Max Jiménez

In his story “The Palmitero,” Max Jiménez personifies the palmetto, the fan palms that stand “with slender trunks, their feathery green tops waving like plumes,” those trees that are cut down by the palmitero to retrieve the delicious hearts of palm:

You have to hear the screams as each palm splinters to earth, as it falls on its lifelong sisters on the mountainside.  You have to see how each palmetto victim buries itself into the damp soil, perhaps seeking a grave, an honorable grave in the dark earth that has so kindly given it nourishment year after year.

It is with this image of death that Jiménez introduces Peje, the palmitero who chooses to escape to the forest and cut down the palmetto trees after his own experience with death.

Jiménez, who lived abroad in Europe and America, is the author of Unos fantoches and El jaúl, in which “The Palmitero” appears.  He was also a painter and a poet.

Photo Credit: Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Ferdinand Bauer / Public Domain
Source: Ras, Barbara, ed. Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts, 1994.

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