Halfway through Sergio Schmucler’s austere yet sweeping novel The Guardian of Amsterdam Street, 15-year-old Galo realizes his destiny. It is May, 1948 in Mexico City, and for the prior six months, he has done little but sit on the patio in the wooden chair his father built for him and think about his small corner of the world.
And it is a remarkably small corner. As a child, Galo’s father told him he would learn to “be a carpenter or nothing at all.” Then his father left, choosing the blonde-haired, blue-eyed American woman over his family, and Galo’s mother, Guadalupe, declared, “My son will never leave this house.” That is a tough double whammy for a child to overcome, but with one brief exception, Galo accepted it. The only day he did choose to step foot out onto Amsterdam Street, his walk soon brought him right back to his front door because Amsterdam Street, built atop the ruts of an historic race track, is elliptical. Galo decides to let the world come to him, and goes back inside to “learn how to become nothing at all.”
For nearly a decade, he tends to the bougainvillea that grows on the patio, he listens to the news on the radio, and he gets to know the visitors who rent out the two rooms that once held his father’s carpentry workshop. The first group of renters — the comparatively worldly and unquestionably flirtatious Ana Gueiser, her father, and her grandfather — are fleeing Nazi Germany. They still have to contend with anti-Semitism in Mexico, but now from the Catholic Church, which tells Guadalupe that the Jewish refugees she is housing are “wicked,” and the government is letting them into the country “because they wish to destroy us! They don’t want there to be a single Catholic left.” She is let off the hook when the Gueisers soon depart for Guadalajara, but not before Ana kisses the adolescent Galo goodbye for three minutes and makes him swear to never kiss another, lest “Hitler will come and put hot coals underneath [his] bed.”
The next renter is Clodomiro Santibáñez, the “official ex-hairdresser of the fourth infantry brigade of the government of the Spanish Republic,” who is fleeing Franco’s civil war. Clodomiro opens “Guernica Hairdresser” in one of the rooms and hires Galo as his apprentice. Soon the boy begins to collect and package the hair and mustache clippings he sweeps from the floor, his own effort to preserve a physical manifestation of the memories the customers recount while sitting in Clodomiro’s chair.
Despite its small-scale setting, Schmucler touches broad themes: religion and the power and abuses of the Catholic Church, revolution and repatriation, and the responsibility we have to our ancestors, to remember but also to move on. He writes in direct, clear clauses, then spools out a long, wending sentence, often to recap events, but more memorably to display Galo’s complicated beliefs or sequences of causation, such as his feelings about the hair clippings he collected:
“It seemed to Galo that [the customers] used those moments to soar over the ocean and arrive at places where they had loved and laughed and fought and prayed, in the place where their hair and their fingers and their legs and their hearts had experienced a sunset for the first time, and where they had felt excited about a colour or a smell or a flavour, and then the monotonous and harsh sound of Mr. Santibáñez’s scissors would bring them back to the present moment, there, in Guernica Hairdresser, in a house on Amsterdam Street, where Galo, without their noticing, would gather up their moustache trimmings so that they wouldn’t be lost, so that the bodies that had been burned and thrown away, a fate which the clients had escaped, would not be forgotten.”
Ana’s family and Clodomiro’s customers not only influence the young Galo’s world view, but define the two groups who have chosen Mexico for their new home, namely “Jews and Spanish anarchists and communists,” whose fates Schmucler considers in the book. Although free from the direct causes of their refugee status, the groups continue, as a rabbi laments to a poet in “Guernica” one day, to hold tightly to the past, “[spending] hours and hours trying to prove who has suffered the most, been beaten the most, endured the worst destruction, and then … immediately argue about who can offer the most to Mexico!”
While Galo takes in his surroundings during the novel’s first half, he remains artless and to some degree, by dint of his isolation, solipsistic. After a particularly eventful — and irreparable — afternoon at the salon, Clodomiro moves out and relocates his shop, which precipitates Galo’s six months of thinking in his chair on the patio beneath his domestic Bodhi tree, the bougainvillea.
The conclusion he reaches, the destiny he descries, are assured and deeply felt. Galo decides that he must protect Amsterdam Street, which he believes is a giant cosmic clock representing “how long it takes a person to walk past his house … and get back again after going all the way around. Whatever its name may be, Galo told himself, that was the true human measurement of time — and the reason for all the problems in the world was the not-knowing of this true human measurement of time. This was why two cities evaporated beneath two enormous mushrooms, and this is why my father had to leave, and this is why Mr. Lindberg had to suffer the misfortune of seeing his sister dangling beneath the branch of a tree in Vilna: because the watches that measure lives do not show the true, human time.”
When Galo has this epiphany, “in the hot month of May 1948, two days after turning fifteen years old, [he goes] up to the rooftop and, with the same conviction with which he had promised Ana he would never kiss another woman, and while looking at the packages of hair and moustache trimmings that he had preserved with such care, he solemnly swore that from that moment onwards, he would be the guardian of Amsterdam Street.”
Don’t worry too much if such logic doesn’t quite seem to explain the rise of fascism or communism, the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the affair and departure of Galo’s father. The Guardian of Amsterdam Street is much more like a fairy tale to be considered as a whole, than historical fiction to be parsed or taken too literally.
Partly this is a direct function of the narrator. Galo never goes to school, his knowledge not born of any formal education or influence, his idle youth instead defined by an act of violence the day his father leaves, when he “watched as [his mother] sawed off the hand of the woman who, despite missing a hand, still managed to steal her husband.” To the end, Galo sees the world through the simple cause-and-effect of that child: the comb his father places in his pocket the morning after the American woman first appears is “the comb that would change history”; men with mustaches, specifically Hitler, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, and his departed father, control the world because they are the only powerful people he knows of and they all have mustaches. And his beloved bougainvillea grows into a symbol of strength and perseverance, because it does “not die from the enormous loss it [sustains]” each year when its petals fall in the spring rains and clog the patio drain. Galo doesn’t even learn to read until he is 24 years old, and convinces himself that he causes a massive earthquake while wishing for his father’s return.
Once he decides to become the guardian of Amsterdam Street, Galo’s life doesn’t really change much. In the second half of the book, he still stays home, he still tends the bougainvillea, but he does start to pay more attention. And he slowly begins to question, first his assumptions and then his conclusions, based on firsthand experience with the Church and a group of revolutionaries, including an asthmatic (who will later stare from countless t-shirts beneath his beret) headed to Cuba where he is “going to do whatever is necessary to make the world a different place.”
And Galo begins to learn compassion. He continues to simplify his already simple life, ceding privileges and saying goodbye to those few people around him, resigning himself to what he must do, resulting not exactly in enlightenment, but something close. He even realizes that he may have been wrong, which is the truest sign of growth and hope, and might even ultimately lead him to become something, instead of just being nothing at all.
[Published by House of Anansi Press on May 4, 2021, 192 pages, $16.95 paperback]