6 A la calle: Violence and Rock-Hard Solutions in Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Piedras encantadas

When does the story of Guatemalan violence begin? In 1954 when a US sponsored coup overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president? Or perhaps with a US-backed military dictatorship decades earlier? Perhaps we might focus on nineteenth-century struggles for independence with what would become neighboring states. Certainly we shouldn’t forget centuries of colonial exploitation or the first years of the Spanish conquest itself. Historians of pre-Colombian America might point us back further still, long before any European conquistador, priest, or pathogen had made landfall on the American continent.

For the sake of reading the novels of Guatemalan writer, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, we will begin in more recent times with the coup of 1954. Perhaps the author himself will walk us back from there. Instigated on specious reasoning, the coup was followed by the installation of a new president more friendly to US economic interests. Not surprisingly the new government proved unpopular and incapable. Constant repression and continuing social and economic injustice over the next six years led first to street violence and then, in 1960, to the official beginning of what would come to be known as the Guatemalan Civil War. Officially, the war would last nearly four decades, though violence would continue into the twenty-first century. In total, the war resulted in over 200,000 dead and a million-plus refugees.

While the 1954 coup happened in the nation’s capital, Guatemala City, the violence itself played out mostly far away. Its principal victims occupied Guatemala’s rural highlands where a variety of guerrilla groups battled government troops and paramilitary death squads, each carrying out different varieties of scorched-earth policies, kidnappings, torture, formalized rapes, assassinations, and sometimes unadulterated genocide. Four hundred and fifty Mayan villages were destroyed over the course of the conflict. The sins of their inhabitants appear to have been little more than having stood in the way of parties sponsored by the powerful in the distant capital, when not beyond. We can only assume their perpetrators had their reasons. While today the war has officially ended, violence, corruption, and poverty persist. Guatemala ranks thirty-first of thirty-three Latin American and Caribbean countries on the UN Human Development Index.

It’s almost a truism that all novels are somewhat autobiographical. We write about what we know. And there’s nothing we know better—not to claim self-understanding, but at least firsthand experience—than ourselves. So when all you’ve ever known is a level of violence that you intuit most of your readers can never fathom—at least if you aspire to a readership that extends beyond the meager one your country boasts (with respect to the author here in question, that’s a mere 0.7 percent of a total population of slightly more than 16 million, and that’s measuring those who merely read the newspaper)—how do you tell a story of a reality so enmeshed in that violence to which the logic of other more peaceful countries does not and cannot apply? How do you stick to your story when your story just might not make sense unless you don’t quite stick to your story? And how do you resist the temptation to use your story to inform and even to persuade? What if you knew that your story—a story told by a writer of some international reputation—might be the only glimpse that many readers might ever get into your country? Especially when time, experience, and the voice of plenty of experts warns against the thesis-driven novel, the didactic novel, the novel with some purpose other than to tell a story? How to proceed? Do you scream out loud, do you proclaim at the top of your lungs the terror that has gripped your country for decades? Or do you lay out statistics and publish lists of the dead? Perhaps you describe the various sides and their contradicting and contradictory positions in a civil war that a half century later so few can make sense of. Or do you just tell an engaging tale and hope we readers care: care enough to learn more, to think a bit, and then to vote, even act, differently? Or do you write without any hope at all? Just tell a tale because what else can you do?

To read Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Imitación de Guatemala [Imitation of Guatemala] is to sense the struggle of the author with these issues across time. Imitación is not a single story, but a collection of four novellas published first as individual works between 1996 and 2006, then republished as a collection in 2014. The first major pieces written after Rey Rosa returned to his homeland following decades in exile, all four of the tales feel at times as if the responsibility of speaking truth to power was proving too much. Each of the four can feel at times heavy-handed, desperate to tell everything at once. The first, Que me maten si… [They’ll Kill Me If…] (1996), uses a rather wooden foreign couple investigating atrocities in the Guatemalan countryside and an equally wooden young Guatemalan assistant to show the reader how, despite official declarations of an end to the Guatemalan civil war, the violence perpetrated by military, paramilitary, and guerrilla units continues—both unabated and unpunished. The patchwork of scenes feels stitched together out of a desperate attempt to capture in a single tale every angle of the ongoing violence, as well as to underscore the futility of the struggle against it, as Rey Rosa’s narrator kills off everyone and anyone who attempts to investigate or merely extract themselves from Guatemala’s cycle of violence. Before they’re killed, for example, they engage each other in stilted conversations that ensure the reader knows just what is happening, how terrible it is, and how impossible it is to escape. Despite its literary limitations, it certainly drives the point home, as Alexandra Ortiz Wallner has shown in her reading of the novella, displaying on occasion subtle tensions between the representation of violence and the ambiguous relationship between memory and forgetting that always inevitably challenges our assessment of that violence (no page number). In the end, writing about violence while still being true to the craft that will ultimately get his readers to care about that violence is tough stuff and Que me maten sí… is palatable if not exactly what we were hoping for.

Luckily for us—and for Rey Rosa—the Guatemalan author markedly improves as he moves through this cycle, as if he first had to work the burden of truthtelling out of his system, or perhaps as if just a little time to process the violence was needed before integrating it, more effortlessly, into his storytelling. His second attempt, El cojo bueno [The Good Cripple], published a matter of months after Que me maten si…, abandons the big picture of the Guatemalan civil war and its aftermath to focus more simply on how violence comes home to affect one otherwise innocent bystander. The title, El cojo bueno, refers to our protagonist, the ne’er-do-well son of a Guatemalan plutocrat, who, after surviving a kidnapping by childhood friends, abandons his homeland only to discover a decade later the whereabouts of one of his kidnappers. In the face of that discovery he returns home to confront both that kidnapper and his own demons. While El cojo bueno avoids the pedantry of Que me maten si… it fails, on the other hand, to draw clear connections between the singular kidnapping and the larger reality of political violence that grips Rey Rosa’s native land. We certainly may intuit that only a society riven by endemic structural violence could produce the cavalier attitude to cruelty displayed by the protagonist’s assailants, as Nanci Buiza has shown in her reading of the novella. However, the novella’s focus on the lives of a small handful of friends turns our focus to moral and ethical questions, the heart of Buiza’s analysis, rather than to more broadly political or historical ones, however connected these may ultimately be.

In his third attempt, Piedras encantadas [Enchanted Stones] (2001), Rey Rosa finds a happy medium. Piedras encantadas, like the first two works, captures the reader’s attention with plenty of violence, both explicit and implicit, narrated in an easy-to-follow third-person style and constructed around a central violent event, this time a hit-and-run that all involved—including we readers—believe initially to be a homicide. But this time Rey Rosa enlivens the story with a richer variety of characters, a wider mix of narrative viewpoints, and several intriguing and enigmatic plot lines that point to the detective fiction genre, as Rodrigo Fuentes has shown (104). Finally, Rey Rosa packages his tale in a more experimental narrative frame capable of drawing explicit attention to bigger political and economic pictures without feeling preachy.

The novella opens in this frame, wherein Rey Rosa’s narrator lets fly on the terror engulfing his country. Here, on page one, line one, he gets straight to the point:

Guatemala, Centroamérica.

El país más hermoso, la gente más fea.

Guatemala. La pequeña república donde la pena de muerte no fue abolida nunca, donde el linchamiento ha sido la única manifestación perdurable de organización social

Ciudad de Guatemala. Doscientos kilómetros cuadrados de asfalta y hormigón…Prototipo de la ciudad dura, donde la gente rica va en blindados y los hombres de negocios más exitosos llevan chalecos antibalas (209)

[Guatemala, Central America.

The prettiest country, the ugliest people.

Guatemala. The tiny republic where the death penalty was never abolished, where lynching has been the lone enduring sign of social order.

Guatemala City. Two hundred square kilometers of asphalt and concrete… Prototype of the hard city, where the wealthy drive about in armored cars and the most successful businessmen don bullet-proof vests]

Here at last is Rey Rosa unfettered, his anonymous narrator speaking the truth to power that he awkwardly attempted to work into every scene in his first homegrown novella and then hid from in his second. Still writing from the frame of the story, he goes on to describe the basic social geography of the city: the whereabouts of the ultrarich (southeast) and the miles of shanties and hovels that ring the city’s northern and western borders. It’s a city of trash and blood, of earthquakes and landslides. At least according to our narrator, who remains unidentified but hardly neutral, thus calling our attention to himself with every damning line. Who is this bitter citizen, we ask, that begins a story thus, that savages the setting before offering a single character or trace of an anecdote? The question demands an alert and attentive reader. Whatever story is to follow, its narration—and not simply the story itself—will matter.

