Santiago Roncagliolo, Red April. Edith Grossman, translator. Pantheon, 2006/2009.
I’m not a fan of whodunits. I have found the few I’ve read too predictable and with unsatisfying resolutions. The last one I read–Juan De Recacoechea’s Andean Express–had a derivative plot and just kind of petered out in the end. I’m a big fan of Jorge Luis Borges’s whodunits, but that’s Borges. I had hope for Red April, which is set in April 2020, during Holy Week, in the Peruvian highlands, as the internal war with the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) has begun to wind down. At that time, Peru was marked by both terrorism and dictatorship (Alberto Fujimori), a social instability that could provide the seed-bed for fascinating narratives. Many of the characters in the novel are indigenous, reminding me of the great Peruvian novelist José Maria Arguedas and the Mexican, Rosario Castellanos, both of whom focus much of their work on their respective indigenous communities. Finally, although Roncagliolo does not label him as such, the main character of Red April, Felix Chacaltana Saldivar, is a district prosecutor and seems to be on the spectrum somewhere. He notices and follows patterns and routines; he is a rule-bound stickler for details. Placing this kind of character as the problem-solver in a place that suffered so much political turmoil seems propitious.
Initially, I was fascinated, because Felix Chacaltana Saldivar navigates a labyrinthine path through much of the novel, which kept me guessing, but I think the ending fails because Roncagliolo changes Chacaltana’s character in ways that I don’t find credible. (By the end of writing this review, though, I’ve changed my mind.)
The story begins with the discovery of a burned–partially cremated, actually–body in a hayloft in Quinua, a small indigenous village. The chapter is from Chacaltana’s prosecutor’s report of the incident, Its language is precise, elliptical and bureaucratic, as well as meticulously edited; his typewriter doesn’t have a working ñ, so he avoids using words with ñ. Back in Ayacucho, the region’s main city, Chacaltana visits the forensic pathologist, who shows him the body, after which Chacaltana believes that the terrorists–senderistas–are resurgent. He is so upset that he does not want to return home to see his mother before he calms down, so he stops in a restaurant for some maté, and the waitress disconcertingly flirts with him. Once he is home, we learn that the mother has been long dead but that Chacaltana keeps a room in his house as a shrine to his mother, where he lays out her clothes, which he talks to as he processes the difficulties of his day. What I initially thought of as creepy behavior, I came to understand as a coping mechanism; the symbolic construction of his mother as a therapeutic object. His mother was originally from Cuzco, of indigenous origins presumably, and he has no memory or knowledge of his father. ←An important plot point for later in the book.
But what makes Chacaltana something other than odd is that he knows how to manage his eccentricities to get what he wants from the norm authority figures (political, military, police) who manage the volatile world they live in. For all that he does not seem aware of the customs that should dictate social interactions, Chacaltana’s attention to detail allows him to read people’s behavior closely and understand their actions and interactions as keeping with expected behaviors or breaking with them. Yet, others find Chacaltana impenetrable. He is as inscrutable as the indigenous population of the region who will hardly ever interact with or acknowledge anyone outside of their clan (for want of a better word).
From the restaurant waitress, with whom he develops an awkward flirtation, Chacaltana discovers that there is a crematory oven in the Catholic church. He goes to the church still thinking that the burned corpse is the fault of the senderistas. But the pastor, Father Quiroz, tells him that the oven was installed by the government/military which put the church in charge of cremating all the bodies produced by the war.. Ayacucho was dominated by the Shining Path, and the army went all out to defeat them between 1980s-2000, killing 50,000 to 70,000 Quechua speakers. Despite the fact that Chacaltana trusts Father Quiroz, he has a difficult time processing the conflicting data. As a government official, he wants to blame the violence on Sendero Luminoso, but now here is a church official telling him of the government's role in all the deaths. It takes Chacaltana most of the rest of the book to work through this cognitive dissonance. Quiroz doesn’t help matters when he tells Chacaltana that he recently fired Justino Mayta Carrazo, the Quechua who discovered the burned body in the hayloft in Quinua. Running down the clue, Chacaltana goes to Quinua, where Justino Mayta Carrazo beats him up, escapes, and disappears. Although the case is unsolved, Chacaltana submits a report, and it is closed.
