Translator’s Note
In The Spanish Department: A Campus Novel, up-and-coming Chilean writer Antonio Díaz Oliva gleefully satirizes the power dynamics among Latin American and Spanish academics vying for permanent positions in Spanish departments at elite universities in the United States. His characters endure struggles to obtain tenure and survive in academia, sadomasochistic displays of power by those who hold it, and the pressure to “publish or perish,” all of which place them in increasingly surreal and violent situations.
Díaz Oliva (who goes by ADO) brings a specific point of view to the novel, as he lives in Chicago and has spent time on a number of university campuses in the US while achieving success as a novelist. He has authored two novels and two short story collections, won the Roberto Bolaño Young Writers Award for La soga de los muertos in 2010 and the National Book Award for Best Story Collection of the Year in Chile for Gente un poco dañada in 2015, and was chosen as one of the most outstanding Latin American writers born in the eighties at the 2013 Guadalajara International Book Fair. Fellow Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra called ADO “an author who writes small revelations born out of a religious-like observation of literature and life.” And Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac dubbed him “a funny anthropologist who portrays with hallucinatory acidity the contemporary barbarity in which we live.”
The Spanish Department is ADO’s first and only campus novel, which he self-mockingly ensures is obvious from the outset (the title of the book is simply Campus in Spanish), but it swings in and out of a whole host of genres, beginning with a classic noir fiction set-up: the suspicious death of a depressed Ivy League professor of Spanish literature. The two living protagonists are a former student of La Rabia who has eyes on his now vacant faculty position and a private investigator who turns out to have her own connection to the late professor. The novel quickly takes a turn for the bizarre and then a hard left toward the sinister, all while managing to not take itself too seriously.
ADO is keenly aware of the Northern Hemisphere’s appetite for what I like to call “dictatorship porn” and “border violence porn” when it comes to Latin American literature. He eviscerates this literary bloodthirst by consciously exploiting it, even having his characters specialize in it as an academic discipline, and taking the novel to ridiculous extremes in service of the satire. (In Netflix terms, it’s like a parodistic mash-up of The Chair and Narcos.) The result is dark, but also extremely funny, especially to anyone who has passed through the hallways, classrooms, or faculty offices of university Spanish departments.
At the same time, The Spanish Department portrays academia as being equally as capable of inciting and incentivizing violence as religion, politics, or drug trafficking, a premise that seems, at turns, both silly and not very far from the truth. The result is simultaneously cathartic and incisive in its questioning of the intellectual brutality that has become accepted as the only way to play the academic game in the United States.
It is my privilege to share a few excerpts from the novel where ADO begins to present his cast of eccentric characters and flow between narrative styles and genres. The English-language rights are available, and inquiries can be directed to: [email protected].
Emily Hunsberger
1
Six years before being hired by Pepsodent University, Salvador Allende G. received a doctoral degree (with honors) in Literature and Cultural Studies from Waindell College for his dissertation, “Pornostalgia: Representations of Self-Victimization in Contemporary Chilean Literature.” Professor Allende’s central argument was that present-day Chilean writers can only achieve recognition if they write sepia-toned books about the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It is through these means, and these means alone, that Chilean literature is able to garner status outside of Chile, in the form of prizes, awards, and translations into other languages. The writers to whom he collectively referred to as the Baby Pinochet Generation were the subject of several individual papers that Salvador wrote, which he then cobbled together for his dissertation. He even invited a few of them to the United States to give talks about their work and their personal traumas. All of them, of course, were generously paid. In US dollars.
Salvador Allende’s dissertation was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, received a few likes and comments in a cultural theory Facebook group, was the subject of a heated panel at the LASA congress in Barcelona, and elicited positive reactions from several professors in his field. All this helped Professor Allende get a job at the University of Buffalo Wings, where he taught for nearly five years and lived with his ex, Anselmo Ángeles. Even though the concept of Pornostalgia gained a certain level of traction in Spanish departments around the United States, Salvador Allende had always been on the quiet side and hardly displayed the type of egocentrism to which most academics are all too susceptible. His only self-indulgence was talking about his father’s tattoo. The tattoo of Salvador Allende’s face. Not his face, he would clarify, but the face of the former president of Chile, Salvador Allende Gossels, victim of the Chilean right wing, Pinochet, and the CIA. His father had Allende’s face tattooed on his arm just days after the coup, his heart heavy as he thought about the mustachioed socialist blowing his brains out that fateful morning of September 11, 1973 with an AK-47 that had been a gift from Fidel Castro himself.
