Los Gusanos
By John Sayles
HarperCollins, 473 pages, $22.95
Writers commuting between media, and especially novelists hacking for Hollywood to finance work on their novels, are a tradition at least a half-century old. But true multimedia literary artists like John Sayles are something new under the California sun, and their work has special interest because its success or failure has something to tell us about the future of literary genres as such.
Sayles is a triple-threat man who writes novels (”Pride of the Bimbos”
and ”Union Dues”) and short stories, quality movies, junk movies
(”Alligator,” ”The Howling”) and television series (”Shannon`s Deal”)-not necessarily in that or any other particular order.
His closest evolutionary ancestors are writers like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, who write quality stuff in both film and printed media but whose priority is unequivocally the written word over the spoken one, and Orson Welles, who like Sayles did a bit of hack acting and writing as ways of hustling money for quality theater or film projects. But Sayles is unique, I think, in representing a generation for which the talents involved in these different activities have truly melded and redistributed themselves.
His most effective serious movies (”The Return of the Secaucus Seven,”
”Lianna,” ”Baby, It`s You”) are novelistic in their depth of character portrayal; and his novels, of which this is only the third, are most effective when they are most cinematic. An artist who is ”deeper” on film than on the page is truly rare, if not unique, and Sayles is one of them.
In ”Los Gusanos” (”the worms,” which is what Fidel Castro called the Cubans who fled the island after his 1959 revolution) he gives us the latest epic chapter in an ancient cultural clash between Anglo and Iberian civilizations that dates back at least to the Spanish Armada that sailed against England in 1588 and now has come down to hand-to-hand combat in a number of cities in the Western hemisphere-in this novel, primarily Miami and Habana, as its Hispanic characters accurately call it.
Along the way he has made the most original attempt at rendering a multilingual story since Hemingway`s translationese in ”For Whom the Bell Tolls” by embedding whole sentences and half-colloquies of untranslated Spanish in an English context that makes their meaning generally clear, giving us the authentic feel of an exile community whose members bop back and forth between languages in the same paragraph, making up a new language as they go along.
The main story, set in Miami in 1981, focuses on the De La Pena family, whose patriarch Scipio, a bulllike cattleman from Camaguey who fought against the dictator Machado in 1933, is dying after a stroke in a nursing home where his daughter Marta works as a nurse.
The slow death of Scipio in the present-time action of the novel parallels the stories of how all his children, soon or late, become victims of the betrayed Bay of Pigs invasion-not only Ambrosio, El Poeta, as he`s called by his comrades, who was killed not far from the beach at Playa Giron in 1961, but later also Marta and Blas, Ambrosio`s elder and savvier brother who drifted into the drug trade after the disillusion of being weeded out of the great adventure by the CIA for being ”prematurely anti-Batista.” As the pathetically Kafkan agent Walt notes on his dossier: ”un Fidelista sin Fidel.” (One of the book`s many incidental revelations is the contempt in which Castro was held by other revolutionaries working against Batista in the `50s.)
Marta has been given Ambrosio`s diary of the invasion by a surviving Brigadista, Serafin, a black man whose sister Luz is her co-worker at the
”hospital de ancianos”-where, by the way, an elderly Anglo patient, Mr. Du Pre, who lost his legs at age 16 fighting Franco in Spain, recalls that event for the edification of an orderly named Dewey, a gun-obsessed high-school dropout whose increasing dementia casts him as a soldier of fortune in training.
Ambrosio`s diary told of a ”special mission” he was being sent on within the invasion, a mission to blow up a power station. And Marta, a beautiful, nun-like mixture of Joan of Arc and la Pasionaria, has resolved to ”complete” that mission on the 20th anniversary of his death.
Rejected by the counter-revolutionary factions still active in Miami, she recruits for her own mini-invasion Dewey, her Uncle Felix, who owns a boat and a sad history of undeserved disgrace during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and a priest who has been defrocked for political activism-along the way attracting the attention of a Cuban assassin and CIA stringer nicknamed El Halcon (the Hawk), who was an army torturer and bagman under Batista and now reports to Walt.
Sayles expertly interweaves the time levels of the two ”invasions,”
both equally doomed, by closeup capsule histories of several key characters, from the terrifying El Halcon to Walt, whose career of epic ignominy and routine betrayal in the Latin world includes the sacrifice of his kidneys while drinking with Franco`s troops in Madrid during World War II to the near loss of his digestive system in the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. In between are those of Blas de la Pena; Scipio, whose own father fought in the War of Independencia in `98; Serafin, who in Batista times was the scrappy jefe of beach boys at a Habana resort hotel; and Villas, a history professor jailed and tortured by the Fidelistas after their victory for his hard-core refusal to betray what the revolution was about. The personal tragedies of these and several other characters are meant to echo-sometimes heroically and sometimes farcically-the tragic, futile collisions of cyclic historical forces.
For example, the mission that Marta all too ironically completes turns out to have been a fiction from the start, a pretext by El Halcon for carrying out a CIA political purge of the invading forces during the invasion itself;
and in the polar opposition of El Halcon and Walt we can see the opposite extremes of Spanish brutality and Anglo racism and duplicity that drive so much of this hemisphere`s history.
Add to that the mad young Dewey and a few others in the polyglot stew of modern Miami, and we can see an emerging American fascism taking shape under the pressure of drugs, race and pure cultural mesaliance, aptly epitomized by the team of Miami cops, Duckworth and Rivkin-one a shrewd Florida cracker, his partner a Spanish-speaking young Jew-who try to make sense of the violence escalating all around them.
”Nunca entenderan,” says the dying Blas to the two cops after settling a score with El Halcon. ”We`ll never understand,” translates Rivkin, and Duckworth tells Blas, ”You got that one right, buddy. . . . You hit that sucker on the head.”
Sayles has a good novelist`s eye for the details that make up his mosaic of small, heroic missions that constitute this huge mural of historical tragedy. When the 12-year-old Serafin, badly cut in a fight over his beach turf, bathes his wound in the salty surf, an American tourist orders a Habana policeman to ”get that nigger out of the water.”
But for all its sweep, sex and dramatic impact (the shootout between Blas and El Halcon could have been scripted for Roger Corman, who once employed Sayles), the novel doesn`t have the consistent depth and growth of
characterization or the feel of history that is so palpable in, say, the recent ”Sea of Lentils” by the Cuban novelist Antonio Benitez-Rojo. The comparison may be unfair, but one wonders what ”Los Gusanos” might have been if the author had taken more than a year to write it between film projects.
