In Search of Lost Time

That’s admittedly not my best headline, as I’m not thinking about anything especially Proustian here. I’m just interested in Baca’s command of time in A Place to Stand. And by that I don’t mean the ways that he moves back and forth in time, but rather the way that he makes us feel it. After the initial sections of the book, which take us rapidly forward to the end of his teens, time really slows down. There are moments when the narrator will tell us his age – “I was twenty-two” (I should apologize here for getting the Kindle version, as I can neither cite pages nor find passages easily because of it) – and I found myself stopping suddenly in a state of shock: Twenty-two? Only? Each time, I’d had the sense of years passing, and would not have been surprised to find out that the narrator was turning twenty-nine or thirty-five. On the one hand, I think that Baca accomplishes this by making us aware of time that he feels he is losing (time dealing when he could be getting licensed, time losing good behavior in prison stealing months – even years – from his education). On the other hand, I think he also does this by causing us to lose our proper sense of time (not unlike his narrator’s own experiences in solitary confinement).

Most immediately, though, I think that Baca sets up an expectation about time very early, preparing the reader for a narrative that will move briskly by giving us one that starts that way. The first line of the Prologue begins “I was five years old…” and takes us quickly through some of the formative experiences of his life. The Prologue ends with the narrator in his chair, writing the memoir. In those few pages, we get a whole life. When Chapter One begins, we’re back at the beginning: “When I was a boy…” (and, in fact, we get information from before he was born). Things move more or less chronologically from here on, and by the time we start chapter two, the narrator has aged more than a decade: “at thirteen years old, I found myself behind bars….” This is how we are introduced to time in the novel, by leaps and bounds – and while it makes sense that the narrator would not continue to age at something averaging in the ballpark of a year per page, there is an urgency to move forward that seems to be established. Things do continue to move quickly until he reaches the end of his teens, and then they slow immeasurably.

And time is a problem for the narrator. A good illustration of this comes when he is arrested after quitting as a seller for Galvan (emphases mine – again, I apologize for no page numbers):

“The time in prison had only strengthened my resolve to quit the business entirely and return home as quickly as I could. While in my cell, the only reprieve from constant tedium had been thoughts of going to Albuquerque with Lonnie.”

Here, Baca crafts the two key competing forces in his narrator’s life in adjacent sentences. First, the need to move quickly, and then the inability to do the same. We see these forces acting on his adult life throughout. When he gets out of prison later, his rush to reestablish a stable life leads him back to dealing, which lands him back in prison where he loses time again. I find this conflict especially compelling because Baca has put me as the reader in the same position – expecting things to move quickly, but finding in fact that they don’t.

The other notable way that Baca’s narrator loses time in the memoir is the way that he loses sense of time. At its slowest, when the narrator is in solitary confinement for such an extensive period, time comes as unhinged in the narrative as it does for the narrator.

“My sleep and waking rhythms were all mixed up, whirling as I was through the gray zone between the cell and the village. I kept time of day and night with meals and shift changes. Whether I was awake or in an altered state or sleeping, Estancia was never far away.”

This passage illustrates the way time begins to lose itself here. It’s difficult to keep track of (so when I hear that he is only twenty-two, my shock is understandable). It’s neither black nor white, past nor present. It twists between reality and a dream state. And Baca shows it do these things.

The use of time in this book seems to me a particularly skillful case of having form imitate function. I can’t help but admire the execution.