt departure" (928). If the
site marks a clear distinction between the indigenous culture and the
scientific ordering of, or imposition of meaning on, that culture, then this
is Wren's territory, in Latourian terms an extension of the northern
university. The biplane is one kind of invasion, then, the archaeological
site another; and Frank's antipathy is indicated by "Harvard halfwits".
Hence it is interesting that Frank finds El Espinero here: he "under[stands]
immediately that this was where the hikuli had taken him the other night,
what El Espinero had wanted him to see". On 926, as Frank emerges from
hallucination, El Espinero is there to say it's important "you don't forget
where you were just now". Back on 392 he says Frank "need[s] practice in
seeing"; here, this becomes an assault on "his ... case-hardened immunity to
anything extraliteral" (928). Eventually, Frank understands the "history of
exile and migration", an exploration of power and dispossession.