Revulsion Read online

  SAN PEDRO DE LOS PINOS, MEXICO CITY

  DECEMBER 31, 1995 – FEBRUARY 5, 1996

  Author’s note

  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.