Truman's Passenger - Book Review

The Truman´s passenger (El pasajero de Truman) is a novel by the Venezuelan writer Francisco Suniaga, the work is about the life of Diogenes Escalante who was an important Venezuelan diplomat and politician of the mid-twentieth century. Escalante was going to be the presidential candidate of all the political factions in Venezuela in the year of 1945, but a tragic event prevented this from happening. The novel develops with the conversations held by two important politicians who worked with Dr. Escalante, they are Román Velandia and Humberto Ordóñez, these characters represent Ramón J. Velázquez and Hugo Orosco. They were interviewed by Suniaga to obtain first-hand information in relation to the events that led to the emotional decline of Diógenes Escalante, who had to renounce his candidacy after going insane.

After sixty years the nonagenarians Velandia and Ordóñez meet to talk, this thanks to the insistence of Velandia, for some reason Ordóñez had kept a sepulchral silence in relation to what happened to Diogenes Escalante, on the contrary Velandia had written several articles and realized some interviews about the events, however, was Ordóñez who was at Escalante's side working with him for ten years as his personal assistant and therefore had to have first-hand information that Velandia did not know, this somewhat tormented Velandia and he wanted know details and things that only Ordóñez could know.

In 1905 Diógenes Escalante is appointed consul in Liverpool by the President of Venezuela, General Cipriano Castro, after the overthrow of Castro in 1908 by General Juan Vicente Gómez Escalante continues as consul in England, and when Gómez died in 1935 he was followed another general, Eleazar López Contreras, who appointed Escalante as Minister of the Interior of his cabinet and then went to the Secretariat of the Presidency. Diogenes Escalante spent many years in Europe to play diplomatic positions of great importance; Escalante was a man years ahead of his time, he had prepared a government plan to give Venezuela a more technical and nationalist treatment of the oil issue, it was mortified by hunger, ignorance and misery in which Venezuela was submerged, he was a politician with a vision of the future that was very different from the Venezuelan politicians of that time.

During World War II Diógenes Escalante is an ambassador of Venezuela in the United States, there he meets President Harry Truman with whom he has a great friendship, at that time in Venezuela the president is General Isaías Medina Angarita who in 1945 thinks seriously about establishing democracy in the country. For Medina Angarita, only one man was able to achieve consensus within a very tense environment on the part of all the political parties, that man was Diógenes Escalante.

Before leaving the Embassy in Whashigton to go to Venezuela, President Truman invites Escalante to the White House where they engage in a pleasant conversation, they talked about different topics, mainly about the communist threat in Latin America and the future of Venezuela, they had put agree to unveil a bust of the Liberator in Bolivar, a small city in the state of Missouri; President Truman himself would send a plane to look for him in Venezuela when Escalante was president, the American president told him that this plane had been baptized as The Sacred Cow, and that it was the most famous in the United States of America.

Ordóñez tells Velandia an unusual event that Dr. Escalante revealed to him that day when he spoke with President Truman, told him that when Escalante left the White House he saw General Eleazar López Contreras enter inside a car, strangely Escalante thought that there was a conspiracy against him, and in which Lopez Contreras and nothing less than Harry Truman were directly involved, all with the intention of overthrowing him once he was president of Venezuela, Ordóñez himself took it upon himself to investigate if López Contreras really was in the United States, which in the end verified that it was totally false, then other incidents occurred in the behavior of Escalante that began to worry Ordonez seriously.

In spite of everything, Diógenes Escalante travels to his country where he is expected with great expectation, he would be the first civilian president of Venezuela, he was a man who knew foreign policy well and who had plans to take the country towards a secure development. However, Ordóñez tells Velandia that in that moment he saw Escalante very tired, that the future president was not sleeping well, he was suffering from permanent insomnia, but Ordóñez thought that everything would be all right, and that Escalante's ravings were something passenger, product of the tension that suffered in those moments.

When Diogenes Escalante and Ordóñez arrived in Caracas, they stayed at the Ávila hotel, in the lobby they received the visit of a person who would inform them of a work plan related to a tour of eastern Venezuela, after listening to the work plan Escalante an exaggeratedly long silence, to then say a series of inconsistencies totally out of context, were so crazy his words that Ordóñez and the other person were stunned, Ordóñez tried by all means to remedy the situation and brought up the room to Dr. Escalante, in the bedroom Escalante returned with his madness and threw the shirts on the bed saying he had to tell them because the hotel had many thieves, also said again that he had seen Eleazar Lopez Contreras in the hotel, which was totally absurd .

With that scene starring Diógenes Escalante, Ordóñez realized that everything was over, that the dreams of Escalante being the president that would take the country to a full demoscracy had vanished, Ordóñez was convinced that Dr. Escalante was suffering of a mental illness. After this came other attacks of insanity, always with the same theme that someone stole their shirts. In the Ávila hotel many people had come to the lobby wanting to see Escalnte, Ordóñez had to go down trying to persuade people that the doctor was indisposed, still in the mind of Ordóñez there was hope that things would be fixed, or least that nobody found out what happened, and that everything was kept secret so that Diogenes Escalante would not fall into public derision.

Suniaga's novel gives many details of what happened at the Hotel Ávila, but the outcome in that place is really historic, Ordóñez (Hugo Orozco) went up to the room where Escalante was and there he met Velandia (Ramón J. Velásquez ), who was there because he was the assistant of Escalante and that morning they had a breakfast with President Isaías Medina Angarita in the Miraflores Palace, Ordóñez seeing the bewildered face of Velandia thought that something bad had happened. What happened was that before Ordóñez arrived, Escalante had made another scene of madness, he told Velandia that he would not go to breakfast with the president because his shirts had been stolen, Velandia opened his closet and saw all the shirts intact, then he he told Escalante that his shirts were there but Escalante told him that those were not his.

The worst thing was that the assistants of President Medina Angarita had called Miraflores by phone to the room, they were surprised because Escalante had not arrived for breakfast, then Velandia answered the call saying what happened with Escalante, and then the president took the phone and asked angry what was happening. Everything else is history, Diogenes Escalante was crazy.

All these events marked the life of Velandia and Ordóñez, in Suniaga's novel it is intuited that Velandia had some remorse of conscience since he asks Ordóñez if he had arrived earlier in the hotel room and answered that call from Miraflores he would have answered in a different way, Ordóñez answered yes, but that did not matter, since the letters were lying, there was nothing to do. After that unfortunate day in the country there was a series of events that convulsed the fragile political calm that existed at the time, President Isaías Medina Angarita was overthrown in 1948 by a coup d'état, and after that came others.

President Truman sent a plane to take Escalante to the United States, there they would treat his illness, it is still a mystery that was exactly what he suffered, there are records that say that it was atherosclerosis which affected the neurons of his brain and trigger in him a premature senile dementia, and others say that he suffered from schizophrenia. Escalante was treated at the Walter Reed Army Hospital of the United States Army and then detained at the Harford Clinic. Thus ended the meetings of Velandia and Ordóñez, with a touch of nostalgia Ordóñez remembers the last time he saw Dr. Escalante, gives a sad description of his appearance that leaves a pain in the heart of the reader. Diógenes Escalante died on November 13, 1964, in Miami, Florida, United States of America.

Some experts in the political field believe that Venezuela had bad luck, in that year of 1945 if Diogenes Escalante had successfully taken his career to the presidency, things in this country were other, who knows; perhaps everything is a romantic dream, one of those that makes us think that this country in those years had been directed towards development, and that now we would not be suffering from all the calamities and misfortunes that we suffer.