7 How It Was and Will Be: Paradise Crushed in Evelio Rosero’s Los ejércitos

Between 1948 and 1958 more than 200,000 Colombians died and more than two million were forced to leave their homes in an internal political struggle known as La Violencia. Since the end of that conflict, many more than that number have perished in an ongoing, slow-burning struggle for power. Of the dead over the last half-century, civilians outnumber combatants four to one. According to recent surveys, 16.9% of Colombians have been direct victims of conflict in a country that enjoys the dubious distinction of being homeland to the second highest number of displaced people in the world.¹³

Colombia has long been infamous for its violent drug-trafficking economy, sustained simultaneously by the addictions and prohibitions of Western societies working hand in glove, if unwittingly, to financially underwrite the ongoing mayhem. But the West’s war on drugs was hardly the first violent foreign intervention into Colombian life. Before coca there were bananas, coffee, and petroleum; before those, the lure of gold and silver. Always there was something outsiders wanted. But while strangers once fought their own way in, today they mostly leave the violence to the locals.

Such violence has long pitted ostensibly liberal ideals against conservative ones. In its more recent iterations, the rebel FARC, the ELN, and other leftist guerrilla organizations struggled against the Colombian Armed Forces and a variety of right-wing paramilitary operations. In theory, the FARC and their kind represented the cause of the poor, championing the struggle for social justice. In opposition, the armed forces and paramilitaries defended the theoretical rule of law and the sovereignty of the state. Always in between stood the land, coveted ground for cash crops: bananas, coffee, palm, and, of course, coca.

After decades of negotiations, repeated cease-fires, and other near treaties, today the prospect of a complete peace appears tantalizingly close. But when a peace deal was brokered with the FARC in 2016, the Colombian people themselves rejected it. And while the government was able to finalize that peace process the following year, a separate comprehensive deal with the ELN was shattered in early 2019, this time by a car bomb that claimed 22 lives and left 100 injured. Peace deals punctuated by violence—it is a tradition nearly as old as post-“Violence” Colombia itself. Colombia, a country of peace. Colombia, a country at war.

If one were to ask a local peasant for some explanation of it all, he or she might likely answer, “This is how it is” or “how it always was.” So too begins Colombian writer Evelio Rosero’s acclaimed 2006 novel of violence, Los ejércitos: “Y era así.” “Y era así”, we read, “en casa del brasilero las guacamayas reían todo el tiempo; yo las oía, desde el muro del huerto de mi casa, subido en la escalera, recogiendo mis naranjas, arrojándolas al gran cesto de palma” [And this is how it was: at the Brazilian’s house the macaws laughed all the time; I heard them from the top of my garden wall, when I was up the ladder, picking my oranges, tossing them into the big palm-leaf basket] (11). That is how it was, how life gently unfolded in the profesor’s backyard arcadia, his Eden. As he gathers the fruit of the tree, his neighbor, Geraldina, lounges about in her backyard, soaking in the sun. She lies in plain view of the old professor, utterly naked. She appears not to have a care in the world. Her husband, “the Brazilian,” sits nearby, lazily strumming his guitar. His voice rises “plácida y persistente, entre la risa dulce de las guacamayas” [placid and persistent, between the sweet laughter of the macaws] (11). Their son frolics innocently about the house, itself opened wide to the garden, where he is accompanied in his play by an orphan girl his parents have taken in. Our narrator goes on gathering his oranges, taking in the scene. On the ground below his wife feeds the fish in the backyard pond while their three cats play about the garden: “Así envejecíamos, ella y yo, los peces y los gatos” [this is how we grew old, she and I, the fish and the cats] (11). This is how it was.

But questions arise, almost immediately. From the top of the ladder, he notes the cats below staring up at him: “¿Qué me decían? Nada, sin entenderlos” [What were they telling me? Nothing, there was no understanding them.] (11). Next his wife joins in; then the fish: “¿Qué me decían? Nada, sin entenderlos” (11). What is to be understood in this backyard paradise? Does it matter that the narrator—so far the reader’s lone access to information—cannot understand, indeed sees no possibility of doing so?

