The Matter Of Desire: A Novel - Softcover

Edmundo Paz Soldan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618395571 ISBN 13: 9780618395576

Publisher: HarperVia, 2004

Synopsis

The Matter of Desire is the story of Pedro, a Bolivian-American political scientist who teaches at a university in upstate New York. Having become entangled in an erotically charged romance with Ashley, a beautiful red-headed graduate student, he returns to Bolivia to seek answers to his own life by investigating the mysteries of his father's past. Trapped between two cultures, Pedro ultimately finds himself in an existential dilemma of tragic dimensions. The Matter of Desire combines elements of the political thriller and the family mystery with a torrid illicit love affair and brilliantly elucidates the complex relationship between Latin America and the United States.

About this title

About the Author:

Edmundo Paz Soldán is the author of six novels and two short story collections. He was awarded the 2002 Bolivian National Book Award for Turing’s Delirium and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. He has won the National Book Award in Bolivia, the prestigious Juan Rulfo Award, and was a finalist for the Romulo Gállegos Award. He is an associate professor at Cornell University. One of the few McOndo writers who live in the United States, he is frequently called upon as the movement’s spokesperson by the American media.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter one I approach the window a few times and, surreptitiously, search the faces in vain, looking for Uncle David. There's still the possibility that he's waiting for me outside, reading the paper in the shade of a molle treeafter all, he's a bit of a misanthrope and avoids contact with people whenever he can. I can't help being annoyed that he might not be here: he said he'd come to meet me. This is my city, but I would still feel like a stranger if there were no familiar face to help me, a glance to save me from my frequent forays into the depths of solitude at the slightest blunder into reality. This is my city, but the airport is new, recently inaugurated, smelling of fresh paint and plastic covers, and the view outside changes and is ever more distant from me. This is the price you pay for leaving: objects don't stay where you left them, friends forget you as soon as you turn your back, relatives don't come to meet you because the fragile bonds have stretched with the distance and broken. The map of Treasure Island is lost. It happens to everyone because everyone, sooner or later, leaves for someplace else. It's happening to an espresso-skinned girl who looks at her watch every ten seconds, then lifts her eyes to the windows behind which people crowd, looks for someone and he's not there. The luggage arrives. I light a cigarette, wondering whether there'll be a shout to put my hands in the air, a shove that'll knock me to the ground, making the pack of Marlboros fall, an arrest and six months in a federal prison. Nothing happens. The act doesn't lead to hysteria here; you're free to damage your own lungs, change the color of your own teeth, and damage everyone else's lungs in the process. Secondhand smoke kills, so the magazines say. I'm not the only one smoking. There are a couple of young kids who look like brothers. The smell of their cigarettes is unmistakable; they're smoking marijuana, mara, bayer, what other names have been invented during my absence? Earrings, Bob Marley sweatshirts, Birkenstocks: they left wearing shirts and ties and this is how the North sends them back. We come back with full pockets, new knowledge, and old things forgotten, contaminating and willing to contaminate, so that what is disappears faster than it ordinarily tends to, so that the reign of the temporary sinks its claws into this world once and for all. The ash falls onto the cream-colored tile oor. And at that moment they knew in unison, once and for all and forever, that they would soon be that which they had been born for and which a thousand permutations had hidden: ash. Like in the Villa de Ash. Like Ashley. A wrinkled old skycap in a dark blue uniform approaches and asks if he can take my bag. There's only one and it's not heavy, but I recognize him and say yes. He's been working at the airport ever since I started to travel fteen years ago (when the airport was one barnlike terminal and the bathrooms smelled of urine; it should've been easy to forget, but it wasn't). He's very small and frail; I've often wondered how he does it, like an ant, capable of carrying twice his own weight. He leaves with my green canvas bag while I carry my briefcase containing a tangerine-colored iBook, magazines, and Berkeley, Dad's novel, which I'd reached out to again when my problems began (that sleepless semester I'd taught it and kept it close by, on my desk, but it's one thing to read in order to teach and another in order to escape from the world). It's a rst-edition paperback, full of coffee stains, notes in the margins, and phrases underlined. I bought it at a used-book stall near the post ofce a few return trips ago. On the cover, silvery tones and Ansel Adams lighting, there's a photo of the signpost of two streets that converge to form that mythical corner, Bancroft and Telegraph. The tele- graph: that marvelous invention for coding messages. It's a photo that manages to summarize the central themes. A masterful 132- page work through which Dad nally discovered that he could be more successful as a writer than as a politiciannot in the end, but, rather, at the same time. And then came the military attack on the Unzueta Street apartment, where the leadership of Dad's party clandestinely met, and his savage, bloody death, as well as that of Aunt Elsa, Uncle David's wife. His brother was the only survivor (apart from Ren Mrida, the traitor who informed on them and so didn't come to