Cortamares.
Nash, Susan Smith
In his first novel, Cortamares, Juan Jose Suarez develops a
distinctive narrative style that is as emotionally compelling as it is
fluid in its excursions into the limits of realistic representation.
Suarez combines two distinctive forms of discourse which are not often
found in a single work. He weaves together indirect and direct discourse
so that the voice of an omniscient narrator is punctuated by
conversations so immediate and vivid, they arouse almost a guilty
pleasure in overhearing them. The effect is stunning: in the hands of an
omniscient narrator, events carefully unfold, and the reader is provided
insight into the history and motivations of the characters.
Nothing could be more perfect than Suarez's narrative style for
telling the story of two truly unforgettable characters. The first is
Basilio, a compassionate, sensitive, yet puffy and moon-faced young man
who is misunderstood and maligned by a world which never bothers to find
out that he is not the slow dolt they take him for. The second is a
young girl, Luisa, who is orphaned when her homeless, indigent mother
dies of AIDS. Built on the history of the interaction of Basilio and
Luisa, Cortamares is the story of damaged individuals who are rendered
virtually mute in the face of the world's scorn, rejection, and
indifference.
Theirs is not an easy life. When Basilio does not have correct change
for his customary daily purchase of donuts, he pays with a large bill,
arousing unforeseen annoyance from the shopkeeper. Even this mild
incident is enough to paralyze Basilio, who cannot articulate his
thoughts quickly, and any perturbations from the routine put him in a
position of flustered, mute panic. The fact that the world mistakes
Basilio for a severely learning-disabled person is not surprising;
neither is Basilio's response, which is to sequester himself away
in his widowed mother's home, in a series of rooms he has outfitted
with televisions, VCR, and stereo. He does not leave his fortress except
for daily excursions to an abandoned housing development that adjoins
his wealthy neighborhood.
It is in this slice of abandoned suburbia that Basilio meets Isabel,
Luisa's mother, who is a squatter in one of the half-finished dream
homes. From the very beginning, the reader knows that Isabel is doomed:
her body inspires lust in violent men, and her mind craves escape, even
if this takes the form of drug-addiction. Basilio befriends the two, and
he brings them food, medicine, and supplies. He is their only reliable
friend, and when Isabel becomes so ill that she must go to the hospital,
she leaves her three-year-old daughter Luisa in his care, however
inadequate he might be. Basilio accepts the responsibility of raising
Luisa in the only way he knows. He takes her to his mother's house,
where he keeps the young child hidden away in his suite of rooms. The
image of Luisa, undetected in the heart of a large, rambling, and lonely
household, creates the perfect motif for the spark of childlike
freshness that resides at the heart of Basilio's personality.
Suarez creates a narrative which heightens the isolation and
alienation of the primary characters. The subordinated indirect
discourse which characterizes the omniscient narrator creates a mood of
distance and loneliness. It is as if the reader could, like the
narrator, peer into recesses that the characters themselves cannot see.
For example, the narrator articulates the thoughts that Basilio cannot
express, and he explains the profound powerlessness that Isabel seeks to
evade or blot out through drug addiction. Suarez enables the reader to
experience vicariously, and thus understand, Luisa's agoraphobia and her unquestioning acceptance of her tiny, hidden world within
Basilio's rooms. Luisa has been profoundly affected by her
mother's early neglect and abandonment, and it takes years to come
to terms with the fact that her mother is not coming back for her.
All the elements in Suarez's narrative combine to heighten a
sense of existential abandonment. In this universe there are no points
of transcendence, except in the fantastic stories woven in isolation
when Basilio embroiders a tale of his hometown, the quiet Spanish
seaside settlement of Cortamares, which Luisa expands to incorporate the
places and images she has seen on television. When Basilio is in danger
of being cheated out of the inheritance bequeathed him by his mother,
Luisa, who is now a teenager, insists they leave for Cortamares. Basilio
realizes there is a conflict between the Scheherezade-like stories he
has spun for Luisa and the tangible reality of Cortamares.
Nevertheless, within the confines of the novel, the differences
between the real and imagined Cortamares fade when the reader begins to
realize that the stories have been created as a place of rescue,
transcendence, and existential refuge. Luisa and Basilio are in large
part self-constructs of the visual and literary texts--television,
radio, books--that surround them. The spinning of stories to avoid
oblivion reinforces the existential notion that language constitutes the
fabric of Being and thus shields us from the unknowable. If Cortamares
is underlain by a vaguely tragic sense, it is because the story of
Basilio and Luisa connects so viscerally to the reader's own
struggles against despair, and the knowledge that reprieves are hard-won
through acts of benevolence and warmth. As a result, reading Cortamares
is a deeply moving experience.
Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma
