Fodder for Fiction

Novelists can be somewhat heartless when it comes to appropriating real people and their experiences in order to recreate them as fictional characters and incidents. In this photograph, taken in the summer of 2010, my wife and I went to visit Maria Auxiliadora Pavon, in the town of La Curva, who played a vital role in the creation of Meet Me under the Ceiba. The novel is based on the real life murder of Aura Rosa Pavon, Maria Auxiliadora’s sister.

Every time I go to Nicaragua I stop by Maria Auxiliadora’s house to pay my respects and deliver a few gifts. Unfortunately, this time she was at work. I did, though, manage to visit briefly with her two daughters, who are also, of course, Aura Rosa’s nieces.

On the magical day, back in 2002, in which Maria Auxiliadora told me her sister’s life story, which provided the foundation for the novel, her two daughters were adolescents who wandered in and out of the house while I sat in the living room, absorbed by the tale and furiously taking notes. Because of this, in the fictional universe that developed afterwards, they became characters: Gema and Nubia.

Oddly, since I have yet to discuss the novel with anyone in the family, they’ve yet to discover their existence as literary characters. What’s more, they are more real to me as the personages I created for the book, than as the persons they really are.

This is a peril, I guess, of coming in contact with a writer.