Street art in Colombia
The Devil of the Provinces
- a beguiling tale of a biologist returning to the small Colombian city
where he was born and raised. He begins work as a substitute teacher at
an all-girls high school, but soon finds himself caught in an
intricate, deadly web woven by a host of diabolical spiders. A crime
novel, you say? Only if we consider the biologist as the perpetrator,
with his crime being his return to the city of his birth.
The
biologist quickly discovers that his knowledge and background put him in
conflict with those around him, particularly with the women and men in
power. To begin with, he overhears a young lady in a bar describing
their country as the happiest on Earth, where the primary source of
their happiness is faith. As she cheerfully states, "No one here loses
faith." Concerning the extreme forms such faith can take, deeper into
the tale, this is what one wealthy and influential grande dame has to
say:
“All the Lord's work is perfection, so the planet has a
thermostat, it regulates its own temperature. Just think about freezers.
You defrost them every so often, right? So they keep working properly.
If you let the ice and the frost build up, that's where you're really in
trouble. So what do you do? You defrost every once in a while, son,
it's God's miracle cure, case closed. And that's the phase we're in now.
Comes around every twelve thousand years, just like clockwork. So of
course we're seeing traces of ancient civilization in what we now know
as Antarctica, because it used to be, twelve thousand years ago,
tropical paradise, just like the one we're living in, and the people who
lived there were really ahead of their time, thanks to the
extraterrestrials.”
Considering the circumstances, the biologist
dare not raise any objections. And further on, he discovers there is
actually a church, well-heeled and flourishing, espousing such
preposterous beliefs.
How prevalent and deep-rooted is this fiendish practice of creating a cartoon world as a method of exerting
control over an entire society and culture? Like a blow from a
truncheon, our truth-seeking, rational scientist is given a disturbing,
panoramic vision when he visits the city's small museum. In the vivid
language of Juan Cárdenas:
“The biologist observed that, as
with most extravagant paintings, the fabrication of custodiae had
flourished during the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church set
in motion its major propaganda operation: the colonization of the senses
through artwork. Persuasion wasn't enough anymore, subjugation was the
aim. The passage from education to spectacle, evangelization to
fanaticism. These images were made to trap the eye and flood it with
vibration, illusions of movement, space-time dislocation.”
Yet,
there's a sliver of light in this otherwise suffocating, stultifying
city (what the biologist terms the “dwarf city”), articulated by, of all
people, his friend, the dealer, who makes it his practice to shower in
total darkness.
“I see how most of the stuff I think of as real
is basically my own production. Things my head put together itself,
without my permission. And right there, in the shower, the darkness and
all that good water around me, I see, I can really see: goddamn, it's
all clear all the sudden: half of anyone's life only exists in their
head. And what's left after that, half of it happens in language, in
fucking chatter, in noise.”
The Devil of the Provinces is a
searing portrait of what an individual, no matter how open-minded and
educated, must come to terms with when attempting to bring an element of
wisdom to the life around them and their own life. Reading this
memorable novel, I was reminded of that 1967 British TV series, The Prisoner,
where the hero, number six (we're giving you a number and taking away
your name), is imprisoned in a village on a small island, a village
where everyone around him will not admit they are also prisoners, mere
pawns to be manipulated.
The Devil of the Provinces deserves a wide audience. Special shout-out to Lizzie Davis for a marvelous translation. Read it. 
Colombian author Juan Cárdenas, born 1978
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