As a Colombian woman living in the United States, I do not often see myself and my reality reflected in a book’s pages. The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos (Two Dollar Radio, 2023) felt like coming home. Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya has crafted a debut novel that overflows with generosity, honesty, tenderness, and hope.
As I was reading Montoya’s words, I was nodding at the dexterity in which it moves between two worlds: the U.S. and Colombia, with its complicated history and beauty—never shying away from the truth. I loved reading about the rituals that the family participated in, such as watching football on Sundays or the delicate and beautiful act of having dinner with a close relative who is suffering from a terminal illness nearing an end.
This novel doesn’t shy away from narrating stories about Colombia’s violent history or talking about death or grief, and yet, the prose carries everything with luminosity and grace. Gregorio Pasos is a singular character. One that, despite the incredible grief and hardship his family has experienced, narrates the world with an ease that makes every page shine with empathy and wonder. Gregorio remains curious and open to the world around him. He contemplates finding his path while not leaving behind everything that has made him who he is.
I had the incredible luck to talk to Montoya about the process of writing his novel, the beauty of short and powerful books, his favorite Colombian authors, and what’s next for this Colombian American writer.
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The Rumpus: Gregorio is eighteen when the novel starts. What prompted you to write a young protagonist? How did this character come to be?
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya: The process of writing this novel began with two characters: Gregorio and his uncle, Nico. I originally thought of them as two versions of the same person with a very similar nature, the main difference between them being that they were born in different countries and circumstances—Nico in Colombia, during times of serious violence, and Gregorio, whose American suburban upbringing was somewhat opposite to his uncle’s. The other difference was that Nico was close to dying, while Gregorio was entering his adulthood. I was interested in exploring what a relationship between two kindred people in such contrasting life stages would reveal. We see Nico project an understanding of himself, his life, his country’s history, and his worldview onto his nephew over the course of their months living together. As for Gregorio, he absorbs and adopts these ways of seeing the world from Nico while helping him in his process of dying. In this way, death and grief became important forms of education for Gregorio.
I was also interested in Gregorio being somewhat new to the world and many of its absurdities. It affects his approach to work over the course of the novel—as a museum janitor, after-school childcare worker, and domestic worker—as well as his relationships. About halfway through the book, Gregorio moves into the basement apartment of a house in Georgetown. Magdalena, the owner, needs a Spanish-speaker to help her around the house in exchange for free rent. I think his bond with Magdalena was interesting to write in large part because of their age difference. He’s nineteen years old, and she’s somewhere around sixty.
Rumpus: One of the concepts that struck me the most when reading your novel was the idea of the main character as a witness. Gregorio is surrounded by adults throughout the novel, absorbing, listening, and observing. In a world where we’re constantly prompted to act and to urge our characters to do the same, what inspired you to present a more meditative character?
Montoya: This novel was kind of a respite for me over the years, and your question really gets at why that was. Writing with Gregorio’s brain was relieving for me because I was able to exist in a very quiet way, yet still engage with aspects of the world I was intrigued by—art, colonialism, Colombia, death, soccer, etc. I think I was also exploring the value of existing as a witness, the validity of leading an unobtrusive life. A teacher once told me that the ethos of my writing was, “First, do no harm.” In many ways, Gregorio is guided by this sentiment. The way you describe Gregorio is also the way we could describe many writers. To some extent, I think I was also exploring how witnessing, absorbing, and listening are related to writing, and questioning whether this is a valuable way of approaching a life. I think it can be.
Rumpus: The previous question makes me think about the role of museums in this novel. Nico loved his museum job and inspired Gregorio to seek a job in a museum as well. What role do museums have in your life? What role do you think they play in the novel?
Montoya: Going to a museum is one of my favorite things to do. A lot of museums appear in this book, and I recommend going to just about all of them, especially the Gold Museum and Botero Museum in Bogotá, the Palace of the Inquisition in Cartagena, the Memory House in Medellín, and the Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. They’re great places to learn, observe, and reflect, of course, but they’re also rich in other ways. I enjoy seeing how other people engage, or not, with the material in these spaces. In other words, there’s a pretty big range of behaviors on display at museums, and that’s as much a part of the experience as their collection.
A lot of the novel’s attention is paid to memory. Nico is fixated on Colombian and colonial history, while Magdalena speaks at length about fascism in the past and present. Museums are especially interesting presentations of a culture, or a culture’s institutions, as well as a nation’s history. So many museums are essentially products of theft and conquest, displaying art that doesn’t belong to them. The Gold Museum, owned by Colombia’s central bank, for example, houses a massive collection of pre-Columbian gold art created by the Indigenous peoples of the region. The Palace of Inquisition houses many torture devices used during the Spanish Inquisition of the Americas. When the Pope visited Cartagena, Colombia, in 2017, these torture devices were removed from the museum.
As you pointed out, Gregorio operates as a witness in the novel. I think there’s an element of investigation to his work and travels. He visits Colombia and these museums with his uncle. Later on, in the leadup to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, he moves to D.C. The time he spends at the many memorials in the city, as well as his time spent as a janitor at the Smithsonian’s Portrait Gallery, fits in with his role as a witness. He’s inside these machines of memory, so to speak.
Rumpus: This book is a beautiful portrait of all the beauty and struggle that immigrant families face in this country. I loved the ritual of watching fútbol together. Was inserting these moments of joy and connection in the narrative intentional for you?
