The Last Days of El Comandante by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer, University of Texas Press, 2020
Can a single person hold a country together? Are the mundane pleasantries we all agree to participate in the only things that keep society from devolving into complete chaos? How much control do we really have over even the smallest details of our lives? Written by Hugo Chávez’s biographer Alberto Barrera Tyszka, The Last Days of El Comandante takes the reader back to the final few months of the Venezuelan strongman’s life, a time when Venezuela “was always on the point of exploding but it never did. Or worse: it was exploding in slow motion, little by little, without anyone actually realizing.” These reflections by one of the novel’s main protagonists, Miguel Sanabria (retired doctor turned chair of his apartment building’s residents’ association), introduce the reader to the overwhelming uncertainty that began to engulf the country with Chávez’s mysterious 2011 operation in Havana, Cuba. It merits stating that between ongoing food shortages, contested presidential elections, and accusations of U.S. interference in Venezuelan politics, the instability permeating the novel has an all-too-real corollary in the Venezuela of reality.
With Chávez’s impending demise as a backdrop, the novel thrusts us into the unraveling lives of a number of interconnected characters, despite its relatively short two hundred and forty-eight pages. The variant cast includes: Sanabria and his wife Beatriz, who don’t agree on politics, and his nephew, Vladimir, with whom he is very close; Tatiana, a freelance designer, and her common-law husband Fredy, who receive word that the woman who owns their apartment not only plans on returning to Caracas from Miami, but that she needs them to move out at a time when affordable, secure housing in the city is at a premium well beyond their means; María, a young student, spars with her justifiably fearful single mother, who pulls her out of school and confines her to the apartment because of ongoing violence in the streets; and lastly, U.S. journalist Madeleine Butler who, entranced by Chávez’s larger-than-life persona, flies to Venezuela to write a personal profile on the ailing strongman. Chávez himself, of course, serves as the human event that binds all of these people and their troubles together, even as the country’s decline mirrors the slow deterioration of his own physical state. As things grow worse, the characters spin in and out of each other’s orbit as their daily lives and relationships become harder and harder to maintain. Sanabria gets sucked into the conflict between Tatiana, Fredy, and their landlady, while María, locked in her apartment, begins an online relationship with the couple’s young son over the internet. Every chapter is punctuated with official updates about Chávez’s health, as well as different characters’ responses to those updates, an almost point-counterpoint format that underscores people’s increasing lack of faith in their government and in the world around them. When Miguel Sanabria first informs his wife of Chávez’s illness, for example, she responds by saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all lies . . . Something the Cubans made up to distract us.”
Indeed, relations between the two socialist countries lies at the heart of the novel’s international politics. Chávez goes there for cancer treatment and numerous operations, while many of the novel’s characters live in fear of Cuban secret agents knocking on their doors. In a move that literary critics are sure to zero in on, when Fredy begins writing a book on Chávez’s illness, he turns to Cuban émigré Aylín Hernández for exclusive information concerning the president’s treatment and prognosis. Rather than being in the country because of socialist solidarity, we are told that Cubans are trapped in the same omnipresent systems of control as their Venezuelan counterparts. From a Venezuelan perspective, the Cubans are both victims and potential victimizers, with “Cubans in Venezuela . . . practically imprisoned and . . . watched very closely . . . Fear proliferated uncontrollably. Like metastasis.” Hearing of Fredy and Aylín’s relationship, Tatiana presciently tells Fredy to be careful; and, perhaps predictably, the condition of Fredy getting his exclusive information is a sham marriage to Aylín so she can escape the island once and for all. While this subplot unfolds, Tatiana is at a loss as to how to deal with their landlord, who has partnered with a small cadre of experienced protestors to literally squat in her own apartment. And then, of course, there is their young son Rodrigo, who is struggling to make sense of this new reality as the one he grew up in comes apart around him. As his relationship with María evolves, moving towards the novel’s ambiguous, devastating conclusion, one is left wondering about the inherent value of innocence in a world where the smallest act can have grave, lifelong consequences.
Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer’s translation is nothing short of exquisite. The English itself is colloquial, smooth, and accessible, as seen in the previous quote from Beatriz Sanabria, in which she uses the technically incorrect “was” instead of “were” when stating, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all lies.” Similarly, having flown to Cuba to consummate their sham marriage, Aylín teasingly refers to Fredy as “kiddo.” That said, the novel does a deft job of maintaining the feel of the work’s original language. A few pages later, for example, Aylín calls him “papi” when telling Fredy that he cannot leave yet, as “I still got one more document to sort out and you have to sign it.” Further, subtler touches such as the consistent use of accents on the character’s names and the unapologetic use of untranslated acronyms like CIMEQ (the Centro de Investigaciones Médicas Quirúgicas or Center for Surgical Research) constantly remind the reader that the novel they are reading is a translated text, and that certain linguistic elements from the original text can and should be preserved in the language of the translation. Finally, the medical language surrounding Chávez’s illness is rendered with a technical proficiency that communicates the complexities of a register that comes across as foreign in any language, and underscores the alienation that the novel’s characters and readers experience at the hands of an ever-more confusing outside world. In sum, the novel’s English translation does a devastating job of portraying the almost magical power that a single, charismatic leader can hold over a country and its people, becoming in essence a talisman that enables people to ignore reality in favor of a blind faith that things are indeed going to get better. When the spell is broken, however, and the person in charge no longer has control, the at times carnavalesque social upending that ensues suggests that control itself is an illusion, and that we are all creatures of change and circumstance, more so than products of our own will.
The Last Days of El Comandante will be a riveting, tragic read for those who are well versed in authors from Borges to Poniatowska, as well as those who are new to Latin American literature in general. In a world seizing in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly battered by authoritarian politics, and buttressed by dreams of immanent socialist utopias, the novel’s intimate portrayal of a country’s slow shattering will resonate globally in its exploration of how people struggle to deal with violence, desperation, hope, and fear, as events drag them into an unthinkable future.
Photo credit: Cristina Marcano
Paul Worley is Associate Professor of Global Literature at Western Carolina University. He is the author of Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (2013; oral performances recorded as part of this book project are available at tsikbalichmaya.org), and with Rita M. Palacios is co-author of Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (2019). He is a Fulbright Scholar, and 2018 winner of the Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. In addition to his academic work, he has translated selected works by Indigenous authors such as Hubert Malina, Adriana López, and Ruperta Bautista, serves as editor-at-large for Mexico for Asymptote, and as poetry editor for the North Dakota Quarterly.
*****
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