By SERGIO ALTESOR LICANDRO
Translated from the Spanish by MARY HAWLEY

Translator’s note: Sergio Altesor Licandro’s 2016 novel TAXI (Estuary Editora, 2016) holds particular resonance this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the brutal military dictatorship in Uruguay, which held power from 1973 to 1985. The novel is structured as a series of journal entries recorded by the protagonist, Pedro Fontana, who in his youth—like the author—spent years in military prisons in Uruguay, as punishment for his opposition to the military dictatorship, before being exiled to Sweden. In Sweden, Fontana trained to become an artist, lived there for some years, and eventually left to search elsewhere for his destiny. Now, many years later, he has returned to Sweden for a conceptual art project, which is to drive a taxi in Stockholm and record his interactions with the passengers, as a way of analyzing life in Sweden at a time when the democratic-socialist ideals of the past have given way to a grim neoliberalism. In this excerpt, however, Pedro Fontana must instead analyze his own past.