Colonel Lágrimas

By Carlos Fonseca Suárez and Megan McDowell

“Beware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo, anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima.”  —Valerie Miles, The New York Times Book Review

Holed away in a cabin in the Pyrenees, the world-famous and enigmatic mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is working furiously on a final project. But what exactly is this monumental, mysterious undertaking? Why did this man, one of the greatest geniuses of the century, a politically militant man himself, suddenly decide to abandon politics and society altogether? As the reader pursues the answer to these questions, two layered narratives emerge. One is a series of unforgettable characters that have transfixed the mathematician’s imagination: Chana Abramov, a woman obsessed with painting the same Mexican volcano a thousand times, Vladimir Vostokov, an anarchist in battle with technological modernity, and Maximiliano Cienfuegos, a simple man who will nonetheless become the symbol for the Colonel’s as well as Europe’s restless political conscience. The other is the protagonist’s life story: a picaresque journey that traverses the 20th century: from the Russia of the October Revolution to the Mexico of the anarchic 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, all the way back to France and from there to the Caribbean islands. Out of this Borgesian web emerges a tragicomic allegory for the political arch of the past century, one that began addicted to political action and ended up hooked on big data.

Loosely based on the fascinating life story of the eccentric mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Colonel Lágrimas is a world-spanning tour de force of history, politics, literature, mathematics, and philosophy that wears its learning lightly, forming an appealingly human story of the forces that have created the modern world. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781632061041

Carlos Fonseca Suárez

Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in Costa Rica in 1987 and grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, BOMB, The White Review and Asymptote. He currently teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.

Book preview

carlos fonseca

colonel lágrimas

Translated from the Spanish

by Megan McDowell

Restless Books

Brooklyn, New York

Colonel Lágrimas

For Ati

I

the colonel must be looked at from up close. We have to approach him, get near enough to be a nuisance, near enough to see his slow-motion blinking—that face of his, youthful still, though tired, as he bends himself once more over the page. Now we will see him engaged in his true passion, meticulous over the paper that he touches with what seems a monk’s devotion, as if it were not his writing, but something sacred. But that’s not enough. We must get closer, until we see his image dissolving into tiny points. Pixels of a latent madness. Pale-cream shades from which suddenly, as we focus once again, that face we know so well emerges: the curly locks falling in a cascade, the receding hairline, and his eyes burning with a passion we do not understand. It is this mortal passion we seek in all his gestures, in all his movements, until we see him broken down into a series of successive photographic frames: here, the hands in a pose of writing; there, the hands relaxed; here, the hands suspended; there, the hands hovering over the coffee. Yes. The colonel drinks coffee because he is writing. On a white winter morning, the colonel sits down to write his life.

*

Spanish: Pirineos; French: Pyrénés; Catalan: Pirineaus; Occitan: Pireneus; Aragonese: Pireneus; Euskera: Pirinioak. One would need to draw a map and tell a story. But there’s no time. The colonel has little time left. And so it is enough to say that the colonel lives in the Pyrenees, and now, when he removes his glasses, round and adorable, the morning blurs into a solid white. Even there, with his gaze turned to the white horizon, sitting calmly, we can see the signs of an unextinguished passion. He doesn’t know it, but he has little time left. That’s why it is enough to sketch the scenes with oriental brushstrokes. Approach until we can get no closer, and see him dissolved in his own passion. On an afternoon like any other, the colonel sits down to write three stories.

*

We don’t know why we call him the colonel. Perhaps because we can see in his face the marks of a man on a mission, one who comes from an aristocratic megalomania that knows no bounds. In the midst of war, he opted for idleness and for knowledge. Yes. The colonel used to be a mathematician, but no longer. The colonel saw the war from the battlefield, but he was unarmed. The colonel was famous, but he decided to stop being so. Now, as we see him seated before the white morning, we can’t imagine him in the mountains of Hanoi, his head shaved Gonzo style, writing indecipherable equations that only a handful of people understood, giving a lecture while around him a carnival of explosions serve as background music. Vietnam was for him a dodecaphonic symphony written in symbols on a black chalkboard. He never liked applause. Perhaps it is due to this military rectitude that we must call him colonel, and not professor. As he is now, with his curls cascading from an impressive baldness, he has something of the Greek hero about him, a Socratic Achilles, a solitary teacher. For years now, he has preferred the green-and-white mountains to the hubbub of the city. Twenty years ago, he made the decision: when death came for him, it would find him peaceful.

*

Now that he only has a little time left, our monastic aristocrat leaves his coffee on the table, looks at a photograph of a white desert, and takes his pen in hand. A fountain pen, same as he’s always used, with good ink, his name etched along the side. We could move a little closer to see his name, but we would rather not; the colonel doesn’t like his name. He takes the syringe, fills the cartridge with ink, and inserts it. He is ready to start. Then, desperate to see what he writes, we run over, but it’s not easy. The colonel writes with his back very hunched, which doesn’t leave space for spying. We move to one side, we move to the other, but it’s no use. The colonel’s curved back recalls the herons on the green grasses of Andorra.

*

The title takes up half a line: Aqua Vitae.

The subtitle follows: Portraits of Three Alchemical Divas.

