Saturday, December 4, 2021

Difficult Light


One cannot discuss Tomas Gonzalez’s work without invoking the name of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  In Gonzalez’s novel, Difficult Light (Archipelago Books, 2020), the influence is evident in his narrator, David, an aging artist and writer who has suffered a lifetime of tragedy and now lives out his days in central Colombia. He reflects on the ghosts that haunt him and the inescapable certainty that in blindness, his best work as an artist is behind him.  He can no longer paint due to macular degeneration and has turned to slow and painstaking writing with his fountain pen and magnifying glass, leaving pages of his life for his housekeeper to organize.  This spare and beautifully written novel is full of requiem and solitude and loss.

In the period of middle-age from which the central storyline is told, David and his wife Sara face a tragedy all parents fear: the impending death of their son, Jacobo, a young man suffering greatly from the horrific pain of an accident that has left him paralyzed.  He and his brother, Pablo, embark on a final journey from New York to Oregon, where Jacobo has decided to commit assisted suicide.  David and Sara wait by the phone, a hopeless and helpless vigil because they cannot accompany their sons due to the legal ramifications of what is to come; however, they support his wish to escape the unrelenting agony of his daily life.

These scenes are intercut with David as an old, nearly blind man living in Colombia without Sara, who has died.  He walks in solitude through the gardens and orchards she tended, a silent memory of the scope and shape of his life, his family, his work.

In his private reflections, David finds unbearable truths.  “It’s a cruel cliché,” Gonzalez writes, that “the last thing you lose is hope.”  Pain is a constant and unrelenting companion, embodied in the physical suffering of Jacobo and the spiritual suffering of his father.  Gonzalez fills his novel with the quiet sorrow of his characters.  Their moments of relief are all too fleeting:  massages help free Jacobo for brief periods so he can find sleep; the substance of David’s memories of Sara and their love bring some comfort to his bereaved state.

Gonzalez lingers on a quiet meditation of summer and light, something that is slipping away from his narrator.  David reflects that  “it was summer and the days were long.  In summer at a certain point you have the illusion that the days last forever.  I didn’t want night to come, because then I’d have to acknowledge that time was passing; that life was passing over us, crushing us with its wheels and gears.”

He has the epiphany that “Affliction is not motionless; it is fluid and unstable, and its flames, which are not orange and red but blue, and sometimes a horrible pale green, torment you sometimes on one side of the body and sometimes the other, sometimes forcefully gripping your whole body until you find yourself silently screaming like that Munch painting where a person is wailing on a bridge.”

This is the torturous physical pain of Jacobo and the psychic pain of his father, and neither can be ameliorated in this life.  They must be accepted as the human condition—our lives are both torment and triumph over the torment.  Jacobo describes his pain as someone “punching him endlessly in the stomach” or “crushing his toes in a vise.”  These are pains from regions where the nerves have been severed, yet the pain persists.  In this life, pain is inescapable.

In this quiet, elegiac reverie, while waiting for the inevitable death, we get to the heart of the human condition:  to live in the realm of sorrow and suffering.  Indeed, life is suffering, but it is in his memories of making love to Sara that David finds redemption.  We love each other physically, spiritually, and in the end, that love will bring us home.

Jim Morrison of the Doors gave us the lyric, “No one here gets out alive.”  Tomas Gonzalez begins his novel with William Blake’s words:  “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is:  infinite,” from which the Doors took their name.  Both have purchase in this discussion of Difficult Light:  if we are creatures fated to move from existence to oblivion, we must reckon with the clarity that only comes at the end of our journey.  It is only in retrospection and reflection that we understand how and why we’ve lived.