Ten years later, in 1983, Aníbal and Alma (his parents) named him Salvador for the very same reason. “Because a country without memory,” they told him, “is a country without history.” Salvador Allende would speak about his father’s brief, but intense period of militancy in his classes and at various academic symposia. Aníbal first joined an armed leftist group as a university student, but it wasn’t until the mid-eighties that the group began sending members to Cuba for military training. Chile had been living under a dictatorship for over ten years and the resistance knew they had to take the next step. “That’s when Aníbal, my father, disappeared.”
It happened in Panama, on his way to Cuba, in 1987. Aníbal was supposed to travel to Punto Cero, where the Cuban government trained guerrilla fighters—or at least aspiring ones—from around the world. There he would take a crash course on how to use assault rifles, maneuver around obstacles, scale walls with a rope, make Molotov cocktails, and deploy military-style tactics. Two weeks later, he would return to Santiago, again via Panama. But during his first layover, he was visited by two DINA agents, the DINA being, of course, Pinochet’s secret police force, the same one responsible for the spying, kidnapping, and torture of Chilean civilians. The agents wore Hawaiian shirts and waited for him in the lobby of the hotel where he was supposed to stay for one night only. They told him in fake Cuban accents that they were members of a group called Kultura Kastrista.
“We’re friends of the Chilean resistance. And the Basque resistance, the Palestinian resistance… all the resistances!” They invited him to join them for a mojito at a back table in the hotel bar. It was late, and hardly any servers were waiting on tables. After covering his face with a handkerchief doused in chloroform, they took him to a nearby warehouse. Salvador Allende’s father never returned to the hotel.
And his whereabouts have been unknown ever since.
Both his mother, Alma, and his father’s sister, his aunt Marcelina, spent years hoping for some kind of clue.
When he went to Pepsodent for his campus visit, Salvador said he was part of the last generation of Chileans born during the dictatorship, which is why—and this part he emphasized with a solemn air of professorial authority—he was not just another academic that studied his country’s trauma. No. He was himself a survivor of said trauma.
“Now, as we all know, at the root of most academic research is some sort of collective trauma. But it just so happens that I’m actually from the generation that grew up in the shadow of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. So, you see, I don’t just study Chile’s great trauma.” He paused. “I embody it.”
Later, Bárbara Montejo told him that this was, in part, the reason they had hired him. Once they got to know one another better, the chair of the Spanish Department revealed to him that, as the one with the final say in hiring decisions, she thought his campus visit was the best one of all the candidates’. Specifically, because of the class where he told the story about his father.
“What you delivered was more than just a lecture,” Montejo told him, “…it was a compelling, almost seductive performance.” She lightly placed her hand on his shoulder and slowly ran the tips of her fingers across his chest. “At least that’s what one of my informants told me.”
When he died, Javier La Rabia had left behind a list of five possible successors, all former students of his. But most of them had jobs at other universities or had given up on academia altogether. Salvador Allende was among the five names on that list. And of the five he was the most adept at combining his field of study with his personal background and family history, something for which he was deeply indebted to his graduate school classmate, Valentina Mauler. A well-dressed, uppity scholar from Buenos Aires, she taught him that in academia, one’s personal history—where you’re from and why you study something—is always invented, augmented, and airbrushed according to the needs of the academic market.
2
Javier La Rabia was convinced he’d reach the pinnacle of his academic career at Prinseton University. After completing his doctorate at Kornell University, he accepted the first job offer he received: a position as an adjunct professor at Waindell College, where he stayed for five years. La Rabia had always considered Waindell to be a stepping-stone to establishing his career as a Hispanist. The great Hispanist the world was waiting for. Javier felt destined for academic glory. He would transcend the academy and influence contemporary thought, all thanks to his theoretical treatises on horses and literature. Or as he liked to say, “a sub-field that might seem rather equestrian… but never pedestrian.”
By the time he was hired by Prinseton, Javier was going bald. The little hair he had left was more salt than pepper, and the lines around his eyes and on his forehead were becoming more pronounced by the day. His skin was turning papery and was mottled with dark patches, that telltale sign of old age.