The narration proceeds. Our narrator is old, pleasant, and harmless. But also helplessly, hopelessly, perversely fixated on the female body, first staring at his neighbor, the Brazilian’s sunbathing wife, and then—his stream-of-consciousness narration pulling him into a paragraph-long, erotically charged disquisition—considering the body of the adopted orphan girl, still playing with dolls, for all the eroticism the profesor projects on her. The poor little girl, he abruptly informs us—a mere aside, as if hardly worth mentioning—was orphaned two years ago when her parents were massacred by paramilitaries while attending a predawn Maundy Thursday mass along with twelve others. No explanation offered. There must have been no understanding it. No matter; we readers move on. Our narrator, the profesor, moves on.

Why worry? Today the young girl is in the care of the Brazilian’s wife, Geraldina, who does little but “dorarse al sol de la mañana, beber vino, tenderse y distenderse sin más preocupación que el color de su piel, el propio olor de su pelo como si se tratara del color y la textura de su corazón” [tanning herself in the morning sun, drinking wine, stretched out with no concern other than the color of her skin, the smell of her own hair as if it were the color and texture of her heart] (13). So goes it, our narrator informs us, in “este San José, pueblo de paz” [this San Jose, town of peace] (13).¹⁴

Who is this narrator, so eager to share so much beauty but unafraid of the attending affront of too much truth? What is this story, this world, we readers imbibe? Our turn of the pages offers telling detail. He is “the profesor,” recently retired after a lifetime of work at the local school, where he shaped the lives—we will come to learn soon enough—of nearly every one of the town’s citizens. He is also a devoted husband, married, and true from the beginning to the firm but patient Otilia. To be sure, he has often gazed a bit too long and certainly too longingly at certain of the town’s female population—a habit only worsening in his old age—but this habit appears harmless, garnering mere chiding, nothing more, from friends, the neighbors, and even Otilia herself.

Symbolically, however, the profesor is something entirely other. While to his fellow townspeople he is a venerable, if increasingly pitiable, old man, to readers of Rosero’s presentation of the profesor, however, he is also Lucifer. At least temporarily, the old teacher plays the role of the devil, Satan himself, the serpent in the garden undoing paradise with the temptations of forbidden fruit. In the first lines of the novel, the profesor is a mere man in a tree. Soon, however, his stream-of-consciousness admiration of the Brazilian’s wife and adopted daughter is interrupted by the Brazilian, who strolls over to chat with the old teacher in his treetop perch. After a bit of small talk swirling around the question of the profesor’s habit of watching, the wife herself strolls over. The couple stands below, in a casual embrace, as if utterly unaware or unconcerned by her nakedness. It is troubling “solo a mí” [Only I was] reports the professor, who has been sharing with the Brazilian stories from his years imparting knowledge and who will, in a moment, remind the Brazilian and his wife of his incomparable experience: “A mi edad yo ya lo vi todo” [At my age I’d seen everything now] (17). The conversation concludes when the profesor hands the wife a piece of fruit from up in his perch in the tree. She partakes. “Un efluvio amargo y dulce se remontó desde la boca enrojecida” [A bitter and sweet fragrance rose from her reddened mouth] (17), whereupon, he reports, Geraldina “me contempló con gran curiosidad, como si por primera vez me descubriera en el mundo.… Pareció ruborizarse, sólo un instante, y después se desencantó” [looked at me with great curiosity, as if she had just for the first time discovered me in the world…she seemed to blush, for a moment only, and then she was disenchanted] (17). The scene ends with our profesor imagining Geraldina inviting him to look, to stare away, if he dares. Innocence has been shattered.

When next we return to the garden, paradise will have been definitively lost, all hell loosed in its place. But first the profesor must perform his own transgression—he is to others the serpent, while at the same time suffering his own particular fall from Eden. The afternoon after the encounter in the backyard garden, the profesor heads out of town in search of medical treatment for a crippled leg. He takes his short trip on a whim, fruit of a last minute decision while en route to an annual neighborhood gathering. In doing so, he breaks faith with his community, not to mention his wife, who has gone ahead to the party without him. He denies communion in favor of self. In addition to being selfish, his choice foregrounds his own fallen state: he is an old man with a bad knee and a propensity for foolishness, if never outright infidelity. From this second transgression, neither the profesor nor the town will ever be the same again.

