Special Features

In an unbroken monologue sustained for over 80 pages, Edgardo Vega, the narrator of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion skewers every aspect of Salvadoran culture he can summon—from pupusas and football to the archetypal Salvadoran character. Moya channels Austrian writer and luminous curmudgeon Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), whose own style eschewed both paragraph breaks and generosity of judgment, and whose work is more often compared to the symphonies of his contemporaries than their novels. Bernhard’s Austria is a failed state, both culturally and politically, a country whose citizens cannot collectively produce a soul worth admiring. Moya’s El Salvador is no different.

Bernhard’s narrators often live abroad, are forced to return to Austria and confront their hatred of their motherland. Moya’s narrator, too, lives abroad, in Montreal. “I left,” he says, “because I never accepted the macabre joke of being destined to be born in this place.” The joke, for the reader, lies in the breathlessness of his assault on El Salvador. Indeed, it is impossible not to laugh, if only from sheer exhaustion. His indictments compound and spin out into manifestations of their own bombast. Vega tells his interlocutor that El Salvador “is a hallucination…it only exists because of it crimes.” Crimes here are shorthand for the atrocities associated with the twelve-year Salvadoran civil war. Because of these crimes, and because of the country, this slim book also exists.

Edgardo Vega lives the life of a grateful expatriate. An art history professor at McGill University, his Canadian passport immunizes him from the indignities visited on émigré Salvadorans. “Even so,” Vega says, “I came because my mother died, Moya, the death of my mother is the only reason I felt obliged to return to this filthy pit.”

Where the reader might expect an epigraph, Moya provides a disclaimer: “Warning: Edgardo Vega, the central character of this report, exists. He lives in Montreal under another name that’s not Thomas Bernhard. He surely relayed his opinions more emphatically and with more carnage than this text contains. I’ve softened perspectives that may have offended certain readers.” First published in 1997 as El asco, readers were indeed offended by its attack on Salvadoran culture and politics. Moya received death threats after the book’s release and friends urged him to remain abroad. In the afterword, he explains that his little book was conceived only as an exercise in style, a game of mimicry. He adds, “El Salvador isn’t Austria. It is a country where, in 1975, its own leftist comrades assassinated the country’s most important poet, Roque Dalton, after accusing him of being a CIA agent. I thought it would be better to go into exile than play the martyr.”

For those, Salvadoran or not, inclined to take offense, there is no dearth of material in Revulsion to do the job. Edgardo Vega’s irascibility is tireless—given a willing listener, he will bemoan “the idiocy of being Salvadoran” eternally. In the Afterword, Moya seems less concerned than amused over his countrymen’s offense. To contextualize Vega’s revulsion further, or attempt to mitigate its effects, would be like explaining a punchline, something from which Moya gracefully refrains.

The author is himself a character, present only as Vega’s silent companion. Both reporter and consummate listener, Moya sits with Vega between the hours of five and seven, in the only bar in San Salvador that Vega can tolerate—the bartender pours heavy drinks and allows Vega to choose the music. “This evening,” Vega tells Moya, “I want to listen to Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in B-flat Minor, which is why I brought my own CD with this stupendous concerto for piano and orchestra, which is why I came prepared with my favorite Tchaikovsky.” This moment depicts Vega at his least vociferous, subdued before plunging into another diatribe.

Vega is foremost paranoid. Suspicious and terrified of his countrymen, he sees everywhere “guys who were no doubt torturers and participated in massacres during the civil war.” Everyone is guilty but those who fled; namely, Vega. When Vega is generous, he’ll add Moya to his list of nonparticipants. Moya is too busy, he says, writing “famished little stories about sex and violence” to actually engage in it.

Vega’s diatribe belies his fear that he, too, despite his Canadian passport, despite his hatred of violence, is guilty of the same crimes. In order to cancel his own guilt, everyone else must be made culpable. Every bus driver, football player, and bartender is, to Vega, complicit in the most horrible war crimes. He doesn’t stop, though, with accusing citizens of El Salvador. It is their culture, too, their dietary habits, their prejudices, and their leisure activities that are responsible for the war’s atrocities. This unsparingness bleeds into hyperbole and comedy. Moya’s Vega is certainly funny, though because of the form of Revulsion, his humor is best appraised in its accumulation. It’s impossible not to laugh when everything is guilty.

The appearance of Vega’s brother, Ivo, signals the arrival of a plot to support further diatribe. Vega says of his brother, “[W]e don’t hate each other, we’re simply two planets on distinct orbits, the only thing that brought us together is the task of having inherited my mother’s house in Miramonte.” Ivo owns a chain of locksmith shops across San Salvador. An arriviste with aspirations beyond his social station, Ivo’s tastes are decidedly lowbrow. He loves football and binge drinking. He “has three televisions in his house,” says Vega, “you wouldn’t believe it, three televisions they turn on at the same time to different channels, a true hell this place is.” Here, there is a barely perceptible increase in generosity never present in Bernhard’s work, as if Vega, or Moya, is uncomfortable directing his rage at individuals.

