A Lover and a Fighter

A Venezuelan revolutionary aims to set the record straight with a fictionalized version of his life.

SWALLOWING STONES

A Novel

By Lisa St Aubin de Terán

Harper Perennial. 512 pp. Paperback, $14.95

"Cancer is a wonderful thing." So begins this spirited fictional recreation of the life of Oswaldo Barreto Miliani, a Venezuelan revolutionary, intellectual and sometime bank robber. Chastened by the discovery of a malignant tumor in his throat -- a cruel twist of fate for an "inveterate talker" -- Barreto (codename "Otto") decides to look back on his life, make a tally of gains and losses and dismantle the myths about him (no, he did not deflower the virgins in the towns he liberated). Half picaresque tale and half history lesson, the narrative often reads like a Who's Who of the radical left-wing movements of the second half of the 20th century. From Ben Bella to Fidel Castro, from Che Guevara to Salvador Allende, many of the leading revolutionaries of our time put in an appearance.

The fourth of 10 children, Otto was born in 1934 to a conservative, middle-class family in San Cristóbal, a small town in the Andean region of Venezuela. Although he always regarded himself as a "puny wimp," by the time he reaches his late teens, his distaste for authoritarianism and his flair for inflammatory speeches force him to go into exile. Settling in Paris, he falls in love with Vida, a beautiful Persian aristocrat who later spends 20 years in jail for opposing the shah of Iran, her best friend's husband. Otto lives in Algiers during the chaotic early years of postcolonial rule, witnesses the Paris uprisings of the 1960s and serves as a close advisor to Castro.

After a decade of botched plans and misadventures, Otto's dream of taking the revolution to Venezuela finally comes to fruition. But with his frail physique and scholarly bent, "el profe" -- the professor, as he is nicknamed by his companions in war -- makes an unlikely guerrilla fighter. Deep inside the Venezuelan jungle, while the others clean their weapons or argue about tactics, Otto studies the insects that make his days a living hell.

Once the fledgling insurrection fails -- one cannot emancipate peasants who don't want to be emancipated -- Otto again has to flee his homeland. A few years later, in Chile, he barely survives the coup against Allende's left-leaning government. Tired of wandering from one hotspot to the next, he eventually returns to Venezuela, where he is jailed and tortured. Luckily, his life is spared, thanks to one of his country's most powerful men, the publishing magnate (and novelist) Miguel Otero Silva, with whose daughter Otto had a child. (Puny but priapic, Otto spends much of his time making love, not war.)

In melancholy counterpoint to Otto's exploits are his ruminations on the random, unpredictable course of his life. If he had found out earlier about Stalin's labor camps, he says, he would never have become a communist. If he had not met Vida, he would have moved to Germany and studied philosophy under Heidegger. If he had not been in France during the Algerian riots, he would not have joined the armed struggle against imperialism. "If, if, if, and again: things just happened." In his old age, Otto realizes that his political struggles were mostly in vain. "I didn't achieve much good -- I spent a long time getting nowhere."

Since testimonial narratives like this one rely on the reader's curiosity about the facts in the fiction, one wonders how much the character portrayed here as Otto resembles the flesh-and-blood Barreto Miliani, who is very much alive and still writing. Did he really mastermind the biggest bank heist in Venezuelan history? Is it true that the first time he met Castro, the Cuban caudillo talked non-stop for nine hours, putting everyone but Otto to sleep? Did he warn Allende, a friend from his Paris days, about the impending coup? Otto, the narrator, insists that everything in this account is true. Indeed, were this "only" a novel, much of it would be superfluous, sometimes tedious reportage. And yet, in her prefatory note, St. Aubin de Terán -- who was once married to Otto's cousin -- warns that she has taken "diabolical liberties" with her subject's "real life."

Nabokovian tease or reality-TV hokeyness? Probably both, unfortunately. However impressive St. Aubin de Terán's gift for ventriloquism, one comes to the end of her novel wishing that Barreto Miliani had recounted his stranger-than-fiction life entirely in his own devilish words. ·

Gustavo Pérez-Firmat is the David Feinson Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent book is "Scar Tissue," a memoir in prose and verse.