Letter to My Father ‘Oblivion,’ a Memoir by Héctor Abad....One the fast rising literary stars in South America, a very touching memoir of his liberal father an epidemiologist and the founder of Colombia’s National School of Public Health, who died at the hands of the miltary right wing conservatives trying to help the poor.
nytimes.com
Colombia’s greatest novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, once lamented that “there has always been civil war” in his country “and there always will be. It’s a way of life.” This war has been going on for at least 150 years — between Liberals and Conservatives (Colombia’s main political parties), secularists and Catholics, armed revolutionaries, drug lords and the army — preventing the country from moving beyond what García Márquez has called its unending “Middle Ages.” One way or another, the national drama has touched practically every Colombian family, Abad’s more than most. Thus, while “Oblivion” is suffused with politics, it is primarily, and most powerfully, a highly personal coming-of-age story that’s also a sharp sociopolitical portrait of its place and time. The place is Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, and the time is the quarter-­century from the early 1960s until 1987. But every word revolves around the author’s father, also named Héctor. In literature, we have been conditioned to expect the malignant father of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, say, or the predatory father of Edward St. Aubyn’s autobiographical novels. In Colombia the saying goes, “A man only has one mother, but his father could be any old son of a bitch.”
The elder Abad was an epidemiologist and the founder of Colombia’s National School of Public Health. Staunchly anti-Catholic, indifferent to money (he gave most of his modest salary to students and friends), excessively tolerant yet actively involved in his children’s lives, he was, in his son’s telling, a maddening, kindly, liberal crusader for social justice whose enlightened ideas were doomed to failure. His passion was preventive medicine — clean drinking water and vaccinations for Colombia’s poor. As a teacher, he would drag his students to Medellín’s slums, organizing the building of aqueducts and forcing them to examine at close hand the diseases of poverty, in the hope they would take up social medicine instead of treating the wealthy at private clinics. With a grandiosity that may have been necessary given the obstacles, he fancied himself a new kind of doctor: a “poliatrist,” or healer of the polis.
Abad succumbs at times to the temptation of hagiography, but it is balanced by his struggle with his father’s constant presence, more pervasive than ever in death. He describes his father as an “ideological hybrid” who was branded a “bourgeois” by the left because of his opposition to “the armed struggle” and his occasional alliance with Conservative politicians who could advance his health care policies. But his main enemies were on the right. In the United States he would have been one of many left-leaning Democrats, but in Colombia his initiatives in poor neighborhoods made him an enemy of the state.
The ideological and religious divisions in the Abad family mirrored those of the country as a whole. His mother was a ­“daily-Mass Catholic,” in local parlance, who had been raised by her uncle, the ultra-Orthodox archbishop of Medellín. One of her cousins became “the most reactionary priest in the whole of Colombia,” the protégé of a notorious monsignor who preached that killing Liberals was “a pardonable sin.” Two other cousins, by contrast, became Liberation Theologists, rebel priests and anti-capitalist activists in the slums.
His father’s side of the family was irreconcilably torn between Liberals and Conservatives. Threatened with death, the author’s grandfather had to abandon his farm and flee with his children to a safer part of the country. But he fared better than many, especially during the undeclared civil war known as La Violencia that erupted in 1948, after the assassination of a popular Liberal presidential candidate. La Violencia lasted at least 10 years and resulted in the deaths of at least 200,000 Colombians.
During the decades that followed, the purges continued intermittently. When the heat was on, the author’s father would scramble for work as a public health consultant abroad until danger passed. For the son, deprived of his benevolent protection, these absences were “a living death.” At his mother’s insistence, he attended an Opus Dei high school. That his father agreed was emblematic of the contradictions at the heart of their lives. “Go to Mass so your mother doesn’t worry,” his father would tell him, “but it’s all lies.” For Abad, the fact that this fundamental difference between his parents never weakened their marriage was an insoluble riddle. His father even seemed to believe that the rigors of an Opus Dei education would benefit his son, as long as he was around to whisper the truth of the Enlightenment in his ear.
In this equation, devout “dark Catholicism” belonged to the feminine world of his mother and five sisters and aunts, while science, music, poetry and reason made up the light-filled world of masculinity. Still, it was his mother’s financial acumen, turning a small office management company into a prosperous business, that allowed his father to preserve his ideological and intellectual independence.
This independence cost him his life. In 1982, at the age of 60, the elder Abad was forced to give up his professorship. Political violence was on the rise. On the radio, in newspaper editorials and in letters, he denounced the military-sponsored death squads that were exterminating political opponents with impunity in the name of fighting a far-left guerrilla group that controlled large portions of the rural countryside. As his former colleagues and students were being gunned down in the streets, Abad was often the lone voice of outrage. Inevitably, he was moved to the top of the hit list. It was one of those terrifying moments in history when assumptions of decency are reversed, baseline human morality turns into a mark of madness, and the few who dare to demand it become pariahs or worse. The murders themselves were distinguished by a kind of lustful barbarity. Victims weren’t just executed; their limbs were chopped off. In at least one case a student was tied to a post and blown up with a grenade.
Abad knew the risks, and his son, with a subdued touch of anger, hints at the possibility that his martyrdom was a form of suicide. “If they kill me for what I do, would it not be a beautiful death?” Abad says when a member of the family warns him about his denunciations. But these sound like the words of a brave and frightened man seeking the comfort of an idealized courage. It seems likely that the impulse to protest had become a personal necessity, and Abad felt he would be unable to live with himself if he fell silent.
For atrocities to have meaning, we must understand their personal cost. In his restrained account of his father’s final days and their aftermath, Abad gives us a glimpse of the mute panic and shattering of self-respect that comes from living under a daily reign of state terror.
Abad waited 20 years to write this account. Clearly the wait was necessary. At one point he mentions the “twin dangers of nostalgia and despairing bitterness” that threatened to drown his story. The passage of time seems to have given him just enough distance to overcome these dangers.
“To remember” in Spanish is “recordar,” from “cor,” the Latin for “heart.” If to remember, then, “means to pass once more through the heart,” Abad writes, “then I have always remembered him.” This hard-earned memoir is an act of courage in its own right.
Michael Greenberg is the author of the memoir “Hurry Down Sunshine” and the essay collection “Beg, Borrow, Steal.”
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