A journey to wholeness through a web of detours

In the beginning of time, there were Four Suns, or worlds, that did not exist concurrently, we learn from the Nahua (or Aztec) Legend of the Suns. Related in the prologue of “The Fifth Sun,” a first novel by Mary Helen Lagasse, the legend serves to illuminate the book’s title and premise. “One [world] followed another, the reigning cosmic forces moving in cyclic order like a great revolving wheel.” But with the birth of the Fifth Sun, the legend explains, it became possible for the separate elements of earth, air, fire and water to come together, resulting in our current world, which continues to exist so long as humankind persists in its struggle to achieve spiritual wholeness.

Lagasse takes this legend and breathes life into its themes of spiritual and social evolution by focusing on Mercedes, a young Mexican woman, as she tries to make a new and better life for herself, as well as the friends and family who precede and follow her in this task. Beginning in Villahermosa, Tabasco, in 1926, the novel opens with the gruesome death of Mercedes’ mother, Nicolasa, from tetanus. Mercedes, still a girl, is taken to live with her father, who is married to a different woman and raising his own family, and is treated as a servant. Unwanted, she leaves Mexico for New Orleans to be a maid for a well-bred family from her hometown and thus begins her journey toward psychic wholeness.

“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” might be the principle inspiring this tale, as disaster and heartbreak befall Mercedes and she must keep her head up and her heart pure in order to win out. She is impregnated by a callous young man of means from her home region who promptly abandons her. Managing on her own with her child, she meets and marries Jesse, a hard-working young Mexican who adopts her son. In no time, though, Jesse reveals himself as weak and easily distracted, forcing Mercedes to dig even deeper into her reserves of strength.

She befriends Manuela, an elderly woman from the well-to-do Maldonado clan, also from the Tabasco region, who teaches her much about maintaining dignity even amid degrading circumstances. Manuela is unabashed about asking for help, and even when refused, Lagasse tells us, she is too high-minded to be offended. “[B]eing a born-and-bred Maldonado elevated her several notches above the common, immunized her against the embarrassment suffered by ordinary people as effectively as the indelible mark of baptism made one a child of God.”

Readers learn of true happiness from Mercedes’ son, Nicolas. He and his family move to Mexico after his adoptive father cannot find work in the States. Though feelings of homesickness swamp him, Nicolas embraces joy. “Happiness was something as simple as a scoop of warm pinole -- the toasted corn kernels ground to powder, flavored with cacao, cinnamon and beechnuts, sweetened and poured into paper cones and bought for two centavos at the corner candy stand -- nutty, pungent happiness which he licked from his spit-wet fingers and poured in little heaps into the palm of his hand, lapped with his tongue and pressed against the roof of his mouth until all the golden sugary goodness had melted.” Delight, Lagasse reminds us, cannot be found by thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, but only in this very moment.

Though the story centers on Mercedes, the author introduces a multitude of characters whose extensive histories and present lives we learn of, even if they are only seemingly tangentially related to the tale. Each person’s actions, we see, influence the others, even among people who’ve never met.

Throughout her ordeals, Mercedes, bolstered by Manuela, remains a paragon of strength, embodying the potency of feminine will. Many of the male characters, meanwhile, are spineless and lack self-conviction, so caught up are they in their need to be manly and proud. Jesse, for example, aware of his wife’s tenacity, is not altogether pleased by it. Were the family to have found itself in the middle of a desert, Jesse considers, “he was certain [Mercedes] would have found the stones to build a hearth.” Yet he resents “her simplicity of spirit in the way he resented the stolid looks on the faces of the men who stared into the oil drum flames not knowing that they looked like buffoons, their faces sooted and streaked.”

Lagasse’s characters are well drawn, and her writing is vibrant with a melange of New Orleans and Mexican zest. While the novel leans to the episodic and uses so many divergent characters and plot threads as to leave many dangling, these flaws are minor in the fabric of this richly drawn tapestry. “The Fifth Sun” illuminates, in piquant, visceral terms, the struggle of humankind to achieve spiritual growth amid stultifying conditions.

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The Fifth Sun

A Novel

Mary Helen Lagasse

Curbstone Press: 342 pp., $15 paper