The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos

Deeply compelling and impactful, The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos by Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya is a stunning reflection on community, grief, and cultural identity led by the eponymous Gregorio Pasos, a twenty-one-year-old son of Colombian immigrants living in Tucson, Arizona, where he works for a company removing and relocating rattlesnakes and playing as a goalkeeper in his soccer league—a position he’s played since his younger days despite having been cursed with, in his own words, “flat feet and the habit of guessing.”

​After a match leaves him bedbound with a collapsed lung and several broken ribs, Gregorio starts thinking back on the last couple of years, trying to ascertain how he ended up where he is. His mind is pulled backward to the spring of 2016 in Danbury, Connecticut, when a teenage Gregorio on the verge of graduating high school is sent to live with his terminally ill uncle, Nico. Aptly described as “discreet, drunk, and observant,” Nico is a man besieged by memories of Colombia’s violent civil war and thoughts of those he lost and left behind. But together, the two create a home forged in companionship and kindness, later traveling to Cartagena, Medellín, and Bogotá for a melancholy yet enriching trip that allows Gregorio the chance to parse his family’s history through his ailing uncle’s eyes, even as Nico says his goodbyes.

Following his graduation and Nico’s death, Gregorio moves to Washington, DC, where he works a series of jobs while living in the basement of an enigmatic older woman named Magdalena. But as the presidential election nears and Donald Trump’s subsequent win gives rise to a violent wave of xenophobia, Gregorio finds himself faltering, questioning his place in the United States as the safety of his friends and family is put at risk. It is this precariousness which has him turning once again to soccer, to the community that he has built over his time in DC, the one he’s built over the course of his life, looking within them for the strength to keep going.

Marked by a sparse, understated style that masterfully conveys the varied emotions welling under its surface, Holy Days is a carefully conceived and stirring debut. Among its achievements is the poignant relationship between Gregorio and Nico, a lovingly rendered dynamic that quickly becomes the pulse that beats through the novel, even after the latter’s death. As the book jumps settings, flashing back and forth in the timeline of Gregorio's mind, it is this relationship, and the others born and cultivated between characters, that give the story its emotional resonance.

Indeed, Restrepo Montoya’s bildungsroman explores themes of loss, political instability, and fraught family dynamics with a nuance that is impressive in a book of such brevity. Particularly insightful is the novel’s exploration of grief and its relation to the immigrant: Nico is the most obvious example, with both the reader and Gregorio witnessing the quiet heartbreak that seeps into his visit to Medellín as Nico is unable to reconcile his surroundings with his memories. The Colombia he remembered—his home, the country he belongs to—no longer looks the way it once did; in a way, Nico’s native land exists only in his mind.

This experience is both mirrored and reversed in Gregorio, a second-generation immigrant who views the United States as his home. It is on Election Day in 2016 that he is suddenly uprooted, nervously ignoring slurs as he reaches a chilling realization: “. . . this was not my country. It never would be. It never had been.” He loses the country his family migrated to, the one he grew up in, and finds himself arriving at a grief similar to Nico’s through a different path. (To its credit, the novel understands that Gregorio possesses privileges that many immigrants in the United States do not, a point that is subtly yet skillfully made throughout. Holy Days does not imply that there is such a thing as a single, unified immigrant experience; Gregorio’s story is specific, and it is precisely this specificity which grants the book its richness.)

As Nico remarks in a letter to his nephew, Gregorio fits the etymology of his name: “alert and watchful.” The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos shares these qualities. It is a subtle work that carefully observes the world it inhabits, portraying it with bare sincerity, achingly attentive to the small intricacies that shape people’s lives. It reveals its brilliance quietly, under its breath, offering readers a moving story that will linger in their minds long after the last page has been turned.

Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya is a Colombian American writer living in Tucson, Arizona. His writing has appeared in The Offing, Electric Literature, Triangle House Review, and Joyland. The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos is his first novel.

The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos is a publication by Two Dollar Radio.