*

We don’t know at what point, or why, the colonel decided to abandon his serious work, his respectable and honorable work, his professional work as a mathematician. In sum, his well-paid work. What we do know is that ever since then he has taken up a mad kind of project—an autobiography by means of a megalomaniacal catalog of other people’s lives. Life written in mirrors, life become external, life become multiple lives. Yes, the colonel has many lives that he hides away day by day in a cupboard of many drawers, among a disarray of books and tobacco. The colonel always smokes while he writes. Tobacco has accompanied him on this long autobiographical journey, which has also been a kind of spiritual monasticism. Now that we approach him again, we see him writing at a frantic pace, with an almost arbitrary punctuation, his pipe suspended in the air and his eyes fixed on the paper. The strangest thing of all is that this autobiography of others—as he called it once—is not written in his own voice, or even in a masculine one, but rather in a very objective tone that portrays feminine lives. Today he returns to one of his favorite subjects: alchemy. And, as always, divas.

*

Sometimes he walks about the house with a thoughtful expression. He walks through the house; it is at times too big for him, alone as he is, but he fills it with his presence, calm and expansive like a yogi from the East. He wears a cream-colored toga that speaks of his eccentricity. Then we can approach his work desk, rummage around a bit among the papers, and see what he has written so far. We can see his methodology: he organizes the entries alphabetically, in that arbitrary, false order of encyclopedias that nonetheless soothes our need for rectitude. We can look from up close, with patience, and see how the newest entry has been placed among the papers that correspond to the letter a, and, more specifically, to Alchemy. Alquimía, a feminine name, we say to ourselves, the colonel must like it. And if we went further and dared to open all the drawers, we would find what seems to be a universal history of the false sciences: alchemy and physiognomy, mesmerism and humorism, magic and astrology. We would see, among the papers covered in idiosyncratic handwriting, a protohistory of science unfolding, a subterranean history of forgotten principles narrated through a series of feminine figures who chose to enter a history that had expelled them from the start. And it’s all accompanied by a strange assertion that we can only attribute to a purposeful madness: All this leads to the current moment, and it is written in my name.

*

The colonel must be saved from insanity and from psychiatrists. One must get close enough to him to believe in his project. We know, there’s a precise distance from which all of this makes sense. We just have to look for it, find it, and then sit down to watch him write the prophesies of this forgotten science.

*

For now, he has written a name, a few dates, and what seems to be the outline for a love story. The name: Anna Maria Zieglerin. The three dates: 1574, 1550, 1564. All this in his perfect, exceptionally hygienic handwriting, which we also find on the letters that he wrote to his Mexican colleague Maximiliano Cienfuegos during his first years of hermetism. Though he now repudiates these documents, they leave one thing clear: the colonel’s madness has order and method. That’s why, now that he puts pen to paper, we again look over his shoulder as if peering at an oracle.

*

No doubt about it, our character is a noble hermit. And as such, he belongs to a grand tradition. He knows very well that the curse of the modern world is its categories. Ermitaño: from the Latin eremita, which in turn derives from the Greek ἔρημος, or from ἐρημίτης, meaning of the desert. He knows it very well. This is why he has included an entry about the famous Desert Mothers in his encyclopedia. Ascetics who, following the tradition established after the Council of Constantinople, left the imperial cities and set out for the deserts of Thebaid. One name stands out: Syncletica of Alexandria. If we search among the colonel’s papers, we would find one that says,

Syncletica of Alexandria: Icon of the brave Desert Mothers. She was born in Egypt in the fourth century AD and lived a hermetic life. Part of an aristocratic family from Macedonia, the beautiful virgin chose to leave the city and shut herself away in a tomb belonging to her family. There, she cut her hair before a priest and swore to fast for months. Her works include Apopthegmata Matum.

But the colonel doesn’t live in the desert. As much as a photograph of a salt desert resembles the landscape surrounding him now, he loves knowing that this silence belongs to the Pyrenees. And thus, our noble hermit is a modern reincarnation of that Simon of the Desert, who, from a height of seventeen meters, saw human history as something that didn’t apply to him. Sometimes the colonel looks at the village miles below and laughs a laugh not devoid of melancholy.

*

Nevertheless, today the morning smiles on him perversely. The life of this Anna Marie Zieglerin is deliciously perverse. As with everything else, the colonel has his methods when it comes to writing the lives of others. He begins with the minimum: date of birth. Just a number: 1550. He loves to feel the temporal distance that transports him to a vague territory where anything is possible, and even so, everything is also objective. The beauty of being able to say, On January 6, 1550, Captain Hernando de Santana founds the city of Valledupar in what is today Colombia. To say immediately afterward, Fourteen years later, Anna Maria Zieglerin loses the virginity that up until now has served as the banner of her supposed divine purity. The colonel looks at what he has written and says to himself, Objective and vague beauty. Then the rest is simple: letting himself get tangled up in the story until he can’t get out again, letting the threads suggest themselves until he feels the autobiographical temptation. The colonel follows his curiosity with a mathematical precision.

*

To say, for example, On March 6, 1550, while a young and unknown Nostradamus puts the final full stop to his first almanac, two street dogs battle over a piece of bread in an alley in Granada.

The pleasure