The local military commander, Carrion (great name!), then assigns Chacaltana as electoral prosecutor in a tiny village in the highlands to oversee the coming election, which he believes is a reward for closing the case of the burned corpse. Alberto Fujimori is on the ballot, and Chacaltana is really being sent to provide a legitimate facade to a corrupt voting process. Chacaltana should be securing the appearance of a fair election and a calm countryside, but as s a meticulous and obsessive rule-follower he discovers lots of broken rules and procedural irregularities. Moreover, he witnesses the active and malevolent presence of Sendero Luminoso. But the town’s police chief won’t do anything, and when Commander Carrion comes to the village on election day with officials and journalists to make a show of legitimacy he just gets pissed at Chacaltana for creating difficulties and denies the presence of the terrorists. Chacaltana demonstrates some self-awareness, though, and realizes that his rule-following has gotten him in trouble and that he should just submit to the government’s charade and get out of the way or lose his job. But, as he wanders around the village environs, he is surprisingly assaulted again by Justino Mayta Carrazo, who tells him before disappearing again that his brother is the one involved with Sendero Luminoso, not him. The closed case is really not closed. Chacaltana’s ethics are being tested, extended, and distended in all sorts of ways. These tests seem to be at the core of his character arc.
On his return to Ayacucho, Chacaltana is punished for not being a team player–that is, not acting as legitimating front man for a corrupt electoral process–and is given no new cases. Bored in the office, he decides to figure out why Justino Mayta Carrazo attacked him again as well as investigate his brother, whose name is Edwin. He finds a report from 1990 about a raid of the Mayta Carrazo home by a notoriously violent soldier named Cácares, after which Edwin was disappeared. To follow up on the report, Chacaltana abandons his normally ethical, rule-bound behavior and illegitimately uses his authority as prosecutor to lie his way into the local prison to interview a Shining Path leader, Hernán Durango González. Chacaltana’s break with his ethics backfires, though, because not only does Durango rebuff all of the prosecutor’s questions, but Chacaltana’s questions about Justino somehow leak out. Next morning, police come to get Chacaltana and take him to a mass burial site, and Carrion then takes Chacaltana to the forensics lab to show him Justino’s body, bled out with 7 knives. Carrion claims that he was killed by Sendero Luminoso because Justino may have revealed something to Chacaltana. Ending Chacaltana’s isolation and seemingly reversing his position, Carrion puts Chacaltana in charge of a new investigation into the reappearance of Sendero Luminoso, with the caveat that Chacaltana can only report to Carrion and not further up the command chain to Lima. As the novel progresses, Chacaltana has to deal with more and more ethical dissonance, which overwhelms his cognitive processes. How can he follow rules in a world where rules are regularly overruled for other, often mysterious considerations? Leaving the lab, Chacaltana ends up in a religious procession and sees seven daggers in the chest of the statue of the Virgin that is being carried through the streets of Ayacucho.
Parallel to Chacaltana’s career narrative is his growing relationship with Edith, the waitress, who is the first woman Chacaltana has been interested in since his wife left him because she thought that he lacked ambition. Initially, he meets Edith in the restaurant where she works. After the procession, he seeks her out, and she goes with him to his home, where their connection deepens over the death of his mother and her parents Edith respects the room that Chacaltana created for his mother. They both feel the ghosts. They spend the night together but without sex. Edith is an oasis in the midst of the challenges his career is throwing at him, but that changes. First, Roncagliolo includes a scene where two youths assault a couple of tourists during another religious procession. During the height of the conflict, Sendero Luminso trained young kids to do guerilla work. At the present moment of the novel, these once young kids are now in their early twenties and use the skills they leaned in other ways, like committing crimes. Edith is in her early twenties (a little dramatic music, maestro).
After Justino’s murder, Commander Carrion becomes afraid for his own life, and he gives Chacaltana a gun, fearful that he too could be a target. Chacaltana has never had or used a gun before, and he doesn’t want this one, but he takes it. Not only is Roncagliolo telegraphing Chekhov’s rule about guns (introduced in the third act, go off in the fifth), but it is the symbol of the effect of violence on Chacaltana, who now seems more tempted by violence, which manifests first with Edith. Before the gift of the gun, bound by deference, Chacaltana treated Edith with gentleness and respect. Not long after getting the gun, Chacaltana lets desire control him, and he is momentarily too physically forceful with Edith. Afterwards, rather than feeling shame, he realizes how easy it was to use force. His ethics unravel further.
