written By
A few months ago, on a hot summer evening in Madrid, Spain, I attended a talk by the author of Anima Fatua, Anna Lidia Vega Serova and the translator of her novel from Spanish to English, Robin Munby. A member of the audience asked Vega how much of her own story was reflected in that of the novel’s protagonist, Alia: both were born to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and a Cuban father, both had lived in and moved back and forth between the two countries. She replied in the vein of many writers: something but not everything – a blend.
In the flyleaf, the book is described as a coming-of-age novel, and it’s Alia’s path we trace from Russia to Cuba at age three, then back to Russia again at age nine. Once returned to the country of her birth, we follow her struggles with less physical, geographical upheavals and those of the more intimate and internal nature: the experience of repatriation and discovering herself to be other in the eyes of those around her (she is referred to as The Cuban), leaving her ostracised and lonely. She loses one language and gains another, journeys through childhood and adolescence, before finally getting caught up in the sistema, the Russian hippie culture of the late 80s. Despite the specificity of her circumstances, there is much that is universal to Alia’s coming-of-age – but the particular way in which the story unfolds (then refolds, bifurcates, multiplies, changes shape and direction) is unique to the novel.
Not only are we presented with multiple worlds through the different countries and languages Alia moves through, but we are also presented with different versions of Alia herself, as she creates various alter egos to survive the mercurial, ever-shifting territory around her. Indeed, even Alia’s name, we learn in the Translator’s Note, has multiple connotations and echoes, Munby finally settling on ‘Alia’ because it is (amongst other things) just one letter away from ‘alias’.
Also in the Translator’s Note, we learn that, at the time when Vega first started writing in the 90s, there was a rich and growing tradition of short story writing in Cuba (something which was not only an artistic choice but a practical one, as paper and ink were in short supply during Cuba’s Special Period). And, like a short story collection, Anima Fatua presents separate but connected narratives that merge and blend with one another. As Munby notes:
Alia always seems to be waking up, or sliding into states of altered consciousness, the narration oscillating between first and third person. (p.268)
In this way it’s a world that is fluid (and the sea frames the story too, providing a motif for Alia of respite, of safety, a sense of something good at the edge of her memory that she can’t remember but can feel and reach towards all the same) and as such is boundless – selves interleave, sexuality is undefined, home is wherever you can grab a sense of belonging, however fleeting. Yet it’s also a world with hard edges, circumstances are tough, food is scarce, as is love, lines are drawn between regional and national identities, people are hard, including cruel, and there is abuse.
Once Alia leaves her mother’s home (where both comfort and sustenance are already scarce) for Moscow, she subsists on a diet of food scraps and temporary homes, which often lead her into danger. One ordeal piles on top of another as she descends further into herself, eventually reaching the end of hope:
My gaze falls on the clothesline hanging from the railings. I undo both ends with the vague idea of killing myself. Nothing has any meaning. I’m mortally tired of everything, and above all myself. (p.207)
As a result of so much accumulated hardship, Alia isn’t altogether likable as a protagonist. Though it is plainly understandable why, as we see her time and again, wrenched from somewhere or someone that represents (at least temporary) safety. Even some of her alter egos are unlikeable, the one she calls Alpha being – the clue is in the name – bossy and more than a bit cocky. But, given the material and emotional context, what choice does she have but to ‘give herself a break and disassociate’?
One of the only real friends Alia has, who looks out for her not just with an eye on what he can take from her, or leverage her for, is Alexei:
He brushed the hair from my face very tenderly, passed me the ashtray and fixed the collar of my dressing gown, all without interrupting his brutal telling off.
‘Air, that’s what you’ve got inside your head. Instead of studying or getting a job like a normal person you go around getting up to God knows what, pissing your life away.’ (p.170)
In this way, Alexi represents us, the reader – we are the ones who root for Alia, see her warmth and intelligence and her potential, we reprimand her, witness her acting her worst while hoping for the best.
The context of the sistema also represents a multiple, shifting (as well as shifty) world. It’s a subculture where what is thought and felt and done, and what is professed, are at odds. We read about its teachings and an ideology of ‘love, peace and freedom’, but unity and togetherness clash with the reality of a hand-to-mouth, dog-eat-dog existence, as people take advantage of one another, especially women; in a system of bartering, Alia often is forced to use her body as collateral. This hypocrisy does not escape Alia, but neither is it the only one at play around her, as she realises towards the novel’s close:
The traffic, still just a trickle, pedestrians hurrying to the most important destinations of their lives, housewives walking their dogs, joggers doing their best to escape old age, all moving through the world in the same superficially rational way that only exposed their generalised dementia. (p.213)
This view of a kind of wilfully blind, or necessarily blinkered, path through life is hard to argue with, feeling as relevant now as it does for a description of the newly globalised world that was emerging in the 80s, the era Vega was writing about. The novel’s title is the same in its original Spanish as in the English translation. When trying to figure out its significance, it also resists a binary definition, slipping in and out of meaning, from Spanish, through Latin and English. I decided to treat it as Alia might and find my own definition, which led me to ‘Foolish Spirits’. And, as Alia realises and reminds us in the quote above, we all have our blind spots, our ‘generalised dementia’. We are all foolish and we are all multiples, at times doing the good and right thing and in other moments doing whatever we have to do, not only to survive, but to hang on to a sense of ourselves, our essence, that which exists beyond the actual and the material and, as such, the only thing that cannot be taken from us. Which, in the end, also represents our only shot at survival.
