William Castano-Bedoya, the Quindío Writer Who Turns Exile into Literature

That is precisely what he did with the novel he titled Flowers for María Sucel, a fictionalized parody of his parents’ lives. In order to write it, after the death of the woman who gave him life, he traveled through several towns in Colombia’s Coffee Axis to investigate his family roots.

His second book, titled The Monologues of Ludovico, is a work of psychological fiction that in some ways resembles works such as The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka or Eyes of a Blue Dog by Gabriel García Márquez. In it he explores the complex inner world of a man with a hereditary mental condition that brings him close to the realm of the absurd and who belongs to a well-to-do family. William has now completed the adaptation of the novel so that it may be brought to the theater.

From the city of Coral Gables, Florida, where he lives with his family, he spoke with LA CRÓNICA.

What led your family to leave Armenia for Bogotá when you were only six years old?

My father was one of the founders of the neighborhood El Paraíso in Armenia, capital of the department of Quindío in Colombia. From the marketplace of Armenia he managed the regional trade in grains. My father eventually fell into decline for several reasons. I remember that when I was still very young, thieves emptied our house, and I later learned from my mother that he had another woman and wanted to escape that situation so as not to lose his home.

He was a paisa, with a rather macho attitude toward his romantic adventures and accustomed to infidelity, especially in the marketplace, where he was constantly surrounded by women, nightlife, and all those worldly distractions. All of that created growing instability.

This is where I refer to the exiles of the self, because my father was a man to whom life’s tribulations arrived, yet instead of confronting them and putting them in order, he chose to flee and exile himself in avoidance, in other lands, distancing himself from his own surroundings so as not to face the truth galloping behind the lie.

Despite everything, however, he was a good man.

When we arrived in the capital we lived in a very difficult neighborhood. He had always been a merchant, but there he had no luck. People who had promised to help make his remaining money grow in business did not keep their word, and he gradually lost what little he had.

There were five of us siblings at the time, out of the eight we would eventually become, plus a pregnancy that my mother secretly aborted, exhausted from having so many children in the midst of poverty. In those years, as in these, abortion was condemned by very traditional families and by the Catholic Church. In Colombia abortion has always existed in clandestine form.

The truth is that we arrived in Bogotá and faced an overwhelming poverty. We became part of the internal exodus that has long existed in Colombia.

In any case, my father fled not only because of his infidelity, which threatened the stability of our home, but also because he was being threatened by criminals who had begun to create a hostile environment around his finances. Crime in Colombia — what today is called la vacuna, or extortion — and the targeting of honest people has always been a constant.

What did you hope to find in the Coffee Region after your mother died, when you began writing Flowers for María Sucel?

The day my mother died in Bogotá as the result of medical malpractice, I had already been living in the United States for five years. Before that, I received a call saying that she had been hospitalized because she had gone in for a gallbladder test, and instead of puncturing that area they punctured her pancreas.

Five days later she died.

I managed to travel to Bogotá in time to see her. When she sensed my presence, she opened her eyes and said goodbye to me with her gaze from her deathbed. She died in that very moment, with only fifty-two years of life. She was still very young and had eight children.

From the moment I arrived at the clinic and saw her there, sedated and connected to tubes, everything happened within hours, perhaps minutes.

From that moment on I decided that I would write about her life and about my father’s life as well. I did not want it to become a simple biography, so I chose to transform it into a novel.

Following the research methods of great writers like García Márquez — who conducted deep investigations for his work as a good journalist — I set out to emulate that process and research the environments of my relatives and their towns.

I traveled through the old Caldas region because I wanted to learn about my grandmother’s life and the lives of my grandparents’ parents: where they came from, where they were going, their customs, and all those things that gave them a sense of humanity, which has always interested me deeply.

I made that journey searching for all of that, but also pursuing my own inner self, because it had been many years since I had left Quindío. I had departed when I was only six years old. That journey took me through Manizales, Armenia, and Pereira.

