Called to the sea and revolution

Acclaimed novelist Francisco Goldman has lived in both Mexico City and Brooklyn, and has always believed, with very little actual proof, that he is a surfer. He has surfed three, maybe four times in his life, but he clings, even in this, his final days of bachelorhood, to this parallel self.

Visiting for a reading at the Los Angeles Central Library, the writer is itching for some time in the ocean. So, at our invitation, we go out to the surf at Venice Beach on a perfect October morning. You have to be careful with this sort of thing, this sort of Don Quixote experiment. And yet, Goldman seems comfortable with himself, unshakeable in a good-humored way.

He’s still in the early stages of passionate love (calling his fiancee, writer Aura Estrada, several times over the course of a few hours) and can’t resist telling the story of meeting her at a reading by a fellow Mexican author, her ex. “She could recite George Herbert,” he says, showing off a picture. “Usually Mexico City girls have an accent but she talked like a New Yorker. She was obsessed with ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

Anyway, it’s a warm fall morning and Goldman, with his curly gray hair and his delirious happiness, puts on his wetsuit. He’s muttering disclaimers (knee hurts, don’t like things sticking to me, etc., etc.), while Chrissie Carver, friend and surf instructor, shows us how to avoid getting killed.

We watch in a kind of awe as she leaps onto the board like a rider mounting a running horse. Goldman, with a look of intense concentration broken by howls of fiendish laughter, follows her out. True, he misses more waves than he catches, but he seems to enjoy the falling and rolling and getting back on just as much as the tentative successes. After almost two hours in the water, the author emerges even more convinced that surfing is his destiny. There is talk of surfing in the near future. Of book tours designed around surfing possibilities.

Although his latest novel has nothing to do with surfing, it’s easy to imagine his writing process as much like the ocean itself, to see him standing amid a swirl of ideas and threads and details overlapping and crashing around him, as he waits for them to form into a story.

“It’s a kind of imaginative reverie,” he tries to explain, “a way of making life more charged, a way of walking and constructing a parallel fictional reality.”

Which he does seamlessly in “The Divine Husband.” The story swan dives from one of the most famous poems in history, “La Nina de Guatemala,” about a young girl who dies of love by Cuban poet Jose Marti into a story of what that girl’s life might have been. It begins with a richly textured chapter on the girl’s early years in a convent in Guatemala City, and ends in the Fifth Avenue salons of New York. As the girl matures, she takes a writing class with Marti -- poet, journalist, leader of the Cuban revolution for independence from Spain and married man -- and becomes his lover.

Goldman, 47, who has an American father and Guatemalan mother and was raised in Massachusetts, spent many happy months (including 28 straight days of rain) in the library in Guatemala City researching life there in the 19th century, when the novel is set. He filled notebook after notebook with strange details, architectural, literary and practical. He read the daily papers, the hagiographies of long-forgotten nuns and the teachings of such saints as Sor Maria de Agreda and Teresa de Avila.

Goldman is thrilled by the hedonism of asceticism, the sexiness of the iconography, of lost relics and lives given over to God. One scene in the book, in which novitiates are sent into the streets to bring back three of the poorest, filthiest indigenous people so the young nuns can wash their feet, is pure heat, pure fire. (“He felt her veil brush against his bare foot like a trickle of chilly water. Was that her breath on his skin?”)

He says he loved the simple, colloquial language that brought him even closer to Marti and the roots of modern literature in Spanish. “Those first notebooks were like the subconscious of the novel.”

Then came the “dream trance.” The state that allows the author to describe a morning in a city a hundred years ago: “The only signs that the city had begun to stir were the smell of pine-fat-kindling and cooking-fire smoke in the damp, night-flower-sweetened air; stripes of lantern light in cracked shutters. As the sun rose, the fog would lift too, and the city, as it had for two rainy weeks now, would feel lost under low gray skies that erased the usual horizon of mountains and volcanoes, creating the illusion that they were alone at the bleak top of the world.”

As a young writer, Goldman loved and still loves the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa and Italo Calvino. “You never are the writer you thought you’d be,” he says of his early dreams of becoming a combination of Calvino and Joseph Conrad. “I’ll never turn my back on my political roots, but I’m looking for full expression, more and more outrageous and more and more realistic. I want to come closer and closer to my own language,” he says.

“Fiction has to speak to the values of the soul and still, you must surrender to detail. You must make something beautiful, not out of vanity, out of something in you.”

Of surfing and strife

In 1987, Goldman tried his hand at journalism in Guatemala City. (He says today that he thought he could pick up some good material for his fiction.) After an incident involving a black Jeep Cherokee and a gunman (Goldman and his photographer lost their pursuer by hiding behind a passing city bus), the U.S. consulate suggested Goldman find another place to live. He called a friend who was then an editor at Outside magazine. “Hey, I’ve heard there’s great surfing in El Salvador,” he said.

The story Goldman wrote covered a lot more than surfing and he went on to write a dozen pieces of literary journalism on the wars in Central America. He’s also written two previous novels to universally good reviews, “The Long Night of White Chickens” and “The Ordinary Seaman.”

While writing “The Divine Husband,” Goldman tried to inhabit Marti, his hero both politically and personally, a romantic 19th century martyred poet, a man, Goldman says, “with a heroic conception of what it meant to be a husband,” an author with an unusual way of “writing to women.” But he lived, the author explains, in anguish over the gulf between his ideals and the life he found himself living. Becoming Marti, Goldman found, was not as uplifting as it might seem to the casual admirer.

“What if love, earthly or divine, is to history as air is to a rubber balloon? I’m holding a balloon inflated more than a century ago,” says the narrator on the novel’s first page. “What if I unknot it and let the ghostly air escape, or better yet, take it into my own lungs ... ?”

But this all-too-human hero matched the author’s mood at the time: In 1992, when Goldman began researching this novel, he was burned out by contemporary reality, by more than a decade of writing about war. He was freshly divorced. “I had a desire to escape into my imagination and into the past. I wanted to know what was behind that poem.”

A poem, a girl, a balloon and a city. Self-delusion, the search for oblivion, spiritual asceticism as a path to the essential self. These all were the ingredients of “The Divine Husband.” The makings for Goldman’s next book, he says, will include a woman diplomat, 50 years in a toy store (inspired by his uncle’s store) and a robot factory in Hong Kong.

“You don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it,” he says with a grin and a shrug. He floats between waves: a writer, a fiance, a surfer. Anything he wants to be.