TOWARD THE END of Salvador, Joan Didion’s account of her visit to El Salvador during its 12-year civil war, one episode crystallizes the “local vocation for terror” that so gripped the small Latin American nation. In the parking lot of a morgue, Didion finds her car boxed in by two motorcycles and further impeded by three men in uniform, one of them “caress[ing] the G-3 propped between his thighs.” A request to leave receives only an enigmatic smile. “This was a kind of impasse,” she writes. “It seemed clear that if we tried to leave and scraped either motorcycle the situation would deteriorate. It also seemed clear that if we did not try to leave the situation would deteriorate.” Finally, desperately, her driver manages to maneuver onto a curb, and out of the lot. “Nothing more happened,” Didion concludes, “and what did happen had been a common enough kind of incident in El Salvador, a pointless confrontation with aimless authority.”
The novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, an exile from El Salvador, seems permanently transfixed by arbitrary terror. His novels, five of which have been translated into English, chart the lives of those thrown into what Roberto Bolaño called Latin America’s “Secret Vietnam.” As in the purest of Greek tragedies (Moya calls Sophocles one of his favorite writers), his slim, exacting books operate according to the shifting logic of distant, mysterious forces. The Olympian gods were the original aimless authority; the various players in Latin America’s civil wars, with their capricious interests, capacity for violence, and callous indifference to suffering, are the gods’ modern incarnations.
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