Week 10 - Rough

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In my story, the protagonist’s grandfather is loosely based on the historical character of former Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, some of this research will be devoted to his life. His figure in the story is presented in the form of vague memories, but the Mexico in which the story is situated, ten years after the end of the revolution and his exile to France, was also marked by the efforts of the current government to reconstruct the country and embrace Mexico’s cultural roots.

The following notes have important elements of the story I’m working on as well as some research that helped me to situate it in a more historical context and borrow details that would add a more solid foundation to it.

Nina, ( working name for the protagonist) one day overhears the house staff talking about taking her away from what she considers her home. After a failed attempt to hide, she ends up living at an unfamiliar town, full of strange creatures, to discover that she has lost a precious medal which is a gift from her grandfather. She resolves that before trying to get back to her home, she has to find it so her grandfather will not be mad at her and refuse to take her back. Soon, she will learn that a stranger sort of creatures, “The corrupts,” are also after her, infecting everything they come close to and that the place she calls home is occupied with a mysterious, yet familiar, character, who is obsessed with her grandfather and that commands those monsters that spread disease between the other inhabitants of the town. 

Beginning of the story:

The girl inhabits a castle that appears to be devoid of people. The castle staff is conformed by beings that have the appearance of toys. His grandfather is constantly mentioned as the always busy and isolated leader of the place, but is never actually seen by the reader.

This castle is based on the historical “Castillo de Chapultepec” (Chapultepec Castle), which served as the presidential residence up until the 1940’s in Mexico (castillodechapultepec.inah.gob.mx).

What the reader will later discover:

Later in the story, the reader will discover that the reality in which the protagonist lives is a dream and that in the real world, she has just fallen down from a large shelf when trying to reach for the medal to show it to his friend and demonstrate that she is related to a former 

decorated general and “king.” She refers to her grandfather as king of the country, rather than president.

       -This medal is the only item that the protagonist’s mother was able to keep before his father’s regime was finished and he was exiled.-

The protagonist is, in fact, dreaming and experiencing her own version of reality, fuelled by her mother’s obsessive stories about her wealthy childhood living in a castle as the daughter of the president. 

    

The different sites of the story represent deeper layers of dream. Since the protagonist is actually dying, these layers are starting to collapse and this is what is causing them to corrupt and the infected monsters to spread.

As she tried to hide from her servants, whose conversation about taking the girl away simply referred to trying to wake her up, she slips and falls down again. This time, the harsh fall causes the medal to fall off her dress and for her mind to split, causing to the antagonist to be set free from her subconscious, which accelerates the corruption.

Protagonist’s mission:

The day the protagonist and her friend, a boy who is the son of another retired general that served during the civil revolution, these children come across buried bones. These bones belong to a mother cat and her kittens. The older cat belonged to the protagonist mother, who also used to live in the castle. When the cat’s “grave” is found, the children fight over what to do with the bones as the boy wants to take them home with him. They end up discussing over who of the two is to give the orders based on their relatives’ former military ranks. The boy accuses the girl of lying about her grandfather. It is for this reason that the girl runs back home looking for the treasured medal and has the accident. When she runs away in search for her grandfather's decoration, the boy takes the larger skull, covers the hole in the garden with the rest of bones and runs away to his own house. 

After the girl arrives to this new town, believing that the servants had brought her here in her sleep, she starts asking about the whereabouts of her medal to the locals, finding nothing but the constant suggestion to go to the woods and ask a family of oracles who are good at “finding lost things.” On her way to their place, she meets a large creature who has a cat skull as her head. This is the mother cat, whose secret intention is helping the girl wake up so she can retrieve her skull in the real world and reunite her with her kittens (kitten’s bones). This creature does inform the girl that she is looking for them. When she encounters the family of oracles, she finds that her mother has smaller creatures, named “Whisperers” by the oracle’s daughters. When the protagonist tells them about these, the oracle says that she found them alone and that she can’t retrieve them now because it is too dangerous outside, but that the girl should inform the cat that her kittens are safe under their protection.

Since the oracle promises that she will only know about her medal once she goes back to tell the mother cat about her kittens, she leaves to find corrupted creatures in the forest and in the town. After finding out about this attack, she runs back and comes across her castle, where she’ll meet the antagonist and find out that she has the medal. 

In the end, when the protagonist finally wakes up, she demands her friend for the skull. The boy, who does not understand who she can possibly know that he took it, gives it back so it can be buried with the rest of the bones.

Mother

The protagonist’s mother is the natural daughter of the former president of the country. She was brought into the castle and adopted by the president’s wife shortly after she was born. When her father was exiled, she was not able to go because she was married to a very important general who served the regime. Her husband was wounded during the fight that ended up in the president's arrest and died a couple of days after the now former president left the country. As the revolutionaries took on the country and land and economic privileges were taken from the elites and the wealthy foreigners, the mother fled the capital, with her newly born child (the protagonist), to a rural state where the high classes and the church where able to keep their goods. Here she could keep a low profile while the country went through social and political transition. 

Grandfather:

His presence in the story is only through old photos. In the protagonist’s dream, he is always supposed to be busy or away in his studio, which is forbidden to her granddaughter. In the real world the protagonist only knows about him through her mother’s stories. She has developed a sense of love towards this figure and  wishes she had a father like him as well.

For the mother, his memory represents her past lifestyle of privilege and status. 

The antagonist wants her grandfather to be only for herself, which won’t happen if the protagonist wakes up. The antagonist is the part of the protagonist that longs for attention from her mother, who is too busy caught up in her past, and wishes to have some sort paternal figure like the one her mother only talks about. For this reason, the appearance of the antagonist resembles that of her mother when she was a child, which she knows through pictures. 

When both the protagonist and the antagonist meet and enter the studio, while the antagonist assures to be in the presence of her grandfather and presumably talks to him, the protagonist sees no one in the room beside themselves, which leads her to discover that something in the antagonist is very twisted. 

Medal:

For the protagonist, the medal is the only tangible object she can have that belonged to her grandfather, which she is negated because the mother is always protective of this object.

The antagonist gets the medal after the protagonist loses it when attempting to hide from the servants. The protagonist desire to have the medal to herself is passed on to the antagonist, who is a corrupted reflection of herself 

In the end, the medal is the protagonist’s connection to the real world and a way to wake up as her mother regrets putting it high up, causing the first accident, and places it in the protagonist’s hand.

Such medal is based on the Gran Cruz de la Orden Española Carlos III (Great Cross of the Order of Charles III), one of the many medals he received, both national and internationally, which Diaz received in 1886 (Simmons 43).