BOOKS
657
Pedro Juan is interested in surviving. To the degree that he reduces
life to its most basic instincts, he uncovers what is fundamentally
human. Paradoxically he discovers in the human debris a quintessential
humanity out of reach of the socialist reformers and outside the scope
of our own novels of manners. Sexual acts, however lovingly observed
or self-indulgent, constitute a form of Cuban
networking,
even when
reduced to their detailed, itemized physical elements . For all the heat
and passion of the writing, Pedro Juan preserves a kind of floating
detachment: the abrupt, impulsive, and variegated copulative acts stitch
together a societal tissue as every other kind of social bond has dissolved
in the accelerated collapse of a "utopian" society.
When we first meet Pedro Juan we have the classic Latino
macho.
No
crack of vulnerability, no self-pity. The sexual predator, the irrepressible
seducer. But as the stories unfold, we discover his terrors and his fury of
resistance, his unabashed weaknesses and emotional exhaustion. The
character Pedro Juan is gradually stripped down to the bare bones of
human existence. The erotic veils of sexuality itself are torn aside, when
he thinks as he copulates with an older woman, "incredibly fat, with huge
flabby tits and a huge flabby ass.. . .It would be like fucking a turtle." An
equation of the spirit and the flesh takes shape, a
satori
regarding the fun–
damentals of human existence, a furious spurning of the superfluous.
Rare, disconcerting flashes of a "spiritual" consciousness occur, without
the slightest inflection of irony
(de rigueur
for any North American writer
in the context of a self-righteous, fundamentalist obsession with wealth
and consumption: wealth is virtue. Has anyone noticed that we are drift–
ing toward a mullah-society?). Here it is admissible, in the ambient sav–
agery of a survival ethos.
In
fact the innocence of such spiritual
"oversights" (hardly insights) is in such stark contrast to the culture of
ejaculation and bloodshed, of shit-misery and self-mockery, that one is
entitled to ask whether this picaresque novel is not really an account of
the "night of the soul." The references to spiritual tranquility are elusive,
ephemeral-yet direct: "And I keep on struggling against fear. Struggling
is what I call it at least. I can't struggle alone. But every night I pray and I
ask God to take away my fear and to clear up the confusion in my head."
"I'd take a break and give thanks to God . . .without faith, no matter
where you are, life is hell." What North American writer could write these
lines? They simply would not be credible in a country where establishment
religion is in abject service to mammon. Our conventional religiosity is
not at hand here-Pedro Juan in distress resorts to
santeras
and maintains
an episodic cult of his
Orisha
statuettes like most of his fellow Cubans.
