Cortamares.

Nash, Susan Smith

In his first novel, Cortamares, Juan Jose Suarez develops a distinctive narrative style that is as emotionally compelling as it is fluid in its excursions into the limits of realistic representation. Suarez combines two distinctive forms of discourse which are not often found in a single work. He weaves together indirect and direct discourse so that the voice of an omniscient narrator is punctuated by conversations so immediate and vivid, they arouse almost a guilty pleasure in overhearing them. The effect is stunning: in the hands of an omniscient narrator, events carefully unfold, and the reader is provided insight into the history and motivations of the characters.

Nothing could be more perfect than Suarez's narrative style for telling the story of two truly unforgettable characters. The first is Basilio, a compassionate, sensitive, yet puffy and moon-faced young man who is misunderstood and maligned by a world which never bothers to find out that he is not the slow dolt they take him for. The second is a young girl, Luisa, who is orphaned when her homeless, indigent mother dies of AIDS. Built on the history of the interaction of Basilio and Luisa, Cortamares is the story of damaged individuals who are rendered virtually mute in the face of the world's scorn, rejection, and indifference.

Theirs is not an easy life. When Basilio does not have correct change for his customary daily purchase of donuts, he pays with a large bill, arousing unforeseen annoyance from the shopkeeper. Even this mild incident is enough to paralyze Basilio, who cannot articulate his thoughts quickly, and any perturbations from the routine put him in a position of flustered, mute panic. The fact that the world mistakes Basilio for a severely learning-disabled person is not surprising; neither is Basilio's response, which is to sequester himself away in his widowed mother's home, in a series of rooms he has outfitted with televisions, VCR, and stereo. He does not leave his fortress except for daily excursions to an abandoned housing development that adjoins his wealthy neighborhood.

It is in this slice of abandoned suburbia that Basilio meets Isabel, Luisa's mother, who is a squatter in one of the half-finished dream homes. From the very beginning, the reader knows that Isabel is doomed: her body inspires lust in violent men, and her mind craves escape, even if this takes the form of drug-addiction. Basilio befriends the two, and he brings them food, medicine, and supplies. He is their only reliable friend, and when Isabel becomes so ill that she must go to the hospital, she leaves her three-year-old daughter Luisa in his care, however inadequate he might be. Basilio accepts the responsibility of raising Luisa in the only way he knows. He takes her to his mother's house, where he keeps the young child hidden away in his suite of rooms. The image of Luisa, undetected in the heart of a large, rambling, and lonely household, creates the perfect motif for the spark of childlike freshness that resides at the heart of Basilio's personality.

Suarez creates a narrative which heightens the isolation and alienation of the primary characters. The subordinated indirect discourse which characterizes the omniscient narrator creates a mood of distance and loneliness. It is as if the reader could, like the narrator, peer into recesses that the characters themselves cannot see. For example, the narrator articulates the thoughts that Basilio cannot express, and he explains the profound powerlessness that Isabel seeks to evade or blot out through drug addiction. Suarez enables the reader to experience vicariously, and thus understand, Luisa's agoraphobia and her unquestioning acceptance of her tiny, hidden world within Basilio's rooms. Luisa has been profoundly affected by her mother's early neglect and abandonment, and it takes years to come to terms with the fact that her mother is not coming back for her.

All the elements in Suarez's narrative combine to heighten a sense of existential abandonment. In this universe there are no points of transcendence, except in the fantastic stories woven in isolation when Basilio embroiders a tale of his hometown, the quiet Spanish seaside settlement of Cortamares, which Luisa expands to incorporate the places and images she has seen on television. When Basilio is in danger of being cheated out of the inheritance bequeathed him by his mother, Luisa, who is now a teenager, insists they leave for Cortamares. Basilio realizes there is a conflict between the Scheherezade-like stories he has spun for Luisa and the tangible reality of Cortamares.

Nevertheless, within the confines of the novel, the differences between the real and imagined Cortamares fade when the reader begins to realize that the stories have been created as a place of rescue, transcendence, and existential refuge. Luisa and Basilio are in large part self-constructs of the visual and literary texts--television, radio, books--that surround them. The spinning of stories to avoid oblivion reinforces the existential notion that language constitutes the fabric of Being and thus shields us from the unknowable. If Cortamares is underlain by a vaguely tragic sense, it is because the story of Basilio and Luisa connects so viscerally to the reader's own struggles against despair, and the knowledge that reprieves are hard-won through acts of benevolence and warmth. As a result, reading Cortamares is a deeply moving experience.

Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma