This most recent novel by Juan Gabriel Vasquez focuses on the life of Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera. The frame story is Sergio’s trip to Barcelona, where a retrospective festival of his films is taking place. Just before the festival starts, Sergio gets the news that his father, Fausto, has died. Fausto’s death prompts much reflection on his upbringing, and the bulk of the novel takes us back to his extraordinary youth in Mao’s China and in the EPL guerrilla movement in Colombia. We know this is a writer deeply concerned with the history of Colombia, and the account of life in the guerrilla movement is absolutely compelling, but I was also struck by the theme of fathers and sons here, a theme we’ve met in his previous novel, The Informers. Not only do we see the relationship between Sergio and his father Fausto, but also Sergio’s relationship with his own teenage son, Raúl, who accompanies him to the film festival.
The personal retrospective starts with Fausto. His Spanish Republican family is forced into exile at the end of the Civil War and, after living a while in The Dominican Republic and Venezuela, ends up in Colombia. He becomes an actor, working first on radio, and then television, always maintaining his left wing sympathies through the violence and bloodshed of the late 40s. His politics make life increasingly untenable under the dictatorship of Pinilla, especially with McCarthyism, the Korean war, and the Cuban revolution making Communism seem the biggest threat ever, and Fausto takes up the offer to move his family to Peking for a job teaching Spanish.
Now, up to this point I found the novel a little pedestrian. There was a bit too much straining to fit the Cabrera family’s experiences to seminal historical events to my taste, and I just wasn’t emotionally engaged. This changed completely the moment the family embark on their extraordinary plane journey to Peking in 1968, involving three days confined to a hotel room in Moscow, and stopovers in Omsk and Irkutsk due to technical faults, where they sleep in a freezing shed. Once in Peking, the family are housed in the Hotel de la Amistad, a luxury hotel where foreign workers are accommodated with their families. With its Olympic swimming pool, restaurants and boutiques it represents a sort of parallel universe to the miserable material conditions endured by the Chinese people outside. While Fausto and his wife Luz teach Spanish in the Peking Languages Institute, Sergio and his sister Marianella attend regular school outside the hotel with other Chinese students. From the age of 15, this involves military training for Sergio, including the use of firearms, a bayonet and target practice.
While in Peking, Fausto and Luz hone their Maoist revolutionary credentials. They decide to return to Colombia to take part in the armed struggle there, somewhat alarmingly leaving Sergio and Marianella, aged 16 and 14, behind in Peking. Alarmingly, because this is the eve of the Cultural Revolution, a movement led by school students to propagate the words of Chairman Mao, involving public haranguing and humiliation of authority figures seen as in any way undermining his ideas. There’s a distressing scene where the art and design teacher at Sergio’s school is first criticised, then physically assaulted by his students for saying that the design of an American plane is superior to that of the Soviet plane. School students become members of the Red Guard and sack museums, temples and libraries, seeking to destroy any cultural objects associated with pre-revolutionary values. The schools close down, Sergio and Marianella spend weeks at home, before going off to work in the fields and factories. When Sergio himself becomes a Red Guard, his experience is contrasted with that of a quite different set of teenagers—the children of the diplomatic corps, protected from external political upheavals as they’re whisked from swimming pool to a showing of A Hard Day’s Night, whatever that’s about—Sergio has never heard of The Beatles or their music.
Eventually, Sergio and Marianella are summoned back to Colombia, to Medellín, where Fausto and Luz are both working for the Maoist revolutionary movement, while Fausto is also putting on political theatre. There are tensions between Sergio and his father, who’s quick to criticise his son, and it’s only a matter of time before the two youngsters get The Call. My heart sank when they’re asked to turn up at the bus stop with a pair of those ominous rubber boots. From my reading of other fiction from Colombia ( The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico, This Wound full of Fish by Lorena Salazar Masso), this can only mean one thing: they’re going to join the guerrillas.
There follows a fascinating, if often harrowing, account of their years with the EPL, the Popular Liberation Army, in the deepest and most remote rural areas in the country. They endure considerable physical hardship, walking for days on end in sweltering temperatures with little to eat. What they do eat is what they can hunt—including otters and tapirs—and beg from the poor rural communities they’re working with. Insect bites are a constant problem as well as the threat of serious illnesses such as paludism, and combat injuries, which they’ve barely got the wherewithal to treat. There’s a dreadful emotional toll for Sergio and Marianella too. They’re despised and bullied by their leader Fernando for their educated, bourgeois backgrounds and Marianella is sexually harassed by him, as a result of which she runs away, though we learn that leaving the guerrillas is not so easy, but rather a lifetime’s work.
Some of the best writing is in this long and detailed section. We have fabulous descriptions of the lush and impenetrable jungle, a lucid narrative of the movements and activities of the guerrillas on the ground, but also a moving and intimate account of Sergio’s inner feelings. He has with him the twelve pages of instructions his father gave him before leaving China, his orders on how to behave as a good revolutionary. He consults this regularly, feels constantly guilty that he’s not living up to these high standards, even more so when, as time goes on, he starts wishing he wasn’t there at all.
It’s a relief at times that the intense sections set in China and the jungle are interleaved by occasional passages back in Barcelona at the film festival. We see Sergio mulling over more recent events in his life, his memories triggered by the films, recollecting the places they were first shown, for example the showing of Todos se van in Havana in 2014 when the Colombian Peace Accords were being negotiated and he realises some former guerrillas are in the audience. Then there’s the memories of Bogotá in autumn 2016, when he’s aware of the reservations ordinary Colombians have about the Peace Accords, influenced by the church, by Facebook and Twitter, even then. And these memories mixed with time out spent with his son Raúl, visiting Barcelona book stores and La Sagrada Familia together, talking to him, and eventually showing him family photographs too.
You see, as Sergio tells us, the family never really talked to each other much once they returned from China: they were each busy with their own activities. So it’s as if he’s trying to do something different now with his own son. And though he insists to Raúl that he loved Fausto, who taught him so much about acting, I can’t help feeling it’s significant that neither he nor Marianella go to Fausto’s funeral. There was that thought that would come to Sergio at night in the jungle, and for years after: at what point do parents decide their children would be better off brought up by the revolutionaries than at home with them? So for me, as much as the novel deals with a broad sweep of history—revolutionary movements in China and Colombia—it also digs deep into the personal. It’s a very personal reckoning between Sergio and his father, a reckoning for that abandonment.
peakreads 