The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada translated by Chris Andrews

I enjoyed Selva Almada’s non-fiction book Dead Girls a while back, so decided to spend some time this Women in Translation Month with her novel The Wind That Lays Waste. Dead Girls so effectively describes the vastness of Argentina, its austere landscape and isolated communities, cut off from provincial capitals, very far from Buenos Aires. The Wind That Lays Waste is set over one day in a similarly desolate landscape, on a highway somewhere in Entre Ríos Province. The scenario is that Reverend Pearson and his daughter Leni have broken down, and are towed by a helpful truck driver to the nearest garage. This is a ramshackle wooden house and yard from which the Gringo Brauer runs his repair business, helped by his teenage assistant Tapioca. Brauer agrees to take a look at the car, but warns straightaway it could take a while. So the Reverend and Leni settle down to wait.

While they’re sitting indoors to avoid the scorching sun, we gradually find out more about these characters, through conversation and recollections, as the narrative switches between them. We learn that Tapioca was left with Brauer as an eight year old when his mother was passing through—there’s a chance he may in fact be his son, as his mother reminds Brauer of a one-night stand they had back in the day. Leni has also grown up without her mother. She remembers in snatches that awful morning ten years before when her father set her mother’s suit case outside the car, and she watched from the rear window her mother crying and pleading on the dusty road, as their car sped off. When Tapioca wants to be alone, he slips off to the pile of scrap metal towering up next to the house. This was a habit he started when he first arrived and missed his mother. On this day Leni comes to join him in the broken down chassis, and the precarity of both these young peoples’ lives, both washed up and living off grid, is somehow mirrored in the wrecked cars that surround them.

Leni is living off grid in the sense that her life is spent travelling round with her father, Reverend Pearson, shining his shoes, and smartening him up for his preacher performances. And they are performances, the Word of God declaimed in impassioned rhetoric—we see one or two examples in the book—which prove utterly compelling for his audience. We learn that the reverend discovered this gift after being baptised and converted by The Preacher—a gift which was most welcome to his calculating mother and his church, as he persuaded the congregation to give generously, which meant she had a roof over her head, and their coffers were filling up. However, we become a little uneasy early on about who exactly his followers are when we learn that Pearson and Leni were on their way to stay with Pastor Zack, with his big, square hands, strong as a pair of power shovels. They were raising the beams of a church now, but those hands had once beaten women. Our unease only grows when we learn that Pearson went behind the church’s back to train his own men, they were all men with a past, and each one had his own weakness….they had all been stray sheep, in the grip of sin.

Pearson asks Tapioca early on whether he goes to church, whether he’s been baptised. Brauer will have none of this and tells Pearson to leave the boy alone. He’s a practical, physical kind of guy, who three decades earlier would put a chain over his shoulder to tow a tractor to impress his friends. He grew up serving in his parents’ bar, witnessed some rough life there, and will have no truck with any religious ideas. But, through the day, Pearson continues to talk to Tapioca about the glories of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Tapioca is moved and intrigued and somehow connects the feelings this talk gives him with the feelings and memories he has about his mother. As the tension increases between the two middle-aged men, the threatening storm breaks, and torrential rain sets in for hours, imprisoning all four characters in the tiny wooden house, with just a few board games and a lot of drink for company. We see then that though the reverend and Brauer espouse such utterly different world views, they have more in common in terms of their behaviour than you might think. And what you might think to be the conclusion of the novel is not actually the end—which comes out of nowhere and is quite devastating.

So this is a novel that critiques the operating of the Evangelical church and its ministers: its propensity for preying on the vulnerable, both in terms of the congregation, but also on those its ministers may choose as its acolytes. It’s an account of a world where masculinity is expressed in physical prowess and fighting. It’s about power in relationships, and I was especially interested in the generational relationships here: those washed up teenagers isolated from their peer groups, deprived of a normal education. But it’s also a novel about precarity. Leni and Tapioca lose their mothers in just a few moments. Even that most basic of relationships seems precarious: it can be snatched away forever, in an instant, with effects as devastating as the storm or that Wind that Lays Waste.