Montoya: Yeah, I felt it was important to include moments in the book where you can glimpse the way an immigrant family comes together around a certain ritual. In the case of this book, and my own family, it happened to be watching fútbol. Fútbol’s a very important part of our culture, a very important expression. If you’ve ever been in the country during a national team’s game, it seems to be just about the biggest shared experience there is. Everyone’s wearing the jersey, kids in the streets throwing fistfuls of flour around, cars honking in celebration, that sort of thing. In the case of Gregorio and his family, it’s a sport they’ve all grown up watching and playing. It’s a lens through which Gregorio sees and experiences the world. For many people in Latin America, fútbol really is a religion.
Rumpus: I loved how Nico talks about the two doves by Botero and how they represent a moment of violence that took away from him the life he once had. Likewise, the novel talks about the violence that Gregorios’s parents lived through in Colombia before they left their home country. How did you think about the cycles of violence in Colombia when crafting your novel? What role did they play?
Montoya: The book examines the violence in Colombia through the lens of Gregorio and his family, especially Nico. It’s the reason the family leaves the country for a life in the United States. While there was a certain amount of history I wanted to explore—terrorist events such as the bombing of Botero’s dove statue, a period of world-leading murder rates in the eighties and nineties, the False Positives of the early 2000s—I was most interested in painting a portrait of how this violence affected Gregorio’s family. I grew up with parents who both missed and didn’t miss Colombia, their home country. In many ways, we were a family that belonged to neither Colombia nor the United States. This, and other losses, were consequences of that violence.
Rumpus: I loved how powerful this book is, in under 200 pages! Did you set out to write a short novel? How did the length come to be? What are your favorite short novels?
Montoya: Thank you! I didn’t necessarily set out to write a short novel, but I did set out to write a novel that was only as long as it needed to be. I wanted every page to matter.
I’d say my long-time favorites are Speedboat by Renata Adler, By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Tumble Home by Amy Hempel, and The Stranger by Albert Camus. A few I’ve really enjoyed in recent years include Loop by Brenda Lozano, Whiteout Conditions by Tariq Shah, Fulgentius by César Aira, Darryl by Jackie Ess, and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss by Mark Haber.
Rumpus: Your descriptions of Colombia are incredible. I was born and raised there, and reading your pages felt like a homecoming. I also loved how you took us all over the country! What are your tips for writing places that might be new to some readers?
Montoya: I’m so happy to hear that. I don’t think I have a craft approach to writing place, exactly, but more so a respect for the importance of setting. In a lot of ways, I think that place is insurmountable. What I mean by that is that I think that the specifics of a place seem to dictate what happens to the people and characters that belong to it or find themselves there. In this novel, I think the cities—Tucson, Danbury, Cartagena, Medellín, Bogotá, and D.C.—each have their own effect on the story. Gregorio is a different version of himself in every city because of the personality, identity, history, landscape, and circumstances of that place. He’s both shaped by the places he’s been and the place he’s dissolved in.
If I had to boil this down to some more concrete advice. I’d say: write what you know, go if you can, and do your research regardless.
Rumpus: Do you have a writing process?
Montoya: Not really, not anymore. I used to be very ritualistic about my writing. There was a time when I’d write every night from midnight ’til 7 a.m. I’d drink and smoke while working. Then I quit smoking, which made drinking less fun. Now I write whenever I can, mostly at home. I usually write in the same room with my partner, Morgan, who’s also a writer. We write well this way. We have a great time.
Rumpus: Who are some of your favorite Colombian writers?
Montoya: Some of my favorites include Andrés Caicedo, Laura Restrepo, Melissa Mogollon, Alejandro Varela, and Sergio de la Pava.
Rumpus: What is something you want readers to leave with when they finish The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos?
Montoya: I don’t have an exact answer for this question, to be honest. I’d like whoever reads this book to have an emotional experience—to be affected, I guess—moved in some way, whatever way that is for them. I’d really like for them to walk away with a sense of observation and reverence. That would make me very happy. I strived for observation and reverence, myself, throughout the writing of this book. I still do. Of all the things I wanted to share with people through this book, those are probably the most important to me.
Rumpus: Lastly, I would love to hear about your next project. Are you working on something? Can you tell us a little bit more about it?
Montoya: Yeah, thankfully I do have some projects going. I’m working on a couple of novels: Anti-Fútbol and Pluto in July.
Anti-Fútbol is about a retired Spanish football manager who reflects on regrets regarding his work, his dismay with the state and industry of world football, the presence of fascism and Nazism in Spain, his past and present marriages, and his relationship with his daughter, a writer.
Pluto in July is an expansion of a story I published a few years back with Triangle House Review. It’s a portrait of the absurdity of life in a lakeside Connecticut town and is centered around a teenage girl who runs away from home. Her parents know she’s fine but milk her disappearance for all it’s worth.
I’m also working on a collaborative collection of stories with my friend, Wes Holtermann. One story, “God’s Fork,” indulges in the joys and despairs of love and cruelty via the letters of two brothers, both chefs, grieving the recent loss of their parents. “The Tortoise and His Problems” examines the sour relationship between an aging model and his aging mother. Another story focuses on a Colombian baseball pitcher and his screen-addicted son. We’re working on more. We’ll see what happens.
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Author photograph courtesy of Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
