Leopard in the Sun

The beginning is like something straight out of Scarface; the pock-marked gangster and the beautiful woman he's always wanted are sitting at the bar when a rival enters, yells something about revenge for something that happened 20 years ago, and opens fire. Bullets whizz, people dive for cover, the gangster and his girlfriend are riddled with – no wait, he's the only one who gets shot, killing women isn't honourable. No wait, he's shot, but only wounded. And besides, it was his cousin who did the shooting. And besides, the man he killed 20 years ago was ihs best friend, and the two families' men have been killing each other one by one since. For honour. No, because a ghost told them to. No, for power over the cocaine trade. No, for love. No, because violence breeds violence. And besides, I could see in his eyes that – how did you see his eyes? He always wears sunglasses. I saw him return fire. No, he was unarmed, he was there for love. His men returned fire. He was there alone.

In the end, its all just rumours. What we know for sure: in one of the larger cities in Colombia, the two families Monsalve and Barragan have been at war for decades. One by one they've killed each other off, always on one of the multiplying anniversaries of some previous death, and now they're down to a few last men on both sides; the warrior, the thinker, the poet, the assassin, living in luxury behind locked doors and tinted windshields since they might die tomorrow. And of course their women, wives, girlfriends, sisters, whores. And then all the other people in town, who narrate the whole thing and occasionally start bickering, debating, speculating, inventing to account for the bits they're not actually present for. How did they get here, who said what, who did what, who loves whom, who killed whom, what were his last words, where's it going to end when they make one last attempt to survive this circle of death?

Leopard In The Sun is a deliciously double-bottomed story. It can easily be read as a pure drama, a South American West Side Story with gangsters, a classic showdown between brothers forced by circumstances to be enemies. As such, it works very nicely, if a little predictably; it depends a lot on its characters, where the women are somehow at the heart of it all even though (perhaps exactly because) the story doesn't shy away from it being a brutal macho society. OK, so at times, it's a question of how flowery you like your prose, but even that works into it somehow.

Because somewhere in the corner of the story, we're constantly reminded that a lot of that typical South American magic realism, all the sun and the dark-eyed women with heaving bosoms and the honourable bandits and the mystical old Indians that pop up a couple of times is a cliché and that the narrators aren't an objective camera. As a kick up the backside of literature it's not quite Bolaño, but there's still a point: all of it, the way everyone trips all over themselves to explain what's going on based on their own ideas of what should be going on is just wishful thinking that falls apart as the story progresses. After all, who wants to live in a society controlled by completely ruthless criminals, naked power, greed and violence? Isn't it easier to see the criminals as tragic, romantic, Shakespeare-Márquezian characters? So that's the story that gets told, as the bodies pile. And if the leopard's spots start fading, we know what they're supposed to look like and we can always fill them in.