Between Tears and Tapes, a Soviet World Under the Pen of a Colombian

Franz Kafka began writing his first stories while working for an insurance company. Employment allowed him to align his vocation for writing and somehow worked as a trigger for his great works. It is not a secret for anyone that being a writer, or in the most successful cases, such as Kafka's, implies sleepless nights, moments of anguish and in many cases uncertainty, which is why it is not surprising that Andrés Obando, a company administrator of a well-known transport company in Colombia, brings to light, hobie that increasingly becomes something more serious, his third novel.

Entertaining, full of suspense and narrated in an enveloping language, what more than going around puts the facts on the surface, the novel is constituted from the strokes of an espionage fiction. Thus, after Benejo el Soil de Paris, the author once again chooses to choose Europe as the place to develop the events that take place this time in Latvia. The chosen setting brings together the memory of a country with a Soviet past, where at the same time the characters keep their past secret and fear being seen or heard. “For me, writing about today's Latvia was not as interesting as describing what that life was like when Latvia was part of the Soviet Union. So that atmosphere is charged with what was the presence of the KGB, the secret police, since it allows the characters to feel that they are watching them at all times.”

But what Obando chooses as the perfect setting to develop a plot full of suspense, which at the same time gives an account of the European conflicts that are becoming more prevalent today, a Cold War that gains temperature with the current conflict in Ukraine, allows him to build well-traced and symbolic characters that run into Edmundo Alvarez, its protagonist. “These characters somehow represent that pure and patriarchal communist Soviet Union that the protagonist encounters. Somehow in European countries, and I found it in Latvia, there is a swaying in which the State is independent but at the same time it is not. So there is internal and ethnic polarization where 25% of people are Russian and the rest are Latvians. That generates a lot of conflict,” he says.

Thus, an unknown city, two fatal women and Edmundo Álvarez, a Colombian journalist tired of their profession, come together to give birth to a play in which a love story is crossed by the obsession with power of Juris Volkov, a Russian film director in which all that Soviet past is concentrated to leave the else.

Volkov then becomes the puppeteer who does not stitch without a thimble. He manipulates his cast while defining, in the eyes of the reader, not only what will happen in his film but what will happen in the novel. “He manages the chips and determines what is going on in each scene. He is the one who determines what the end of the scene will be like and puts the chips so that what has to happen happens. For Juris, what matters is not so much the film, but the control that his role as a director gives him and the role he lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. He is empowered by that thought and he is the one who manages the chips, determines where he is and what each of his actors is doing,” says Obando.

Thus, only until the end, does surprise steal the last pages and as if it were the last scene of a film, all the characters, in the perfect place and time, come together where stories intersect for the first time, the place where everything begins.

As Miguel de Cervantes pointed out at the time, as well as saying that memory was “the mortal enemy of his rest”, the same happens with several of the characters in Entre lágrimas y cintas. On the one hand, Estela, the impossible woman for whom the main character goes out of his way, a Colombian woman who lives in Latvia and works as an actress hiding her past among a bunch of letters. On the other side is Mr. Álvarez, a middle-aged man who knows almost everything but whose transformation ends up turning him into a tormented being who carries the weight of memory on his back. “They say that true loneliness is to have nowhere to return. Yeah, I thought that too; now I'm not so sure. Perhaps true loneliness is the abundance of memories and the lack of illusions. The more memories, the more loneliness; the more the past consumes you, and the less you want to live in the present. That was the only thing I brought from Riga: memories”, says Álvarez in the Epilogue. It's no wonder. The events that have the effect of domino fall occur one after another, having no return and leaving memory, the memory of a past that would often be more convenient to erase than to keep alive.

But unlike a bitter journey, the trips Obando undertakes work after work, which usually take place in foreign lands, are nothing more than a trigger for the creation of new stories. “For me, writing is a joy, it is being able to research and travel through writing. It's not about the time you have to be living in a place to be able to write about it, but it's an exercise in which you take advantage of being on the street, living the city, that, somehow, is trying to smell and live that life,” he says.

In this sense, through his personal experiences, he invites readers to travel to new places that are built and that gain life from simple but powerful prose where there is no room for unfinished facts or presumptions. On the contrary, it is the creation of a work in which the narration of events and unforeseen turns maintain tension and allow both the writer and the reader to leave in the memory of both the writer and the reader, a fast-reading novel that can easily replace a sitting down to watch a movie.

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