When the profesor returns the following morning from his spur-of-the-moment and ultimately ill-advised trip, the armies of the novel’s title have arrived. Their arrival is in truth a return, as their appearance in town brings to light for readers a history of previous kidnappings and assaults—including that which took the life of the parents of the neighbor’s orphan girl. This time, rather than engaging in outright massacre, the armies usher a handful of unlucky townspeople into the local square, to then cart them off to jail without cause. The profesor, initially part of the roundup, escapes imprisonment and heads home. When he arrives, however, he discovers the aforementioned lost paradise. A battle between the army and the guerillas has smashed a large hole in the wall between his home and the neighbors’. The orange tree has been splintered in pieces, the fishpond obliterated. The neighbor’s husband—the carefree Brazilian—her son, and the orphan girl have been kidnapped. The profesor’s wife is missing.

A double reading of the novel begins to develop. At the level of story, the profesor is yet another victim. He is the protagonist in an Aristotelian plot in which his sin will lead to recognition, self-understanding, and finally a reversal of fortune; his intertwined lust and wanderlust have, for the moment, have separated him from his community, his neighbors, and now his wife. On a structural level, in contrast, the profesor is the victimizer. He, the enlightened one—Lucifer—is the serpentine tempter whose offering of fruit in the backyard garden foregrounds the fruit of knowledge he has long provided to an entire community. For decades he has been the sole teacher of a town stubbornly resisting the reality of the armies, a town insistent on its innocence, resolute in its self-perception as a town of peace. The act of the delivery of the fruit to the naked Geraldine, foregrounds the profesor as simultaneously hero and antihero of the unfolding events. The two roles are inseparable. As the profesor suffers his own Aristotelian narrative arc, his persistent wandering about town reigns down misery, death, and destruction wherever he steps.

As we’ve seen, within twenty-four hours of offering the fruit to the Brazililan’s naked wife, her husband, her son, and the orphan girl have all been kidnapped, the fruit tree split in two, the fishpond exploded, and the wall that divided the Brazilian’s Eden from his own yard reduced to rubble. While everyone assures the profesor that his wife hasn’t been similarly kidnapped, the fact remains that she never returns. He will never see his beloved Otilia again. The destruction that follows in the old teacher’s wake continues. When he journeys back out of town the next night to reimburse the folk healer who had treated his knee, he discovers his old friend beheaded for “collaborating” with the enemy. We, and the profesor, have no idea who has committed the crime nor who they might perceive that “enemy” to be: the army, the guerrillas, or someone else. But the structural and symbolic logic of the story points directly to the profesor himself. The same ironic dynamic plays out in the case of his wife and his neighbors. No army ever accuses any of them of any wrongdoing. No explanation is ever given. The only constant regarding their disappearances is, again, symbolic and structural. They have had close contact with the profesor.

While consequences aren’t always so stark, the pattern continues with the old teacher’s fellow townspeople. The profesor is well-liked by all. The entirety of the town seems to want his company, inviting him in for visits or offering to watch after him when conditions in his own life deteriorate as a result of the war. Nevertheless, the closer people get to him, the worse their outcomes. Within minutes of hiring a servant girl to help around the house during Otilia’s absence, the yard and then the house are invaded by soldiers. The events traumatize the girl, who hides under the bed and then retreats into silence. That same afternoon the girl’s mother is killed in an army assault on the church, where she works. Several months later we and the profesor will reencounter the young girl. This time the trauma plays out differently. Now she stares, listless yet defiant, at the profesor, as a soldier mounts her over the hood of a car. Though it is clear to readers that this is rape, the girl herself smiles cruelly at her former protector and provider, brazenly declaring to her temporarily distracted attacker: “Déjalo mirar … que a él le gusta” [Let him watch… he likes to do that] (141). Her words echo those of Geraldine, the Brazilian’s wife after accepting the profesor’s fruit in those innocent times so many months past.

The irony in all of this is that the profesor, as noted, remains popular. He recalls frequently, and others echo always with fondness, his imprint upon nearly every one of the town’s citizens. From the local priest, to the mayor, to the town gossip—all have passed through his classroom. He has rapped them on the knuckles and taught them to read. They respect him for that. But ironically, not only do the profesor’s actions structurally set off chaos, but the idea of knowledge and understanding that a formal education would supposedly represent seems to serve no purpose in this town where nothing is what it appears to be. This is apparent in the profesor’s own declaration, in the first pages of the novel, of San José as a town of peace, even as he recalls the attack on the church and the provenance of the orphan girl. The profesor—our town’s literal and symbolic tree of knowledge—walks in and around town as if nothing is amiss, even as his neighbors, his wife, and his closest friends disappear, are randomly shot, raped, and beheaded. If this is San José, town of peace, what is war?

