The novel’s dramatic frame is the kidnapping, in Paris, of a Latin bigwig—the so-called “person in charge of the coordination of Latin American affairs in Europe,” whom Cortázar calls the “Vip.”
It doesn’t matter that there is no such cosmic person, that he is a caricature, for almost everything in this novel is a caricature, including the author himself, who appears as “the one I told you.” Late in the novel he confesses: “At a certain point in the disorder the one I told you begins to realize that he’s gone too far in spontaneity.…”
Whether he has or not depends on the loyalty and pertinacity of the individual reader. I admit to agreeing with the author. He is taking a leaf from Pirandello and Flann O’Brien in letting author and character carry on dialogues, Platonic and otherwise. But he uses pronouns whimsically and with unnecessary obfuscation, intent on being original even if it kills us. Worse, his avant-garde forays too often drag us backward in time. He plumps, in one section for instance, for the use of candid sexual language.
“A man’s sex is so strange,” says one of the book’s women. And her bedmate retorts that “calling it a sex is silly, anyone would think you’d learned Spanish through a correspondence course.”
Cortázar then delivers up a set piece (as he does repeatedly in the book), this one on the sexual vulgate, and how it varies from Chile to Cuba to Argentina. We must, the argument goes, avoid using banal, lifeless sexual language; for “that type of vocabulary links us to the Vip.”
If this warmed-over sexual boldness should be confused with an avant-garde position, then someone please page Norman Mailer immediately. Mailer was arguing on behalf of dirty talk ten years ago as the way toward a funky new world, and even then we were hip-deep in the verbal crustaceanisms of Henry Miller and William Burroughs, and catching up belatedly with the waning clandestinism of De Sade’s stuff, and Frank Harris’s. After all that, can anyone still believe that foul-mouthery (or long hair, or blue jeans, or rock, or dope) will hasten the revolution? Can Cortázar?
Well maybe he doesn’t. Maybe his story of this handful of socialist plotters and their groupies is meant to satirize zealot as well as villain, for a dumber bunch of kidnappers you’re not likely to come upon in a hurry.
Yet, despite such disparagement, despite Cortázar’s recidivistic intellectuality, the book is a work of high seriousness in service of a higher morality—the use of excellent language, sex and silliness to carry us a few inches closer to socialist nirvana. It is translated with great panache, as usual, by the wizard Gregory Rabassa.
Anyone who values Cortázar’s previous work should certainly confront this new novel for historical similarities, anomalies and mutations. Anyone looking for literary effusions, or for meditations on the new social and political realities, will have to test the water and decide privately what has been revealed. Anyone looking for a good novel should keep looking.
1978
Pedro Juan Soto:
Spiks
To What Extent Was Enrique Soto the Creation of Pedro Juan Soto?: An Interview
Spiks
This is a landmark book, the first published work of one of the best modern Puerto Rican writers of serious fiction, Pedro Juan Soto. It is Soto’s second book to be published within a year, a breakthrough for Puerto Rican literature. Much high-quality Spanish-language fiction from the island remains dammed up behind him, victim, like Soto’s work, of this country’s longstanding linguistic and political prejudice toward Puerto Rican writers, many of whom are leftists and active workers for Puerto Rico’s political independence from the U.S. It is also a blatant case of literary myopia in which a rich cultural achievement on the American landscape has been totally ignored.
Soto’s first language is Spanish (he also has taught and written in English) but he is unquestionably an American, not a Caribbean, writer. His subject is the U.S.—the scene in New York and Puerto Rico, the interplay of the two cultures, the exploitation of the island, of the island in the city, of the islands of the Puerto Rican heart.
Spiks was pure gold as subject matter—the anguished spirit of New York’s Puerto Rican ghetto—when it appeared in Mexico in 1956 under the Los Presentes imprint. Other writers mined the same material much later, Piri Thomas in Down These Mean Streets, Oscar Lewis in La Vida, both nonfiction, both in English, both successful. Soto, in Spanish, remained invisible.
