Violence Penetrates Society, the Psyche in ‘Armies’

“The uncertainty that reigns in San José is perhaps similar to tranquility, but it is not the same; people go home early… then doors close and San José agonizes in the heat.” Muted violence is doubly frightening; harder to confront, yet perversely easier to live with, it becomes an atmosphere, lurid and inert. It’s this atmosphere that permeates “The Armies,” Columbian writer Evelio Rosero’s latest novel. Like the best literary treatments of trauma, “The Armies” utters its violence quietly, with the clear-eyed intensity of a fever dream.

The first of Rosero’s works to be translated into English, “The Armies” was the recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize earlier this year. This short, sharp novel recounts a few days in the life of the narrator Ismael, a retired schoolteacher who lives with his wife in San José, a fictional Colombian town nestled in the highlands and surrounded by coca plantations. In the latest spate of politically-motivated violence, some citizens are murdered while others—probably including Ismael’s wife, though it’s never made clear—are kidnapped. Once content to drink coffee in the plaza and daydream about beautiful young women, Ismael is suddenly stricken by his wife’s disappearance and sets out to look for her.

Rosero never reduces the complexity of Colombia’s political situation, nor does he impose any prevailing moral framework upon the story. Its title—in Spanish, “Los Ejercitos”—refers to all three “sides” of the conflict that blights rural Colombia: the military, the paramilitaries, and the guerrillas. In the violence that comes to engulf San José, it is impossible—and, perhaps, pointless—to distinguish between them. Ismael remembers the recent attack on the local church, “by whichever army it was, whether the paramilitaries or guerrillas.” The combatants are “slow silent figures, which emerge blurry from the last horizon of the corners.” In “The Armies,” brutality is so arbitrary and ubiquitous that it comes to resemble an implacable force of nature more than the product of human agency.

The sumptuousness of Ismael’s garden as he describes it—where oranges grow fat and succulent in the blazing sunshine—echoes in his descriptions of the attractive young family living next door. The object of his desire is Geraldina, a wife and mother of two, whom he admires from his vantage point atop a ladder while picking oranges. His wife, Otilia, notes and censures his voyeurism, but Ismael’s desire is compulsive and extends to every young female character we meet. Each is subjected to his scopophilia, described in terms that evoke the ripeness of fruit; Gracelita, aged twelve, is “almost plump, and yet willowy” and sways her backside as she washes the dishes, while Geraldina sunbathes naked, “stretched out with no concern other than the color of her skin.” By taking every opportunity to remind us of his narrator’s transgressive fixations, Rosero interrogates the limits of our sympathy as readers. Is our identification with the suffering of others unconditional or, in fact, contingent upon the goodness of the sufferer? “The Armies” has no clear answer, but it hints at a radical skepticism that sits uneasily with our expectations of a novel that bears witness to the suffering of innocents.

We come to realize, however, that these prurient meditations represent more than the lecherous fantasies of an old man. Early in the novel, Ismael recalls the dire circumstances in which he and his wife first met; in the bus station of a nearby town they both witnessed the shooting of a man by an eleven year-old boy. Rushing nauseated to the lavatory, Ismael walked in on his future wife sitting on the toilet and was instantly transfixed: “… her eyes like lighthouse beams over the hitched up island, the join of her legs, the triangle of her sex—indescribable animal.” He tells us that the murder and the incident in the toilet “went on recurring, becoming associated, in an almost absurd way, in my memory: first death, then nakedness.”

The discomfiting union of sex and mortality is a recurring trope of “The Armies.” So clogged and abortive are Ismael’s desires that his visions of the female form are as morbid as they are irresistible; between every woman’s legs is a “wild darkness,” an “infinity” to which Ismael’s eyes are always drawn. We are reminded of “King Lear,” in which the vagina is, similarly, an entry to an unknowable—and therefore threatening—interior, a “dark and vicious place,” in Edgar’s words. In “The Armies,” Ismael’s vexed desires have long been mingled with the constant threat of violence from paramilitaries and guerrillas, as though the most effervescent expression of life—lust—has unconsciously incorporated death.

Rosero’s choice of name for his protagonist puts us in mind of another famous first-person narrator and survivor of catastrophe: Herman Melville’s Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale in “Moby Dick.” Melville’s epilogue is taken from the book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Like Job, Rosero’s Ismael has no part in the processes governing the destruction of his life but is forced to take up the challenge to his faith. When the other inhabitants of San José flee in trucks, Ismael refuses to leave, choosing instead to honor the promise he and Otilia made during the last attack: “Neither Otilia nor I had any hesitation: we were never leaving here.”

As the violence intensifies, Ismael becomes willing to face death with Job-like submission: “let God’s will be done, whatever pleases God, whatever he feels like.” But Rosero does not glorify Ismael; his illicit desires never cease. Although his love for his wife is, ultimately, the rubric by which he lives, we glimpse redemption only in his small acts of imaginative tenderness, as when Ismael decides, in his wife’s absence, to bury the cat that was killed in an explosion, “so that you shall never see your cat dead, Otilia.”

“The Armies” begins with an epigraph from Moliere: “N’y a-t-il point quelque danger a contrefaire le mort?” (“Is there not some danger in refusing death?”). Rosero’s novel offers us an answer: to refuse death is to invite madness in the form of Ismael’s cultish devotion to his missing wife. But it is also to maintain a kind of integrity, to supplant the inevitability of death with the logic of love, by marshalling “all the force and stubbornness of a light in the middle of the fog that men call hope.”