As soon as readers ask that question, however, the entire logical edifice on which stands formal learning crumbles. Because, in fact, it is indeed hard to know if this is war. What kind of a war can it be where no one appears to know who is fighting whom? The novel leaves the reader, for the most part, in the dark. With a little effort, readers can pick out the following details: the army enters the town first; next, both army and guerrillas clash; finally, by the end of the novel, the guerrillas appear to have taken over. But with the exception of a single observation regarding the soldiers’ footwear, little distinguishes one group from another. There is but one lone instance in which a townsperson attempts to clarify the conflict. According to him, there are a minimum of four groups responsible for the violence: the army, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, and the drug traffickers. The man’s point in naming the groups, however, is to underscore how impossible it is to distinguish one group from another. In practice, no one seems to care. They are all to be alternately respected, feared, obeyed, and ultimately avoided. In fact, the one person in the novel who attempts to make distinctions and cut deals exists to readers only by way of flashback. When the novel begins, he has long since disappeared, kidnapped four years prior to the beginning of the novel and then killed two years later. In this town, knowledge doesn’t engender survival; instead it gets you killed.

As with oppositions between knowledge and ignorance, war and peace, and allies and enemies, so goes it with just about every other of Rosero’s oppositions, upon which any sense of order might be built. The general of the army whose presence rains war and pain upon the town and who eventually abandons San José to the guerrillas, is simultaneously a committed environmentalist. He has planted over five thousand trees while on campaign and dedicates the occasional moment of armistice to protecting and preserving the native fauna of the areas he wrecks. If destroyers are conservation’s greatest champions, youth and old age have equally traded places. While the wizened profesor sees the world as if through the concupiscent eyes of youth, Geraldine’s twelve-year-old Eusebito eventually returns to his mother looking like “un niño empujado por fuerza a la vejez” [a child pushed by force into old age] (121). But the most devastating of all this structural collapse is the conflation of truth and lies. While violence slowly obliterates San José, the people in the capital go on believing official dispatches: there is no war, the kidnappings are mere rumor, and the country is at peace. Most devastating of all, this collapse of truth and lies has become internalized with the profesor being its living embodiment. He, the town’s venerated center of knowledge, is also a first-hand witness to the worst of the violence. Yet while others flee, he stays put, insisting to himself and others that all is well in his city of peace: “Quedaré solo… haré de este pueblo mi casa… Comeré de lo que hayan dejado… dormiré en todas sus camas… me entretendré, no soy ciego, sanará mi rodilla, caminaré hasta el páramo como un paseo y después regresaré, mis gatos continuarán alimentándome” [I shall stay alone… I shall make this town my home… I shall eat what they have left… I shall sleep in their beds… I shall amuse myself, I am not blind, I shall cure my knee, I shall walk up to the high plateau as a stroll and then return, my cats will continue to feed me] (194).

The profesor’s declaration is, of course, absurd. His decision to remain makes no sense. Everything he touches suffers, which compounds his own suffering only that much more. And still he insists that his town is at peace and that he shall stay. And still he remains popular—beloved of every local with whom he crosses paths. In contrast, all those who represent traditional logical thinking—conventional rational approaches to life—come off as the crazy ones. At least three months after the initial attack, the man who had been the town’s new school teacher following the profesor’s retirement, returns to town to gather some belongings. Sitting in the local tavern sharing a drink with the remaining townspeople he offers explanations of the events that are slowly but surely putting an end to their beloved San José. The armies are a consequence of a series of poor presidents, he explains. Politics is to blame: “Es este país…presidente por presidente, todos la han cagado” [It’s this country…president by president, they’ve all screwed up] (159). Rather than being impressed with the teacher’s political acumen, the locals lose patience. Violence is all they know. Talk of politics misses the point. Interestingly, at this stage of the novel, we readers may be beginning to feel the same. While one might expect that a novel about the ongoing violence in rural Colombia might leave readers hungry for political understanding, the now former schoolteacher’s attempts at explaining what is crushing this “pueblo de paz” [peaceful town] strike us as absurd as they strike the locals. What political machinations can make sense of such chaos? Dispassionate political explanations feel insulting.

