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73 Edgardo Vega’s aversion and asco (“disgust”) for El Salvador has only grown since he emigrated in the late 1970s and made his new home in Montreal, Canada , where he has cultivated a satisfying academic career in art history. It is clear that Vega—the protagonist of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 1997 novel El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador—never wanted to return to his birthplace. The idea of returning to El Salvador represented a bitter, ongoing battle and a source of deep tension between Vega and his mother while she was alive. She pleaded with him for years, yet he never gave in and never returned to visit her. But now it is the mid-1990s, Vega’s mother has died, and he had promised her that he would return for her funeral and to fulfill the final wishes expressed in her will. When the novel begins he is sitting at “La Lumbre,” a bar in San Salvador , sipping his first (or is it his third?) whisky while telling his friend Moya about what he has lived during the past two weeks. All this, because of that promise: “My mother won, Moya, she made me return, already deceased, of course, but she won: here I am after eighteen years, I returned only to confirm that I did very well by leaving,” Vega ruefully admits (Castellanos Moya 1997, 19). In this chapter I offer a close reading of El asco as an example of literary representations of emotion, disgust, and the relationship of the emigrant protagonist to postwar Salvadoran society. As in previous chapters, I address the ambivalences surrounding national belonging and connection to El Salvador, including the question of how different sites and situations present us with instances of connection accentuated by distance from El Salvador. El asco grapples with nostalgia, the commonly held notion that certain emblematic aspects of Salvadoran history, culture, and places—food, childhood home, and tourist attractions—along with ways of socializing are invariably productive of migrant sentimentality. Vega mocks this assumption of nostalgic feelings, actively 3 Vega’s Disgust 74 SALVADORAN IMAGINARIES differentiating himself from (and feeling superior to) those who ache for El Salvador and for memories of “better times” before emigration. Vega certainly remembers El Salvador and the time before his emigration to Canada. However, his memories are transgressive—that is, his idea that El Salvador evokes deep disgust offends many of his relatives (and maybe even some readers). “As if this country had anything valuable for which a person like me could feel nostalgia,” Vega tells his friend and confidant Moya while at the bar (Castellanos Moya 1997, 60). Vega is marked by a stark sense of himself as an estranged Salvadoran, someone who remains paradoxically connected to the Salvadoran nation by a very profound feeling of disenchantment and aversion toward the repulsive subjects that he criticizes. I develop the idea of Vega’s transgressive nostalgia as I discuss the intertwined narratives of disgust, reluctant return, and sense of obligation (however deferred and ambivalent) to family and friends that are entangled thematics in El asco. Moya and Vega Vega does not have many friends left in El Salvador. Over the years, as he remade his life in Canada he intentionally lost contact with most of the people he knew during his childhood and teenage years. And now, in the reencounter at the bar that opens the novel, Vega has been waiting for Moya. Moya, a privileged interlocutor and rare friend of the protagonist, is a way to tell the story of El asco. Sitting at “La Lumbre,” Moya is a character we meet at this bar and Vega’s sounding board—the narrator and a literary device to connect the characters and interlocutors to the novel’s real author, Horacio Castellanos Moya. We could interpret this as an effort to connect the San Salvador of this novel to a possible version of the postwar reality of the city and its inhabitants, lending a form of verisimilitude and immediacy to the narrative. Moya is also a writer of fiction, especially short stories. Like the real author, Moya was born in Honduras but moved to El Salvador when he was young. Like the real author, Moya spent most of the war years in Mexico but has returned to San Salvador in the postwar to try to make a living as a writer. We learn this much about Moya from what Vega says. In the course of El asco...

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