Building Your Library: Notes on Amalia

“The young man raised heavenward a pair of large black almond eyes, whose melancholy expression was in perfect harmony with the paleness of his countenance, illuminated by the attractive light of his twenty-six years.” (4)

This is how we are introduced to our first hero in Amalia, Eduardo Belgrano, whose name would have been familiar to Buenos Aires an Latin American readers because their character is the fictional nephew of Manuel Belgrano, a military leader during the fight for independence, a liberator and creator of the Flag of Argentina. This mix of real and fictional is typical of Mármol, whose novel is about no less than the constitution of the Argentine nation. So, let’s go back.

1910 was the year Latin America gained Independence from Spain, marking an important shift in the world geographical imaginary. Buenos Aires, now the capital of the Argentine nation was, at this time, the Fourth Viceroyalty of the Spanish Empire, making it the last formal administrative city in the Spanish Empire making it a significant urban location, a geopolitical center of Latin America, but in a different system of organization. 1910 marks the moment of Latin American Independence but not the moment of national organization. When our novel opens Argentina is at a pivotal moment in its history. There are two dominant discourses and factions battling to define the national structure: the Federalists and the Unitarists. The Unitarists made up of privileged criollo elite (American born Spanish) who believe Argentina should be a nation with Buenos Aires as its capital. It will have a centralized government, in other words.

Alternatively, the Federalists sought a loose Federation of regions in which each region would govern itself. Paradoxically, Juan Manuel de Rosas (the villain of many an Argentine novel) was the Federalist leader of the Buenos Aires region under whose brutal governance Argentina was first united so that it was a government centralized in Buenos Aires, which was antithetical to the Federalists proposed method of governance.

Within this context exiled Unitarist José Mármol set out to write his novel of nation-building with the Unitarist Belgrano at the center, but Daniel Bello, a character who navigates the treacherous political scene of Buenos Aires with skill, if not ease quickly becomes the hero of the novel while Belgrano spends most of the novel in hiding and recovering. Daniel is the son of a Federalist and seems to navigate all sides of the political spectrum in Buenos Aires. While Eduardo is clearly a brave and skillful fighter, as illustrated in the first chapter when, against all odds, he nearly fends off the Mazorca single handedly, for this next phase Mármol seems to be saying Argentina needs diplomatists like Bello not soldiers like Belgrano, in spite of the violence in the region.

While Belgrano is a fictional character related to a real figure, Mármol uses the real figure of Rosas heavily (and heavy-handedly) in his narrative. He is introduced:

The first of them was the heavyset man, who looked to be about forty-eight years old, with fleshy, pink cheeks, taut lips, a high but narrow forehead, small eyes hooded by their upper lids, and a rather pleasant air about him, though at first glance his appearance came as a shock. He was dressed in black wool bell-bottomed trousers, a loose raison-colored blouse with a black cravat wound about his neck just once, and a straw hat whose broad brim would have concealed his entire face had the part just above his forehead not been tilted back” (46-47).

His clothing is that of a provincial, not necessarily attractive, but the narrative does suggest extremely charismatic. However, later he is described in strong contrast to this first relatively benign physical description:

“And as the commandant left the room, his lively and intelligent gaze measured Rosas, that human guillotine who moved under the influence of his terrible will, and whose fist was ever raised to the neck of the virtuous and wise man, the old man and the child, the warrior and the virgin” (63)

At the opening of the novel Buenos Aires is fully under Rosas’s control, but it is also blockaded by France and other regions are in the process of trying to remove some of Rosas’ control. Another real character who shows up throughout the novel is Rosas’s daughter Manuela, another aristocratic criollo woman who seems more like a prisoner of her father’s than a daughter. Mármol’s sympathetic admiration of Manuela was well known. But also keep in mind these representations are representations, and not the people themselves even though they bear the names of real people. Amalia is as much a political tract, written by a future Argentine politician as it is a novel.

Nevertheless, don’t forget to lose yourself in the epic, which was serialized and enormously popular. Especially as you near the end remember that Rosas was still in power and Mármol was writing from exile, aware that he might never return to his home city. The ending is as much a call to action as it is a conclusion, and I think this is an interesting thing to think about when we engage with stories. What purpose does the ending serve? Does it give use sense of resolution or does it leave us with the sense that there is still more to be done, and in what way do these different types of endings make literature an opiate or drive us to think further?