Ximena de dos caminos.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Ximena, the protagonist of a new novel by Peruvian author Laura Riesco, is a precocious yet sensitive child who is just becoming aware of life's complexities. From her comfortable home in the Andes, she looks out on a magnificent landscape, but also on the squalor of an Indian encampment. Fiction routinely idealizes the early years, depicting youngsters as sublimely innocent or else impossibly wise. In contrast, for Riesco, childhood is a time during which people begin to grapple with moral issues and acquire an ethical sense.

The success of the book relies largely on Riesco's ability to capture the child's point of view. Forced to piece together snippets of information gleaned from her parents' remarks and her own observations, Ximena forms a not-quite coherent picture of things, although she often grasps primal truths that escape more rational minds. As adults with life experience, we can fill in some of the gaps to construct a more complete image, but by seeing Peru through Ximena's eyes, we avoid over-intellectualizing the issues; we experience at the gut level the anxieties and resentments that permeated Peruvian society during the forties, when Ximena's story unfolds.

Ximena is neither cute nor cloying. She is simply a chronically ill little girl whose hours in bed provide her with time to look at picture books, to think, and to dream. Her imagination stimulated by fairy tales, Greek myths, and ancient Indian legends, Ximena uses fantasy to deal with the chaos and brutal realities of everyday existence. In the last chapter, the mature Ximena interrogates the child Ximena and writes down her experiences, forcing her to reexamine her actions and her motives. The ending defines the novel as a kind of memoir in which the author looks back on her own childhood and attempts to re-create the moral confusion she felt growing up in a rapidly changing Peru.

The process includes an exploration of Ximena's growing awareness of sexuality. In one episode Ximena, having just seen the film Wuthering Heights, begins to idealize the strong, handsome Heathcliff. As her mother reads her fragments of the novel, Ximena replays and embellishes scenes from the movie in her mind. At about the same time, her father begins to tell her Greek myths, some of which are quite suggestive.

Soon she begins to confuse Heathcliff with Samuel Robertson, a handsome gringo who lost his job after taking up with an Indian woman. Robertson and his common-law wife have two...