Before anyone jumps on the zoological inaccuracy of having what is clearly a jaguar on the cover of a book entitled The Tiger, allow me to clarify. In Venezuela, these elusive, spotted big cats are referred to as tigres. But the ‘tiger’ in Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s novel is really a metaphorical presence. Both demon-remnant of a savage grandmother clinging to the back of the protagonist, and the all too real burden of asthma in the tropics.
This gripping novel, written in a magical realist style reminiscent of García Márquez or Isabel Allende – out of Lisa’s own experiences of living deep in the Venezuelan interior – is based on a true story. A story that in itself demonstrates how the frontier between truth and fiction is a fragile one. A story that involved a remarkable, if sinister, man who Lisa personally encountered.
The real-life Rusián Schmitter, on whom the novel’s character of Lucien Schmutter is transparently based, was convicted and sentenced to thirty years for murder. The result of an over-reaction to some poorly cooked food in a roadside diner. He shot the cook, for having burned the rice, and another diner, who as bad luck would have it, was the brother of a general.
Eight years into his sentence, Rusián escaped with two other convicts. After three weeks hiding in the jungle, he and one of the others were recaptured – following a nationwide manhunt and media frenzy. But the body of the third prisoner was never found. With the exception of his semi-decomposed left leg, which Rusián was carrying over his shoulder when he was apprehended. When asked where the rest of the body was, he calmly replied, “I ate it”.
There was something unnerving about Rusián Schmitter. Well-born, from a wealthy family of landowners, he was educated and cultured. His German ancestry meant that he physically stood out in his Venezuelan homeland – his striking blue eyes and fair looks making him seem foreign. As not really belonging. Lisa has elsewhere recounted meeting him, and being disturbed by him (see The Hacienda, which Amaurea will be republishing later this year). But also so fascinated, that she made him the subject of her third novel – extrapolating from what she had been told of Rusián’s past.
This resulted in The Tiger, in which Lisa tells the story of the fictional Lucien (closely overlapping that of the real Schmitter), from childhood under the tyranny of his grandmother, through decadent excess in the early oil-rich days of Caracas, seeking his family roots in a Germany already falling under Hitler’s sway, and back to Venezuela, where he faces imprisonment, torture, and ending his years in the tower that he builds. Throughout carrying the burden of the tiger on his back.
The Tiger has been republished by Amaurea Press, as part of a series of new editions of Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s previous work.
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