"I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No."
That is the novel - written by the Argentinian author Antonio Di Benedetto in the 1950s but set in a Spanish colony in Paraguay in the 1790s - in a single line.
The book and the magnificent film adaptation by the Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel just now being released on the festival circuit are concerned with existential despair; the disappointment in the realisation of hopes being forever deferred, of ambition never being satisfied, of the quotidian as what happens before real life starts.
They are also concerned with the identity that we assign to ourselves. As the director said at the screening last night:
"I believe that identity creates an inevitable trajectory so it becomes a trap in itself."
That may feel rather hard to unpick but she is saying that once we fasten on to a set of assumptions about who we are and our place in the world we struggle ever to escape them. In the case of Zama this is as a white, Spanish corregidor who has a wife back in Spain and ambitions to continue to rise in Royal service but is living in a colonial backwater surrounded by people, most of whom are indigenous, who he considers beneath him.
As he gradually sinks in terms of his career and his prospects, however, he is increasingly desperate for approval (particularly from children who he sees as being his own younger self) and interprets that approval as a reflection of his own merit:
"Zama had been and could not modify what he once was. Should I believe I was predestined by that past for a better future? This boy, Indalecio’s son, demanded that of me with all the force of his admiration."
He lives both in the past in terms of how his expectations have been shaped but also crucially in the future in terms of those ambitions being satisfied. In the restrictive nature of the times he can only hope to move on thorough Royal favour and to secure that he must attract attention, most obviously by being recommended by a superior for promotion.
Zama's whole existence is therefore founded on waiting. He waits for messages from his family. He waits for the governor to write letters of recommendation to Spain. He waits for his merit to be properly appreciated by the few people in his local society whose good regard he values. He waits to have relationships with the few Spanish of equal standing having already fathered a child with a local indigenous woman.
It is with these attempts and failures at relationships that much of the novel is concerned. Zama is haughty. He should be appreciated. He is self centred but he is also blind to the reality of what is happening because it is all refracted through his own sense of merit and being the focus for whatever occurs.
In practice, he is being exploited but his self obsessed, narcissistic temperament, almost solipsistic in its resolute focus on securing his own future fails to appreciate what is happening until it is too late. In one moment he is considering how to respond to one of the objects of his desire and weighs up the choice between feeling that he can almost punish her on the one hand and on the other that he may need to exploit her in the future:
"I hesitated between a lengthy epistle of postponement designed to stoke her longings on the chance that I might one day find myself in need of her help, or a few laconically expressive lines, like those she had sent me, to dash all her hopes."
Gradually, Zama becomes feverish both in terms of being ill and in terms of hallucinating figments of what he wishes to see; the things that are not there but were they to be realised would satisfy his hopes and dreams.
Nature also seems to take a delight in undercutting him with its insistent concern only with the present. There is a glorious sequence in the film when a stray llama wanders backwards and forwards behind Zama coming into view over his shoulder but wholly unconcerned with his inner crisis as it chews on some grass suffusing the whole scene in the most delicious bathos.
His hopes of preferment both by the governor and by these women gradually fading, Zama determines to join an expedition in search of a notorious local bandit who has been terrorising the area and disrupting trade. His calculation is that success in this venture will lead to his immediate elevation back in Spain.
Zama and his colleagues travel through extraordinary scenery, as they ride and then wade their way through the flooded swamp land in search of the bandit. They are sinking and with their bodies and their animals their hopes of success also gradually fade until they are the ones being pursued and finally captured by warriors from a local tribe.
There are final delicious disappointments and realisations for Zama. Towards the very end as he drifts between conscious and unconscious states and between life and death he is yet again visited by a child:
"He was me, myself from before; I hadn’t been born anew. I understood that when I recovered my own voice and was able to speak. Smiling like a father, I said, “You haven’t grown. . . .” With irreducible sadness he replied, “Neither have you.”
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