This lively, multilayered family saga about three generations of women opens with the vivid image of three of the four las Ferreira women of the book lugging a purple second-hand Facebook Marketplace sofa along the footpath to their cramped flat in Fairfield, West Sydney.
There’s single mum Grachu, a “stumpy” 50-year-old in heavy steel-capped boots; her precocious 14-year-old daughter Diana, with “a knife for a tongue” and her “blend of Westie slang and Spanglish”, who humorously refers to her mother as “Bro”; and 12-year-old Laura, the brainy bookworm in her Kmart trackies.
Grachu, “a snapped twig under pressure”, has just quit her cleaning job after discovering she’s been ripped off by “her ex-piece-of-caca boss”. Now, she can’t afford to pay the rent, let alone save for Diana’s impending quinceañera/coming-of-age celebrations.
It’s a not-uncommon working-class migrant story: an unskilled, uneducated, exploited woman with poor English ekes out a precarious living fraught with stress and uncertainty. Figueroa Barroso movingly portrays the experience of trying to survive in a First World country after starting from scratch, risking loss of culture “by assimilating into a new one and eventually they will become gringos, too”.
The novel is split into three parts, each of which reflects the distinct points of view of three women: Grachu, her eldest daughter Rita, and her elderly aunt, Chula.
In the first, Grachu has been estranged for three agonising months from Rita, who has come out as bisexual and moved in with her vegan girlfriend. Grachu finds work cleaning for a finicky client, “El Designer-Artist”, whose lifestyle highlights her hardscrabble life. Outside her job, the tortuous marriage problems of Grachu’s best friend, Pancha, exacerbate her stress.
The chapters about Chula transition the story from present-day West Sydney, home to Grachu and Rita, back to Uruguay and the 1973 civic-military coup. Figueroa Barroso deftly evokes the oppressive atmosphere of life under a dictatorship – the terror and uncertainty, the ever-present dread.
Chula’s beloved sister Tata, a communist and union representative, fell victim to “Los milicos with batons for tongues, bullets for hearts and knuckles for brains”. In Tata’s absence, Chula fulfilled the role of mother to her baby niece until Grachu migrated to Sydney at 25 with her fiancé. Chula sacrificed the chance to have a future with her lover, who likewise migrated to Australia. Instead, she remained in Montevideo, unwilling to give up hope that her sister might one day miraculously reappear. She suffers the indignities of working as housekeeper for “Fur Woman”, her unreasonable and arrogant female boss.
In the third and final part of the novel, Rita is reunited with her mother on the flight to Uruguay to attend a ceremony marking the recent discovery of the bones of Grachu’s murdered mother. Grachu had always been told her mother died in childbirth, so she’s shocked to learn the truth from Chula – Tata had been forcibly “disappeared” by the state.
The trip gives Rita the chance to meet her great-aunt and connect with her culture and ancestral roots. Her visit to Montevideo is threaded with flashbacks to troubling events at her TV channel where she’s the only Latina staffer. She’s still fuming over the channel’s decision to hire a person of Spanish heritage – in Rita’s view, a representative of “Latin America’s main coloniser” – as cultural adviser on a TV series featuring Chilean characters. What will she lose if she calls it out?
Hailstones Fell Without Rain is the first novel by this Uruguayan-Australian author. Spanish and Spanglish are skilfully woven into the text, enhancing and authenticating the storytelling. The politics of sexuality, identity, classism, colonisation and race smoulder throughout the text in this spirited debut.