the meeting). Dad, who left me when I was young, and I, who strive to nd him in a novel. I walk on polished tiles toward the main exit, amid the rejoicing of my travel companions and those who receive them. Through the loudspeaker a woman's singsong voice announces ight delays, the escalators operate incessantly, the sounds reverberate sonorously on the high yellow walls with neon signs advertising Coca-Cola,McDonald's, Entelnet, and several hotels. There's a large photo of PresidentMontenegroaffable, triumphant, not at all dictatorialand a plaque saying the airport was opened during his administration. I stop at a kiosk bursting with Argentine and Chilean magazines, the covers featuring the sentimental crises of models and the salary gures for today's soccer players. I buy newspapersEl Posmo and Veintiunoand Mcially approved Jaime Villa's extradition to the United States. Villa, that legendary drug trafcker who thought himself a Robin Hood but was really more like Al Capone. In El Posmo, a full-color photo of an effusive Villa in a mariachi's sombrero and white suit, like Garca Mrquez when he accepted the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. In Veintiuno, a photo of the drug traf- cker with his cousin, that militaryMinister of the Interior who in 1980 planned the Unzueta Street massacre.Welcome to Bolivia. As soon as I leave the terminal I hear the voices of taxi drivers offering their services. I miss the kids looking for handouts. They must not let them come into the new terminal: the price of modernization, I suppose. I stop at the edge of the sidewalk, anxious. Am I to be punished by a migraine, one of those that force me to hole up in a room with the lights out and damn my fate? The restless trigeminal nerve, the neuropeptides, the pressure behind the right eye: the Migraine, that mythical animal I only just domesticate with Imitrex. No, it's not. Just a pang this time. I inhale the dirty air with relief, and now, seeing the cloud of dust oating over the city, the washed-out blue sky, feeling the aggressive heat of the sun, so far from the snow, I recognize Ro Fugitivo, smile faintly, and know, at last, once more, I'm home. Everything stops for a few seconds and I'm the child, the young man who never left, the one who planned on following in Dad's footsteps, the idealist who wanted to dedicate his life to politics in order to change the country once and for all and forever. The skycap asks where he should take my bag. End of the rapture. "Leave it here," I say, and give him a dollar. Uncle David isn't anywhere in sight. Maybe he's running late. Or maybe notat least not here, where everything is so nearby. How often had I waited to hear the roar of a plane's engines before nally leaving for the airport? How long should I wait? Half an hour? Twenty minutes, no more. Or should I call him? No, I don't want to go back into the terminal. I sit down on my bag, take my glasses off, put them on again. I take out my Palm Pilot, turn it on, stare, not knowing what to do, and put it away again. I don't feel like playing blackjack, I'm tired of losing at chess, and I have to reorganize myself for a new game of DopeWars (where you head up a drug cartel, have to build your empire to ght against other cartels, and are chased by the DEA; true, its not at all educational). I quickly ip through the newspapers and then look in section two of El Posmo for one of the things I miss most about Ro Fugitivo: the Cryptogram, the crossword that Uncle David sets (they don't put it on the Internet version of the newspaperbig mistake; how many times have I had to have it sent to me from Bolivia?). Firmenich's nickname. While waiting for him I'll solve his verbal labyrinths, nd out about the latest things he's seen and read, discover the extravagant ramications of his education. Joined Hungary and Bulgaria. Horizontal and vertical phrases that intermingle, blank spaces that need to be lled in. Astronaut on Friendship VII, ve letters. Some were born to leave hieroglyphics behind them; others, to decipher them, to clarify the world another strives to make opaque. I belong to the latter, and I'm convinced that our work is no less honorable, no less deserving of recognition, than that of the creators. Without us, without our answer to their threatening, secretive challenge, they could not exist. Pioneer of French aviation. Defeated Spassky. Creator of Hermann Soergel. Coach of the Brazilian team defeated at the Maracanazo. Catalan painter mentioned in The Crying of Lot 49. So he's been reading Pynchon? How dare he use such a specic clue when so few of his followers even know who Pynchon is? But I guess it's not so bad, you don't have to know everything to do a crossword. It's a matter of having a nose for it, analytical and deductive abilities, and being generally knowledgeable. It's also a matter of good dictionaries and encyclopedias, having a talent for looking up information on the Internet, friends who share the fervor, and patience. Above all, that: patience. Half an hour goes by. My uncle doesn't arrive, nor do I nish his crossword. I get into a taxi. In the back seat of a white Toyota, being tortured by the sound of Enrique Iglesias and the smell of home-brewed chicha, I wipe my mouth on the sleeve of my T-shirt and tell myself again what I got tired of thinking on the plane, while dozing next to a gay Chilean reading Look Homeward, Angel: that I came to Ro Fugitivo with the excuse of looking for Dad when I really came to escape a woman. Ashley. Beautiful, sweet, cruel, wild Ashley. Finally, in the taxi, as we drive alongside the stagnant waters of the river that winds through the city, the pain of Ashley's absence overwhelms me. ...

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperVia
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0618395571
• ISBN 13: 9780618395576
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224