Fearing that terrorist violence is spiraling out of control, Chacaltana visits Durango again, who tells him a long story of state violence against senderista prisoners, including himself. Chacaltana feels sympathy, but he also feels ethical dissonance, because the story is about state violence, just like Father Quiroz’s story about the state’s role in the crematory in the church basement. Durango escapes from prison, only to be killed, supposedly, by Sendero Luminoso. Moreover, when he is found he has been crucified. Chacaltana turns to Father Quiroz, who explains how local indigenous cultures use Christianity as a mask for their own beliefs and practices, which then Sendero Luminoso uses to mask its own violence. The instances and explanations for violence continue to fracture and spiral: government, terrorist, religious, indigenous. Chacaltana’s control mechanisms fray. Commander Carrion has been relieved of his duties by Lima, so he can no longer offer any protection to Chacaltana. Even returning to his mother’s clothing, no longer calms and grounds Chacaltana.
The climax of the novel comes on Friday of Holy Week. Awakened by a nightmare, Chacaltana goes in search of Father Quiroz at the parish house. First, he encounters a two shadowy figures between the church and house, who seem to be ghosts but turn out to be a man and woman having sex. When he enters the house after no one answers the door, he finds Quiroz in the basement next to the crematory oven stabbed to death and his limbs mutilated with acid. Chacaltana has his gun, shoots at the killer but misses. Rather than going to the police, he searches out Edith for protection and solace, and then rapes her in the morning. Why? Because of the two people he saw having sex, or a consequence of the accumulated violence he has experienced? Chacaltana realizes that he is the one common element for the deaths (Justino, Durango, Quiroz), and he feels enough guilt after raping Edith that he would turm humself in, only to discover that he is not a suspect.
Again, Chacaltana fails to make sense of events, but that does not stop him from trying. The next day, investigating further, he discovers that Edith visited Durango in prison. Chacaltana is so angry that he confronts Edith at the restaurant and nearly shoots her on the street. He is in high moral dudgeon, feeling betrayed, and no longer feels any shame raping Edith. Rather than shoot her, though, he lets her go and advises her to betray her accomplices. Chacaltana holds to his interpretation that Sendero Luminoso is resurgent. As a government official, it is the one “truth” that he cannot let go of, which is reinforced when Edith is discovered murdered and ritually mutilated. Those nasty, primitive indigenous terrorists¡
Roncagliolo pulls out Chacaltana’s last anchor peg when the prosecutor seeks out Carrion one last time for an explanation, only for Carrion to admit that the government has been behind all the murders and that Carrion knew Chacaltana’s father, who was an ultraviolent, blond torturer who worked for the Peruvian government and probably killed Chacaltana’s mother in a fit of rage. Yes, Chacaltana, you are your father’s son! There is too much Oedipal stuff in the air, and the prosecutor loses it, killing Carrion with his own gun, dead dead dead. Yet, despite plenty of evidence that Chacaltana killed Carrion, he is let go, because the government fears that the fragile/false peace that it stage manages might crumble because of all the violence and the war would return, breaking through all the attempts to suppress it. Chacaltana ends up free-booting it in the highlands, trying to organize citizen defense militias to fight the terrorists. Even though he is no longer employed by the government, he cannot let go of its ideological position. The thoughtful, meticulous rule-bound character who sometimes was able to see through the falsity and pretense of the world around him was defeated.
After finishing the book, I didn’t find Chacaltana’s character arc credible. He seemed to become too violent and unhinged too suddenly, but after working through this review I think those changes are credible. A post-war society and a post-war mental state are very fragile. Red April reminds me of Horacio Castellanos Moyas’s Dances with Snakes, which satirizes San Salvador’s fragile grip on social order after the Salvadoran Civil War.
The burned body at the beginning of the book was the violent soldier Cáceres, who had lost control, so the government decided he needed to disappear. Unfortunately, the crematory in the church broke part way through the cremation.