Category: Behind the Stories: Inspirations and Encounters

Though far from new, this book is timely. It takes place when kids were still sent to institutions, and the polio vaccine was not yet available. Discussions are currently occurring about the possible institutionalization of disabled children again, after years of integrating them in schools and giving them full opportunities.

The characters in the book are children with various disabilities ranging from being kept alive with iron lungs to treatable conditions caused by serious accidents. They’re housed in the Carrie Tingley Hospital for Crippled Children. It’s not named, but it’s obvious to someone who knows southern New Mexico. The Tortuga of the title is both a boy in a body cast and the turtle formation on Turtleback Mountain in Truth or Consequences. The town was still named Hot Springs back then, and the building, which has now expanded and become the New Mexico State Veterans’ Home, was smaller and more isolated. Anaya spent time there is in his childhood after fracturing vertebrae in a diving accident when swimming in an irrigation ditch.

The book is not quite autobiographical, but he used his experience to create an intense and important story. The narrator is a sixteen-year-old boy with a severe injury like Anaya’s, gradually recovering while his entire spinal column, even his neck, is encased in a cast—thus he’s the turtle, and he chooses Tortuga as his nickname. He shares a ward with other boys who have significant injuries and a boy with progressing ichthyosis. The girls are on another ward. The polio victims in iron lungs are referred to by these more able-bodied boys as the vegetables. One older boy among them is left alone to read, the only thing he is capable of doing, but he becomes a philosopher.

As in many of Anaya’s books, the male characters are complex and fully developed while most of the female characters are not. The nurse’s aide, Ismelda, is essentially the same healing feminine archetype seen in his other books. Ultima is the elder version, Rita in the Sonny Baca novels the womanly version, and Ismelda the girl of eighteen. She is loving, giving, nurturing, beautiful, understanding, and wise, demanding nothing.

Tortuga falls in love with her, and they develop a relationship modern standards would consider inappropriate, as Ismelda gives him baths and appreciates his arousal at her touch when he cannot yet move more than his fingers and toes.

The physical therapist KC seems to relish her close contact with the boys as she manipulates their limbs, and being teenaged boys, they don’t object, but to a modern reader, KC seems to cross a line. She also shows appreciation of Tortuga’s arousal. I had a sense of the staff unthinkingly reacting this way without considering the impact of the boys’ disabilities and their isolation from normal female companionship. The wildness of a boys-and-girls field trip to the movies (Frankenstein, a great choice for the plot) only emphasizes how deprived of a normal life the kids are.

They get an education. They have a swimming pool, they have the hot spring waters in a special bath, and they have an excellent surgeon who genuinely cares. But they don’t have a full life. Jerry, a Navajo boy, personifies the urgent need for family and culture and connection.

As always, Anaya’s language is poetic and vivid, sweeping dreams into reality. The Turtle on the mountain is made into a myth that I’ve never heard in this town. I think it’s Anaya’s invention, but it works for the story—except for the hot spring water being the stone turtle peeing down through the mountain. Yuck. But teenaged boys—hey, they like this. And this book is fully in the mind and heart of a boy, a boy of his time.

Anaya also take a novelist’s liberty with our seasons for poetic purposes. In his Sonny Baca series, the seasons play significant symbolic roles. In Tortuga, the author gives southern New Mexico a cold, snowy winter with gray clouds and icy streets. He describes summer as a time of hot dry wind, and makes spring green and refreshing. Our mild, sunny winters, dry springs with high winds and dust storms, and summers of thunderstorms greening the mountain don’t fit the story’s needs.

A tragic twist near the end truly surprised me.  I was expecting something more predictable to go wrong. It doesn’t. The unexpected turn is perfectly prepared, however, and all the stronger for not being what I thought would happen.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to explore Anaya’s work in depth and to examine an aspect of twentieth century history. It’s not a light read, and yet it has luminous moments.

*****

The picture of Turtleback Mountain is by Donna Catterick, whose work is seen on the covers of many of my books. I took the pictures of the original building at the New Mexico State Veterans’ Home, the portion that was once the Carrie Tingley Hospital.  I wonder how small those trees were when Anaya was a patient.