The Cemetery of Untold Stories, by Julia Alvarez

Alma Cruz is the central character in Julia Alvarez’s most recent novel, Cemetery of Untold Stories. A well-known, prolific writer, Alma goes by the pseudonym Scheherazade because of her mother Mami’s uneasiness about being exposed in her daughter’s works of fiction. In addition to writing, Alma has been teaching at a college in Vermont. Heading into her twilight years, she’s decided to retire and move back to her homeland, the Dominican Republic.

Many readers understand that Mami’s fear of exposure is justified since author Julia Alvarez weaves much of her own life experiences into her fictional stories and characters. Like main character Alma, Alvarez is Dominican-American, taught at a college in Vermont, and is in her twilight years. Also, like Alma, Alvarez is one of four sisters.

This quartet of sisters exists in two of Alvarez’s earlier novels, too: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of Butterflies. Read our other NWW post about Alvarez, her life and works: Julia Alvarez, Minerva Mirabel and the Embeddedness of Women’s Stories

Alvarez embedding so much of herself into the central character in this novel is an ingenious way to explore her current existence, try a radical experience on for size, and see more clearly where she may want to go next.

At arm’s length, Alvarez can toy with what it means to move closer to the end of one’s life as a writer, an artist, a creator. Through this character similar to herself, she can ask and attempt to answer important questions, such as what writers might do with unfinished work, ideas left adrift, secrets and stories untold.

Character Alma has boxes and boxes of research, clippings, notes, and drafts. Although she’s written and published a lot, these are big, important stories she has yet to assemble. She devises a plan that is both creative and bizarre, although a writer friend of Alma’s deserves some credit. This friend, also famous and accomplished, never writes the biggest story she has in her, and after developing dementia, is committed to a facility. Alma attributes some of her friend’s decline to never writing this compelling story, and she wants to avoid this fate. She believes she must do something with her untold stories.

After her parents pass, Alma and her three sisters are left with several plots of land in the Dominican Republic. Alma hatches a plan and then chooses the plot of land that best suits this scheme: a cemetery for her untold stories. If you’re not going to write them, at least give them a proper burial.

Alma muses,

“To close a story, the old people back home would utter a chant. Colorin colorado, este cuento se ha acabado. This tale is done. Release the duende to the wind. But how to exorcise a story that had never been told?”(23).

As the novel unfolds, possible answers to this question surface. Who would think a cemetery is where untold stories come to life?

Cemetery of Strong Women

Writer Alvarez presents us with three strong and intriguing women who are the backbone of this unusual project. One, of course, is Alma, who has inherited the plot of land and concocted the plan, along with “her decision to withdraw from public life, her return to her native land”(228).

She then recalls and recruits Brava, a sculptor she met at a book signing years ago. Alma takes a risk by sharing her plans with Brava, but the collaboration is solid from the start.

Alma discloses to Brava that “she needed a place to bury her unfinished work, a space honoring all those characters who had never had the chance to tell their stories. She wanted to bring them home to their mother tongue and land. What do you think? she concluded, finally looking at Brava. She had avoided glancing in her direction so as not to be deterred by an eye roll or a condescending smile,” and Brava replies, “For your characters, it will be un cementerio, for mine, a gallery garden”(29).

Once the deal with Brava is sealed, Alma seeks a third person, a keeper of sorts:

“Better than a guard dog, a guardian angel. Someone to oversee this final resting place for her unfinished stories…Alma spots the woman who was the first visitor who had helped them burn the manuscripts. She has returned often, on occasion helping out, refusing propinas. Quiet though she is, it turns out she is packed with stories”(69).

Reticent Filomena is chock full of her own secrets and buried stories, and listening to others share theirs, although at times disturbing, is easier and safer than telling her own.

Alma and Brava discuss:

“Maybe Filomena’s a better listener. She won’t make use of her story the way we artists do. There’s a kind of violence in art. Alma thinks of Mami, her fury at being misrepresented. But it’s fiction didn’t work for her…

“Violence? Brava couldn’t disagree more. I call it surrender, I call it love.

“Hard to argue with that, Alma thinks, but still, she does. Their back-and-forth banter on matters great and small is how their friendship makes its own kind of love”(123).

Alma, Brava, and Filomena bond around their devotion to this place and one another. With her job to sit in the cemetery and listen, Filomena bears witness to Alma’s untold stories as they tell themselves, ultimately expanding Filomena’s world and helping her discover herself and her capacities.

“Listening to all these stories has opened so many windows in Filomena’s life…each one offering a different view of the world. Even the disturbing ones that frighten and confuse her – maybe someday she will understand them, too, and their anguished wailing will turn to birdsong. So much sadness, so much wonder, so much joy. Her heart is messy with feelings, her mind with possibilities, twists and turns. It was simpler before. And yet, she would not go back. Now there is room in her heart for everyone, or most everyone”(224).

Readers are led to understand the ‘anguished wailing’ to be Haitians, thousands senselessly and brutally massacred by Dominican dictator Trujillo and his regime in 1937.

