Lives littered by tragedies
Sometimes the fault lines that grind and gape beneath the feet of the characters in these nine stories by Daniel Alarcon, a talented young Peruvian American writer, are physical. In “The Visitor,” for instance, a landslide in the mountains engulfs an entire town except for the cemetery where the narrator and his children had gone to bury a dead baby. His wife, left at home to recover from the birth, is among the victims. This scene of desolation is strangely cheerful. Boards from uprooted coffins furnish shelter; aid packages float down by parachute.
Giddy with shock, the narrator, once poor, realizes that the best farmland in the area “now had no owner other than me.” More often, the fractures in “War by Candlelight” are economic and spiritual, though no less real. In “City of Clowns,” a young man who escaped the slums of Lima to become a journalist is upset when his widowed mother befriends the mistress for whom his father left her. The father, a skilled workman, remodeled the houses of the wealthy, cased them for valuables and later burglarized them. He understood the “essential truth of Lima: if there is money to be made, it must be bled from these stone and concrete city blocks,” the son recalls with a painful mixture of pride and guilt. The son even helped his father steal from a generous family that hired his mother as a maid and paid his way through private school. “Some win and some lose, and there are ways to tilt the odds.”
While growing up in the United States, Alarcon spent summers with relatives back in Lima during Peru’s civil war against the Sendero Luminoso. Two of the strongest stories in this collection are set against the backdrop of this bloody struggle between a repressive government and vicious Maoist guerrillas.
“Flood” is narrated by a street kid whose hero, a neighborhood gang leader and former soldier, is locked up with many of his former enemies in a prison nicknamed the University because “it’s where you went when you finished high school.” When a riot breaks out, the government, rather than risk an assault, prefers to burn down the prison and kill everyone inside -- captured terrorists, ordinary inmates and hostages alike.
The title story, which has the bones of a potential novel, outlines two decades in the life of a man who joins the rebellion for idealistic reasons and tries to juggle work and family with periodic stints in jungle training camps. The strains of clandestine activity, the constant fear, the rifts with friends and kin, the inevitable moral compromises wear on him, but “[t]he crisis they had foreseen in their youth had finally arrived. It was too late to give up.”
However difficult it may be for a person to straddle two cultures, it’s an advantage for a writer -- an advantage Alarcon exploits with a technical skill and a maturity of feeling that belie his age.
He can describe the pull of the United States as Peruvians feel it -- as a force that, in “Absence,” tempts an artist visiting New York to steal his host’s girlfriend in hope of marrying her and gaining a permanent visa; and that, in “A Science for Being Alone,” threatens to deprive an unambitious man of his girlfriend and baby daughter.
But he also is aware of the illusory nature of that pull. In “A Strong Dead Man,” poor immigrant boys playing by the Hudson River glare at a sightseeing boat laden with tourists. “[N]one of them knew why they hated that boat so much.” Alarcon knows.
Like all good short-story writers, he has the gift of compression, of reducing ideas to images. Striking details are what we remember best from “War by Candlelight.” In “Flood,” it’s the dirty torrent that, like the war, sweeps down on arid Lima from the mountains. In “The Visitor,” it’s the brightly colored neckties from a Danish aid package. In “City of Clowns,” it’s the greasepaint, rubber nose and giant shoes the young journalist dons to hide from the world and himself after his father’s death. Only in disguise can he overcome his disappointment in his mother and finally bring her some much-needed comfort.
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Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.