Diatribes erect a formidable edifice in Moya’s book, but their indictments are allowed to stand unsupported. San Salvador is a stupid city. Why? Because its people are stupid. Why? Vega answers that question in a number of ways, and few of his answers are sufficient. San Salvador, he writes, is “a culture with the memory of a gadfly, crashing every two seconds against the same window glass because after two seconds it’s already forgotten that the glass existed.” Because the form of the monologue lends itself more easily to exposition than scene, Vega conveys his observations in lists, similes, and hyperbole. Anecdotes would better serve a story, but Revulsion is not a conventional story.

In the afterword, Moya notes that “the wife of a writer friend threw her copy [of Revulsion] into the street, out of her bathroom window, indignant, thanks to Edgardo Vegas’s barbaric talk about pupusas, the national dish of El Salvador.” (Vega claims that the popularity of pupusas can only be explained by “hunger and ignorance.”) Despite death threats and book burnings, Revulsion continues each year to expand its Spanish publication. Moya writes that strangers beg him to write a Revulsion for Mexico, for Guatemala, for Costa Rica, a book “that would critically demolish their country’s cultures,” that would plainly articulate their revulsions for them.

In 2016, New Directions published the book in English, as translated by Lee Klein. Nearly ten years after its initial publication, Revulsion is as timely as ever, and not only for El Salvador, Guatemala, or Costa Rica. As political backlash threatens to undo years of progressive advancement in the United States with a public resurgence of white supremacy and xenophobia, Vega’s type of paranoia is all too relevant.

Near the end of Annie McGreevy’s debut novella, Ciao, Suerte, a young woman named Inés reflects on the ways her life has changed since meeting her boyfriend, Miguel. They are two twenty-somethings living in Madrid—she a local, he a wealthy émigré from Patagonia—and with their union Inés finds that “the fear of nothing, the fear of falling and falling and never hitting the ground…[has] lessened.” However, any gratefulness Inés feels is tempered by disdain, as Miguel’s indifference forces her to admit her own vulnerability: “she is deeply, viscerally offended that he doesn’t feel it too,” this lessening of fear.

Ciao, Suerte concerns itself with our persistence in policing the feelings of those we love. Critics have noted the novella’s political preoccupations—it concerns the fallout of the real-life military usurpation of Argentina’s government in the late 1970s, the consequences of which reverberate to the narrative’s present-day of 2003—but the story is arguably only nominally about national politics: the sundry sins of Argentina catalyze, but do not necessarily overshadow, the various emotional exploitations perpetrated by the main characters.

These characters revolve around Miguel, and project their deepest longings and aspirations onto him. Adopted by a prominent Patagonian businessman and his wife, Miguel is the biological son of two members of the Montoneros, a group that opposed the Argentinian military’s rise to power. His birth parents, Alejandro and Sabine, were captured and murdered by the government—and Alejandro himself is the son of two wealthy Argentinians, Beatriz and Giancarlo. Their marriage dissolves in the opening pages of the novella as a result of Beatriz’s concomitant grief at the loss of her son and obsession over finding the grandchild her husband “campaign[s] to try to convince her…was never born.”

Here we get our first inkling of what this story is really about, as Giancarlo laments that “he had not understood how to save [Beatriz]” in the wake of the loss of their son. Giancarlo represents another element of love, the ways in which we are bound—by ideology, by affinity, by genetics—to other people, and the ways in which we fail to meet the expectations they place upon us.

Ciao, Suerte is largely about thwarting expectations—amongst the characters themselves, and for us as readers. The novella’s centerpiece is the reunion of Beatriz and Miguel; she has found him through Argentina’s Grandparents Index, a DNA database to which Miguel had unknowingly given a sample. In the hands of a writer less subtle than McGreevy, more concerned with the sensational or sentimental, Miguel would be flabbergasted at the appearance of his heretofore unheard-of grandmother, but excited to learn more about his biological parents—and Beatriz would be ecstatic at the opportunity to know the young man who shares so much in common with her beloved son.

Such a pat conclusion to Beatriz’s journey would be impossible: her own feelings for Alejandro, let alone his progeny, are deeply conflicted. In some ways, she blames her son for his own death; she rues the “overconfident smile…Alejandro wore on his face until the day he was killed, probably” and sees Miguel as “a posh, futuristic version of Alejandro” who is somehow “more relaxed.” This relaxation insults Beatriz, who discerns in her grandson an undeniable phoniness:

“He’s got the manners of rich kids. The manners she had when she was a rich kid. Polite, but with a mechanical sincerity. Does he use this shit on other people? Does he think he’s a European? Does it work? It must.”

For Beatriz, who has spent over twenty years surveying “[c]hilden on the street in Rosario with Alejandro’s white skin and floppy hair” in the hopes that one of them “might be [her] grandchild,” her disappointment with Miguel is not only unexpected, or heartbreaking—but also a comment on the unrealistic expectations she has placed on this encounter, and this young man, in the first place. Over a strained lunch in Madrid, Beatriz must contain her impulse “to reach out and bring [Miguel] to her, hug him until he sees what she sees, knows what she knows;” in the face of such unguarded, and fundamentally selfish, love, can we really blame Miguel for his aloof detachment?

Beatriz’s desire to shape Miguel to her own specifications is reflected in Inés, who understands upon watching Miguel flirt with an old romantic fling that “she’s falling in love with him…because she has never before had this intense desire to erase a man’s past.” Throughout the novella, parallels between Inés and Beatriz abound. A native of Madrid, Inés must contend with “run[ning] into some member of her extended family on the street or the metro” and “look[ing] across the dinner table at her brother and…see[ing] her own face.” Compare this with Beatriz’s compulsive need to scour the faces of Argentinian children in the hopes of seeing Alejandro’s reflected back at her, a “relentlessness” for which Beatriz chides herself near the novella’s end: Inés’s close family ties are a source both of comfort and that “extreme fear” she expects Miguel’s presence in her life to ameliorate.

And what of Miguel? As Giancarlo reflects on his fatherly feelings for Alejandro, he expresses frustration at being “hopelessly in unrequited love with a careless person.” It is this carelessness that binds Miguel to his biological father, but while Alejandro channeled his energies into political activism, Miguel spends a year futzing around Europe before starting law school. Alejandro dies for a cause that Miguel dismisses to Beatriz, claiming the Montoneros “talked too much.” Miguel proves himself shallow, unambitious, and relatively unremarkable: the antithesis of what a reader might expect of the man upon whom Beatriz and Inés have hitched so many hopes and dreams.

McGreevy rounds out Ciao, Suerte’s collection of characters with someone else who has devoted himself to a callous entity: Eduardo, a senile former military officer currently languishing in an Argentinian retirement community. Eduardo—the man directly responsible for the dirty adoption that stripped Miguel from his family—emerges as one of the novella’s most sympathetic characters. At turns hilariously contemptible and oddly humane, Eduardo is a stand-in for military corruption and the feebleness of aging, outmoded politics: he spends his days reflecting on women like Sabine, imprisoned by the military complex for treason, women who “had done something awful against the state, though now Eduardo can’t remember what it was.”

If the sections told from Eduardo’s point of view lend the story its highest moments of satire, they also present a twisted commentary on the events unfolding between Beatriz, Miguel, and Inés in Madrid. In imagining the successful lives of the children whose adoptions he facilitated, Eduardo reflects that “[p]eople were so amazing, and there were a million different ways to love them, even the ones you didn’t know.” This belief is shared with Beatriz, who spends decades loving an imagined grandchild only to find herself disappointed in the real-life Miguel.  Eduardo also deems the female rebels “nice girls who just got caught up with the wrong men”—a designation that might as easily apply to Inés in her single-minded pursuit of Miguel.

Although Eduardo’s comment is sexist, stripping these women of their ideological agency in perceiving them as victims of deceptive and politically-motivated men, in many ways Inés is indeed subject to Miguel’s whims. She longs to be invited back to Patagonia with him when he leaves Europe, hoping for “[a] thing that will tie him to her irrevocably.” While Inés serves doubly as a mirror of Beatriz’s insecurities and a foil for her familial isolation, at times the character feels more like a plot device than a fully-realized human being.

Inés is one of roughly six characters whose thoughts thread through Ciao, Suerte, and the novella ends with her. However, it begins with Beatriz, the undeniable heart of the story, who

“gets into bed and doesn’t get out for over a week except to use the bathroom. The only other time she was still for so long was when she’d had her wisdom teeth removed as a teenager and her father said, Think of it like four separate gunshot wounds inside your mouth. That’s what you’re recovering from….This is the same, Beatriz thinks now, thirty-five years later—it’s like bleeding inside my own head. But this will never end.”

Ciao, Suerte is primarily a narrative of grief, most potently the grief of a mother who has lost a child. Such losses are the basis of any number of literary works—that a child’s death forever alters the fabric of his or her parents’ lives is by now accepted truth—and so it is particularly noteworthy when a writer finds a fresh way to describe the mental and physical particularities of a familiar tragedy. McGreevy does her best work, and wields her novella’s true emotional power, when she uncovers these new ways of telling us truths about love and loss that we already know, but have failed so far to explain.