Three paragraphs in, the narrative voice suddenly slides from outside to in, drops down, as it were, from any position we might have imagined external to the story. Abandoning heterodiegetic—or third person—description, the narrative voice now directs itself personally to some humanlike entity existing at the level of either us readers or of the story itself: “No digas automóvil, tampoco coche…sino carro; tu telefóno no es un móvil sino un celular” [Don’t say automobile, nor car… but carriage; your telephone isn’t a mobile phone but a cellphone] (210). The narrator and his narration have acquired life. He and now we are in the story. We readers—as just happened with our narrative guide—have been ripped from any position of comfort we might have occupied above and beyond the narrated story. We’re inside, and we’d better know what’s being said, be wise to the fact that in this place called Guatemala few things work and little is as it seems.

As we continue to read, the actual target of the narration comes into focus. It is not us, per se, but a character—our protagonist, we presume—living in a high-rise near the Guatemala City airport and to whom the narrator directs himself, and hence with whom we identify. He is new to the area, new enough to have been so naïve as to register official complaints with local government bureaucrats that will surely go nowhere, and thus tomerit the narrator’s reminder, “Estás en la ciudad de Guatemala. No lo olvides” [You’re in Guatemala City. Don’t you forget it.] (211). Eventually the narrator gives this protagonist a past (a younger member of a wealthy Guatemalan family of colonial pedigree, he has recently returned from several years in Spain), then a name (Joaquín Casasola), and finally a love interest (his cousin, Elena). With the revelation of the love interest, the first section ends and the narrator of these first pages—distinguished through this opening by the use of italics—disappears.

As we turn the page from this de facto preface and proceed to the first proper chapter of the novella, what appears to be an otherwise conventional story told in rather conventional narrative style begins to unfold. Joaquín has recently returned, as previously noted, from a lengthy stay in the motherland. The reason for the stay is left unknown, though the novella encourages us to assume that the wealthy, when things aren’t going just right at home, can always head off to more pacific climes. No need to explain, no questions asked. When you have resources, you just leave. Now however, back home and trying to reestablish himself, Joaquín has dedicated the morning of the novella’s first proper chapter to getting high. But first he needs his dealer to bring the goods. Unfortunately when he arrives, the dealer, an old friend of Joaquín’s, startles his pal with the news that he has just been involved in a hit-and-run. In fact, this is his first stop after fleeing the scene, and his Discovery SUV is now parked in Joaquín’s garage. He receives permission to leave the car from a reluctant Joaquin, if only for the next few hours until he can work out a plan of action. So much for a chill morning smoking a doobie.

With that, our plot gets underway, Joaquín is thrown headfirst and unprepared back into the world of dangerous Guatemalan society, where, as the rather fearless and somewhat frightening narrator of the first section made abundantly clear, anything that can go wrong, will. When things go wrong for the powerful in a place like Guatemala, the powerful turn to their lawyers. And so it is that we abandon Joaquín for the moment to follow his friend as he heads over to his family lawyer’s office—the abogangster (literally lawyer-gangster), Franco Vallina. Within minutes, the unflappable protector of rich and famous sets to work, making calls and lending advice that soon has the friend abandoning his car at Joaquín’s and fleeing town. Now Joaquín is the one running scared, as a private detective named Rastelli begins snooping around the premises and asking uncomfortable questions.

After the interview with the family lawyer, the narrator returns us to Joaquín who is now sharing a midday meal with his extended family. Among the guests is Joaquín’s cousin and love interest, Elena, a reporter with the local newspaper, El Independiente. Thanks to Elena’s job, she is well-informed of the morning’s hit-and-run that, unbeknownst to her, has brought her favorite cousin into its poisonous circle. The narration then shifts to the detective, Rastelli. The victim of the hit-and-run, Silvestre, has recently been adopted by a couple that is now divorcing. The mother has hired Rastelli, it appears, to not merely solve the murder but protect her son from the potentially nefarious behavior of associates of her estranged husband. In his investigations, Rastelli becomes our guide through Guatemalan hell.

First we accompany him as he visits with his client in her private boutique in one of Guatemala City’s posh shopping centers. Rastelli then moves from the vapid materialism of exclusive stores to interviews with the impoverished street urchins and local laborers who witnessed the hit-and-run firsthand. From there he proceeds to the office of the abogangster, then finishes his trawling of the city’s underbelly with a visit to a government intelligence bureaucrat known only as “la Sombra” [The Shadow]. Rastelli, himself only a social rung or two from the bottom-of-the-barrel street kids he relies on for so much information, enjoys a distinct ability to deftly maneuver through the complexities of Guatemalan society. Such skills contrast notably with the tragic innocence of the more wealthy and connected but shockingly ignorant Joaquín. The contrast also rescues Joaquín and those of his ilk from easy accusations of villainous cruelty. They are separated by an unfathomable economic, political, spatial, and temporal gap from their victims. The division frustrates any straightforward understanding of, and hence solutions to, the violence and suffering noted in the novella’s opening lines by that original, bitter citizen-narrator.

This understanding gives Rastelli’s final stop at the workplace of the aforementioned “La Sombra” added significance. This mysterious man-in-the-shadows purportedly works in the basement of Guatemala’s National Palace, locally known as the Guacamolón, an ironic tribute to the green mortar that adorns it and its salad-like mixture of architectural ingredients. The Guacomolón, according to popular rumor, houses in its deepest recesses a massive IBM supercomputer. This technological wonder allows its government operators to eavesdrop simultaneously on hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of conversations around the city and across the nation. La Sombra is the human assistant to this mechanized monster. Through it he acquires the information necessary to bridge the gaps in understanding, to make sense of the raft of crimes and cruelties that daily plague Guatemalan society, and perhaps to find at least temporary solutions. This information, like everything else in Guatemala, has a price. Luckily, Rastelli is able to pay and so the information is obtained—information we’re not privy to but which apparently convinces Rastelli to take the action that follows—and allows our novella to roll swiftly to its denouement.

First, however, we should note that Rastelli’s visit to the National Palace, plus a rumor-riddled narrative commentary that follows, alert readers to elements beyond the plot that deserve attention. The narrative aside on the Guacamolón suggests that perhaps our angry-citizen narrator of the opening section and the less intrusive narrator of the rest of the novella are one and the same. To be sure, this particular aside is not the first double-voiced commentary on the sites we readers pass through as we follow the revolving door of protagonists—Joaquín, Joaquín’s friend, Rastelli—over the course of the novella. In a scene where Joaquín and his friend revisit the scene of the crime on La Reforma avenue, the narrator comments, “La Reforma./Paseo de la Reforma./La despiadada reforma que abolió el derecho de los indígenas guatemaltecos a sus tierras comunales para que fueran convertidas en plantaciones de café” [La Reforma/Paseo de la Reforma./The ruthless “reforma” that abolished the rights of indigenous Guatemalans to their comunal lands in order to turn them into coffee planatations] (220). He continues, noting that it is the very descendants of those indigenous people who ended up working like slaves to build the avenue that now celebrates their undoing. The same goes for the “Liberación” boulevard: “conmemorativo del derrocamiento del primer intento de gobierno democrático en el istmo” [Commemorating the overthrow the first attempt at democratic governance on the isthmus.] (245). Another celebrated location, the Avenida de las Américas is, according to the narrator, a joke in comparison to the New York City, USA version. More damning still is its possible allusion to the US Armed Forces School of the Americas—also in the USA—a training ground where Guatemalan army officers mastered the techniques of infiltration and torture that would make their civil war especially devastating and its consequences so enduring. As Rodrigo Fuentes has noted, here the city itself becomes a witness to not only the crime of the child’s near murder but to the entire history of violence that has led to this moment (101).

Is it possible that this novella’s more interesting, ironic, and angry narrator is trying to speak to us through these place names in the same way he spoke to Joaquín in the novella’s opening pages? Are there messages for us here in the geography his protagonists pass through? While not every name carries significance—for example, he notes that you get to Liberación via Sixth Avenue (nothing of note in that)—there are enough potentially significant place names that readers feel invited to mix their reading-for-the-plot with a search for allegory. The characters in Rey Rosas’s novella embody the spectrum of Guatemalan urban society, both socially and historically, from the poorest to the richest and from the oldest, most established of families like the Casasolas, to the most recent and, by this point in the novel, utterly untethered orphan Silvestre. Can we be blamed for noting the vehicle that initiates so much chaos is a Discovery? Or that the accident occurs on the Avenida de las Américas as it approaches the Imperial Treasure restaurant? Is it merely accidental that the victim is riding on the back of an animal described as a mix of Spanish stallion and native pony? Admittedly any attempt at clean, sustained allegory beyond such basic observations will be frustrated. Still, the references to discovery, conquest, and empire function at the very least as cruelly playful nods from an indignant, ironic narrator, who doesn’t want readers to forget he’s around and that there’s a problem at hand much larger than the mere resolution of a crime or the consummation of a budding romance between kissing cousins. How can we separate the widening circle of life-and-death plotting that turns on a simple hit-and-run from a whole history of violence, injustice, and even general madness? This widening gyre, the allegorical references declare, does not begin with a single avaricious abogangster. The “topography of injustice” displayed by the city, as Fuentes calls it, insists that we recognize that the conditions have been laid for the current violence as far back as the earliest Spanish Conquistadors (105). Indeed, they may even precede them. A single snide comment made by the narrator critiquing the native culture’s preference for primitive technologies when more advanced ones were available clearly signals such (“el monopolio de la piedra de obsidiana, símbolo de la dureza en un mundo que despreciaba el uso del metal” [the monopoly of obsidian, symbol of the hardness of a world that rejected the use of metal] [209]). This then isn’t a problem of contemporary potheads, of old-wealth families, of the petty crime of street urchins, or of the ongoing violence perpetrated by military officers. Not even stopping at the cruelties of sixteenth-century Spaniards is enough. While perhaps not all equally guilty, everyone is complicit in the current culture of violence.

Certainly Rey Rosa’s decision to place his protagonist Joaquín into the heart of one of Guatemala’s most venerable families is not accidental. The Casasolas, with their four-hundred-year legacy in Guatemala, gives the impression via their lunchtime banter of having seen it all. Their conversation shifts easily, if sometimes formally—guided by the wisdom of the family patriarch—from one topic to the next, the difficult ones touched on only until discomfort sets in and long before danger might strike. To be sure, the youngest generation, embodied in Joaquín, either hasn’t learned the lessons of the fathers, or in the case of his cousin Elena, may be a beacon, however faint, of hope. Joaquín, initially a naïve pot smoker appears to be getting some wisdom over the course of the day. A portion of that comes precisely by way of his cousin, who threatens at last to bring the family, after four centuries of privilege, face-to-face with the dark side of the Guatemalan reality over which they have so long presided. Even when unintentional, as in the case of her lunchtime reporting of the details of what for her is an unimportant hit-and-run, her work at the newspaper inevitably brings topics to the family table that may open up a socially and historically charged Pandora’s box.

In this case, both the crime and the victim, she reveals, may not be what they seem. They are certainly not what Joaquín’s friend has believed, nor even what the latter’s supposedly informed legal counsel presumes. The victim, this time, is not a typical or anonymous Guatemalan child, but, as we note, the European-born and then adopted son of a recently separated nouveau riche couple. The estranged husband has connections to the Guatemalan military. The adoption itself, it turns out, may have been illegal. It is even possible that Silvestre was not willingly surrendered but kidnapped and that his real parents (or perhaps an earlier foster family) are in the country at this very moment seeking his return. Questions also exist concerning the role the child presently plays in his adoptive parents’ ongoing divorce proceedings.

Thanks to all this, Rastelli begins to suspect that the hit-and-run was not so much a result of Joaquín’s friend’s bad driving as it was the consequence of a failed kidnapping, possibly even a botched murder attempt. Once again, darkness and violence pervade Guatemalan society.

Our discovery that Silvestre wasn’t merely a victim of a hit-and-run, but of possibly an attempted kidnapping if not murder, sets in motion the abrupt changes that will lead to the novella’s denouement. They will also effect the final transformation of our original protagonist, that element of plot readers have been looking for in every story since the beginning of time. Knowing that the Belgian-Guatemalan boy, Silvestre, was not an accidental victim transforms both Joaquín and Rastelli. With this information, the former realizes that his friend’s role in this—the hit-and-run with the Discovery—is really a rather small matter. If this is the case, then Joaquin has been getting drawn into a web of lies, favors, and cover-ups that won’t ultimately benefit anyone but his friend’s and his family’s legal counsel. Perhaps all these events are just the machination of the abogangster, a man who pretends to be defending everyone when in fact he’s only looking out for himself. The scales begin to fall from Joaquín’s eyes as he at last understands the true extent of the legacy of violence in his native land. Many have driven the vehicles of discovery over the years, like his friend unwittingly setting in motion their own terrible series of events. Perhaps those drivers are not the problem. Perhaps their actions, however terrible, shouldn’t be our focus. Managing larger operations from the shadows, others claim to work for us but only perpetuate in their representations the ongoing cycle of violence. They have created a system that benefits possibly no one. We are all victims of an endless, and endlessly anxious, grab for ever-elusive power.

Of course, in terms of plot, Joaquín is ultimately old guard, a part of the oligarchy. While his realization is enlightening for us readers, it ultimately doesn’t significantly change his material conditions. Being a Casasola, he was always going to somehow land on his feet. Rastelli on the other hand is one of the handful of characters in the novella scraping out a real living, working the streets to try to understand what’s really going on. In so doing, he engages with just about every element of Guatemalan society. He knows where information is to be found and where action is to be had. With his discovery of Silvestre’s unexpected status as double and possibly triple victim, he realizes that Silvestre stands little chance of a normal, peaceful life. It looks as though the accidental hit and run may have saved the child from any number of more intentional crimes connected however murkily to his status as the illegally adopted son of militarily connected nouveau riche climbing economic, social, and political ladders in contemporary Guatemala. It’s a recipe for disaster. Recognizing this, Rastelli sets aside his role as detective-for-hire to assume the role of savior to the poor Belgian boy.

The salvation he offers cannot but strike us readers as troubling, at least initially. Rastelli steals his way into the hospital where the boy is recovering from his injuries and helps him sneak out a back window and onto the street behind the hospital. There he picks Silvestre up in his car, drives him to the center of town, and proceeds to drop him off in a park where, to our surprise, he begins a new life as a street urchin. With the aid of a street-sweeper friend of Rastelli’s, Silvestre makes the acquaintance of three other homeless fellow orphans, three of what Guatemalan society refers to as “piedras encantadas.” As the novella draws to its conclusion, there is no indication of any future for Silvestre other than permanent membership in this fraternity of street children. He is orphaned, homeless, and part of a despised, criminalized class.

What are we readers to make of this curious, ironic salvation? Certainly, Silvestre’s backstory looked complicated and, had our narrator wished to overstay his plot-line welcome, probably would have become much more so. But life on the streets? Can that be any kind of solution? Perhaps the answer is a clear no. Perhaps, yes. But certainly not definitively. And it’s here that our narrator really drives the point home. Who knows all the ins and outs of Silvestre’s backstory. Who understands the ugly divorce ripping his parents apart, the years in an orphanage in Brussels, the conflicts and possible crimes leading to a contested international adoption that would bring another family in search of him. Who understands his adopted father’s military backstory (or does that story belong to his grandfather?) and the insurance money someone or someones (how many abogangsters are involved here?) stand to gain by his death, or the ransoms or the simple vengeance (a new cycle?) that his kidnapping might inspire? The narrator, if the same voice in frame and tale, has made abundantly clear that the answers to such questions may be impossible in Guatemalan society today. But if anyone might know, who better than Rastelli, a servant of both the new rich and the old, a colleague of both the climbers and the scrappers, the payroll to both street urchin informants and the great Shadow himself, he who lurks in the very belly of the national intelligence beast. In the world Rastelli knows, in the world that comes closest to comprehending all that is Guatemala, perhaps one could do much worse than to become a piedra encantada.

Our narrator certainly appears to share Rastelli’s point of view. Has he not set up all of Guatemalan society to be nothing but an endless series of piedras encantadas? Buildings and roads of hard pavement built on a civilization of stone, even when in so many other ways so far removed from the stone age. And a society racked by the violence that the search for precious stones and metals would bring. And a mysterious supercomputer hidden in the basement of the country’s most symbolically important building, a machine that sees, knows, and understands everything. The whole of Guatemalan society ordered by an enchanted machine, a philosopher’s stone.

