Pablo and Lucía are Colombian immigrants who have established themselves in the US. They've been married for nineteen years and are raising adolescent twins Rosa and Tomás. Their relationship is extremely strained as they both grapple with ageing and their disillusionment with the American dream. While teacher Pablo is recovering from a heart condition he comes under scrutiny from his school in New Haven after the majority of his students make allegations against him. Meanwhile, Lucía has taken the children to her parents' holiday apartment in Miami and they spend placid but subtly-distempered days on the beach. In a series of alternating accounts between them we get a fascinating picture of a couple physically and emotionally divided. This is a perceptive and engaging novel about how the people closest to us can suddenly feel like strangers when we lose an understanding of ourselves and what we really desire.
Both Pablo and Lucía try to artistically articulate their points of view through writing rather than honestly communicating with each other. Pablo has been working on a novel for a long time and the way he goes about composing it is psychologically telling in regards to his understanding and expectations about Lucía: “an intelligent woman – like his character was supposed to be – would never leave her husband after so many years. She would prefer a miserable but stable life to the unpredictability of happiness.” Meanwhile, Lucía has also spent a long time trying to compose an article about gender and relationships which candidly reveals her frustrations with her family. She doesn't feel comfortable with the idea that a wife and mother should simply be caring and nurturing so purposely doesn't conform to the stereotype of a “good” mother: “The best thing she does for her family is fill their bellies with layers of cholesterol.” Equally, she finds no fulfilment in the tedious, time-consuming obligations which consume her days: “Her life was filled with important dinners that were completely pointless.”
It's moving and insightful the way in which Robayo writes about this couple who are uneasy in the roles they are expected to fulfil. Pablo is regressing to a kind of adolescent state by developing an inappropriate closeness to a student and fostering murky fantasies about returning to the homeland he's now estranged from. Lucía stubbornly asserts her independence, engages in a casual affair with a famous footballer and mostly passes the caring of her children onto Cindy, a maid and nanny who “came with the apartment.” While the title of the novel refers to a peculiar medical condition which Pablo suffers from it also describes the way adults try to take a break from the responsibilities of their lives - ones that they aren't sure they ever want to return to.
The novel also compellingly presents the complicated relationship this family has to race and nationality. While Pablo ponders themes for his novel and thinks about his job at the school he's idly aware of “The fear of wasting his life away in that building infested with minorities.” Meanwhile, Lucía looks with contempt upon the Russians she sees around the hotel and their son Tomás embarrassingly and loudly spouts racist statements such as “I don't like black people” on the beach. This probably reflects the resentment Pablo feels about different ways Latin American and African American people are treated in the US: “Being brown isn't an advantage, thinks Pablo – and he thinks about himself, his mothers and his sisters, even Lucía. Being black gets you further. A brown man is a watered-down man, stuck halfway between identities.”
It's bold how this story expresses the painful reality of never being able to fully integrate into American culture and how this arouses different prejudices. Yet, Lucía holds a different point of view feeling the nation one is born into isn't a defining factor of one's identity. At one point she angrily asks the rhetorical question: “Is anyone born with a flag tattooed on their neck?” The story movingly shows the many tensions engendered from self-consciously designating people into different “minorities”.
“Holiday Heart” brilliantly dramatises the disjunction between an idealized picture of life like sitting on a sunny beach and the reality of that life like getting sand caught in your teeth.
