Liliana Colanzi - Two Short Stories - “I Pray for You” and “Chaco” - 2018

“I Pray for You” by Liliana Colanzi

Liliana Colanzi talks about “Chaco” and The Bogata 39 Project

Today’s stories by Liliana Colanzi are about life on the edge of the abyss in contemporary Bolivia.  

The Gran Chaco or Dry Chaco is a sparsely populated, hot and semi-arid lowland natural region of the Río de la Plata basin, divided among eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, northern Argentina and a portion of the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, where it is connected with the Pantanal region. This land is sometimes called the Chaco Plain. 

“Chaco”, which appears in translation in by Julia Sanchez, in Bogata 39, takes us along for a ride down a very dark road trip through the Chaco plain in the company of a young man whose consciousness is intermingled with that of a Mataco Indian whose head he bashed in with a rock as he lay passed out drunk in the street.  He was living with his mother and she has told him she is going to live with a relative so now he is on his own.  He hits the road.  Colanzi very visually evokes the brutality of the once beautiful countryside and the ravegement of aborginal cultures by outsiders.

“clouds from the cement factory hung, bloated and heavy, above our heads, and at sunset gleamed in every colour. Those who didn’t have a skin condition had sick lungs. Mama had asthma”.

A truck driver picks him up.   Life on road is nasty, he ends up having to give the driver blow job.  He bashes in the head of a mentally challenged child with a rock.  

We see the deep destruction of the psyche brought about by the legacy of colonialism:

“Soon after, the Mataco’s voice got inside my head. He mostly sang. He’d no idea what had happened to him and crooned in that mournful, almost swampy way that Indians do. Ay-ay-ay, he cried. I dreamed his dreams: herds of javelinas fleeing through the forest, the warm wound of a deer struck by an arrow, an earthy steam rising up to the sky. Ay-ay-ay . . . The Mataco’s heart was a red mist. Who are you? What do you want? Why have you come to live inside me? I asked. I am the Ayayay, the Avenger, he who Gives and Takes Away, the Killer, the Furious Rage, said the Mataco, and asked, in turn: Who are you? There’s no you or me any more, I said. From now on, we are only one will. I was euphoric, I couldn’t believe my luck.”

The ending is very startling, blending Christian beliefs with Indian traditions buried so deep in consciousness of the young man it takes magic realism to show us.

A very good story.

“I Pray for You”, which can be read online at the link above, is another road based story.  It shows us the relationship of a young couple.  

For sure worth reading.

Liliana Colanzi is a Bolivian writer who has published the shortstory collections Vacaciones permanentes (El Cuervo, 2010) and Nuestro mundo muerto (Almadía, 2016). Nuestro mundo muerto has been translated into English and Italian and was shortlisted for the Gabriel García Márquez short story award (2017). She is the publisher and editor at Dum Dum editora. She won the Mexican Aura Estrada Literary Prize in 2015 and has contributed to publications such as Granta, Letras Libres, Gatopardo, the White Review and El Deber. She lives in Ithaca, New York State, and lectures in Latin American Literature at Cornell University. From Bogata 39

Bogata 39 is a collection of Short stories by authors from fifteen Latin American Countries, all the writers are under forty.

More details can be found on the publisher’s webpage, One World Publications.

https://oneworld-publications.com/bogota-39-pb.html

I hope your full collections of Short Stories will soon be translated as I would love to read more of her work.

Mel u

"The Well" by Augusto Cespedes-Project 196- Bolivia

"The Well" by  Augusto Cespedes (1936, 15 pages)

AmericProject 196

Bolivia

24 of 196 Countries

Augusto Cespedes

Project 196 is my attempt to read and post on a short story from all 196 countries of the world.   Right now I am in South America  and hope, maybe in vain, to post on all 12 countries before I leave.  I was just in Guyana and I had hoped my next stop would be in its neighbor Suriname.   In a fairly long Google search I could not find a story from an author from Suriname online.   The native language of Suriname is Dutch, the population is only 500,000 and poverty limits internet access so this maybe a country I will come back to latter.    

Today I took the 3.5 hours flight from Georgetown, Guyana to La Paz Bolivia.  In the world's highest

elevation major city I am a bit short of air but I decline the local remedy of Coco leaves.  In my journey I am learning, or trying to, a bit about the literary culture of each country I stop in.  Some are very much under the domination culturally of bigger countries or old colonial masters.   Through reading the introduction to The Fat Man from La Paz-Contemporary Fiction from Bolivia edited by Rosario Santos (where I read this story) I was able to gain a basic knowledge of the short story in Bolivian literary culture.  I was happy to see the form is very much loved and appreciated there.   Many of the writers are influenced by Magic Realism and the lived experiences of the often in poverty Bolivian Indians and the challenges of big city life.    

The most read worldwide Bolivian short story is "The Well" by Augustus Cespedes.  The story in fact is a very powerful work about the cruelties and hardships in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia fought  between 1932 and 1935.  It was a war over territory and Bolivia lost.  In Bolivia most of the soldiers were indigenous men forced into service who felt almost no sense of national identity and no quarrel with Paraguay.  If you read the history of the war (as you can here) it seems like the very epitome of a war where the rich of both countries sent their native population to fight in a battle that meant nothing to them.   The territory fought over is harsh very arid land with little water.  The soldiers on both sides were very ill-prepared for this and many died from sheer lack of water.   The story is told as if it were the diary of a field sergeant in the midst of the dessert.   His men have no water so they begin digging a well.   Conditions are terrible.  There is no sense of patriotism at all in the minds of anyone in the story.   They dig deeper and deeper but still no water.  Cespedes is brilliant at depicting the consequences of spending long hours in a futile dig in a deep hole on the soldiers.  The absurdity of the story is a direct reflection of the absurdity of the war.   

I know few will read this story.  It is not online and still under copyright but it really should be on a list of world best 1000 short stories, at least.  If you focus on war short stories, then then this is must reading for you.

Author Data

Augustus Cespedes (1904 to 1997, La Paz, Bolivia) had a very influential and interesting life.  In 1927 he founded The Revolutionary Nationalist Party, one of the countries most important political parties.  He worked as a journalist during the Chaco wars.  He founded the major newspaper of the country.  He was a highly regarded deputy in the parliament of the country, ambassador to Paraguay and UNESCO.  He also wrote a number of novels, short stories and polemical works. 

I think I will next stop in Paraquay to see things from the other side in the Chaco War.