This is arguably the moment that most clearly supports previous critical readings of Rosero’s novel. Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo has shown how the events of the novel undermine traditional notions of human rights in addressing the horrors of war. While politicians speak of and seek negotiated peace deals guaranteeing reparations and reconciliations through courts and cameras, novels like Rosero’s illustrate the final absurdity of such rational approaches to the irrational insanity of violence inflicted on human bodies (143). In earlier readings of Rosero’s novel, critics like Iván Vicente Padilla Chasing contrast the refusal of Los ejércitos to offer anything but an aesthetic look at violence with the “pathological descriptions and political and social explanations” of earlier Colombian literary representations of “la Violencia” (122). Norman Valencia similarly explains how Rosero’s novel critiques the desires of politicians to control versions of truth, determining what is visible and what remains invisible (369), while Héctor Hoyos and Claudia María Maya Franco focus respectively on the novel’s challenge to and difference from media representations of violence (293; 237–39). Either way, the celebrated “rational” discourse of those in power is undone. In a related fashion, Gradeazábal Bravo hones in on the key role played not by reason but by the physical body in Rosero’s novel (146–47). While Western politicians speak of a theoretical liberal rational subject, Rosero’s novel illustrates time and again the lack of rationality manifest in severed fingers, decapitated heads, and raped corpses. Laura García-Moreno explains in her own reading of Los ejércitos how violence invades and contaminates everything, not just the physical town but its thoughts and thinking. The invasion, again, collapses difference: inside and outside, public and private, reason and insanity (142). The world produced, according to Mabel Moraña, is emotional, not rational (190).

The new schoolteacher embodies the insistence on reason that earlier critics have identified with philosophers, politicians, and the media. While he has worked recently in the town, he is ultimately an outsider, one of the city folk who come and go freely, somehow unscathed by the violence engulfing the locals. Accustomed to being the fount of knowledge, the youth teacher has explained how politics works—or doesn’t work—in their country. The townspeople are unimpressed. But he proceeds undaunted—whereupon all reason disappears forever from Rosero’s novel. Hoping to drive his point home, the teacher resorts to rhetorical flourish: “Porque a la hora del té…” [When it comes time for tea] he states, prepping his audience for what is sure to be his big point. The point never comes. Instead, Chepe, a local whose pregnant wife was kidnapped in the initial violence months earlier, explodes, “Cuál té, maldita sea…Café por lo menos” [What tea, dammit…Coffee at least] (159). And that’s the end of the conversation. What has happened? On the one hand, Chepe’s words make little apparent sense. “Porque a la hora del té,” is a mere figure of speech. Why the vitriol? On the other hand, Chepe’s response may, in fact, be directed, not at the content of the teacher’s lecture (the political origins of the conflict), but at its form. Chepe objects to a rhetorical flourish that highlights the teacher’s outsider status, both in its form and in its content. This is Colombia, and the Colombian interior at that, Chepe appears to be saying. You people in the city may drink your fancy foreign teas, but here in the interior we are what we are and we have what we have. And what we have, plain and simple, is coffee. And violence. Here where we are dying, we have no time, place, or patience for the political theories—abstract classical liberal theories of human rights, to cite Gradeazábal Bravo’s example—of a remote tea-sipping capital elite. There, after all, the war doesn’t even exist. For them, there are no armies.

To a certain degree, of course, the politicians’ claim is true. Officially there is no war. Certainly not according to classic definitions. If there is no clear enemy, no obvious us and them, no good confronting the forces of evil, then how can we declare war? In San José, this town of peace, rather than declare formal war, the armies just come and go. Violence happens, never clarified and, thus, undeclared. The fruit of knowledge of good and evil didn’t occasion the opposition of military and guerilla, of left and right, of good and evil; rather, it deconstructed that very division. The science of good and evil the profesor brings into being over the course of the novel is the deconstruction of that most basic of binary oppositions.

Indeed, if we can speak of development of the character of the profesor over the course of the novel, this comes in the form of the profesor’s own implicit understanding of this deconstruction. The profesor has of course provided the fruit, but he has also partaken. As noted previously, the novel begins with the profesor perched in his tree practically drooling—noted both by his wife, Otilia, and the Brazilian—over the Brazilian’s wife. After he finally descends from the ladder, Otilia reprimands him and provides in doing so a long list of similar behaviors over the course of his life. His ogling, on the one hand, foregrounds the contrast between the state of the town before the armies’ arrival and after: the possibility of leisure and sensuality in contrast to the obligation of mere survival. But it also underscores the utter collapse of difference that the profesor himself represents, even as he appears to develop as a character. In terms of character transformation, once Otilia disappears, the profesor’s wandering acquires a single-minded purpose. He is determined to find his wife, utterly ignoring attempted arrests, states of emergency, or even street-to-street combat, as he traverses the town in search of his lifelong companion. In his tireless search, he epitomizes the loyal husband who has devoted a near lifetime to the same woman. Yet even as he wanders from street to street and house to house, risking life and limb to reunite with his wife, we readers also find him looking up the skirts of the youngest adolescent girls and staring at the swaying backside of his neighbor, despite the fact that she is now dressed in the black of mourning and nearly hysterical over the disappearance of her family.

