The office’s peach-coloured walls and the small picture frames adorning them – displaying photographs of caterpillars and butterflies that were either cutesy or pornographic, Lucia couldn’t decide which – all had more dignity than her at that moment. What was he sorry about? Was it really so obvious that the risky and excessive sexual activity did not involve her? And then, shattering the brief period of incomprehension due to Lucia’s narcissism, Ignacio revealed that Pablo had been brought to the hospital unconscious, accompanied by an underage girl.
The silence expanded in the seconds that followed, like a plague, building vast totems of humiliation.
Wow, what a punch to the gut this novel is, Garcia Robayo cleaving through a marriage with a force of a hurricane as Lucia and Pablo find themselves looking at one another not really recognising the other.
Lucia has taken their two children to her parents apartment in Miami as Pablo recovers from holiday heart and searches himself for reasons to stay in his adoptive homeland. Indeed Pablo and Lucia represent two different sides of the same coin. One, holding their homeland up on a pedestal, making it the centre of his identity, while the other, submersing herself in their new home, taking advantage of all the opportunities it has to offer and pouring scorn on where she came from, for not being able to offer the same riches.
It is this interplay that runs throughout the novel, as Pablo and Lucia both come to realise the wedge this dichotomy has brought between the two of them, more than their kids, which Lucia smothers at one moment, and hands off to Cindy, the nanny, the next. While Pablo drives to excesses to try and fill the hole in him, Lucia fully embraces the American way, pumped up on her own importance of having made it, she walks around as superior until it comes to her children where she flounders between strict and bewilderment, as well as jealousy at the ease at which Cindy interacts with them.
Despite being apart, Lucia and Pablo review their lives, their marriage and where they go from here.
Following on from Fish Soup, is this full blown novel from Garcia Robayo who perfectly captures real moments with powerful, plain prose that sets the tone of two people battling one another without realising it, until they do and they both stop dead for an instance as their reality sinks in, before they whirl off again. Holiday Heart is a fascinating look at the immigrants dream, and the reality. Not for Garcia Robayo the happy fulfilled life with frequent trips back to the homeland. Pablo feels disconnected and discombobulated, Lucia finds herself fully embracing the American dream, imprinting it on her children and severing the homeland for good.
Another great read from Charco Press, looking forward to the next book in my 2020 bundle.
Sara-K kept telling him how it was important for his children to know where they came from – ‘Poor little mites, frowing up in the stratosphere’ – and she’d persuaded him. He was determined to take them to visit the family, so they could connect with that part of him which also belonged to them. He started imagining it: the trip would be a fresh start in his relationship with his children, a chance to build something vital, something where Lucia – who made a great show of rejecting all sense of geographical belonging – couldn’t compete with him.
a strange kind of peace 