He thought locking in tenure would be a breeze, but he couldn’t have been more naïve. At forty-something years old, La Rabia was still young—at least within the relatively geriatric world of academia—and in the Spanish department at Prinseton, they relegated the youngest professors to that revolving door known as the tenure track. The idea was that the weakest ones would end up dizzy and disoriented and give up on any hopes of an academic career. Only the best ones would continue going round and round until they were deemed worthy of the title of permanent tenured faculty. The problem was that, as each year came and went, the promise of that blessed tenure was never fulfilled, but rather renewed. Because that’s all it was: a renewable promise. Javier La Rabia published paper after paper about ponies and postwar Spanish literature, or mares and the work of Miguel de Unamuno, or miniature horses and the madness of Nietzsche, or any type of horse and any author as long as it kept him in the perpetual motion of the revolving door. He also taught classes on Spanish grammar and composition, the Spanish Civil War, Basque separatist terrorism, and even bullfighting. The workload was intense: teaching five courses per semester, serving as advisor for seven dissertations, attending countless meetings, preparing and delivering talks at conferences, writing papers for journals, publishing two books before his tenure review, and overseeing a summer program in Sevilla. Not to mention enduring the harsh New Jersey winters. And to top it all off, studies on Francoism and the Spanish Civil War didn’t seem to matter as much as he’d always believed. ¿Es que a nadie le dolía ya España? Javier La Rabia would wonder late at night, remembering how even as a little boy, while he was having churros y chocolate for his after-school snack, he dreamed about growing up to become a great Hispanist.
During his last year at Prinseton, La Rabia suffered the first in a series of psychological breakdowns. In other words, he succumbed to Paul de Man’s irony: he was never going to get tenure. Ever. The department chair—a pale Uruguayan woman with a short, blonde, pixie haircut who studied mental institutions and monarchies—told him he just had to keep up the good work. Relax, Javier. You know how it is. Publish or perish! Any academic that doesn’t contribute to the humanities deserves to be forgotten. But each May, at the end of the semester, the tenure committee met with him and explained that, because of the university’s financial troubles, the department would be delaying his tenure a little longer, just a little bit. They really did want him to be a permanent faculty member, but it was better to wait. Let’s come back to this in a year. Keep up your spotless performance and impressive output. You know how it is, Javier: the worst kind of academic is the one that rests on his laurels.
That last year, La Rabia would get up in the morning and look out the window without opening it. He would gaze at the sparse, soft winter light filtering in through the curtains. He kept attending meetings but said little or nothing at all. And his appearances on the Prinseton campus became fewer and far between. From time to time he was seen at a department reception or a lecture given by another Ivy League professor. On those rare occasions, people said he was like a specter of his former self: he shuffled around in his shabby bit loafers, pants covered in grass and mud stains, shirt untucked (and sometimes off by a button), a faraway look in his eyes. Even the tone of his voice had become unsteady and, according to some of his students, gave off a hint of aggression.
~
It was during winter break, after classes had already ended for the semester, when the students were holed up finishing their final papers or had already gone home for the holidays. The quads were completely abandoned. The first of many winter snows had fallen, and the lavish profusion of Christmas lights and decorations only served to accentuate the loneliness of those with no family or home to return to, as was the case of Javier La Rabia.
That December, one of his students named Wanda Rodríguez (who was studying the semiotics of horses in Che Guevara’s journals) waited for him in a café for not one, not two, but four hours so they could talk about her dissertation. But Professor La Rabia never showed. He didn’t respond to her five emails, either. Wanda Rodríguez went to look for him at his office: empty. She wrote a sixth email, this time copying the chair of the Prinseton Spanish department. Two weeks went by. Christmas. New Year’s. Still no signs of life from La Rabia. As all this was happening, money was getting tighter and tighter—the stipend Prinseton provided for PhD candidates was barely enough to live on—which is why Wanda answered an ad from a company looking to test new vaccines on animals and graduate students. She got paid to get a couple of shots in the arm and ended up with vertigo, vomiting, and hallucinations. But it only lasted a few days. Or weeks. Or was it months? Years? Anyway. The point is that it wasn’t too long before the due date for turning in her dissertation was looming ominously on the horizon. Wanda Rodríguez decided to go to La Rabia’s house and knock on his door without leaving until he came out to talk to her. She had run out of options. So she entered his address into her phone and got an Uber to the outskirts of campus, near the house where Albert Einstein once lived. Oddly, the door was unlocked, so Wanda let herself in. The house, which she had been to once for an end-of-the-year gathering, was exactly as she remembered it: photos of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish flag hanging solemnly, a picture of La Rabia sitting next to Derrida at a conference in the eighties, several diplomas, and daguerreotypes from the Spanish Civil War. Everything meticulously matted and framed, of course. Wanda walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, but she didn’t find any beer inside. That was weird; Professor La Rabia always had some of his home brewed beers on hand to offer his guests. All she found was a bunch of kale, some shriveled radishes, and a glass bottle filled with a suspiciously green substance, an expired dairy product of some kind… Just then, as she was about to inspect the bottle more closely, Wanda heard a faint sound coming from the second floor. It was a continuous plunk, plunk, plunk sound, like a drip. Wanda climbed up the spiral staircase. “Professor La Rabia?” she called. “It’s Wanda Rodríguez.” The drip was coming from the bathroom. “I tried emailing and calling… I’ve been trying to get a hold of you… it’s about my dissertation.” She was almost to the second floor. “Please forgive me if this is, like, inappropriate in any way.” Wanda knocked twice. “If you’ll excuse me, I just…” She pushed the bathroom door open, but immediately stepped backward and pulled it shut again. “Oh my God.” She said the words slowly, as if only to herself, in a whisper. She didn’t raise her voice to get anyone’s attention or shout loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Partly out of morbid curiosity and partly to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, she quickly opened the door and shut it again and repeated those same words, only more slowly, first in English and then in Spanish. Oh. My. God. Ay. Dios. Mío. She thought for a few seconds about what to do. Should she call 911? Campus security? The MLA? Before she did anything else, she wanted to go in and get a closer look at the body, ideally without accidentally seeing her professor’s pubic area. Gross. She noticed that La Rabia’s skin appeared to have the same greenish hue as the rotting sludge in the refrigerator. “Professor La Rabia?” she said. La Rabia, naked and surrounded by ice, was fully reclined in the tub. It was a lot of ice, at least five or six bags’ worth, and, in Wanda’s estimation, it had been slowly melting all afternoon. A few cubes bobbed on the surface. Others were about to dissolve completely. Water was coming out of one of the faucets in a slow, but constant drip, making the sound she had heard from the kitchen. Wanda approached the body. She realized Professor La Rabia wasn’t actually dead or unconscious, but in a sort of trance. He was talking to himself, eyelids fluttering. He was whispering, babbling, and gurgling softly. Then Wanda heard a little chuckle that started getting louder and louder until it became an unhinged cackle that got softer again until it returned to a chuckle, whispering, babbling, and gurgling. Unsure of what to do, Wanda touched his shoulder. “Professor La Rabia, are you okay?” La Rabia went silent. So did Wanda. She would later say she felt something, like a short circuit in her brain and a shiver that went through her entire body. A barrage of images and sensations flooded her mind and left her in a daze. That’s when La Rabia opened his eyes. He blinked. And then, as if nothing had happened, as if Wanda wasn’t even there, he stood up, let the water run down his body for a few seconds, grabbed a towel, wrapped it around his waist, and walked out of the bathroom. Wanda had her eyes closed the whole time. When she opened them again, she realized her professor wasn’t there anymore. She saw him standing in the middle of the hallway, wearing a robe and slippers. He told her he would wait for her downstairs in the living room to discuss the latest chapter of her dissertation. “I’m sorry I don’t have any refreshments to offer you, Wanda. It’s been some time since I went to the farmer’s market. How about a cup of tea or coffee?” Wanda didn’t say anything. “Or perhaps some homemade yogurt?” La Rabia stood in the hallway waiting for an answer. Wanda shook her head, and the words, no, I’m okay, thanks, left her lips almost involuntarily. “Bueno, venga, I’ll make some tea anyway, just in case,” he said. Wanda didn’t react. “I know.” La Rabia sighed. “It’s too bad I don’t have any beer left.” He started to descend the stairs. “But maybe tomorrow I’ll get to work on another batch.” La Rabia’s voice faded gradually. “Maybe I’ll see if my Belgian friend from the Comparative Literature Department wants to come over and brew a few cervecillas with me.”
The whole situation really freaked Wanda out, but not as much as the possibility of missing her dissertation deadline, which would mean delaying her graduation by another year. So she kept everything that had happened to herself. But not for long. A few months later, she had an emotional breakdown and dropped out of graduate school. It was only then that she sent a long email to the chair of the Spanish department. And the pale Uruguayan woman with a short, blonde, pixie haircut did something about it. For a while, Wanda Rodríguez felt bad. It was her fault they kicked Professor La Rabia out of Prinseton. She couldn’t get out of bed for two months straight. In her head she kept returning to the moment she touched Professor La Rabia’s shoulder. Then Wanda would close her eyes and think about the visions that shot like lasers across her mind’s eye. She could hear Javier La Rabia’s Iberian Spanish accent as she witnessed his memories playing back like old reel-to-reel films before her eyes. It was as if, in the moment she touched him, she ever so briefly saw inside his head. No, no way. Wanda kept telling herself as she lay in bed, now with her eyes open. ¿Qué coño? Am I totally nuts? Or just a bit off? Over the next few days, Wanda tried everything to shake off the strange feelings she was having. She smoked a shit ton of weed, talked to an online therapist twice a week, wrote some mediocre poetry; she even tried doing stand-up and improv. She also did a bunch of odd jobs to try to make ends meet. But the one thing she didn’t do was go back to Kaiser InPermanente, the company that tested new vaccines on graduate students. Never again! Wanda promised herself. She would never sell her soul to a pharmaceutical company ever again!
