The Armies by Evelio Rosero. Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, 224 pages, New Directions, $14.95

Of Violence and Beauty

Colombian writer Evelio Rosero’s work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and this book, which won 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is no exception.

At the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel “The Armies”, the protagonist, Ismael, a retired professor in his seventies, spies on his young neighbor Geraldina over the wall between their properties. Geraldina enjoys walking around her yard naked, knowingly teasing Ismael. “I ask nothing more of life than this possibility,” Ismael thinks, “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.”

It’s a typical statement from the typical creation of a typical older male novelist. Perhaps from reading too much Marquez and Roth, I thought I could pretty well predict where the story was going: Ismael would eventually conquer the beautiful woman, body and soul, and there would be an extended (and slightly nauseating) sex scene. That instead the book would end with mass murder and necrophilia never crossed my mind. Disturbing political novels ought to carry a warning label.

Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his native Colombia for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies” is no exception.

To highlight the horror, the novel begins with a brief idyll. The setting is San José, a small town somewhere in Colombia. For a few pages, we enjoy Ismael’s thwarted lust, his wife Otilia’s resigned patience with his wandering eye, and the pleasures of small town life. But darkness quickly seeps in. There is an invasion of soldiers, guerrillas or paramilitaries of some sort, and the police charged with protecting San Jose are no better than the invaders. Soon, Otilia has been kidnapped, along with Geraldina’s husband and children.

What we are given to understand is that this is only the latest in a long string of attacks. Most of San Jose’s residents have lost loved ones, either to violence, or to the threat of violence. There are almost no young people left in San Jose:

“They’ve all gone in this past year.”
“All of them?”
“All the girls and all the boys, Is mael.” She gave me a reproachful look. “The most sensible thing they could do.”
“It won’t be any better elsewhere.”
“They had to leave to find out.”

“The Armies” doesn’t have much by way of a plot; another attack begins soon after the first one, and it is still going on when the novel ends. But in spite of all the terror, Rosero manages to get in some beautiful writing (aided in no small part by his translator from the Spanish, Anne McLean). A grenade is “an animal with jaws of fire that will dissolve me in a breath”. Dawn “descends from the mountaintop like fluttering sheets”. Best of all is the ways in which Rosero connects sex and death, as when Ismael watches Geraldina in her misery:.

“I proceed behind Geraldina, trying in vain not to recognize her besieging scent, my eyes involuntarily exploring her black-clad back, and catching a glimpse, beneath the mourning, of her legs, her sandals, the radiant movement of her body, her whole life diffusing and proclaiming, beneath the veils of fatality she is suffering in this world, the perhaps inclement desire to be possessed as soon as possible, albeit by death (by me?), to forget the world for one moment, albeit for death.”

There is also plenty of time left over to wonder at the inanity of war, and this war in particular. We are told very little about who or what the armies are fighting for, aside from the fact that San José represents a “strategic location”, and is surrounded by thousands of hectares of coca.

Instead of a lot of political explanation and historical background, we get anecdotes. The chief of San José’s police force has a mental breakdown and kills a handful of civilians, then is promoted to work in another city. A bomb-sniffing dog is buried with military honors while men lie rotting in the streets. When Ismael is told that his name is on a list of collaborators to be killed, he laughs, “Why do they ask for names? They kill whoever [sic] they please, no matter what their names might be. I would like to know what is written on the paper with the names, that ‘list’. It is a blank sheet of paper, for God’s sake. A paper where all the names they want can fit.”

The only thing that can really be said against Rosero’s novel is either irrelevant or a deal breaker: it isn’t particularly fun to read. When the darkness falls over Ismael, it is never to rise again. Nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse. The manager of a local café receives the index fingers of his kidnapped wife and daughter in order to extract a higher ransom. The city’s empanada vendor’s severed head is found in his grease boiler. One woman watches her son die, then is killed and raped (in that order) by a group of soldiers.

What we’re supposed to take away from all this brutality is unclear, and the moments of light are so few and far between that they seem almost rote when they arrive. Near the end of the book, Ismael sits with Geraldina, and his trembling hand falls on her knee. Old habits die hard, apparently.

“It is the emotion, Geraldina. Or it is my lechery, as Otilia would say.”
“Don’t worry, profesor. Stick with love. Love conquers lechery.”

That may be so, but the armies in San José are fighting for neither love nor lechery. They are fighting for greed, which it seems nothing can conquer.