Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo (Vintage International)
Santiago Roncagliolo’s dark, award-winning thriller, Red April, must have one of the most poignant scenes I have read in recent times, a moment that captures the soul of the work, directing and shaping it.
Picture this: two bureaucrats, one a nonchalant pathologist and the other a frightened prosecutor, are standing in a morgue that used to be an obstretrics ward. Dr Posadas is talking to Félix Chacaltana Saldîvar about a burned and mutilated body, the sheet pulled away, that lays lifeless before them; the body is so vivid it “seemed to be smoking”.
Only stubs remain of the fingers, an arm is missing (he was not one-armed; it had been hacked off as though a “dragon attacked him”); on the man’s forehead a cross has been etched using, perhaps, a butcher’s knife. After going through this treatment little about the body suggests its human origin.
The prosecutor, sweaty and dizzy, wants to collect a report and flee from the hospital grounds; the pathologist, on the other hand, is chatty, evidently grateful for living human company. Yet even the pathologist, who has seen countless cadavers, is dumbfounded: “I’ve never seen anybody so burned. I’ve never seen anything so burned,” he says.
On his way out, the prosecutor asks: “Where could a body be burned so severely? In a baker’s oven — in a gas explosion?” Biting into a chocolate, the pathologist responds: “In hell, Señor Prosecutor.”
Bloody past
It’s the year 2000, during Holy Week; the brutal guerrilla war waged by Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path), a Peruvian Maoist insurgency, against the Albert Fujimori dictatorship is officially over. Even though 70?000 people are dead, the state is rehabilitating that bloody past, blotting out inconvenient details and suppressing any information that may keep tourists away.
The memorable scene captured above is prefigured by three epigraphs, the first eclipsing the second in its apocalyptic tones. One, in part, reads: “Observe the orgy of corruption that is flooding the country, the hunger that annihilates some, the excess that fills others to bursting; … in this way the violence will be explained.” Sound familiar?
Red April first came out in Spanish in 2006 and was awarded the Al-faguara Prize that year. The English translation came out last year.
Saldîvar is the novel’s chief protagonist, a comically conscientious and procedurally rigid associate district prosecutor for Ayacucho, a small town in southwest Peru. He writes with the grace of a man, say, on stilts, using a suitably ancient Olivetti typewriter that doesn’t have the Spanish character Ñ, churning out comic reports in strained officialese. At once delusional, frustrated and ambitious, he always finds something to applaud about himself — after every report he smiles contentedly, contemplating that “in his lawyer’s heart, a poet struggled to emerge”.
Roncagliolo has a magician’s ability to make whatever he touches into a spectacle or a ritual. This overwhelming atmosphere is accentuated because the book is set during Catholic festivals.
It seems that wherever you look there’s a festival and blood: the blood of Christ, the blood of murder victims, sacrificial lambs. It’s blood, blood, blood — everywhere. A central ritual of one gory festival involves tying a condor by its talons to the back of a bull, at which it predatorially pecks, tearing the living beast apart. Yet someone points out “that’s a folkloric celebration — not terror”. If you look this way you will see the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors roughing the Indians, if you tilt your head a bit it’s the boots of soldiers grinding the heads of the civilians. Animals are not spared terror — it seems to be integral to the festivities.
A distinct signature
Attempts by the prosecutor to investigate the murders are thwarted by the police and the army, symbolised by Commander Carrion. Even though he wants to internalise the injunction by the commander that “in this country there’s no terrorism, by orders from the top”, he is confounded by the bodies that keep piling up, as officialdom insists on everyone ingesting amnesiac tablets. All of the deaths have, as it were, a distinct signature — they are the work of one hand or a group working in concert. But as soon as there are footprints in the earth, a force, what could be a torrential wind blowing from the Andes, billows down to erase the evidence and the prosecutor has to start all over again.
The sense of terror in Red April is visceral and unrelenting, as in the sense of a death foretold: there’s the obstretrics ward turned morgue, a body killed and drained of all blood — and, if that doesn’t scare you, there’s a crematorium in a Catholic church (as a rule cremation is discouraged by the church because it believes the body should be intact as it awaits resurrection and judgment).
When the prosecutor is dispatched to go to the provinces as an election observer, he’s confronted by dogs killed by artists: every morning dogs are hung up, some strangled, others beheaded, some slit, their innards spewing out. Always attached to the dogs are signs that read: “This is how traitors die” and “Death
to turncoats”.
In this dystopian world, as a sad Andean cry spirals up the snow-capped mountains, it’s not quite clear whether Saldîvar is the hunter or the hunted. As he ambles on vertiginously, following the trail of the murderer, he contemplates the city of Ayacucho (Quechua for “place of the dead”) as a “great sepulchre of slaves buried alive”.
Feeding into this great sense of tragedy and horror is the resigned cynicism that suffuses the lives of the native people. Replying to a question of whether he believes in heaven, a jailed member of the Shining Path says: “I believe in hell, Señor Prosecutor. I live there. Hell is not being able to die.”
Red April is a great achievement. It melds Incan and Catholic millenarian and resurrection doctrines, the documentary style (some of the dialogue is taken from official documents) and other genres to come up with a portrait of a society full of people who have, to use two lines from the book, “just come out of a sewer. Or a mass grave.”
It is a riveting read, a moving portrayal of a persecuted people who walk through a necropolis with the kind of jaunty stride more suitable to a carnival.