Today when I visit neighborhoods of the capital of Quindío such as Corbones, Quindío, and Granada, they seem somewhat laconic, suspended in time, yet still preserving the purity of their inhabitants.

In that journey I was retracing my steps in order to reconstruct the story of the third generation of my family — my mother’s generation.

Did people close to you live with hereditary mental conditions similar to those of the character in your novel The Monologues of Ludovico?

As I mentioned, the works of authors such as Kafka and García Márquez were studied before I shaped that character, whom I had been imagining for many years and through whom I wanted to explore the universe of the absurd.

During my immersion into the character I also spoke with psychologists and consulted specialists who helped me approach the world of behavior, even though every individual condition is different. One of my concerns with this fascinating character was whether or not to address his sexuality. In the end I decided to include it, because it is also part of human life.

According to the impressions of my friend, the Brazilian-American psychologist Sonia Gimenes, author of the book Domestic Violence: How to Break the Cycle, my character — although he might be around forty-four years old — could very well possess the psychological development of a child of ten or twelve. Yet his sexuality might still function like that of any adult, since it responds to instinctive or innate impulses.

My inspiration also came from the careful observation I carried out for years of people similar to Ludovico. Close to my family there is a beloved person who has a condition that is neither autism nor Down syndrome, but something relatively new that has attracted the attention of the scientific community. That condition is called Fragile X Syndrome.

I mention it because, although there is no scientific diagnosis that explicitly defines my character in that way, there are aspects of his personality that lead me to think that his fascinating character and his ethics of life could be situated somewhere within that spectrum.

I also have a very close friend in the United States, of Mexican origin, who has a son with severe autism that makes him very aggressive, so he must remain in a specialized environment. His father, his mother, and his sister live with that anguish — an anguish that will last their entire lives.

In addition, I have a Costa Rican friend whom I met on a flight from San José to Miami who also has children with similar conditions. Another great friend of Colombian origin also has a son with comparable challenges. All of them deserve the deepest respect and admiration, because their lives are devoted to caring for them and to the hope of improving their well-being.

These are families that live with hereditary genetic conditions, and their greatest hope is simply that life will pass while transforming suffering into moments of happiness and purpose.

These people possess an enormous human strength that I value and admire from the deepest part of my being.

At one point while writing the novel, during a period of nearly two years, I considered titling it When the Old Ones Die, as a tribute to those parents. I was thinking about the circumstances surrounding people like Ludovico, who may reach advanced adulthood while the elderly parents who care for them gradually leave this world.

The greatest fear for the parents of people like Ludovico is dying first and leaving their children unprotected.

The Ludovicos who concern me in the novel are those who remain children even at fifty or sixty years of age, and whose orphanhood would condemn them to total abandonment. There are Ludovicos living alone in this world, in poverty — I know this because I have seen them in towns and cities across Colombia and in many countries I have visited.

I must clarify that everything that happens in Ludovico is psychological fiction and does not represent any real individual, although it is inspired by the realities I have observed in people like them and in those who love and care for them.

In many ways, fiction can become a well-told truth.

I created Ludovico as a character without gray areas. In his conceptual world things are either black or white; what happens to him is either good or bad.

Ludovico belongs to a financially comfortable family and lacks nothing — in fact he is surrounded by love — yet internally he experiences a deep frustration because he is aware that he cannot communicate normally. He must rely on speech patterns that resemble onomatopoeia, since he cannot articulate words clearly. The few expressions he uses are repetitive, as if he lived with only fifty phrases that allow him to defend himself in every situation.

I realized that the best way to portray him was through an interior monologue, as though he were trying to express things but could not fully articulate them.

When I walk through the streets and see someone with limitations accompanied by family members, I see the Ludovicos who inspire me.

And when I walk through the streets of Miami or any other place in the world and see young or old drug addicts suspended in their hallucinatory madness from which they cannot return to reality, I also see Ludovicos — people who were not born that way but who became so through many of the circumstances of our modern world.