The Armies (Los Ejércitos) - review

Written by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated by Anne McLean
(from El Espectador 11 April 2008)

If the Colombian novel has any sort of tradition, it is this: a permanent difficulty in confronting the country’s reality. Such has been the case since the genre reached maturity, just a little over fifty years ago, when García Márquez began to publish; since then, our excessive violence has constituted a cruel challenge for novelists, who have failed resoundingly each time they have tried to look the violence in the eye. The first to fail were the so-called novelists of the Violence, those who thought reproduction and denunciation sufficient, and forgot about literature; all those who over recent years have put the words “guerrilla” or “paramilitaries” in their fictions — with one or two honourable exceptions — have failed. Reality has always found a way to make fiction’s attempts look ridiculous. Well, that has just changed. The Armies, by Evelio Rosero, has done what Colombian literature has spent several decades wishing it could do.
The Armies, as Colombian readers will imagine, are three: the paramilitaries, the guerrillas and the so-called forces of order. They are three anonymous, faceless bodies, which enter and leave San José, a town not described for us in much detail; we are, however, presented with the consequences of these visits, the extreme cruelty and desolation, the irrationality and absurdity of a war motivated only by the inertia of the war itself. The poor man given the task of narrating Rosero’s novel is Ismael Pasos, an aging schoolteacher who, in a couple of hundred pages, bears patient witness to the disaster of his town and his own life. One of the great achievements of the novel is his voice, a voice Colombian readers have never heard before, a voice that blends in unprecedented ways resignation and despair, passivity and active hatred, crudeness and poetry. A voice that, while being absolutely original, owes a debt to a venerable presence in Latin American literature: Juan Rulfo.
Several of those who have written about the novel have already pointed this out: Rulfo is a sort of invisible tutor of The Armies, and it is quite possible that the Rulfian tone is the precise reason Rosero’s novel succeeds in telling us of its world. It is the tone of stories such as “They Gave Us the Land” and “The Burning Plain”, but most of all it is the tone of Pedro Páramo, which is entirely appropriate: both Rulfo’s and Rosero’s novels are novels where everyone is dead. Pedro Páramo’s dead are ghosts; Rosero’s are corpses who have nothing supernatural or metaphorical about them, who are painfully real. Towards the end of the novel, Ismael, who had begun the novel spying on his naked next-door neighbour, no longer has time for any eroticism, and on the other hand has started to wonder whether or not he is still alive. “It is fear”, he tells us, “this fear, this country, which I prefer to ignore in its entirety, playing the idiot with myself, to stay alive, or with an apparent desire to stay alive, because it is very possible, really, that I am dead, I tell myself, good and dead in hell”.
“This fear, this country”: one of the hair-raising things about this novel is what happens every time the word country appears. “Oh, this country, poor in its wealth”, says Ismael at one point. He says it without dramatics — the refusal of melodrama is one of the moral codes of The Armies — but the contrast with the incidents of the novel is so brutal that the reader cannot help but be moved. Because behind the kidnappings and disappearances and selective murders (which are the story’s backbone), behind one of the harshest final scenes in recent Latin American literature, a single question lingers: what would this country be like without the armies?