Dancing With Mr. D

“Our Lady of the Assassins” is the lyrical reverse side of violent current events, as if, were you to turn over a newspaper devoted to violence, you would discover a sonnet. Fernando Vallejo is a much-published, much-praised novelist in Colombia and throughout the Spanish-speaking world, but this is his first novel to be translated into English. It is also the subject of a new film by Barbet Schroeder.

The unnamed narrator is a middle-aged man who has returned to Colombia, probably for good, and his native Medellin, “the capital of hate” in the “most criminal country on Earth.” There, at a friend’s apartment, he meets a teenage hit man who, like so many of the poor boys of his generation, has a strange foreign name, Alexis; all of his friends are named Faber or Eder or Rommel or Yeison. And, like them, he is surrounded by the glory of his reputation (“He’s already got ten or more victims to his name,” the friend says at the moment of introduction). The narrator immediately makes love with the young gangster, whose thin, naked body under his flashy clothes is covered with scapulars, that is, holy medals or pieces of cloth. No explanation is given for their sudden intimacy. As the intermediary says to the narrator, “These boys belong to nobody. They belong to whoever needs them.”

The poor outskirts of the city look and sound like scenes from Dante’s “Inferno.” Tumbledown shacks, unpaved streets, blaring televisions reporting the latest gangster deaths, roving bands of soccer hooligans mingling with holy processions of candle-bearing penitents, drive-by murderers shooting nonchalantly from car windows in broad daylight before hundreds of witnesses--this is the constant pageant of Colombian life. I realize Dante describes nothing exactly comparable, to be sure, but the prevailing mood of hatred, pain and boredom shares the same spirit. At dawn, beggars are found stabbed to death--their eyes have been dug out and sold for university research.

Alexis and the narrator lead a strange existence of sleeping late, shopping for clothes, roaming the city and visiting every one of its countless churches, offering a prayer at every altar. The older man buys the young man a television with a satellite dish “that picks up every station on Earth and the galaxies, too.” Alexis channel-surfs hour after hour.

The nights are devoted to passion, to endless lovemaking. Alexis has never touched a woman nor wanted to (“So that was what was behind those green eyes, then, a purity unsullied by women”), whereas the narrator says his interest in women depends. “On what?” Alexis asks him. “On their brothers.” The narrator revels in his kept boy’s love: “It’s not very charitable, I know, to exhibit your own happiness in front of other people’s misfortune, to recount stories of unbridled love to someone who lives as a prisoner, locked up, married, with a prim, fat wife and five kids eating, whining and watching television.”

This is territory marked out by the great French novelist Jean Genet who, in the five novels he wrote during World War II and just after, glorified the world of Montmartre drag queens and boy prostitutes and their pimp lovers, who were often petty criminals. The contempt for the heterosexual bourgeois reader, to whom the story is addressed, was already present in Genet, who was determined to mystify, seduce and insult that reader through the magical wiles of his writing and the systematic reversal of all normal values.

It’s not an approach that European or American gay writers today particularly favor, especially since contemporary gays seem hell-bent on assimilation and tend to play down their sexual and moral excesses. The older male narrator, who appears to be interchangeable with the author, dotes on his young criminal lover in the books of both Genet and Vallejo, and indeed in Genet’s “Funeral Rites” and Vallejo’s “Our Lady of the Assassins,” the entire text can be read as a cenotaph raised to that lover after his death.

For Vallejo’s pages are soaked in blood and burnt as an offering to the dead. “At twelve,” Vallejo writes, “a kid from the comunas is, as they say, an old man: so little life remains to him “

When the narrator idly complains about a neighbor who plays his ghetto-blaster too loud, Alexis vows to murder him--and does shoot him down in the street, aiming right between his victim’s eyes. In turn, Alexis is gunned down by a passing hit man and killed. Just as the narrator in Genet’s “Funeral Rites” imagines having sex with his lover’s assassin, in the same way the narrator in Vallejo’s book ends up with the guy who murdered his lover.

This discovery, however, does not excite Vallejo’s narrator to wreak revenge on the culprit. He realizes, as he puts it, “that impunity and punishment were all the same to me, and that vengeance was too much of a burden for my advancing years.”

Just as Genet, following Baudelaire’s example, sought for beauty in squalor, Vallejo has discovered something sexy and hellishly appealing in the slums of Medellin, the drug capital of the world. In this place, the world’s supply of cocaine is traded. The stakes are high--so high that they cost thousands of young lives every year. Vallejo--perverse, poetic, dramatically disabused--is the poet of this destroyed, destructive culture. *