In fact, the more desperately the profesor searches for Otilia the more perverse his behavior becomes. In one instance, while consoling the neighbor, he ends up with his hand on her bare knee, finding himself lost in erotic reverie even as she interrupts her own mutterings about loss and defeat with the embarrassed realization (mistaken, of course) that her interlocutor must be so worried about Otilia. She then goes on to reassure him, as everyone does, that his wife is bound to be somewhere safe, as no one has heard anything of her. All the while, he continues on, unabashed, with his perverse daydream. The scene is at once terribly pathetic and pitifully tragic. The profesor is a poor pervert, unable to control himself even when supposedly consoling a widow who, not entirely unaware of his weaknesses, is attempting to offer her own comfort.

Of course, we must keep in mind whose words we are reading. Our narrator is none other than the profesor himself, a teacher who has dedicated his life to crushing the fantasy worlds of others with his transgressive knowledge and who now inhabits, in growing solitude, a literal version of that crushed world. Appropriately what he provides to readers is precisely this increasingly crushed, collapsed, or binarily deconstructed, if you will, worldview. From this perspective, as previously noted, war is peace, knowledge is confusion, and all armies are alike in their violence. There is no good and evil. Eden is gone, and all things instead are become one. All chaos has been loosed upon the world. In the face of this reality, the profesor no longer distinguishes. He simply reports in transparent prose, peppered by the occasional stream-of-conscious riff, his reality. His story becomes his honest confession. He is done taking confession, as it were, from his parishioners. It’s his turn to speak truth, be it to power or the lack thereof. Who are the armies, he seems to ask us. And who are we readers, the direct addressees of his tale?

The truth he speaks to whatever powers might read increasingly takes the form of a nightmare. The wife of Chepe, the bar owner, never returns. Chepe receives instead a paper bag containing two severed fingers, those of his wife and his newborn daughter. When Chepe turns with rage on the town’s guerrilla occupiers, they matter-of-factly shoot him dead. The local empanada vendor, an odd man known only as Oye, vanishes. His severed head appears hours (days?) later, resting in the bowl of his empanada fryer, a shining cockroach crawling out of his eye socket. Celmiro, the only man in town older than the profesor, lies abandoned, bedridden in his home as the war rages about him. His family—sons, daughters, and grandchildren—have placed plates of cooked food to sustain him in their absence. He will finish them off, they will rot, or the dogs will eat them out from under him. After which he will die. Another man, one whose name the increasingly delirious profesor cannot recall, is dragged from his house then shot in cold blood, after which they finish off his distraught mother. Just before her own execution she screams at the soldiers, “Mátenlo otra vez… por qué no lo maten otra vez?” [Kill him again…why don´t you kill him again?] (198). Her furious cry, though literally nonsensical, underscores the smashed world where now even life has become death and death is life, where there is no war and the dead can be killed over and over and over again. With every shot and every disappearance.

