The Cleansing by George Rabasa
The Permanent Press, 2006. 245 pp. $26.00
Reviewed by Meehan Crist
1.20.07
George Rabasa’s newest novel, The Cleansing, explores how people cross the boundary between humane and cruel. Victor, Paul, and his wife Adele were “inseparable friends” in Mexico City during the 1980s, but the three haven’t seen each other in over twenty years. When Victor shows up at the southern California hospital where Paul works as a pathologist, Paul diagnoses him with cancer, and he ends up at the couple’s house for an indefinite stay. The novel shifts between present-day California and 1980s Mexico City, where Adele is an up-and-coming photographer, Paul a med student, and Victor a wealthy, well-connected law student. “His father was supposed to be a federal judge. Victor was often seen flashing a laminated ID from the Policía Judicial. He counted drug traffickers, labor leaders, and gun dealers among his friends.” Eventually, young Paul ends up in prison, where he stays, despite his powerful friend. And there is the knotty heart of the book.
Like the novels of Graham Greene, The Cleansing explores some of the morally ambiguous territories of human nature. Its also recalls the classic Stanford Prison Experiment— which some argue predicted the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal— examining the relationship between power and cruelty, and ordinary people’s capacity for doing unspeakable things. When Paul is imprisoned, his medical school training and official-looking white coat make him useful to the guards during the torture of other prisoners. While he does not actively choose to help the interrogators, he goes along with them, and is rewarded for his behavior through amenities such as a private cell. During the long months in which Paul aids interrogators, he undergoes a frightful awakening that will haunt him throughout the rest of the novel, and which prepares him for the cruelty he eventually inflicts on Victor in present-day California:
[Paul] would always be guilty of the surprising cruelty he had discovered in himself. Through some wrinkle in his soul he derived pleasure from the sight of pain. There was nothing erotic in what he felt… During the interrogation sessions he had wanted to touch the men in the chair, to lay his hands on their head or on their shoulders, perhaps flat on their torso. Not to ease the pain, but to understand it.
It seems that Rabasa would like to do something similar: to touch his pen to the place from which cruelty springs in order to better understand it.
In search of that source, Rabasa explores what happens when a person deviates— geographically, socially, ethically—from the well-trodden path. “With an unexpected turn off the main thoroughfares, a path might open up through a crack in a wall that would lead to Ciudad Netza, a hidden parallel universe, existing simultaneously yet apart from the safety of the public city.” For Paul and Adele, this means entering a world not unlike hell, ruled by Victor, who is immediately cast as the devil in his parallel domain, “an impish figure sitting cross-legged in the room’s smoky gloom… From the clay fireplace, flames formed capricious designs on the walls of unfinished stone, the light illuminating their rough surfaces and the shadowy gaps where the blocks were joined.” Rabasa often uses literal elements, cracks in walls, for example, to suggest metaphorical realities such as passages across moral boundaries. He also uses the characterization of Victor as a foil to Paul and Adele, who are both cast as average people who choose to do morally reprehensible things. As Victor pointedly remarks to Paul, “It is an open question as to who is the worst of us.”
Rabasa uses Spanish, and Mexican slang in particular, with musical grace. Having grown up in Mexico and having lived in the US for many years, Rabasa is able to navigate the boundary between languages with ease, building a fluid rhythm throughout the novel. Readers unfamiliar with Spanish will not be left behind, and those familiar with its nuances will be rewarded.
While Rabasa’s language may be melodic, his characters can seem one-note at times and the relationships between them are sometimes unconvincing. Victor is pure, uncomplicated evil, and it’s never quite clear why Paul and Adele are in love. Still, the effects of Paul’s imprisonment resonate throughout the characters’ lives and the rest of the narrative in satisfying ways, including the neat twist at the end. While many of Graham Greene’s novels examine the question of what happens to good people in bad places, The Cleansing goes farther, asking, finally, what pain we are willing to inflict on others. It suggests the boundary between good and evil is more fluid, and perhaps closer at hand, than we might like to think.