Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 - the amazon luncheonette
Chapter 2 - the house of toast
Chapter 3 - the male recumbent
Chapter 4 - french lessons
Chapter 5 - the infamous blue ballet
Chapter 6 - mexicans in space
Chapter 7 - on tourette’s hill
Chapter 8 - the ballet rose
Chapter 9 - the spider’s banquet
Chapter 10 - gods go begging
Chapter 11 - the women’s chorus
Chapter 12 - the biscuit libretto
Chapter 13 - the soloist
Chapter 14 - a night in tunisia
Critical Acclaim for Alfredo Véa and
Gods Go Begging
“Written in a style that is urgent and poetic … lit by
phosphorescent desire and shadowed by heartbreaking waste.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“A terrific book: street-smart, savage, brutally funny but also
intelligent and compassionate.”
—
San Jose Mercury News
“A meditation on the Vietnam War and on race, desire, and urban
gang wars [that] equals the passion and originality of [Véa‘s] earlier
work … He is becoming one of California’s best novelists.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“A tightly wrapped tale of mystery, desire, hopelessness, and
death … Véa composes his plot with great skill, leaving the
reader strongly convinced of his story’s credibility.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“An ambitious, complex story tracing the efforts of
several men and women to put the horrors of
Vietnam behind them … gripping and intriguing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
A practicing criminal defense attorney and the author of two previous novels,
La Maravilla
and
TheSilver Cloud Café
(both available in Plume editions), Alfredo Véa was born in Arizona and lived the life of a migrant worker before being sent to Vietnam. After his discharge, he worked a series of jobs—from truck driver to carnival mechanic—as he put himself through law school. Winner of the 1999 Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award for Fiction,
Gods Go Begging
was also named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the
Los Angeles Times.
Véa lives in San Francisco.
“A riveting tour de force … Alfredo Véa has become
one of America’s most important fabulists.”
—
Brick
,
A Literary Journal
, Toronto
“A stunning novel that draws on the author’s own
experience in Vietnam. A beautifully crafted story of
emotional scars and battles.”
—
Strictly Books
“Véa expertly marries the magical realism of Gabriel García
Márquez to his visceral accounts of battle. Indeed, whether we
measure by the breadth of his imagination, the strength of
his characters, or the hallucinatory power of his prose, there
seems to be no novelistic terrain that Véa can’t conquer.”
— [http://amazon.com] amazon.com
“A passionate exposé on war and desire.”
— [http://Latinolink.com] Latinolink.com
“Véa is a very good writer, powering up a scene
with description and dialogue. He keeps the
reader’s attention from first page to last.”
—Library Journal
“A hybrid of court drama, dramatic fiction, murder mystery,
and war novel … Uses flashbacks, fever dreams, and
recollections to bring the elements of the book together.”
—
Albuquerque Journal
Praise for the previous novels of Alfredo Véa
The Silver Cloud Café
“Blends Gabriel García Márquez and Raymond Chandler.”
—San FranciscoChronicle
“Véa has passion and imagination … Engaging.”
—Los AngelesTimes
“Ambitious, energetic … A highly original, moving work.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
LaMaravilla
“Beautifully written, thematically vital.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Powerful … enchanting … From the very first
sentence I was trapped and could not resist.”
—Isabel Allende
“A lustily told tale …
La Maravilla
almost does it all.”
—
The WashingtonPost
“In the search for the Great American Novel, it’s time
to start looking in this direction … Unforgettable.”
—East Bay Express
ALSO BY ALFREDO VÉA
The Silver Cloud Café
LaMaravilla
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition.
First Plume Printing, September
Copyright © Alfredo Véa, 1999
All rights reserved
Lines from “The World’s Wonders” from
The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers
by Robinson Jeffers. Copyright © 1951 by Robinson Jeffers.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:
Vea, Alfredo.
Gods go begging / Alfredo Véa.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-17398-5
I. Title.
PS3572.E2G63 1999
813’.54- dc21 99-14338
CIP
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION. PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET. NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.
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dedicated to all the boys on all the hills.
Thank you
Rosemary Ahern, Sandy Dijkstra, Hong Thuc Ha,
Shannon Raintree, Jeff Biggers, Carla Paciotto, Edmund K. Oasa.
Thanks to all the vets who shared their stories with me.
Above all, thanks to Carole Conn.
It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea,
storm and mountain; it is their soul and their
meaning.
Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we
have to harden our hearts to bear it.
I have hardened my heart only a little; I have learned
that happiness is important, but pain gives
importance.
The use of tragedy: Lear becomes as tall as the storm he
crawls in; and a tortured Jew became God.
—Robinson Jeffers,
The World’s Wonders
1
the amazon luncheonette
For a time, they both held on to their lives, gasping softly, whispering feverishly, and bleeding profusely, their two minds far, far away from the cruel, burrowing bullets that had left them mere seconds away from death. Face to face, they spoke their last words in crimson-colored breaths. Theirs was a withering language, one for which there are no living speakers.
Then, like warriors abandoned on the field, they lay in unearthly calm as the things of life deserted them. They had seen the mad commotion boiling in the air above them. In bemused silence, they heard the alarms, the screams, and the growing wail of sirens.
Pronounced dead on a cold city sidewalk, they held on to each other as the gurney rolled from cement to asphalt and into a waiting ambulance for a long, anonymous ride. In the end it was clear to every onlooker that neither dying woman would ever let go of the other. Leaves of lemon grass had drifted to the ground from the dress pocket of one of the women, marking their trail to the ambulance. Some of the sprigs and blades were bloodstained, adding spice to the liquid life that had trickled away.
