The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

himself travelled in Central and South
America, and he offers his experiences of
the exotic south in story form for the delectation
of the armchair tourist back home.
That the exotic is mostly found to be somewhat
unglamorous and "scruffy" (a
favourite word of Henighan's) makes it no
less the mysterious Other for him.
Perhaps the least successful of the eleven
stories are the two which attempt to give a
voice to the South American Other itself.
"Small Exposures" is a kind of snapshot
narration of the linked lives of two wealthy
Columbian girls, one of whom is considered
too darkskinned for beauty. This
"exposure" of the intimacies and prejudices
of a foreign society has a phony flavour; it
is the kind of narrative which depends on
authenticity for its interest, yet it cannot
shed its male, northern author whose existence
it refuses to acknowledge. "The Sun
of Coricancha" avoids this kind of phoniness
by means of irony. Its fabulously aged
narrator tells a secret hidden from strangers,
the author and reader alike, which concerns
the whereabouts of the greatest of Inca
treasures. This secret possesses a deadly relevance
to their voyeuristic—not to say narcissistic—interest
in the subject-matter of
all these stories: but it is an irony into which
the stories and their author are trapped,
not one which they control or benefit from.
The "golden disk of the sun" which used to
adorn the walls of Coricancha disappeared
because the conquistadors plundered the
gold sheets whose mirror effect on the other
walls created it as an illusion. The trope
places Henighan and his book clearly in the
role of conquistador: the eye which plunders
to see, and sees to plunder, and is
hence blind.
All the other stories are tainted with this
ironic consciousness of their own bad faith,
especially "My Last South American Story,"
in which Henighan actually kills off his
first-person narrator as punishment for
"spending the last four years in countries
where [he] was granted a special, favoured
status . .. due to the colour of [his] skin
and the power of [his] currency." In other
stories, this colonial encounter is handled
with varying degrees of guilt and sensitivity.
Henighan's gringoes may strike up
poses as casually familiar as Jos's in "North
and South" or as committed as Edward's in
"The Border," but what emerges time and
again is their isolation from indigenous
people and landscape. The south is portrayed
according to the prevailing northern
myth, as a primitive, violent, sexualized
environment, in which the quest for the
Other is really a quest for a lost version of
self. No matter how involved these North
American figures may become in the politics
of the south, they remain sight-seers,
bargain-hunters, thrill-seekers. All of them
have problems with commitment or social
responsibility "back home" and flee southward
for escape or diversion. The narrative
focus is always on the consciousness of the
subject. Even when a character elects to
stay, as Laura does in "The Wind Off the
Volcano," this is mainly because remaining
can give her experiences and satisfactions
which her superficial life in Canada with
her swimming pool engineer cannot provide.
Her spurious offering of herself in
"atonement" for the sins of her city
(Philadelphia, where one of the Contra
leaders apparently learned English) will
convince nobody. She is disappointed by
the virility (and fidelity) of the northern
male and, by staying in Nicaragua, she opts
for the greater manliness of the Latin
Silvio—though, as is characteristic of sexual
relationships in this collection, she is
denied the opportunity of enjoying him.
Nights in the Yungas is a youthful attempt,
whose self-destructive irony prophesies
Henighan's abandonment of the balcony
attitude in later writing. In contrast, Hay's
The Only Snow in Havana is a mature work,
poised and contained by its ironies, which
work not against but with the rich flow of