A Son of the Rock

Granada, 1980, 138 p

In an unspecified Central American country, a group of men are planning a revolution to restore General Jorge Alvarez to the Presidency. He had been allowed back in to the country after his successor, a mathematics professor named Ospina, decided to curry favour with the US and so promised elections.

The main conspirators are the General, his son José, his friend Peter Nelson, not long ago court-martialled from the US Army (a fact he doesn’t wish to conceal but also doesn’t advertise,) a Frenchman called Charles de Cluny, Colonel Aranha, and priest Father Miguel. They have the backing of the Company of Mr Green, a US citizen whose son George is engaged to the General’s daughter, Elena. Without that support and the implicit promise of US approval the revolution would not be possible.

Elena attracts Nelson’s interest. She decries his description of her father as a former dictator, saying he did good things for the country and the people. She in turn takes a fancy to Nelson, who contemplates sex with Elena thus, “The beast with two backs had still two brains and two identities and it was neither possible nor desirable to fuse them, to lose identity. The act made a momentary union, an instant of sharing, of identification, but this passed in a single second to be recalled later as pleasure and little more. The religion of union was a female doctrine, a false dream, possible only at the risk of sanity: a hypnotic state where reality was replaced for a time by a destructive vision.” (I did wonder if this line of thought was occasioned by the author’s homosexuality.)

Nelson is charged with the training of General Alavarez’s army (rudimentary training at best.) The revolution goes ahead in the country’s second city and Nelson is involved in the fighting. While that goes well enough news from the capital is not so good, with betrayal on top of betrayal and the influence of the Company not what the conspirators had hoped.

Vidal is here explicitly critiquing the US Government’s tendency to interfere in other countries’ affairs; not necessarily to their benefit.

Pedant’s corner:- “General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’ house (General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’s house; or maybe even ‘General Jorge Alvarez’s Asturias house’,) “‘You can see if from the street’” (‘see it from’,) a missing comma – or full stop – before a piece of direct speech, gulley (gully; as it was spelled later,) “(I’d even been in school with them, danced with some of them!).” (an exclamation mark doesn’t need a full stop following it,) a gap between a colon and the preceding word (x 2.) “José unbuttoned his shirt and lay in the sun, eyes shut. A small scapula glittered on the dark pink chest” (how can a shoulder blade lie on a chest?) “Aristophanes’ The Birds” (Aristophanes’s,) an end quotation mark follows a paragraph of speech which is carried on on the next line. The convention is no such mark is required in those circumstances.) “‘Then what do you think about our chances.’” (is a question and so requires a question mark,) two lines of the text were transposed. “‘They wanted to get back him’” (wanted to get him back.) “She shut here eyes” (her eyes,) de rigeur (de rigueur,) “sounded strange on his own ears” (in his own ears.)