Caught in Argentina’s 1980s intrigue

The story that unfolds in Irish writer Colm Toibin’s haunting third novel begins in the late 1970s in Argentina, where the narrator, Richard Garay, a closeted gay man, lives with his widowed mother, a sadly disappointed English immigrant:

“The generals were in power then, and nobody stayed out late ... nothing happened. Or, as we later learned, a great deal happened, but I never witnessed any of it. It was as though the famous disappearances we hear so much about now took place in a ghost city.... I knew, or thought that I knew, no one in those years who disappeared.... “

Soon, however, Richard learns otherwise -- not from direct personal experience of detention or torture, but indirectly, almost accidentally, from a host of incontrovertible sources.

Looking back on those times, he attributes the blindness he shared with so many of his countrymen to “the strange lack of contact we have with each other here. It is not simply my problem, it is a crucial part of this faraway place to which our ancestors -- my mother’s father, my father’s great-grandfather -- came in search of vast tracts of land: we have never trusted each other here, or mixed with each other. There is no society here, just a terrible loneliness which bears down on us all, and bears down on me now. Maybe it is possible that I could watch someone being dragged away in front of my eyes and not recognize it ... and maybe this is what I did, and others like me did, during those years. We saw nothing, not because there was nothing, but because we had trained ourselves not to see.”

A gay man in a stridently heterosexual culture, Richard feels himself to be something of an anomaly. English in his appearance, his ancestry and his knowledge of the language, he nonetheless shares his fellow Argentines’ chauvinistic response to the Falklands War. In the years after Argentina’s defeat, dictatorship gives way to democracy and the Americans come in with plans to privatize the state-run oil industry.

Thanks to his skill as a translator and his friendship with the son of a prominent businessman, Richard finds himself, willy-nilly, unexpectedly close to the new centers of power. Again he does -- and doesn’t -- quite comprehend what is happening. And neither, it seems, do many of the others involved -- not even, perhaps, Susan and Donald Ford, the beguiling, seemingly omniscient pair of American diplomats-intelligence agents who employ and befriend him.

Richard’s story is also a love story: a picaresque tale of unrequited crushes on straight men, of furtive, intense, brief encounters with strangers and, finally, of a serious, but by no means uncomplicated, relationship with the businessman’s second son, Pablo, who, unlike Richard, still keeps his orientation secret from his parents.

As the 1980s wear on, this time of emerging freedom and openness is increasingly darkened by the ever-expanding shadow of AIDS, another of those unforeseen twists of fate that can disrupt the pattern of any story, sending it off irrevocably in unimagined directions. In a strange way, the unexpected shocks and turns of Richard’s life echo his mother’s experiences:

“My mother had come to Argentina ... in the early 1920s.... When I was a small boy I always wanted her to tell me the story of the voyage one more time.... I knew this story as though its details were more real and absolute than anything that happened in our apartment, or in school, or in our lives during those years of childhood.

“And even then I knew that things had been disappointing for her. The story created expectations of future wealth and romance and excitement. The story should have been the beginning of something, but it was not.”

Originally published in 1996, subsequently the recipient of the 1998 Ferro-Grumley Award for best gay novel, “The Story of the Night” is being reissued in conjunction with the paperback edition of “The Master,” Toibin’s novel about Henry James, winner of this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Toibin’s expansive, yet intensely focused imagination, his sensitivity to atmosphere and nuance, his sense of pacing and his beautifully controlled writing make “The Story of the Night” a book that is hard to put down, and even harder to forget.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.