FICTION

MOTHER TONGUE by Demetria Martinez (Bilingual Press: $17; 125 pp.) The author of this novel, winner of the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction, was indicted on charges relating to smuggling Central American refugees into the United States in 1987, and later acquitted on First Amendment grounds. She has written a brave and complicated account of what it is to be a refugee, to help a refugee and to fall in love with someone fleeing an unbearable past. “His nation,” it begins, “chewed him up and spat him out like a pinon shell.” On one level, the romance in this story has many similarities to “The Bridges of Madison County.” One hesitates to say it, for the backdrop of this book is the violence of Central America, particularly El Salvador in the early 1980s, which has nothing to do with Iowa or bridges or lonely photographers, none of the same factors creating an impossible romance. Maria falls (yes, helplessly) in love with the man, Jose Luis, whom she has been asked by her wise old friend, Soledad, to help assimilate. He is a poet, a man who has been tortured, and whose wife-to-be was brutally murdered by the police. He has trouble living in and trusting the present and is not looking to fall in love. But his Mexican-American savior, Mary/Maria (“a blessing name that had become my curse. At age nineteen, I was looking for a man to tear apart the dry rind of that name so I could see what fruit fermented inside”) describes herself as “one of those women whose fate is to take a war out of a man, or at least imagine she is doing so, like prostitutes once upon a time who gave themselves in temples to returning soldiers.” Her longing and his fear make the book simmer, carrying the reader through a somewhat hasty, pat and disappointing ending.