War Within

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Ayacucho in Andean Peru is all about Catholic tourism and its 33 churches — one for each year of Christ’s life. It was also at the heart of the extremist Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path movement,which,coupled with the military counter-offensive,had left 70,000 dead by the time the civil war (1980-2000) was declared concluded.

But Santiago Roncagliolo,who wrote a biography of Abimael Guzman,the founder of Sendero Luminoso,never spells out that history and its continuation in his novel Red April (originally published as Abril Rojo in 2006 and winner of the prestigious Spanish Alfaguara Prize). It surfaces from the confident restraint,intricate plotting,delicate characterisation and comedy of menace. Roncagliolo himself has observed with satisfaction that while European readers tend to read the book as a thriller,Peruvian readers identify it as a political novel,in the realistic tradition of Latin America after The Boom (associated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez,Carlos Fuentes,Llosa,etc).

Félix Chacaltana Saldívar,associate district prosecutor of Ayacucho,is called upon to solve the mystery of an unidentified body,charred beyond any hint of its once-human form. Chacaltana is a brilliant creation,difficult to conceive outside Latin American fiction. To the foreign reader,he may be incompetent and mind-numbingly rulebook-bound,someone who loves writing mundane reports,expending himself on linguistic and grammatical felicities (his typewriter Olivetti 75 doesn’t have “ñ”,but given his large vocabulary,Chacaltana can easily use a hundred words without “ñ”); but Chacaltana is an “innocent” battling institutional cynicism,with faith in those self-same institutions — in duty and the indispensability of the tiniest procedural detail. His ex-wife never thought much of him. Police and military commandants call him a fool to his face and he spends his hours at home laying out changes of clothes for his long dead mother and talking to her. That is the kind of backhanded tribute to and refutation of magic realism common to post-Boom writers. Thirty-five-year-old Roncagliolo,though,comes a generation after post-Boom proper — a generation that has to make sense of the violence it witnessed in childhood but was not party to.

Chacaltana is asked to bury the mystery and file a dishonest report. Although his instinct is to follow the official line,everyone he talks to ends up dead,suggesting serial murders,gruesome and apparently quasi-religious,overlapping with the Holy Week festivities in April and the presidential election. When he hints at a possible revival of Senderista terror,he’s told: “In this country there is no terrorism,by orders from the top.” Chacaltana also has to oversee a fraudulent election and witness how the Indians,the biggest victims of both the Maoist Senderistas and the state reprisal,are never willing to talk,obediently voting as ordered to.

Red April is set in 2000,just after the civil war ended in Alberto Fujimori’s Peru,a president since convicted for corruption and crimes against humanity. As he forces himself to investigate further,Chacaltana has two epiphanies — that the Senderistas and the government are mirror images in violence and intimidation; and that there’s a darkness within himself that’s also a key to that violence. For an insider who’s really an outsider,Chacaltana’s education is a reburial of the Boom’s belief in progress,its ideals and its craft.

Blood and fire,red and black,light and dark are persistent image-sets in this weaving of history,politics and a serial murder plot which rebuilds the original tension of Catholicism and pre-conquest Indian religion. As with Chacaltana,everything is characterised by a pathos that could rise to the tragic,or the tragic about to fall into pathos. Humour is a survival tool here.

Peruvian-born Roncagliolo,who lives in Barcelona,has worked in human rights in Peru. Even without his Guzman biography,he would have known the real-life counterparts of his fictional material. Chacaltana’s ridiculously immaculate reports are straight out of Latin American bureaucratese,and Edith Grossman has done a brilliant job of translating that language with every little nuance and inflection.