Vagas desapariciones.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Like Torres's earlier novels, Vagas desapariciones deals with the individual's battle against oblivion. Employees in a Caracas psychiatric hospital, Pepin and Eduardo are an unlikely pair of best friends. Pepin, an orphaned street urchin who never received much of an education, considers himself a self-taught writer. He spends his free time penning his memoirs in a desperate attempt to remember the dates that shaped his existence, especially the date when he went to work at the hospital. Eduardo, a failed artist from an upper-class family, is engaged in the creation of a photographic essay that will prevent him from being completely forgotten. For both, the past is a series of "vague disappearances," an unretrievable blur into which they fear sinking. The struggle against the void is what unites them.

Deserted by his father, Pepin was raised in a Caracas slum by his mother, a maid who supplemented her meager income through prostitution. His brothers are thugs, and as a child, Pepin lives in apprehension of being swallowed into the drug-infested, violent underworld of the neighborhood. In a desperate attempt to create a past and thereby, an identity for himself, he invents endless stories about the father he never knew, only to have his mother shatter them with a dismissive remark. After her death, he learns to survive by escaping from the neighborhood and ingratiating himself to people who can help him. Two things fill him with dread: losing his mother's little house, his only anchor to the past, and being caught by a social worker who will cast him into an institution, where he will become one more anonymous "abandoned minor."

Pepin finds work picking up garbage with a man who has a truck, doing odd jobs for middle-class matrons, helping the old man who tends the grounds in the cemetery where is mother is buried, cleaning a brothel, working in a bookstore, distributing Bibles for an evangelist, and rabble-rousing for communists - all the time harboring dreams of saving up enough money to take a course in electricity. Eventually, Pepin does wind up in the dreaded orphan asylum. When a fire breaks out, he aids the medical staff and earns the respect of a doctor, who offers him a janitorial job in the mental hospital where he now works. There, through his memoirs and his conversations with Eduardo, he attempts to recuperate his vaguely remembered past and fix in time the pertinent events. He comes t.o realize, however, that the struggle is...