quotes: Luis Alberto Urrea

A long time ago I read this bit of advice to aspiring novelists:  If you want to learn to write excellent, realistic dialogue, just listen to real people and real conversations wherever you go, and (surreptitiously) write down what you hear.  The moment that I decided to try this, I began to hear some of the most bizarre actual conversations I had ever imagined could occur.  So odd, in fact, that I soon gave up the practice, convinced that no reader would ever believe they could have happened.

Maybe truth really is stranger than fiction.  But I've come to admire, and to be fed by, those writers whose fiction is as strange as truth.  Or, whose strange (and often quite simple) fiction..awakens truth.  If you haven't experienced this, I'm not sure I can describe it.  But I will offer here one small example, just encountered in Luis Alberto Urrea's novel The Hummingbird's Daughter.  Followed by one of the finest and most ridiculous pages of dialogue that's come my way in a while.  And which sounds, in fact, quite a bit like some of the "real dialogues" in my own overhearing.

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"Don Refugio Moroyoqui never explained himself.  Even when he was teaching...he stayed quiet even while speaking.  A particular knot could be tied but one way.  The grain of the wood allowed but one shaving.  Some roads, despite appearances, went in only one direction.  Don Refugio did not speak of dried-out riverbeds."

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(The dialogue is between Tomás, the patrón of a great Sinaloan rancho, and his lifelong friend Aguirre, "the Engineer", visiting from the North.  The story takes place just before 1900.)

"I was afraid I'd miss your party," Aguirre said.  "Things are complicated on the roads."
"Did you see bandits?"
"Only in the form of government agents....The bandits are all dead," Aguirre informed him.  "And many Indians.  Americanos are buying land in Chihuahua and Sonora on deeds from Mexico City."  He waved his hand before his face.  "There are department stores."
"What is this?"
"Germans selling coats and underpants and pots and toys all in one great store."
"No meat?"
"No."
"No steaks?"
"No! No meat at all."
"What kind of a store sells no meat?"
"Tomás!  Por Dios!  Pay attention!  A department store."
"What do they sell?"
"I just told you what they sell."
"No meat."
"Correct."
"German underpants."
"Well.  As a figure of speech."
"Ah."
"Things, in other words."
"Ah!"
"It is very North American."
"No meat," said Tomás.  "It is the end of ranching."
"No, no," the Engineer said.  "There will be department stores of meat!"
Tomás raised his glass.
"Let us drink a toast, then, to the future!"