responsible parties
by Douglas Messerli
Eliseo Alberto Caracol Beach, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New
York: Knopf, 2000)
By coincidence a group of students just graduated from the nearby
Emerson Institute, have traveled to the wealthy spit of land named Caracol
Beach in Florida to celebrate at the home of their fellow classmate, Martin
Lowell, who has invited his friends to the house without his parent’s
knowledge. Martin, the best student at the Institute, has just discovered his
love for a young girl, Laura Fontanet, of Cuban heritage. She is also the
girlfriend of the school athlete, Tom Chávez, and a rivalry between the two
boys lies at the heart of their concerted effort to save her life when she is
later threatened by the ex-soldier.
In short, the series of events which ends so sadly with the deaths of
both boys (deaths foretold and reported throughout even the earliest chapters
of this fiction) seems terribly random. Had they only not run of beer and wine,
had they only not happened to visit the liquor store at the same moment that
Beto Milanés was prowling the neighborhood, had they simply refused to go along
with the mad man’s horrible demands, had the local Sherriff, Sam Ramos, been in
his office instead of a new deputy, Wellington Perales, when the calls
concerning the boys’ activities first came through….if only.... At first this
tale seems so utterly meaningless, a series of random encounters which end in a
tragedy and painful memories that later lead others to self-destruction as
well. But it is at precisely this point that novelist Alberto, the son of the
great Cuban poet Diego Alberto, makes it clear that his fiction is not a
thinly-veiled retelling of real events, that it is not even a truly realist
fiction.
Caracol Beach, in fact, had
its roots in Gabriel García Marquez’s script-writing course at the
International School of Film and Television in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba
in 1989. As the assistant for that course, Alberto shared stories with the
students, one of which, a tale in which young Puerto Ricans were pursued for an
entire night by an unknown assailant, clearly became the embryonic center of
this novel. In the class, various students suggested wild alternatives for the
attending plot, including suggestions for the inclusion of an Armenian, a drug
addict, a Bengal tiger, and other elements, many of which found their way into
Alberto’s work of 1998.
And parallel to its development, one might argue, Caracol Beach is not at all a story of random acts, but like the collaborative process which helped bring
it to life, is ultimately a story of tightly interlinked events, of human
actions and failures that are so interwoven that, at the close of this story,
one sees the young boys’ deaths as strangely fated.
The mad ex-soldier, first of all, is not just a misfit who has found his
way to the Beach salvage yard where he lives. Ramos, a former soldier himself,
was the man who watched over the recovery of Beto Milanés, and developed such a
close relationship with the unfortunate young man, that when it came time to
part ways, the survivor felt betrayed. It is not entirely accidental,
accordingly, that when Ramon retires from the army and comes to work at the
Caracol Beach Police Department, that the young soldier has moved nearby.
Perhaps if Ramos, instead of ignoring the suicidal soldier had befriended him
again, Beto Milanés’ killing may have been prevented.
But Ramon, himself, has problems. The night of these events he is not
only busy training a clearly inept new deputy, the son of another army buddy,
but is plagued by the behavior of his own son, Nelson (who uses the name
Mandy), a transvestite who he has not seen for weeks, and who, as a judo and
black-belt expert has not only just beaten his own lover, Tigran Androsian, but
attacked a man who attempts to make advances toward him at the local bowling
alley and bar. It is this series of events, along with the nuisance call by the
town busybody, Mrs. Dickinson, that takes Ramos away from his desk during the
crucial hours during which the young boys are forced by the soldier to destroy
an automobile, kill a dog, and attack a prostitute, Gigi Col, a friend of
Mandy’s and Tigran (it is notable that the mad soldier’s son was also a
prostitute). And it is Ramos’ decision to visit his estranged son that puts the
young deputy in charge of the attack upon two boys who enter the junkyard to
save their beloved Laura.
Laura, who is at the center of the boys’ world at the moment of these
events, is, herself, a kind of lost soul, having witnessed as a child the
wasting away of her Cuban-born mother, a woman she imagined watching over her
when she was young, and who, herself, loved to visit Caracol Beach. As she
enters the area to attend the party, she conjures up the mother, pounding at
the car window to tell her not to go to the Martin home.
The wealth of Martin’s parents, moreover, draws these young people to
his home, and the parent’s evident permissiveness, expressed in a telephone
conversation never received by Martin, suggests that, despite Martin’s own
previous sense of responsibility, they might have attended more to his
whereabouts that night.
The school gym teacher, Agnes MacLarty, invited to the party at Caracol
Beach, and who had had a sexual relationship with her student Tom, might have
been able to protect her charges from their destinies; but that night she had a
date with a charming poet and scholar (he has written a thesis on the Cuban
writer Reinaldo Arenas), Theo Uzcanga, whom she later marries.
In short, as the lover of astronomy, Alberto Beto Milanés, might have
said, the events of that night of June 20, 1994, were “in the stars.”
As the author himself makes clear, particularly in the passage where
Martin and Tom enter the junkyard, fighting each other for a few moments in a
combat that encompasses their desires to save Laura, to retreat, and to turn to
one another in love:
When Martin turned and began
his retreat, Tom suddenly tackled him and
they both rolled down the slope
of wrecked metal in the auto salvage yard.
They fought hard and
senselessly and with love. How can that terrible moment
be described if neither of them
lived to tell about it?
With that remarkable questioning of his own narrative techniques,
Alberto retreats from his seemingly objective narration (something he does
numerous times throughout the book) to question not only his authorial motives, but the meaning of it all.
Would it be better to use this
page to reflect on the indecency of wars,
which do not end when the
politicians sign their peace treaties but live
on in the survivors, the
victims of an arduous campaign that still goes
on inside each one of them,
between their guts and their hearts?
…But does that make sense?
What good would it do? Tom and Martin
won’t read this book: if the
document exists, this fiction about facts, it
is because they could not rely
on the shield of letters, sentences, para-
graphs, parapets of words. The
only way to change destiny would be to
lie, and not even a lie would
save men: death, too, is a tyrant.
Alberto here defends fiction as an act of imagination rather than a
telling of historical or political truth, which he recognizes would have to be
a kind of lie. Life does not represent, after all, an orderly pattern of
experience, but is a “totality of coincidences. And accidents” that includes
everyone. It is only through the
imagination, through a recreation of reality, that forgiveness and redemption
can be found.
And this is, at last, a novel of just such redemption. Mandy and her
lover return to their relationship, with Ramos’ blessing. Agnes MacLarty, at
book’s end, is pregnant with her second child. Laura, after a period of
psychological recovery, is studying psychology at the University of California
at Los Angeles. When one of Tom and Martin’s young friends is caught up in
depression and joins a religious sect, the Children of Heaven, which brings him
to the edge of suicide, Ramos, Uzcanga, officer Wellington Perales, Laura’s
father, and the headmaster of the Emerson Institute secretly travel to Utah,
attacking the “monastery” and rescuing the boy.
Out of these seemingly meaningless deaths grows the awareness within the
community of Caracol Beach that everyone is in some way responsible and that
they need to admit their failures, forgiving one another and themselves.
Perhaps more than any novel since Heimito von Doderer's Everyman a Murderer, Alberto's Caracoal
Beach recognizes that we are all, in a small way, "responsible
parties." By novel’s end, fortunately, “clemency” is finally realized—if
only as crossword puzzle word—and mercy is awarded for those who have survived.
Los Angeles, August 2, 2000
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (August 2010).
No comments:
Post a Comment