Cassandra may be real, or she may be a coping mechanism like Rauli, she is whomever we want her to be. Cassandra, in contrast, is the only identity he takes on willingly: “I am not, I am Cassandra, who does have a spine, made up of so many bones that no one else sees.” Here, Gala invites us to question Rauli’s reliability as a narrator. Others assume he is homosexual, although, in fact, Rauli has no sexual desires. His army commander calls him Marilyn Monroe. In Cienfuegos, his mother dresses him up like her dead sister Nancy, whom he physically resembles with his blue eyes and blond hair. In Angola, the army captain compares Rauli to his wife during their sexual encounters. To other people, he is a chameleon whom they can change at will. Rauli never makes any effort to run from his fate like Achilles and Odysseus, Rauli believes in the gods’ absolute power. This is mentioned repeatedly without emotion or fanfare (“My Zeus, I know I will die at nineteen, very far away from Cienfuegos”). Like Cassandra, Rauli reportedly possesses the gift of telling the future and is convinced that he will die at nineteen, fighting in the Angolan Civil War. Moving between Cienfuegos, Cuba and Angola in the 1970s and eighties, Gala’s second novel translated into English follows Rauli, who believes he is the reincarnation of the Trojan priestess Cassandra. Marcial Gala’s “Call Me Cassandra” is a strange, dazzling novel that is as difficult to categorize as its protagonist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |