Colombian Fernando Molano died (of AIDS-related causes), aged thirty-seven, in 1998. Some years later, one of his friends found the draft of the novel he was writing in his final years: Vista desde una acera (“View from a Sidewalk”), which was then published in 2012. This is an autobiographical account of growing up poor and gay in Bogotá, of sexual awakening and young love, and (intercut with this Bildungsroman narrative) of caring for a boyfriend with AIDS in the face of homophobia and hostility at the hospital and beyond. It’s a plea for freedom and tolerance imbued with deep romanticism.
The book both opens and concludes with the boyfriend’s diagnosis, as ultimately the sections that describe the narrator’s past catch up with the diary-like sections that are set in an urgent present of battling for better treatment and for the right to be recognized as carer and lover. As such, the book is formally coherent and comes to a logical end. Its final line is a succinct send-off: “And that was all” (249). On the other hand, there are also signs that the manuscript was left unfinished at its author’s death. Towards the end, it is increasingly ragged and uneven, not least when it includes a long digression (supposedly an essay co-written by the narrator and his boyfriend) on the problem of defining poetry. There are also disquisitions on the guerrilla and on the fate of the public university that feel like material for essays and disrupt the narrative flow. Yet of course there is nothing that disturbs that flow so much as the disease itself, even if it is also what makes the writing feel so urgent and necessary, as an effort to memorialize a life before it finally slips away.
Indeed, though this is a book that is written under the sign of death–a double death, in fact, both the author’s and the boyfriend’s–it’s striking that it has far more to say about life and, above all, love. Molano presents himself (and his protagonist) as unabashedly romantic, and he’s prepared to run the risk of appearing somewhat kitsch as a result. “It’s always somewhat sad,” he tells us, “to see how among men love was seen as something repugnant” (207). He sees lovelessness or (even) an antipathy towards love wherever he looks: whether in his parents’ marriage or in his account of most gay hook-ups, whose focus is the immediacy of desire rather than long-term affection. Not that Molano (or his narrator) is indifferent or opposed to desire; far from it. But his “dream,” as he tells us, is “to belong to someone who would truly love me” (233). And for his beloved he would do almost anything–and ultimately has to do so, faced with the contempt and moral opprobrium attached to the stigma of AIDS.
In the end, then, Vista desde una acera is the story of a love that dares to speak its name. Challenged by repeated oblique insinuations as to his rights to stay with his boyfriend at the hospital, the narrator casts aside any masks or pretence: “Look [. . .] you know perfectly well who I am. I’m his friend, I’m his lover, I’m his boyfriend, I’m his companion: whatever you want to call it. So I don’t know why you’re asking me. As to what I’m doing here, it seems obvious to me. He’s very sick, he’s close to death, it’s natural that I should want to be with him, no?” (198). The entire book is written in the voice of someone who feels he has nothing to hide, and who has little sympathy with those who do, whether they be hypocritical heteros or closeted gays.
I am not the only one to note that there’s more than an echo here of The Catcher in the Rye, even though Salinger is not on the list of the narrator and his boyfriend’s idolized writers (who range, instead, from Dickens to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, Borges, and Wilde [241]). Molano’s rage is against what Holden Caulfield called “phonies,” and he has little of contemporary queer theory’s interest in the performativity that attends any claim to identity. For Molano’s narrator, there is no doubt as to who he is, and his stake is in his own sense of what is natural and authentic. As with Caulfield, there is something almost adolescent about some of his literary and political positions. His Romanticism (aesthetic as much as interpersonal) is quite straightforward, and it is no wonder that, in the essayistic sections towards the end of the book, he rails against the “postmodernity” that, he claims, brings with it “a type of devaluation [of] human things, such as poetry or love” (241).
The irony is that Molano’s own text is far from poetic; in fact, as Héctor Abad Faciolince’s (excellent) postface notes, the prose here is almost militantly anti-literary (256). Unpolished, unfinished, and uneven, devolving into a patchwork of genres, one might even call this book (despite itself) somewhat postmodern. And still, despite Molano’s fears, the sense of love prevails.
A brief video essay about Molano, and a longer interview with the writer are both available on YouTube.
Posthegemony 