Frank Waters, whose work has spanned half a century, has
continually attempted to depict the reconciliation of opposites, to
heal the national wounds of polarization.
"Flight From Fiesta," Waters' first novel in nearly two decades, is
testimony to that aspiration, emerging as a moving and
masterfully-told story of two characters who must discover the
potential for common ground between their personalities.
Set in Santa Fe in the mid-fifties, the story itself is deceptively
simple. Elsie, a spoiled, self-centered ten-year-old Anglo tourist
girl, has come to the annual Fiesta with her divorced mother and
her mother's lover. When Elsie runs away from her hotel, she
encounters Inocencio, an old alcoholic Pueblo Indian now reduced to
selling pottery beneath the portal of the Palace of the Governors.
With childish cunning she maneuvers Inocencio into taking her away
with him. In the wake of the child's disappearance, as the local
posse-mentality intensifies and Inocencio is suspected of
kidnapping and perhaps molesting her, the frightened Indian flees
to the hills, taking Elsie with him on a week-long odyssey through
the mountains, towns, and pueblos of New Mexico.
Waters' eye is precise, providing sharp visual detail on very page.
His ear is flawless, especially in his rendering of the laconic and
stolid Indian speech patterns. All through his book there is an
immediacy and a feel for place and culture that cannot be
fabricated but must be gained, as Waters himself has gained it,
through a lifetime among these people, these towns, and these
mountains. The reconciliation of the two fugitives of "Flight From
Fiesta" serves to point, not didactically or allegorically, but
emotionally and spiritually, but emotionally and spiritually, to
the possibility of the grander reconciliation that Waters
envisions.
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