(…cont.)
Leaving Pico is Gaspar’s novel of childhood, picking up certain of the themes and characters evoked in his first collection of poems, The Holyoke (1988). It is set over a summer in Provincetown, some time in the 1950s, among the Portuguese community in which the author grew up. The novel focuses on the experiences of Josie, a young boy, and in particular, the relationship with his grandfather, John Joseph, who represents a last link with the vanishing world of the Azorean fishing community. It is through the tales that John Joseph tells him that Josie becomes aware of the importance of tradition, and learns to contribute to the stories himself, eventually becoming the guardian of that tradition and, in the process, gaining a greater awareness of the world. The novel is built up upon a series of contrasts. The first is the animosity and mistrust between the two representative blocks of the Portuguese community: the ‘Picos’, who are Azorean immigrants or their descendants, a sub-class of Portuguese who are associated with the fishing industry, and the ‘Lisbons’, who have arrived in the region more recently from mainland Portugal. Tension between the two is synthesised by the relationship between Josie’s Great Aunt Theophila and denizen of the Azorean community, and their snooty neighbour, Madaleine Sylvia, who looks down on the Azoreans, regarding them as unruly. Rivalry between ‘Lisbons’ and ‘Picos’ dominates the operation of the local community organisation, and even extends to the annual blessing of the fishing fleet. It is therefore hardly surprising that hostility between these two groups makes the romance between Josie’s mother, a first-generation American of ‘Pico’ background and Carmine, the young ‘Lisbon’ who arrives in town from Montijo via New Bedford, hard for the family to accept and eventually results in the couple leaving town. Yet the animosity between ‘Picos’ and ‘Lisbons’ echoes more ancient rivalries evoked in John Joseph’s tale of their ancestor, Joaquim Carvalho, the Azorean who had supposedly reached Cape Cod before Columbus first sailed across the Atlantic, and of course long before the first English colonists made landfall. Carvalho’s epic journey of discovery had been cast into historical oblivion for the sake of geopolitical expediency on the part of Lisbon in the interests of its relationship with Spain and the Papacy in the wake of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). The second binary acting as an influence on Josie is that of the Church versus nonconformism, on the one hand, represented by the parish priest, Father Santos, and his Great Aunt Theophila, and on the other by his grandfather, John Joseph and the art of storytelling. It is not that Theophila’s world is one devoid of stories. Indeed, her superstitious, rural Catholicism, is characterised by inventiveness, which means that her alliance with the priest is essentially one of social convenience, designed to preserve traditional authority within a household exposed to ‘foreign’ pressures . But essentially, the influence of religious teaching upon Josie is oppressive and authoritarian, its plot predetermined, admitting of no possible re-interpretation or democratic involvement on the part of those subjected to it. This is clearly illustrated in Father Santos’s testing of Josie on the martyrdom of the saints, which he is supposed to learn unquestioningly by heart. By contrast, John Joseph’s tale of the family ancestor invites Josie’s intervention. It is based on nothing more than hearsay, a few ancient maps, and intertextual elements from boyhood adventure stories such as Treasure Island. It is open to the creative imagination, which is why Josie joins in its narration and suggests his own plot lines. Above all, it is not intended to reaffirm a commonly imposed certainty, but rather to resolve an enigma: who was Joaquim Carvalho, how did he get to America, and what happened to him when he got there? Between them, John Joseph and his grandson gradually work out a hypothesis. The third set of contrasts is suggested in the struggle and rivalry between conservative and liberal forces that sway this tiny community. It is expressed, of course, in the mutual incompatibility and latent hostility existing between Great Aunt Theophila and John Joseph, but it is also present elsewhere, most patently in the relationship between the resident community and the summer visitors, whose behaviour is slowly having an effect on the town. There are the female holiday visitors with whom John Joseph gets involved and are responsible for his leaving home, and the suggested gay couple, Lew and Roger, who lodge with Josie’s family and are strangely tolerated by this intensely traditional society. Significantly, one of these is a historian, who aids and abets John Joseph and Josie in their attempts to re-interpret history, thus suggesting a meeting of minds between the bohemian world of New York and the social pariahs of Provincetown. But perhaps the most blatant example of the community being eroded in its traditional Catholic values from within, lies in the relationship between Josie’s single mother and the ‘Lisbon’, Carmine. Josie’s mother has already transgressed the rigid norms set by Theophila, by having a child out of wedlock, but her pariah status is reaffirmed when she takes up with Carmine and then runs away with him to Florida, enthralled by his more modern dreams of making a living rather than in the traditional occupation of fishing. While the affair runs its course and she eventually returns to Provincetown without him, there is a sense at the end of the novel, that society has evolved and that Aunt Theophila’s authority is no longer what it was. Indeed, she ultimately fades into the background, authority and the power of decision passed on to the next generation – that of Josie’s mother. The gradual transformation of 1950s Provincetown from a declining fishing town into a tourist haven, and the competing values of tradition and modernity, are underpinned by the flux in Josie’s relationship with his mother, grandfather, and his mother’s suitor, Carmine, who represents a force for change and is therefore considered by some a threat to the integrity of the community, appealing as he does to the rebellious streak in Josie’s mother, as a first generation American. Josie’s mother and Carmine aspire to change: she wants to work at the Bluefish Inn, tangible symbol of Provincetown’s new tourist economy, while Carmine has ambitions to open a seafood restaurant. Josie himself is torn between the new, potentially attractive world of modern urban America, and his attachment to his grandfather and love of the sea – in other words, between the past, with all its uncertainties and the future, with all its promises of material progress and assimilation into mainstream American life. The tension within Josie is illustrated most poignantly in the scene where a speedboat, driven by well-heeled summer visitors cuts across the bow of John Joseph’s dory. Their display of brashness and arrogance is a sign of his difference, and for a moment Josie resents his grandfather as the sudden appearance of a symbol of modernity makes him ashamed of his own family’s lack of status: Suddenly I was filled with hatred. It wasn’t for them. It was for my grandfather and the pathetic little dory he sailed in. (81) Yet ultimately, it is Josie who looks after the dory when John Joseph disappears while out at sea and presumed drowned. In the end, he realizes that a narrative of the past, even with no hard truth to it, is important. After all, in the story, Joaquim Carvalho’s was a stolen identity, and when he arrived in America, he died. But Josie’s re-insertion into an ancestral myth through his grandfather’s grooming of him to take over as guardian of the family’s past, gives him his sense of identity and pride in being an Azorean American. In this sense, as a second generation American, he has regained what his parents had lost, which was their identification with a poetic truth: I thought about how John Joseph had fa
stened his whole life to the sinuous truths of his stories, and how he believed such truths would save us. And as I gazed around the yard, I knew that someday that’s how I would look on all this, on Sheika and my Great Aunt Theophila and Johnny Squash and all the rest of us gathered here. And then it was not so much of a reach to see that this might be just the sort of peculiar and omen-filled night in which a certain captain bearing our last name could have left his safe harbor on Pico, the green jewel of the Azores, and sailed obscurely, but with great ambition, to this strange New World. (211)
(cont.)