The Abyss – Fernando Vallejo

[New Directions; 2024]

Tr. from Spanish by Yvette Siegert

Fernando Vallejo’s novel The Abyss, newly translated into English by Yvette Siegert, opens with the Colombian writer returning to his native country after a long voluntary exile: “And I who swore never to come back,” he gloomily remarks upon his arrival. “But never say ‘From this water I shall not drink.'” And he has drunk from it many times. Colombia has long been Vallejo’s nemesis and anti-muse, from his short stint as a filmmaker in the late sixties and seventies to his emergence as one of the most important literary voices in contemporary Latin American literature. Vallejo left Colombia in 1971 with the promise to never come back. In those years, emerging Colombian writers certainly had big shoes to fill, contending with the tremendous success of the most celebrated and beloved Colombian writer of all time, Gabriel García Marquez. His epic seven-generation saga of the Buendía Family, set in the fictional town of Macondo and narrated through the monumental One Hundred Years of Solitude, is considered a great achievement in world literature. One of the foremost writers of magical realism, García Marquez helped established the genre as a quintessential Latin American literary mode. Vallejo similarly centers his novels on a family saga, except he writes his own family: the Rendón clan, from his mother’s maiden name. He chronicles the life of not a fictional town but a real one: Medellín. He opposes the literary tradition of magical realism with raw realism. A master of autofiction, Vallejo stands out in the contemporary Latin American literary scene not only for writing about his complicated relationship with the Rendón family and Colombia but also for challenging the traditional tableau of male sexuality in Latin America, often incarnated in the concept of machismo. Vallejo, who is openly gay, started to write about messy homosexual desires and relationships at a moment when the subject was considered either a social taboo or not worthy of “serious literature” in Latin American literary circles. In his writings, homosexuality is not relegated to shadowy margins or treated in figurative ways for the sake of literary aestheticism. Instead, queerness is at the center of his literary world-making.

Vallejo’s most famous novel and, until recently, the only English translation from his vast body of work, is Our Lady of the Assassins (La virgen de los sicários). This tragic tale of intergenerational queer love entangled with Colombian drug cartels, narrates one of Fernando’s returns to Colombia and his romantic, dangerous relationships with young Colombian men, including Alexis, an older teen sicário: a hitman. After Alexis’s premature death, Fernando meets another youth, Wilmar, whose uncanny resemblance to Alexis makes Fernando fall in love with him. From Vallejo’s perspective, Colombia itself is nothing but a country of assassins: “Colombia used to be split between the Conservatives and the Liberals. . . . Today it’s between the hit men and the corpses,” he would later lament in The Abyss. In his fiction, Vallejo catalogs all the ailments that sicken his home country: political neglect and corruption, greedy Catholicism, extreme poverty, the merciless ruling of gratuitous violence by Colombian drug cartels and sicários. And his undisguised hatred for Colombia has made him into something of a national pariah—a mark of infamy he wore with pride. In 2007, Vallejo apparently broke all ties with Colombia when he decided to renounce his allegiance to the country and take up citizenship in Mexico, where he had been living for the past thirty-six years. Yet, Vallejo never really left Colombia, and Colombia never really left him: reading his novels feels like watching a series of homecoming parades on a loop, dodging real and metaphorical stray bullets. In The Abyss, Vallejo reevaluates his relationship with Colombia, his family, and his queerness, even though there appears to be no space for absolution. A deep sense of loss and urgency separates The Abyss from Vallejo’s previous works. In this novel, a middle-aged Fernando returns home once again, this time to care for his brother, Darío, who is dying of AIDS.

Fernando is the first in a very long line of siblings, and he has had uneven degrees of affinity with each one of them. Vallejo centers the narrative around Fernando’s relationship with Darío, the brother closest to him in age and in spirit. A sort of queer kinship also strengthens their bond: both brothers are gay. “Darío had shared everything with me,” Fernando says, “Boys, memories—nobody shared more memories with me than he did.” Leafing through an old photo album, Darío pulls out a picture of two boys, about five and four years old: “That’s us. Him with his blond curls and wearing a coat; me in a striped shirt, hugging him.” In stark contrast to the memories of childhood, the brothers’ adult memories are filled with lust. The two brothers used to cruise for sex together in a shopping center in Bogotá, a site “that served as meeting place for soldiers and lowlifes alike and that had become an obligatory stop on our daily Via Crucis.” The summer Darío took a job as a superintendent in a building on Eightieth Street, on the West Side of Manhattan, he and Fernando split their time between unclogging toilets and cruising for sex. The building was just two blocks away from Central Park “and its endless orgy of queers among the trees.” Years later, on his deathbed, Darío reminisces about those days with Fernando:

Darío rolled a joint with a slip of Pielroja cigarette paper, then licked it tight and lit it and took his first deep drags. And as the mysteries of that smoke began to cloud his soul, he started remembering this wonderful young Black man that we had met one summer night in Central Park, in New York City. . . . “We took him back to our apartment at the Admiral Jet, where I was the super, and we put him between the two of us in the middle of the bed.” “And we passed him back and forth between us like a ping-pong ball. What a hot night that was!” And I began to bless the Lord God for having given us that beauty, and so many others, undeservedly . . .