Alma’s Untold Tales

The two biggest stories Alma never finished writing are the ones about her father, Papi, and the one about dictator Rafael Trujillo’s second wife, Bienvenida. She wanted to tell her father’s story, one of pain, escapism, and exile. And Bienvenida’s, married to a monster, then cast off, and basically forgotten.

“Papi, Bienvenida – Alma had even tried to write a novel combining their stories. BIENVENIDA + PAPI, that box was labeled. These two most recent failures especially haunted Alma. Bienvenida had been erased from history; Papi had sealed himself off in Alfa Calenda – these were precisely the characters Alma felt drawn to. The silenced ones, their tongues cut off; wives and daughters taking dictation from their husbands or fathers, improving and revising, in fact, cowriting the epics, the sonnets, the ballads, with never a credit to their names. Generations of Anons”(23).

Such an important yet mammoth message intertwined with these people and their stories seems to have made them overwhelming for Alma to complete. Now with the manuscripts burned and buried in the cemetery, Filomena listens as the spirit of Alma’s father, Papi, shares his story of love, heartbreak, and resistance against dictator Rafael Trujillo, and this same dictator’s second wife, Bienvenida, relays her painful story, too.

Filomena doesn’t tell Alma about the stories she’s privy to on the job. She doesn’t want to upset Alma, nor does she want to betray Papi and Bienvenida. But hearing these stories that seem to evade erasure is transformational for Filomena, who eventually is able to tell her nephew, Pepito, more of her own story, along with his mother’s.

“You guys sure had a rough life, Pepito says, shaking his head. And now this. His mother in prison, her mind racked by what she has done.

“A rough life, that is true. But then, who doesn’t? if Filomena is to believe the stories she has been hearing in the cemetery. Seems like everyone who lives has endured some sadness, sometimes buried so deep inside them, even they don’t know it’s there”(223).

Filomena Flourishes

Through her work at Alma’s cemetery, Filomena is reborn. Resilient from the start, Filomena is finally able to care some for herself, since being abandoned by her mother when she was young, and forced into domestic servitude after that. Ultimately, Filomena is reunited with the family she had lost for years, her sister Perla and nephew Pepito.

Alma isn’t fully aware of this, that her cemetery has delivered such happiness and a second chance at life for Filomena. But isn’t it true that writers and artists never really know what the outcome and long-range impact of their creations will be? Once the imagination releases them, they take on a life of their own.

Alma teaches Filomena to read, and Pepito teaches his mother to read. Right here, new worlds are opened to these sisters who never had a fair shake.

Pepito, wondering about Alma, known as the writer Scheherazade he has always admired, asks:

“What happens when a writer leaves the gated community of her established craft and instead goes feral?”(212).

Author Alvarez provides an answer: Things flourish.

Even Alma herself flourishes, finding her way back home into her body, a shift from the heady world of language that can so consume a writer. Pepito escorts a barefoot Alma through her cemetery at night, offering to light the way:

“She refuses. My feet know the way by heart. She laughed, repeating the words with each step, feet, heart, feet, heart, as if she were a child learning the names of her body parts.

“They walked up and down the makeshift rows in silence. It took so long to get here, she said finally. A whole life”(229).

Alma and Her Sisters

Alma’s three sisters come from the States to the Dominican Republic to settle some loose ends with the parents’ will. Alma isn’t looking too forward to this reunion. It’s not that the sisters don’t get along and care for one another, but strong personalities can make for exhausting exchanges, especially when together for days. But this time, perhaps because they have moved into their twilight years, the sisters abandon their egos and connect at the heart, as captured in this scene at the airport as the three visitors await their flight back to the States:

“The last days with her sisters are tinged with tenderness…Inside the airport terminal, they linger, blocking the entrance to immigration. Senoras, would you kindly step aside, the young guardia says, his order in the form of a polite request. They are his elders by almost half a century.

“We’re sisters, Piedad explains, as if that gives them the right.

“In this country, it actually does. The guardia gestures to the bench beside his post where they can take their time. That’s another thing Alma loves here, familia as well as age are valid excuses, as are, on the negative side, crimes of passion. If their flight were on Domenicana Airlines, air traffic control would probably delay the departure until the sisters are done with their goodbyes.

“But they’re on the American Airlines flight to Miami, which is boarding now, no ifs, ands, or buts. Time to go. The sisters rock in each other’s arms…Everybody loves everybody more. No need to bring out the measuring cup”(203).

Although Alma refuses Pepito’s offer to light the way, readers appreciate Julia Alvarez shedding some light on the possibilities that accompany gracefully growing older.

Alvarez has certainly not let up on her knack for storytelling, weaving real life in and out of her fiction and sprinkling it with a whole lot of wisdom.

Julia Alvarez is a Nasty Woman Writer.

© Maria Dintino 2026

Works Cited

Alvarez, Julia. The Cemetery of Untold Stories. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2024.