PARADISE
Elena Castedo
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990
323 pp., $19.95
I must have been five or six years old when my father took me to a charity benefit for foreign children in the 1940s in Cordoba, Argentina. "Refugees," he explained in a hushed and solemn tone - unusual for him, an ironic and irreverent man - were enemies of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco who had managed to outwit and escape these ogres. When we go to the house where the benefit was held, my heart was beating and my mouth dry with excitement. My disappointment couldn't have been greater when, instead of the fairy-tale heroes I anticipated, I was introduced to three thin, pale girls wearing long, black stockings, who clung to each other and glared at me, as if I were the ogre. When they finally decided to play, they would suddenly burst into tears or run away and hide without, I thought, the slightest provocation. Later, my father explained that the girl's parents had been taken away from them but that the girls had survived by hiding and by pretending to be French and not speaking their own language, not even among themselves. Will then, I remember arguing, if one could hide and cry and still be a hero than even I could be a "refugee!" Now, thanks to Elena Castedo's exceptionally fine novel Paradise, I know what my father was trying to tell me on that day, almost fifty years ago, about children and the meaning of courage.
The novel is the saga of Solita, a refugee girl, and her family's escape form Spain after the civil war and their exile in a Latin-American country clearly based on Chile. Solita tells us that in the gypsy world of the refugee "long-range plans didn't work; each minute you had to save your skin right then and there," you "went from country to country, from place to place, because things happened." That was why "there were few children left after the war, the exodus, the concentration camp in France, and the exile to faraway countries. I was a survivor, they said."
In this deeply moving and witty exploration of Solita's survival the author also gives us a brilliant satire of New World pretensions and Old World delusions. With great skill, she brings to life, for lack of a better phase, the unique "culture of Spanish Republican exile." The personalities and the refugee milieu that she evokes coincide with my own memories of the men, women and children who arrived in Cordoba, Argentina, in the late 1930s and 1940s and became close friends of my parents. Such as the sculptor Alberto Barral, who lived in the most spartan little house I ever saw: one chair, one bed one table, but hundreds of books and plenty of fresh fruit for us visiting children. On the way to see him, our father would invariably ask us, "Now, who does Barral live like? "The anticipated answer was, of course, "Diogenes," and the implicit message was that we should grow up to emulate Barral's frugal ways rather than the luxurious and frivolous life-style of people - many of them friends, some even relatives - who set the trends and enforced the secret codes that ruled our snobbish little world.
Solita's narrative of her trajectory form the frugal and breezy world of the refugees into the extravagant hothouse of the Latin-American gentry makes her the best chronicler of one of the most important cultural encounters in Latin America. The influence of Spanish Republican exiles on the region's culture
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