Traces of beauty and glimpses of happiness occasionally shine through small cracks of Vallejo’s abyss, but these moments appear to stand only as relics from the past. “What else could be happening on Junín [a famous street market in Medellín] besides all the dying?” Fernando asks morosely. “Beauties and more beauties were what walked along that blessed street from those blessed times of my reckless youth. But no more. The beauties had all been snuffed out. . . . Oh lads and young men of Junín, you have gone now. Cronus, the beheader of beauties, blotted you out with a single stroke of his wing.” In The Abyss, it seems nothing has the power to rescue a person from the destructive force of time. Death looms over the entire book, a character in its own right: “I walked in and set my suitcase in the entrance,” says Fernando upon his arrival. “That is when I noticed her. Death, that fuck-faced floozie with ineffable smile . . . positioned firmly on the first step of the staircase. She had returned.” First, she came for Fernando’s father, who died of liver cancer. Then, his brother Sílvio, who committed suicide at twenty-five. This time, she came for Darío: “Everything in this world must come to an end. Now it was his turn, and not even God Himself could prevent it.”

In his novel, Vallejo treats the AIDS epidemic as a metonym for the universal problem of death:

Life itself is a kind of AIDS. If you don’t agree with me, just look around at the old people, weedy and wobbly and immune-suppressed, with age spots all over their bodies and hairs sticking out of their ears, hairs that get longer and longer the more their dicks continue to shrink. If that isn’t AIDS, then I don’t know what is.

For Fernando, at least Darío was “dying in time to escape global warming.” By making this apparently unrelated shift from AIDS to global warming, Vallejo signals that the immune system of people with AIDS is not the only one at risk—the immune system of the planet has also been compromised. Long before the climate fiction trend in Latin America, Vallejo denounced the destructive relationship between humans and the planet. In The Abyss, Fernando attributes the rising temperatures in Colombia to man-made impacts in the environment: “My neighborhood died, the carbonero trees were chopped down, the shadows disappeared, the breezes grew tired of stirring . . . and this whole city went to shit, growing hotter and hotter and hotter, thanks to all these streets and all these cars and these people and all this rage.” Vallejo extends this posthumanist approach to nonhuman beings, a reflection of his long practice of veganism and animal rights activism. In the novel, Fernando befriends a pack of rats that live in the basement of a New York City apartment, and cries (perhaps for the only time in the novel) when a rescued dog is euthanized: “For me,” Fernando says in The Abyss, “dogs are the light of my life.” In 2003, when The Abyss won the prestigious Venezuelan Rómulo Gallego Prize, Vallejo donated the $100,000 prize money to an institution that cared for abandoned dogs in Caracas.

Fernando’s affection for the planet’s resources and the life of nonhuman beings is staggeringly at odds with his disdain for humans. At first, readers might mistake this anti-humanist stance for sexism or racism, but it’s more specific than that: his hatred for his fellow human beings is driven by his criticism of what he calls “reproductive mania,” heterosexuality’s compulsive sexual reproduction. In The Abyss, the narrator’s mother La Loca, the Crazy Bitch, is the embodiment of that inherently evil compulsion: “In every child there exists a potential grownup, an evil being. Men are born evil, and society makes them worse. Out of a love for nature, for the sake of ecological balance, and to save the vast oceans, we have to put an end to this scourge.” In The Abyss, the Crazy Bitch represents a type of matriarchy that upholds one of the worst tenets of the patriarchy—the idea that women are born to procreate. Fernando also blames his father, “an accomplice in this reproductive madness, of course, since ours is a bisexual species. Without him, the Crazy Bitch would have turned herself into a parthenogenetic machine.” In the novel, Fernando’s mother has given birth to twenty-one children.

Readers familiar with strains of queer theory may immediately recognize in Vallejo’s novel some echoes of the antisocial turn in queer theory, which overlaps with great part of Vallejo’s literary career.  Responding to the movement for queer assimilation in the 1990s US— as gay men organized to serve in the military, get married, and have kids, consciously distancing themselves from associations with perversion and promiscuity —some theorists articulated the revolutionary power of queerness as an inherent ineptitude for (heterosexual) sociality as it is known. For Lee Edelman, one of the most controversial figures of that debate, the cult of family in heterosexuality never questions the value of biological reproduction and futurity. Heterosexuality dwells in the obsession with sexual reproduction and the child as safeguarding the future of heterosexuality, always perpetuating itself, which reads as a wish for immortality. For Edelman, queerness challenges the primacy of biological reproduction, which makes queer people uniquely mature enough to face mortality. The queer antisocial turn is translated in The Abyss as sheer nihilism, as if humanity, standing at the edge of the abyss, has no other alternative than plunging to its own death. A few years ago, when questioned about his disavowal of heterosexual biological reproduction, Vallejo despondently replied, “May life end on Earth” (Que se acabe la vida sobre la tierra).

In The Abyss, Fernando’s anti-natalist, potentially queer antisocial views sometimes overshadow what seems to be the central theme of the novel: the deep bond between Fernando and Darío, which is built on queerness, not on family or genetic ties. Behind the Colombian-hating, Oedipal façade, Vallejo’s novel is about how to care for oneself and others, human and nonhuman beings, when everything seems doomed. As an intersection between queerness and posthumanist ecological concerns, The Abyss suggests a way out of the heteropatriarchal regime. Perhaps queerness can initiate a utopian movement toward the past, touching across time. Fernando is always trying to touch the past, those moments of bliss and youthful lust. At first sight, Vallejo’s yearning for the past may seem triggered by his attempts to restore his brother’s immune system: “In order to do this,” Fernando says, “you would first have to reverse the AIDS, and to reverse the AIDS there was nothing available at the time.” But reversing time seems to play a bigger role in Vallejo’s narratives. In his novels, Vallejo’s constant return to Colombia is a queer yearning to return to the past—traveling backward in time, to the motherland, to his childhood, to his mother’s womb, to the beginning of times when time itself, rather than destroying, stood still.

Bruno Franco is a cultural historian and PhD student at Johns Hopkins University, with a specialty in Latin American literature, Queer Theory, and Visual Medias.