But Soto’s collection of seven short stories and six miniatures was never invisible in Puerto Rico. It was a cult work from the time its prepublication fragments began winning literary prizes in the early 1950s. It is a tiny book of short works whose concision has the excitement of poetry because of the enormities suggested in so few words.
Unfortunately the book was also a feat of language that the present English translation doesn’t reflect. Soto worked with the Puerto Rican Spanish vulgate in New York. Victoria Órtiz, who did the translation and a preface locating Soto in the literary framework of the island, doesn’t echo that vulgate with her Studs Loniganese: “… you think yer king or somethin. Geddoudahere, you miserable …,” an archaic American street idiom that has nothing to do with the language of Soto’s spiks.
The ghetto as prison, daily life as agony, that is what the world has come to for the people in these stories; a place where the innocent fail easily, love turns into hallucination or nightmare, violence erupts in the peaceful soul and mockery is the lot of the slut who finds God in her own belly. The people are pool players, lonely women, a would-be artist, a pushcart peddler, a barber. The mood is one of depression realism, but Soto is a skillful ironist who can turn a value inside out with the flick of a wrist and who sees well beyond the street problem. The street is only the now of these lives. But there was a garden. “In Puerto Rico in my day you didn’ see such things.…” And in the lost island garden, life was possible, even when the palm trees were fake and the moon was made of paper.
The chief influence on Spiks, according to Soto himself, was a book of stories in Spanish, El Hombre en la Calle (The Man in the Street) by José Luis González, which Soto read in New York in 1948. González looked on his own work as a break with the dominant tradition of “jibarismo,” the romanticized literature of Puerto Rico’s rural peasantry, and the beginnings of a realistic literature of the city. Soto, stunned by its powerful simplicity, vowed to match it. Spiks was the result.
González is now the big dad of the generation of writers that came to flower in the 1940s and 1950s and is enjoying a republishing renaissance in Puerto Rico after twenty years of exile in Mexico. Another of that generation, Emilio Díaz Valcárcel, won much attention in Spain and Latin America in 1971 with his avant-garde novel, Figuraciones en el Mes del Marzo (Figurations in the Month of March) and was accorded by some critics at that time a place in the current, so-called boom of quality Latin fictionists.
(Among other members of the forties—fifties generation in Puerto Rico—Rene Marqués, Edwin Figueroa, César Andreu Iglesias, Abelardo Díaz Alfaro, and Luis Rafael Sánchez—only Sánchez is widely known in the United States in 1992.)
One of Soto’s novels is available here. Dell published Hot Land, Cold Season (Ardiente Suelo, Fría Estación) as a paperback original in early 1973, but disguised it as a juvenile for the high-school market in Puerto Rican studies, assuring it of no serious attention.
But the odds against the novelist have always been longer in Puerto Rico than elsewhere. Soto recalled in a conversation at his home in San Juan that until his generation, Puerto Rican writers published their own books at their own expense. “We felt this was not honorable,” he said, “a hobby. I didn’t find any seriousness in them.”
Since Puerto Rico had no book publishers, the new generation went to Mexico and Spain for recognition. Los Presentes accepted Spiks but charged Soto $200 to help with the printing. It was his first and last bit of self-subsidy.
His second book was Usmail, a novel which won him a literary prize and became a Puerto Rican book club selection. All this earned hi
m $500. Ardiente Suelo followed and earned $300. El Francotirador (The Sniper), a novel, was a coup: $800. But times changed. Puerto Rico in the sixties mushroomed as a literary market. This has been largely because of the concern the 30,000 students and faculty at the University of Puerto Rico are suddenly showing for Puerto Rican literature.
“Professors who haven’t read a book in twenty years have begun to recognize Puerto Rican writers,” said Soto, who has been teaching literature at UPR.
The current English version of Spiks is the book’s fifth edition. The second, of 6,000 copies, was to be for distribution to high schools by the Puerto Rico Department of Education, but the Grundys thought it a bit salty and all 6,000 books are now somewhere in a closet. Soto doesn’t know where. The third and fourth editions were 3,000 each, for general distribution.
Soto has more novels, a story collection, and criticism coming and will try to publish it all off the island as a way of resisting insularity and also proselytizing abroad for the unsung Puerto Rican literature. When Soto talked of that literature being ignored for so long his bitterest word was for the Latin critics and writers who have come to live on the island but have written nothing about its books.
“I’ve asked myself if it’s the poor quality of our literature,” he said, “but I don’t find that true at all. I say it’s politics. They’re afraid that if they elevate a Puerto Rican book they’ll be attacked for selling out to a colony of American imperialism. American writers and critics who come here usually don’t know the language, but for the Latins to be so ignorant and ungrateful, that’s really sad. Every time I talk about this, people think I’m expecting it for myself, but that’s not true. I don’t mean people should praise the hell out of everything, but they should read whatever is on hand and comment on it. They seem to me to be mainly tourists.”
If there were any literary fair play such as Soto hopes for, Spiks would have been recognized and published in English in the late fifties, when its bleak realism would not have seemed dated. But then this is a work of protest as well as compassion, the kind of writing that has almost ceased to exist in the U.S., and whose role is partially filled here now by nonfiction. Puerto Rico exists in a different literary time zone from the mainland. Nonfiction does not yet have such a vogue on the island and fiction, old and new, is in flower, as it is throughout Latin America. Spiks, in 1974, must therefore be judged not as a creation from yesterday afternoon but as an artifact of precious metal lifted from a time capsule.
1974
To What Extent Was Enrique Soto the Creation of Pedro Juan Soto?: An Interview
Carlos Enrique “Quico” Soto Arriví, the eighteen-year-old son of famed Puerto Rican author Pedro Juan Soto, was one of two young men gunned down by police thwarting an alleged terrorist attempt near Villalba Tuesday noon.
Soto Arriví and a man identified as Arnaldo Darío Rosado, twenty-eight, were gunned down reportedly during a half-hour battle with twelve police agents, allegedly when the two were trying to sabotage federal and Commonwealth communications towers in Cerro Maravilla in the central mountains.…
—San Juan Star, July 27, 1978
In a story in Pedro Juan Soto’s new short-story collection, “Un Decir … (de la Violencia),” a young man strips himself naked and runs across an area guarded by armed police in order to explode a plastic bomb on the door of a university chancellor’s office, a symbolic bombing to affront what he feels is repressive authority.
He places the bomb on the door, puts his fingers in his ears, sees the door blown away. He waits for reprisals, but no one comes after him. He looks out toward the area where he had run the gauntlet of police steps. Panting, he throws himself on top of his own naked body, which lies on the lawn, a bullet through the forehead.
The explosion in the story proves to be only imagined by the young man in the instant before his death, and in this respect seems extraordinarily prophetic of the fate of the author’s son Carlos Enrique Soto Arriví, eighteen.
Young Soto was fatally shot during what police have said was to be a terrorist attack on a communications tower at Cerro Maravilla, near Villalba, on July 25. He and another man, Arnaldo Darío Rosado, twenty-eight, were shot to death by a squad of police, in mufti, who had been anticipating the attack for more than a day.
A police undercover agent, Alejandro González Malave, who was with Soto and Rosado, and who has been described as an agent provocateur, was wounded by his fellow police in the shooting. The three had kidnapped a público driver and taken him and his car to Cerro Maravilla with them. The driver, Julio Órtiz Molina, has described the event as a massacre.
The case of young Soto is singular for he is the son of one of the best-known independentistas in modern Puerto Rican history. Pedro Juan Soto has published seven works of literature—novels, short stories, theater pieces—in which his characters are often politically motivated, or are victims of oppressive social conditions. This is hardly the full range of his work, which is ambitious in intellectual and psychological as well as social and political dimensions. His works have received international attention and acclaim and made him one of Puerto Rico’s most famous writers.
