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| La calavera El Naranjo, Colombia, 2006 Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas |
Scott Esposito on The Armies
Enmeshed in War: Evelio Rosero's The Armies
Colombia is almost certainly among the most difficult places on Earth for an outsider to understand. For forty years, the country has been embroiled in a civil war that pits various arrays of paramilitary groups and well-armed drug cartels against one another, with the government caught somewhere in between. In some parts of the country, warfare has been constant for decades — so long that it is simply sewn into the flesh of everyday life. That such a state of affairs deforms life from what most of us would consider normal is obvious and tragic; what is less remarked upon is the difficulty of empathizing with those affected by the war, the great challenge to someone who has not experienced this life in comprehending what the everyday is like for the those enmeshed in it.
Great art has always played a facilitating role in exactly this way. Even in this era of photographic and cinematic plenty, true art is has a near monopoly on conveying authentic subjective realities that can rarely be related otherwise. This is the tall order that the Colombian novelist Evelio Rosero has set for himself in his 2007 novel, The Armies. Winner of The Independent’s Foreign Fiction award in 2009 and widely lauded in the British press, the book arrives on U.S. shores highly recommended. Reading it, one hopes for a document that will articulate the fabric of everyday life in this extreme environment; indeed, if the interviews Rosero gave after receiving the Foreign Fiction award are at all accurate, this was the author’s foremost aim in writing The Armies.
Unfortunately, The Armies is only a partially successful novel — or rather, a successful enough experiment to make the overall failure more acutely felt. Occasionally, the book strongly evokes certain aspects of the struggles that continue to take place in the Colombian mountains and jungles. More often than not, though, its failures only highlight the difficulties inherent in writing about this war as well as those qualities that separate good fiction from average.
The book starts promisingly with a vision far removed from war: the septuagenarian Ismael is standing in a ladder and peering above his wall, eying the exposed nipples of his young Brazilian neighbor as she sits ravishing and naked with her guitar-strumming husband. Barely have we begun to assimilate this strange scene than we find ourselves within the Brazilians’ kitchen, where the 12-year-old maid Gracielita stands washing dishes as Eusebito, their son, peeps at her and is “fascinated and tormented by [her] tender white panties, slipping up through generous check.” This scene of mutual ogling could be taken in any number of directions—significantly, though, Rosero ends the scene with the information that Gracielita only became a maid after being orphaned “when our town was last attacked by whichever army it was.”
In the following pages, Rosero is deft in elaborating the nuances of the lecherous relationship between Ismael and his married neighbor, Geraldina. One feels that the beautiful Geraldina is both awed by her beauty and greatly proud of it—she doesn’t know what to do with Ismael’s improper attentions, although she definitely knows that she likes the way they make her feel.
Rosero then turns our attention to the relationship between Ismael and his wife, which, befitting a couple with decades of stagnant marriage behind them, isn’t nearly as rich. Though Otilia chides her husband for his lechery, her resignation is clear, especially when she disinterestedly suggests that he take his problem to Father Albornoz. Ismael sets out on his journey, yet this domestic drama is soon to be interrupted by the arrival of the armies as they battle over the village.
In these early pages Rosero is economical and subtle in presenting an interesting web of relationships. The novel is narrated in a detached first-person by Ismael, and his interest in the Brazilian Geraldina is vaguely reminiscent of Humbert Humbert. Ismael’s desires mix provocatively with Eusebito’s fetishistic interest in the maid Gracielita; his leer is boyishly innocent, yet its implications for the social relationships that the long Colombian war has insinuated into these communities is sinister.
At any time of the day the children would forget the world and play in the garden burning with light. I saw them. I heard them. . . .
Sooner or later the shout would come from the terrace: it was Geraldina, more naked than ever, sinuous under the sun, her voice also a flame, sharp yet melodious.
She called: “Gracielita, time to sweep the hallway.”
They left their game, and a slight sad annoyance returned them to the world. She went running at once back to the broom, across the garden, the white apron fluttering against her belly like a flag, hugging her young body, sculpting the pubis, but he followed her and soon enough took up again, involuntarily, not understanding, the other essential game, the paroxysm that made him identical to me, despite his youth, the panic game . . .
From this promising start, however, the novel falters into a far more mundane depiction of the village; ironically, this mundanity comes right when the soldiers arrive. The village is soon invaded by armed men who wage a firefight, killing a number of residents and taking as hostages Ismael’s wife and Geraldina’s husband and children. As life goes on, Rosero follows Ismael’s fraught attempts to make sense of the loss. Before long the armies once again come, bringing further disaster and a resolution to Ismael’s problems.