In such a state, the profesor now welcomes his own extinction. He refuses, however, to execute it himself. While there is no history—no explanation for how this all started nor sense of where it will all end—the profesor is insistent that if nothing else, this is his town. His daughter in the city begs him to leave, as do his neighbors fleeing the town, themselves following now the example of the army, packing up, carting off themselves and their favorites, along with their general’s menagerie of protected species. The profesor’s response, on the one hand, confirms the deep love of the old man for his wife: “Yo me quedo, Dios, yo me quedo, me quedo porque sólo aquí podría encontrarte, Otilia” [I am staying, God, I am staying. I stay because only here can I find you, Otilia, only here can I wait for you and if you do not come, you do not come, but I am staying here] (190). On the other hand, this statement coincides with the collapse of the line between life and death for the profesor. Wandering about town or lying in his bed, he sees her in dreams and visions. “Are you real?” he asks, seeing visions of her in the streets with children who he figures must be his grandchildren and who he imagines find his own condition appalling. In such a condition, place acquires extra meaning. What is the past and what the future? What is the passage of time? This location, however, invaded though it may be by armies of whatever stripe or boot, belongs to him—its lifelong instructor, its historical fount of knowledge, its tree of the science of good and evil. He will not abandon it to soldiers who would crush its last difference. And so, in this scene, the town is not only where he will stay, but will be his very interlocutor: “Quedaré solo, supongo, pero de cualquier manera haré de este pueblo mi casa, y pasaré por ti, pueblo, hasta que llegue Otilia por mí” [I shall stay alone, I suppose, but in some way I shall make this town my home, and I shall stroll through you, town, until Otilia comes for me] (194). He continues on thus for another paragraph. It is his intention to take possession of the whole of it, to occupy the homes, to understand their lives, to heal his knee once and for all, and to wander where and when he will. It is at this point, significantly, that Otilia, as noted above, appears to him. If previously she has been about censoring and directing, this time she comes as if to console; her appearance, an act of implicit approval.

Now resolved to maintain possession of his former Eden, come what may, the profesor and the town approach, in terms of plot, their final denouement, their respective Aristotelian reversals of fortune. The profesor abandons the spot of his vision to make his way through town one final time toward his house. As he stumbles along, soldiers run by, then retreat back past his ghostly, defiant, still-plodding body. He walks past the young man shot in the street and his mother demanding of the soldiers, “pues mátenlo otra vez” [kill him again] (198). She follows her demented order, with an even madder claim: “Les falta matar a Dios” [there’s still God to kill yet] (198). A mere statement of rage? Perhaps. Who is left in this town abandoned as if by God himself? Only the profesor, left wondering at every moment when his own turn will come, the time of the new god of this fallen world, the purveyor of knowledge, the Lucifer of earlier transgressions, and last but not least, our own all-controlling narrator. There is, indeed, still God to kill.

In this concluding scene, the profesor at last appears to arrive home. He no longer recognizes the place, but, he notes, it may nonetheless be where he sleeps. He soon determines that he is mistaken; this is not his home. As he wanders he appears to have become, ironically, homeless even as he has taken a kind of possession of the entirety of the town. But then, just as suddenly, he does find his home and there discovers “una quietud inesperada” [an unexpected quiet] (200). The quiet, though, is “sin sosieto” [without peace] (196). Walking zombie-like through his gutted house and then his garden, he notes his lack of any sense of time. While his final descent through town is ostensibly a final return home, the profesor continues walking, passing now through the hole blasted in the wall between his orange tree and his neighbor’s former arcadia. He is drawn one final time to Geraldina.

Now his footsteps carry him past the neighbors’ former swimming pool, now a mere pit in which Geraldina’s son, Eusebito, returned by the kidnappers without explanation, now lies lifeless amid leaves, bird shit, refuse, and the corpses of dead macaws, a string of blood still dripping from his ear. But still the profesor proceeds, stumbling now into the neighbors’ house without knocking or asking permission, in search one final time for his sensual neighbor. Instead in the shadows he makes out the silhouettes of men “recogidos, como feligreses en la iglesia a la hora de la Elevación” [gathered like parishioners in church at the hour of the Elevation] (202). The object of their worship, to our horror but not our surprise, is Geraldina. Bringing the tale full circle, the Brazilian’s wife is again naked. Now, however, she is a mere corpse. Her head lolls awkwardly to one side while one soldier after another grotesquely mounts her. In this final, gruesome scene—its terrible contrast to the scene of the novel’s opening impressing itself brutally on the minds of the readers—the collapse of differences is sickeningly complete and final. The wry perversity of the fruit-gathering tempter is now the sickened confession of an infirm mind, as the profesor rambles on madly to himself, “¿Por qué no los acompañas, Ismael?… ¿Por qué no les explicas cómo se viola un cadáver? ¿o cómo se ama? ¿No era eso con lo que soñabas?” [Why do you not join them, Ismael?…why do you not explain to them how to rape a corpse? Or how to love? Is that not what you dreamt of?] (202). He continues on envisioning himself “acechando el desnudo cadáver e Geraldina, la desnudez del cadáver que todavía fulgía, imitando a la perfección lo que podía ser un abrazo de pasión de Geraldina” [lying in wait for Geraldina’s naked corpse, the nakedness of the corpse that still glows, imitating perfectly what could be Geraldina’s passionate embrace] (202). Never has the disgust and self-loathing been more complete. “Ismael ¿esperas tú también tu turno?” [Ismael, are you too waiting for a turn?] (202).

