John Baker’s “Winged With Death”


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In John Baker’s thought-provoking, elegant new novel, “Winged With Death,” the past leads the present in an unstoppable tango.

The past is 1970s-80s Montevideo, Uruguay, where the military dictatorship is burying people alive, and a milonguero, a master of the tango, dances in cellar salons. The present is present-day York, England, where the dancer has returned to his home town and is drawn into the personal nightmare of a missing family member. “Winged With Death” is a sweeping novel and yet each step reveals a perfect pattern.

In 1972, eighteen-year-old Fredrick Boyle jumps ship in Montevideo, just as the military—with United States assistance—is capturing, torturing, and murdering people ever more ruthlessly. The people rely on a growing revolutionary group, the Tupamaros, to fight these death squads. But simultaneously, many if not most citizens struggle to deny that their friends and neighbors are disappearing all around them.

Fredrick is immediately befriended by Julio Ferrari, a skillful and well read Tupamaro, who on sight changes the Englishman’s name to Ramon Bolio, an identity he keeps. Thanks in part to Julio’s unwavering friendship, Ramon tutors the privileged children of the military. He falls in love with the tango, which in Montevideo is no ballroom dance. Rather, it “has none of the flamboyance…it is sometimes passionate and sensuous, often lyrical, even philosophical, but it is never for show alone unless it is a show of unity.”

Performed throughout the city, it is “a march for the dispossessed and exploited.” While mastering the tango, Ramon seduces the reigning milonguero’s protégée. With his beautiful, young partner, he becomes a dancer to the extent that the dance becomes his life.

“The inevitability of isolation is confined to the level of the senses. But there is a realm above that, to which we all subscribe, and there, there is the potential to move together, to be as one, to dance.”

Yet nobody is safe. When his neighbors disappear, Ramon has no way to respond. Except that like anyone, he is relieved that it isn’t him—this time.

The present era appears at first like an interruption. Ramon is back in York and his sixteen-year-old niece is missing. The parents, Ramon’s brother and his wife, are mentally slow. At first Ramon thinks the girl is taking a break from her obtuse parents and will soon return.

But time passes and Ramon finds he is again involved in a delicate, dangerous dance. “In the tango both leaders and followers lead and follow.” He bolsters and calms his devastated brother and sister-in-law. Every day he provides emotional support, expansive knowledge, and careful attention. Month after month, the teenage niece remains lost. Missing. Disappeared. “The questions are overwhelming, they hide a world that is too windy and wild to contemplate.”

Accepting the girl’s death is unbearable. Yet while mourning his niece, Ramon helps his brother and sister-in-law establish the rhythms necessary for waiting, grieving, and continuing on without their daughter.

He also finds his thoughts drawn back to Montevideo. During those years, long past, when people were faced with random, unrelenting murder and torture, survival depended upon shrouding reality and maintaining everyday denial.

Here John Baker’s tango comes full circle. “Winged With Death” resonates with time, demonstrating honestly how: “Each moment contains all that has gone before it, and each moment contains all that will follow.”

[Cross-posted here]

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April 21st, 2009
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