The Armies

Evello Rosero

The Spanish Civil War, World War II, Vietnam have all produced legendary work which reviewers invariably tend to portray as epic in concept and redemptive in effect. Evelio Rosero joins an elite band of brothers with The Armies.

Ismael Pasos is a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher who lives in a Colombian highland village with his wife Otilia. In their garden of Eden, she tends her fish and cats, while Ismael climbs his ladder ostensibly to pick oranges, but in fact to ogle at Geraldina sunbathing naked in the neighbouring garden.

It has been a lifelong passion of his to spy on females and, so unashamedly does he indulge this passion, voyeurism is in danger of being interpreted as a virtue.

Ismael, leaves this “town of peace” to visit a healer friend on the mountain. On his return, Otilia has disappeared. His mind drifting, Ismael searches for her, his quest taking him through a gallery of characters worthy of magic realism: Maestro Claudino, the healer; Hortensia Galindo, possessor of “two colossal round melons”; town drunk Mauricio Rey; the wayward Fr Albornoz; the rationalist Dr Orduz; the sluttish Cristina; and the paranoid Captain Berrio. Each of these characters is besieged from without by paramilitaries, drug traders, militias and the army; from within by the fear of kidnap by one or other of the protagonists and its consequences.

Ismael’s pursuit of Otilia is always one step behind her last sighting, one step closer to another disappearance/atrocity, one step towards the eventual depopulation of this town of peace – a misnomer if ever there was one, with so many barbarians at the gates.

Rosero’s depiction of life in the town of San Jose is sensuous and vibrant in its celebration of the normality of life. Though, as a result of his hero’s failing memory, events take on an almost dreamlike quality, episodic in presentation yet random in interaction, the author rejects a dreamlike approach.

He has stated that, as an investigative reporter by profession, he chose to write an account of the war based on media reports and word of mouth attestation. He rejects the use of symbol.

Nevertheless, a recurring image haunts the reader: a child approaches a huge man dressed in a white suit, eating a white ice cream, and shoots him in the forehead. What strikes Ismael is not the red spot like a third eye on the dead man, but the dead eyes of the child.

This image recurs in the repeated attacks by whatever army as boy soldiers kidnap, rape and kill indiscriminately with no hint of humanity in their eyes. In a war in which over 100,000 Colombians have disappeared in the past 20 years, there are no victors, only victims: innocent civilians and dehumanised boy soldiers.

Evelio Rosero, in this Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner, refuses to take sides, instead “through writing (he) was able to use the literary art as witness”. The work is an elegant, finely paced literary gem at the core of which is man’s resilience and his pursuit of truth in the face of evil. Anne McLean, the translator of that other great quest for truth and reconciliation, Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, reinforces this realisation with a quick-witted, tender translation.

There are moments when the timeframe floats free. However, these are the privileges of a memory in decline. These are the dream effects that lead to the nightmare in which Ismael happens upon soldiers raping the corpse of Geraldina. In this terrifying climax, the voyeur ironically finds redemption and we the readers are once again faced with the guilt of the world’s indifference to the consequences of the other man’s war.