Horacio Castellanos Moya - Revulsion - Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador

SAN PEDRO DE LOS PINOS, MEXICO CITY

DECEMBER 31, 1995 — FEBRUARY 5, 1996

ALMOST TWENTY YEARS AGO, in the summer of 1997, I was visiting Guatemala City, staying at the house of a poet friend, when the telephone rang in the small hours of the night. It was my mother, calling from San Salvador: still shocked, she told me she had just received two phone calls. A threatening male voice informed her that they would kill me thanks to a short novel that had been published a week ago. With my mouth dry from rising fear and the certainty that my blood pressure had shot up, I managed to ask if the guy had identified himself. She told me no, he hadn’t identified himself, but his threats sounded very serious; she alarmedly asked if thanks to these circumstances I still intended to return to El Salvador in the next few days as I had planned.

The novel that awoke such hate is the one now translated into English. I wrote it in 1996–97, in Mexico City, as an exercise in style: I would pretend to imitate the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, as much in his prose based on cadence and repetition as in his themes, which contain a bitter critique of Austria and its culture. With the relish of the resentful getting even, I had fun writing this novel, in which I wanted to demolish the culture and politics of San Salvador, same as Bernhard had done with Salzburg, with the pleasure of diatribe and mimicry. I didn’t foresee that reactions, including those of some loved ones, would be so virulent: the wife of a writer friend threw her copy into the street, out of her bathroom window, indignant, thanks to Edgardo Vega’s barbaric talk about pupusas, the national dish of El Salvador.

Of course I didn’t return to San Salvador. I called some friends of international press agencies to tell them about the threat; there was scant coverage in the national press, although it didn’t lack a columnist who claimed I had invented the threats to promote the book and that I wanted to imitate Salman Rushdie. I continued earning a living as a journalist in Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain. A colleague mentioned the possibility that the threats could be related to Primera Plana , an ephemeral weekly publication I had edited (1994–95). It was very critical of political forces recently emerged from the civil war, and my colleague ventured that Revulsion was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But this was nothing peculiar. El Salvador isn’t Austria. It is a country where, in 1975, its own leftist comrades assassinated the country’s most important poet, Roque Dalton, after accusing him of being a CIA agent. I thought it would be better to go into exile than play the martyr.

It’s interesting that Revulsion didn’t exhaust my luck. Despite the threats and my absence, the little book continued to be published every year in El Salvador by a small and valiant publisher, and thanks to one of those twists of fate it ultimately was taught in the university. Soon various copies left for neighboring countries. On more than one occasion — in some bar in Antigua, Guatemala, or in San José, Costa Rica, or in Mexico City — I was introduced to people who expressed admiration for the book and asked me if I would write a Revulsion about their respective countries, so to speak, a novel in the style of Thomas Bernhard that would critically demolish their country’s culture. Of course I always excused myself, I told them that I had already done my work, mentioning without breaking into a smile, that some countries would require many more pages to complete their Revulsion and I was a writer of short novels.

Two years after the threats, in the summer of 1999, I returned with caution to San Salvador for a few days to see my family and take care of some red tape. In a restaurant I encountered a lawyer, an old acquaintance, who worked for an international human rights organization. “What are you doing here? You want them to kill you?” he asked with a gesture that could have been consternation or black humor. The following day I visited various friends, who to my surprise all told me that I had to write the sequel to Revulsion , because the country was worse than ever: the political corruption, the organized crime, the gangs, the loss of the value of life. .

But then I had other literary plans. With Revulsion , a fact was reconfirmed: thanks to their work, some writers earn money, others obtain fame, and some writers only make enemies. After the publication of my first novel The Diaspora that addressed the rot of the leftist Salvadoran revolutionaries during the civil war, I had become part of this latter group. To tell the truth I was tired of that existence. But as Robert Walser said to his editor Carl Seelig: “You can’t confront your own country with impunity.” Years later, despite having published many other novels since then, on various topics in which I didn’t imitate any writer, and not having written the sequel that some asked me to write, for Salvadorans, I remain uniquely and exclusively the author of Revulsion . Like a stigma, the little imitation novel and its aftermath pursue me.