He left his adobe home in Albuquerque made by himself for a weekend. He has a wife, two daughters and a granddaughter that when she does not hear stories read, listens the inventions by his grandfather.
Rudolfo Anaya says that sometimes the stories to her granddaughter likes it so much that with his 60 years, he gets into his study, where close to the Holy Child of Atocha writes it in his computer.
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As Vivaldi, he is doing four works that bear the names of “The Four Seasons”.
Spring was the novel “Alburquerque”; Summer, “Zia”; Autumn, “Rio Grande” and Winter is waiting to be baptized before his head gets completely snowy.
What I do know is that the detective Sony Vaca, who has walked for several novels, finally discover what is good and bad, what is it? -he says.
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While in Los Angeles, he wants readers to notice his latest novel of crimes and detectives “Rio Grande”, the incandecencia of his first major work keeps stealing profile to the others. People keep asking him if the healer Ultima was himself, “Tony”, the student of Ultima.
The last reader to ask for his first novel is a girl of about 13 years in the auditorium of the Lakewood High School.
She makes the big question that college students spend months to write write their thesis: how wrote “Bless Me Ultima”, what inspired you?
The writer replied with a laugh and a few kind words from a happy grandfather.
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Rudolfo sufferd an accident that left him unable to move for a summer which pushed him to want to be a writer. With imagination we can all move.
The tragedy of the youth is said in his most beloved novel “La Tortuga”.
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Sipping a Capuccino coffee in the little warehouse of the library “Latino Culture” in Long Beach, he says he does not need tragedies for inspiration, and, as Walt Whitman, leaves his home every day to see what herbs can be collected, what people and places. This is a guy who lives a simple life: washing dishes, fixing the car, riding his horse “Estela”, picking up applesand, before going to college, where he has been teaching for 19 years, he asks his wife if she needs something from the market.
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When he was young she used to write four hours a day, now two, at most. But, yes, if he has less time, he still meditates and reads a lot. It has come to appreciate as the value of their characters, their friendships, “because they are very jealous and when you do not attend them, they go with another writer,” he says.
When he began writing his mystery novel, Sony Vaca appeared and said “Why do not my story?”.
“I told him I could not write detective novels, and he said, ‘is very simple: you just kill someone in the first chapter and the rest (I will say it to you) is easy.'”
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The unveiling of the novel:
Knowing in a society where individuals are divided by brand, color, national origin, earthly laws and by the amount of things that accumulate, “The Writer” says his novel “Jalamanta” (pulls the blanket) is where best expresses his thought of life: Jalamanta is a wise old woman who uncovers what really is the human being, an individual who cry, laugh, think and write his own novel.
* Text written on November 18, 1996. “Bless Me Ultima” is now a film released in February 2013. -Jose Fuentes-Salinas, tallerjfs@gmail.com