But the final piedra encantada gives the ultimate confirmation that perhaps Rastelli has done good by the child Silvestre. In the novella’s concluding section the narration returns once again to the italics of the novella’s opening pages. This time, however, the voice has changed, and the reader can’t help but wonder why. Though italicized, the narration appears no different than the chapters that followed the introductory angry-citizen diatribe: a third-person omniscient and fairly transparent voice describes the action as he sees it. Joaquín is, as in the earliest chapter of the novella, once more our protagonist. As the novel concludes Joaquín at last enjoys an intimate moment with his cousin. A day has passed since the frustrated marijuana drop, the hit-and-run, and the complicated cover-up.

Despite an argument the previous night when Elena learned of Joaquín’s role in the matter, twenty-four hours later the cousins have made up. In a sign of personal transformation, Joaquín has taken the relatively bold step of rejecting the advice of his family lawyer, the abogangster. With this move Joaquín achieves a form of relative enlightenment amidst the obscurity of Guatemalan society: the incident need not be so complicated; a simple confession will do; the child has survived. When the lawyer insists, Joaquín holds firm: he will have none of it. He refuses to perpetuate at least this particular cycle of spiraling violence. And so, in the final lines of the novella Joaquín’s new attitude leads to reconciliation with his cousin. They have retreated to his apartment. Lying next to each other, they entertain the possibility of a move to Spain. But it is clear they won’t go. Guatemala will be their home. Elena touches Joaquín intimately. And he’s hard. As stone. A piedra encantada.

It’s a poetic ending, the symmetry of stone, both Silvestre and Joaquín converted to rock, each in his own way. The one question remaining for the reader is the issue of the italics. The narrative voice—that angry, ironic, and godlike citizen-voice of the first pages—doesn’t appear to have returned. Our expectation of a chiasmic resolution remains unresolved. Instead we simply have more of Joaquín’s story. Our initial impression may be that this is an error on Rey Rosas’s part. On closer examination, however, we find this may be the very point. What happens to anger when there is hope, he may be asking. Or, in other words, perhaps Joaquín’s rock-hard phallus, not Silvestre’s transformation, is the real “piedra encantada” of the story. Has the angry narrative voice of the novella’s opening salvo been quelled by the hope for Guatemala’s future, brought on ironically by the progeny of its oldest of families? The Casasolas may be privileged, but perhaps they are at last prepared to lead the way in speaking truth to power (Elena) or at least refusing to play the games that the lawyers and financiers and politicians insist are essential (Joaquín).

So the voice from the novella’s opening pages, represented by the italics, returns, but that voice is now thoroughly transformed. Gone are the anger, the cynicism, and the obsessive recounting of violence and dysfunction. Gone is the desperate, withering direct address. Now our narrator merely recounts love. The offspring of Guatemala’s monied classes will become the piedras encantadas they so fear. The distinction between the most monied and the lowest of the low has, for a moment, been erased in the mutual realization and refusal of the violent Guatemalan game. The new Casasolas have, for a moment, become themselves street urchins, figurative to be sure, playing other games, willing to face the violence, so long as it’s not the violence of obfuscation and pay-outs and assassinations. In this refusal there is hope, if only that. But with hope Guatemala can at least proceed. It will not be pretty. But nor will it pretend to be. For its prettiest, its beautiful people, have at last said no.

With this third novella, Rey Rosa appears to have reached a happy place in his Imitación de Guatemala. In the fourth and concluding installment in the series, Caballeriza [Stable] (2003)—and the highpoint of the tetralogy according to Nery Rolando Villanueva—Rey Rosa passes the length of the story with the intrigues, political and familiar, of his country’s wealthiest class, as seen through the eyes of a writer witnessing a family romance from quarters too close for his comfort. After the first three novellas, this viewpoint is icing on the cake, simply another illustration of the rapid turn to violence of a people who carry it deep in their bones, even when not directly affected by the long Guatemalan civil war (Que me matan si…), economic penury (El cojo bueno), or the hardscrabble violence of the nouveau riche (Piedras encantadas). With Caballeriza, Rey Rosa drives home the point made by the angry narrator of the third piece: this is a land of violence. What more can be done? Ironically, in Piedras encantadas, the only one of these four novellas where he allows that voice to come to the fore, he provides, even if unwittingly, some semblance of an answer. It’s not an easy one. It’s arguably quite an ugly one. But in a place where only violence is known, where all is hard as pre-Colombian obsidian, perhaps that is the place one must begin. In the streets. To the streets.

Like the child Silvestre, a la calle.