But because of the political element in his writing, and because Soto has associated himself publicly with the cause of Puerto Rican independence, with the Cuban revolution, and with other leftist causes, the question arises: to what extent was Enrique Soto the creation of Pedro Juan Soto? What does his father think of what he was, and of what he planned to do at Cerro Maravilla? What does this father now plan to do as a consequence of his son’s killing?
Soto was interviewed at length last week and addressed himself candidly to these questions. He spoke entirely without emotion, as if his son were a character he had created in a novel. His friends are intrigued by the obvious personal control which Soto maintains over his emotions, though his wife, Carmen, who fills with tears at the mention of her stepson Enrique, says that Soto does not sleep at night now. “He lies awake with his eyes open, thinking it out, thinking everything out,” she said.
Soto neither looks nor talks like a sleepless man. He writes and speaks fluent English (in which this interview was conducted), and his responses could in no way be considered the responses of a fatigued or confused person.
He believes that his son was entrapped by a provocateur and that he was ripe for entrapment.
He thinks he himself failed with his son because his son is dead.
He thinks he himself has been a failure because he has been too much a literary man and insufficiently a political activist.
He believes political violence is on the rise in Puerto Rico.
He believes there is a concerted effort by the enemies of Puerto Rican independence to commit a kind of psychological and social “genocide” on the young generation of independentistas.
Enrique Soto, the second of Soto’s three sons (Roberto is twenty-six, Juan is thirteen), became politically conscious about 1974 when his father and stepmother, Carmen Lugo Filippi, were both studying for their doctorates in literature at the University of Toulouse in France. (Both Soto and his wife teach at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras.) Enrique was with them in France, and learned to speak French well; and later was with them in Zaragoza, Spain, where they wrote their theses. This was a period before and after the death of Franco, and Enrique became absorbed in both French and Spanish politics, and talked often with his father about such matters—journalism in a dictatorship, the discovery of America as a capitalist endeavor, the workers’ movement.
“In Spain he was of course against Franco,” said Soto. “And he also complained about his fellow students there. They had all been born under this dictatorship and it was really amazing to him to find them so docile … nobody even contradicted a teacher.”
Enrique was a consistent reader, often of books suggested by his father. Soto says his son also read several of his fictional works and liked Spiks best, a collection of short stories about Puerto Ricans in New
York City.
“He also liked Usmail [a novel], but El Francotirador [The Sniper, another novel] he had doubts about,” said Soto. “The technique was too advanced for him. When he died he was reading Un Decir … (de la Violencia) [A Saying About Violence].”
The young Soto had many friends in Spain and had a girlfriend there with whom he corresponded after he came back to San Juan. They exchanged clippings of articles on politics. Back here, said his father, he eventually found a new girlfriend. But he was not quite as gregarious here as he had been in Spain.
“I found that he didn’t have many friends here,” Soto said. “Two or three, maybe. He had acquaintances. He was gregarious as a child, but by aging he got more particular. I noticed he was staying up late in recent times and I used to wait for him and give him hell. He said he was no longer a child, that he could no longer get home by ten o’clock. He wanted to stay until eleven. But even then I’d have to wait half an hour or forty-five minutes longer.”
“Were you a strict parent?” he was asked.
“Yes, I think I was very strict.”
The younger Soto was, of course, not wholly political. He was a fan of films, science fiction particularly, and he had seen and talked much about Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He was a fanatic for rock music, and particularly for salsa. His father gave him records by such traditional salsa groups as Ismael Rivera and El Gran Combo, but he preferred the more modern, and wilder, music.
“He was obeying the fashions of his time,” his father said. “I told him all this babbling, no lyrics at all, was just shouts, music made by mutes. Well, he said I was out of his time. He said he couldn’t blame me, but then I should not criticize his taste.”
Writing was a part of the young man’s life also. He wrote and enjoyed writing on social studies at the high school he was attending, República de Colombia in Río Piedras. “He liked his teacher and spoke often about him. Enrique said he was a good teacher because he dealt with facts, with personal observations, not with suspicions, about what was right or wrong.”