One wishes that the sense of perversion that pollutes these early pages would have stained more of the novel, for it is in these early pages that Rosero captures the strange yet not wholly inaccessible moral space that is emblematic of a part of the world where well-armed, privately financed armies regularly fight to the death for tiny, impoverished towns and villages. Yet as The Armies plays out this Colombian warzone begins to feel too much like just another battle, Ismael’s thoughts and concerns like those that might arise from any number of scenarios of loss. Undoubtedly there is something universal about Ismael’s story, and Rosero cannot be faulted for trying to show his common humanity, but more often than not the commonness of Ismael’s thoughts and actions feel less like an appeal to the universal in strife than a failure of the imagination. We are no longer so much in the deft and the nuanced town from the novel’s opening pages as in a dull and ill-defined space that feels too much like anywhere.
In Rosero’s favor, when the armies descend upon the village he skillfully conveys the sense of confusion that is part and parcel with an unending war. There is no loudspeaker to announce the beginning of hostilities, there is no radio news report to let citizens know that the was has begun again for them. There are only rumors and worries. It starts with a “white shadow” that “runs across the street.” Soon there is the sound of machine guns in the distance. At one point Ismael is mysteriously detained with a group of men, but then released on account of his age. Soldiers continue to waft in and out of his day, and no one seems to know what is going on, although they all are impressed by the same feeling of menace, the same dull feeling of this all having happened before. Life carries on more or less as usual, but with the looming threat of disaster.
This is truly a perverse state of affairs, far more perverse than the mere lechery described at the beginning of The Armies, yet none of Rosero’s characters seem to know how to properly represent it. At times a flavor of that earlier perversion is present, as, for instance, when Ismael utterly ignores the new school headmaster who confides his shock that no children attend the school.
More often, this sense of perversion is lost. Referring to the great care that the town priest must exercise in all conversations in order to preserve his life and the integrity of his church (which was already once bombed and rebuilt), Ismael laments:
The uncertainty is the same for everyone; Father Albornoz replies, spreading his arms; what can he know? He speaks to them as in his sermons, and maybe he is right, putting oneself in his place: the fear of being misinterpreted, of ending up accused by this or that army, of annoying a drug trafficker — who can count on a spy among the very parishioners who surround him — has turned him into a concerto of faltering words, where everything converges in faith: pray to heaven that this fratricidal war does not reach San Jose again, may reason prevail . . .
Ismael’s reaction here is typical of the kind of failure The Armies indulges in too often. His thoughts feel too scripted, his response to the priest’s display far too rational and measured, and they fail to convey anything particular to separate the Colombian experience from similar ones in other parts of the world. Moreover, why is it that Ismael has such perspective? As a citizen caught up in this war would he really be in a position to so calmly judge the priest’s display, or would his own sense of logic and morality not be as twisted and confused as the priest’s? It is a hazard that Rosero runs constantly into in this book. He seems to want Ismael to both embody the pain, disillusionment, and madness of this war, while also trying to raise his voice up into a kind oracle that can see what his fellow citizens don’t quite. Rosero has said that he originally wrote The Armies in the third-person and then switched to the first, and indeed, too often this book sounds as though too much information is being made to fit into Ismael’s single consciousness.
The Armies, once so full of potential, continues to pale once the combatants leave. Though Ismael’s wife has been kidnapped during the invasion, his mounting fear for her safety as the months pass is difficult to believe: Is this really the same man who earlier thought “if she loved me today as much as she does her fish and her cats perhaps I would not be peering over the wall?” Of course, it is utterly plausible that Ismael might be jolted into remorse at the kidnapping and sudden loss of his wife, but this man who previously had such little regard for his wife’s companionship never notes this incongruity, and never once wonders where his sudden passion for her has come from. He merely offers us uncharacteristically overheated remarks like “right that very moment I am going mad at the edge of this cliff and feeling that a hand could push me at the most unexpected moment.”
In the concluding fifty pages The Armies does begin to gain momentum. Although the changed relationship between Ismael and the now-husbandless and childless Geraldina never becomes quite convincing, Rosero does write a number of good scenes for the wandering Ismael that begin to exude the madness of this war. Particularly successful is a Beckettian moment in which Ismael speaks through a closed window to an elderly friend who has been left for dead by his children after suffering a heart attack when the armies once again descend:
“Open the window, Celmiro.”
“Didn’t I tell you I can’t move? Thrombosis, Ismael, do you know what that is? I am older than you. Look at you, after all: out in the street, and dancing.”
“Open up.”
“I can only move my right arm, to take a piece of meat, what will I do when I need to relieve myself?”
“Here they come, shooting in all directions.”
“Wait.”
Time goes by. I hear something fall, inside.
“Damn,” I heard Celmiro say.
“What happened?”
“The frying pan with the kidneys fell. If a dog gets in here I won’t be able to frighten it away. It’ll eat everything.”
A word should be said about Anne McLean’s translation, which is generally successful but breaks from character often enough to be obtrusive. After a charged encounter between Ismael, a naked Geraldina, and her husband, it is simply bizarre to hear the lovely Brazilian say in closing to Ismael “Thank you for the orange, kind sir.” Likewise, something sounds off about guerrillas talking like mobsters when they exhort one another to “whack him.” At other times, it seems that too much of the original language has been kept in the translation. In English, no one utters the wish, “I want to sleep unconscious,” and the following is simply a construction that is ungrammatical: “She discovered suddenly, my gaze drawn, like a whirlpool of cloudy water, full of who know what powers . . .” Perhaps that gaze could be drawn as if by a whirlpool of cloudy water, but I don’t see how a gaze is drawn like a whirlpool. This lengthy sentence also sounds off amidst the rest of Rosero’s prose, which is utterly economical and concise, almost calcified in its concision and respect for the rules of syntax.
In the end, The Armies is a partially successful novel, a book with enough good points and potential to make the dead weight that surrounds them lamentable. It is laudable that Rosero has taken it upon himself to speak for the victims of his nation’s war, but worthy causes alone do not make for good art, no matter how often book critics may patronize mediocre novels that depict harsh realities around the globe. One hopes the strong reception accorded The Armies will spur publishers to make more of Rosero’s novels available in English, and that these novels will in turn be more complete works.
http://criticalflame.org/fiction/1109_esposito.htm
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| Evelio Rosero |
THE ARMIES BY EVELIO ROSERO
The Armies
Evelio Rosero (trans. Anne McLean). New Directions, 199pp.
Evelio Rosero (trans. Anne McLean). New Directions, 199pp.
There is a moment in the film Werckmeister Harmonies in which a rioting mob ransacks a hospital. When they come upon a frail, ancient man standing naked before them, the mob collectively recognizes something symbolic or pathetic in him and quietly disperses. Though the old man does not appear in the book from which the film was made, László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, the mob similarly shamed into retreat.
In Rosero’s spare novel The Armies, another ancient man is faced with a cruel mob, but there will be no epiphanic recognition to disperse it. The Armies, the first of Rosero’s novels to be translated into English, describes the old age of Ismael Pasos, an elderly retired teacher who lives in the Colombian village of San José and has a penchant for voyeurism. In his retirement, Ismael has realized his personal version of Eden by looking over the wall at the beautiful neighbor suntanning in the nude. It is clear from the outset that all that matters to Ismael is to admire women.I spy on her from here: without resting on the back of her chair, knees together but calves apart, very slowly, delicately, she removes her sandals, leans her body even further: revealing her neck, which is like a mast. . . . I ask nothing more of life than this possibility, to see this woman without her knowing that I’m looking at her, to see this woman when she knows I’m looking, but to see her: my only explanation for staying alive.
He peeps, he spies, he openly lusts, and yet his perversion is relatively benign, if not impotent. He reminisces about first meeting his wife Otilia, bursting in on her in the bathroom after witnessing the killing of a man. He has always associated “in an almost absurd way, in my memory: first death, then nakedness.” As warring paramilitaries and guerrillas increasingly take over the town, the abduction of Otilia unseats Ismael from his Eden.
The two armed factions surrounding San José are equally destructive, equally aimless, and both operate without ideals or morals. Rosero refuses to explicitly provide causes and goals for the conflict; what do they matter to the suffering people caught in the middle? This blank slate invites the reader to attempt to contextualize or find symbols in the novel. One can look for literary references as well, from the madness of Hamlet in Otilia’s name and Ismael’s wish “to sleep, I hope not to dream” to similarities to the trapped denizens of the dreamlike ghost town of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (a book of similar length and tone). Ultimately, The Armies stands well on its own as an engrossing tale and needs no reference or interpretation beyond one’s own emotions and sense of justice.
The entirety of the book follows Ismael’s first-person narration as he totters around the village, solving (or failing to solve) the dilemmas that face him. Because of his advanced age and diminishing memory, nearly everything is a monumental challenge for Ismael, from the quest to cure his aching knee to finding his way. This focus on the tribulations of an aging man beset by the outside world is reminiscent of the work of Samuel Beckett (in fact, Ismael’s dragging leg is a dead ringer for Molloy), and the titular armies could be considered as stand-ins for the unseen gods and manipulators of Beckett’s plays. But unlike Beckett, the style and the simplicity of The Armies encourages a swift read, making it a book that is difficult to put down. Perhaps this is because the book is an antiwar novel without politics, one that only concerns itself with consequences and is all the more moving for it.
The Armies has picked up a number of honors around the world, most recently The Independent’s Foreign Fiction prize. Why is this slim novel being so rewarded? Politics, perhaps: everybody loves a victim. I might also suggest it is equally due to the strength of the story’s progression. Look at the choices made in the design of the novel. While there is a clear descent from Paradiso to Inferno, most of the elements are in place at the beginning: violence, kidnapping, and fear. But it begins with an overload of sensual detail, as Ismael takes note of everything around him, all the beauty in particular. Phrases are strung together to create long sentences that encourage fast, rhythmic reading. Then Rosero slows down and enhances the action when it counts—the day when Ismael’s wife disappears stretches across fifty pages out of a scant two hundred. In the absence of his wife, Ismael’s mental state declines and the narrative reflects it: time jumps an hour, a day, three months. This gives the impression that he is barely taking note of life; he is barely living at all anymore.
Rosero has expressed his fondness for Crime and Punishment, and there is a distinct element of Raskolnikov to be found in Ismael. He spends the second half of the book wandering in a daze, often acting unconsciously (Ismael’s affliction is more dementia than guilt, but the effect is similar). He continually asks questions of himself, reprimanding his own foolishness. For all the wandering that the narrator does back and forth through the town, the plot composition is tight and economical, and often a striking scene is revisited later by an incident that resolves what had come before, following Chekhov’s admonition that if a gun appears on stage, it must eventually be fired. Everything and everyone in San José will eventually be affected by the armies. This adds an element of relentlessness.
Themes creep in indirectly through repetition. Perhaps to highlight the indifference of the killers, several deaths are described in such a way as to make them seem almost indistinguishable from life. One man is shot in the head and still looks like he wants to enjoy his ice cream; another dies still leaning on his cane; a third fakes his death to avoid detection; and one mother cries out over and over to her son’s killers, “why don’t you kill him again?” The point seems to be that not even death will end the tragedy. Fittingly, the epigraph that starts the novel is from Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire, wherein a man faking death in a chair asks whether it is wise to do so (the answer coming when Moliere himself fell ill performing the role and later died). The appearance of a seemingly animated corpse in a chair late in The Armies echoes Moliere’s scene to horrifying effect.
But how lovely, in a book brimming with sex and war, to find tenderness in the characters. Their faults are matched with virtues: Ismael’s perversion is sweetly replaced by longing for his wife. Rosero fills his town with complex but familiar types: a village drunkard, a priest, a schoolteacher, a doctor, a street vendor, and the requisite scary old loner on the edge of town. There is hope in the villagers, even to the last, even if fleeting. They expect disappointment, and they accept it to the extent that the ordinariness of their lives becomes an uncomfortable companion to the terror of their situation. For instance, a man tells Ismael about a kidnapping he witnessed:
He was crying. Remember he is, or was, pretty fat, twice the size of his wife. He just couldn’t go on. They were looking for a mule to carry him. There was a woman as well: Carmina Lucero, the baker, remember her? From San Vicente, Otilia’s town. Otilia must know her, how is Otilia?“The same.”“That means she’s still well. The last time I saw her was at the market. She was buying leeks, how did she cook them?”“I don’t remember.”“They took the baker too, poor thing.”
That simple detail about the leeks suggests a life beyond the terror. The village brims with personality, which stands it in relief against the hell that it becomes.
Not all in the fever dream that Ismael presents to us is perfectly crafted; certain scenes, such as one with an uncaged bird that refuses to fly away, feel a bit familiar. And Rosero strains at times to find ways to put characters in Ismael’s path to provide their exposition. But as a whole this is a focused story as much as it is a presentation of the inhumanity forced upon us by war. The impotent and exhausted old man, entirely spent, stripped of dignity and confronted by the endlessly devouring and irrational armies, unable to care for himself, unable to leave, wanting to die, unable to die; this searing image lingers well beyond the day or two required to read this book.
Travis Godsoe is a native of Bangor, Maine, and a graduate of the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program in creative writing. His short fiction has appeared in The Puckerbrush Review and 5_trope, and he has recently completed a novel, Barnacle. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the writer Julie Novacek Godsoe.
http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-armies-by-evelio-rosero
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