Of course, true to this conflicted but ultimately sympathetic character, the profesor does no such thing. His final perversion is, in fact, his final recognition, his moment of Aristotelian anagnorisis. The simple distinctions that falsely ordered this false world, that perpetuated the lie that there is no war in this country, that San José is a town of peace, that there is good and truth and beauty and order and youth and sense that can be set up in contrast to some opposite, which knowledge and power—the power of faith or government or simple reason—can keep at bay, have collapsed. The world of the armies is a doubly crushed world, its people defeated and its logic destroyed. And so, our tempter and our tempted, our transgressor and our transgressed, the profesor and now his town, can at last be redeemed, their fortunes reversed.

“¿Su nombre?” [What is your name?] the soldiers demand as they pause from their violation of Geraldina’s cadaver to take note of the old man who has passed them by and who they have passed by time and again on the war-torn streets of this newest of ghost towns. “Su nombre,” they demand, “o lo acabamos” [Your name or you’re finished] (203). But it is finished. His work is done. “Les diré que me llamo Jesucristo,” he declares, speaking only to himself and us readers, “les diré que me llamo Simón Bolívar, les diré que me llamo Nadie, les diré que no tengo nombre y reiré otra vez” [I shall tell them I am Jesus Christ. I shall tell them I am Simón Bolívar, I shall tell them I am called Nobody, I shall tell them I have no name and I shall laugh again] (203).

He knows then that they will shoot, that, even if he says nothing at all, he will soon be a dead man. Either way, he will laugh again. For in the end, our serpent in the tree, our Lucifer with the fruit of knowledge—the dark, sweet juice of the orange fruit held out to the enticing, innocent naked body in the garden—is become now the redeemer, the author of his own redemption and symbolically of his town’s. He remains there as he does, refusing to budge, demanding his right to speak truth to power. But he is also become our own, the readers’ redeemer. The profesor has become our profesor, offering to us readers an enticing but ultimately awful glimpse into the reality of a world where the simple faiths of our fathers have met collapse. Jesus Christ, origin if not author of the most deeply rooted, guiding and defining system of ethical thought in the world of the narrator/profesor’s San José, of author Evelio Rosero’s Colombia, and of the reader’s Western civilization, has been torn from any straightforward redemptive cross. So too, Simón Bolívar, the father of the dreams and ambitions of a civilized Latin America, the original general of Latin American “ejércitos,” the first failed caudillo, the original lying politician. Crushed, all. They—Jesus Christ, Simón Bolívar—who are everything in the symbolic orders their work created, the Alpha and Omega of the Latin American sociopolitical order, are no more than he, the profesor. And he is Nobody. El profesor is become a man with no name, a wanderer of deserted streets in a city without inhabitants, a place filled with corpses, where violence is life and there is no war and where the erotic lays its exhausted head on the limp body of a twisted, raped corpse.

Those readers seeking ready explanations will be, like the soldiers the profesor refuses to answer, disappointed. In reading a novel called Los ejércitos, a tale about violence, about the violations of Colombian armed forces, paramilitary organizations, guerrillas, and drug traffickers, inquiring readers might initially feel, like the soldiers, that the profesor is mocking them, “que me burlo y dispararán,” [mocking them and they will shoot] as the profesor puts it (199). But in their shooting, a new way, a new truth, and a new life will spring forth. And that is why he will laugh, why he refuses to have a name. He is future possibility. Unpredictable and terrible, perhaps, but now bearing the wisdom of the ages. And a future notwithstanding all else.

In the beginning, in its first line, the first words of the novel declared a past once understood and certain, declaimed by a venerable teacher, a fount of knowledge enjoying the fruits of a life of meaningful work. “Y era así” [And this is how it was], he confidently declared. In the end, he, perhaps already a corpse but certainly at the least a dead man walking, no longer knows anything. He and his people have all equally partaken of the fruit. Their fall is complete. Their world is smashed. There remains only an unknown. It is, notwithstanding, a start. “Así será” [This is how it will be] (199). Our profesor has spoken. Class dismissed. Our lives begun.