You don’t need to be a soccer fan to appreciate the game’s intrinsic drama. Nowhere is it more evident than in the penalty kick. At times the whole game can come down to a tense face-off between a kicker and a goalie—never mind how well or poorly both teams have played in the many minutes before. 

The plight of these players in the clutch can be read as a metaphor for the pervasive unfairness of individuals being held responsible, or holding themselves responsible, for failures that are more accurately social, political, or collective. In The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos, Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya’s stirring and timely debut, the eponymous hero is a goalie who, having sustained a grievous injury on the field, takes to the road for a year. As he travels, he repeatedly bears witness to the ways in which individuals close to him play goalie in their lives by taking the fall for larger collective failures; their sacrifices become the “Bildung” part of this Bildungsroman.

Gregorio’s journey begins at home, in Danbury, Connecticut. He’s about to graduate from high school when he is suspended for sending a teacher an erotic note. This outreach isn’t surprising, as he’s been quietly abandoned by his family. His parents are divorcing, and his older sister, an immigration lawyer, is battling her own demons in faraway Tucson. Gregorio moves in with his uncle, Nico, whose advancing illness prompts him to take one last trip back home to Colombia. Tagging along, Gregorio finds that he, too, is struggling with the question of what home means. Back in Danbury, Gregorio feels stuck, wanting to leave home but guilty about doing so while his parents’ divorce is not yet final. “My father and I were at the train station. I told him I was worried about him being alone with all our ghosts. ‘The ghosts were here first,’ he laughed. I thanked him. He told me not to cry. He told me to go.” 

Gregorio moves to DC where he finds a room in a house owned by a mysterious widow with resources and an impulse to share. They take a shine to one another, and with her encouragement Gregorio finds work at a local center for immigrant families and as a guard at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Temporarily saved by work and love, Gregorio finds that, in life as in soccer, personal goodness only only takes you so far—you need to be lucky as well. Given these odds, it’s not wrong to save your best self for the people who appreciate you.

The story might have ended here, but Restrepo Montoya has other plans for Gregorio. Shadows are lengthening over the body politic—rising authoritarianism, populist nativism. Terrified and disgusted by the 2016 election, Gregorio senses important parts of himself slipping away. “I was guessing my way through America,” he says. 

I was far from home, a place, I realize now, no longer even existed. I imagined my father watching the news from his old couch. I imagined my mother doing the same in Columbia, and my sister following along in Tucson. A great fear rooted itself in my stomach. To this day it has only grown. That Election Day, on that corner, I realized this was not my country. It never had been. 

His fortunes take a dark turn when he’s caught defacing a monument, emblazoning it with an indictment of everyone who turns a blind eye as anti-democratic and authoritarian forces gather. His message: “You are the war you sleep through.” 

Around this time Gregorio becomes obsessed with a work of folk art that he guards at the museum. Covered in silver and gold foil, Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly is a huge, shining installation made by James Hampton between 1950 and 1964 as a way of taking his own seat at the table of American art, notorious for its gatekeepers. To Gregorio the installation is a tremendous gift, an idea of what it might be like to feel welcome in a world that for once does not exclude him. 

Gregorio wants to be found—to be known, to be accepted, to belong: “What I wanted was for someone, any one of them, all of them, to find me.” At the same time he understands that his wish is not his alone but one that’s held close by many people. “I’ve learned,” he says, “that this is a common want. I’ve learned that most wants are common.” As this magnificent novel ends, a bonded pair of mourning doves crash into Gregorio’s window, fatally mistaking the reflected open sky for reality. “I bury them in our small yard,” he says, “one next to the other. I do so in the evenings when the world is still. When the sky is purple. When the mourning doves, those still living, sing their common song.”

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Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya is a Colombian American writer living and working in Tucson, Arizona. His writing has appeared in Triangle House Review, Joyland, X-R-A-Y, and SPECTRA. The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos is his first novel.

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Diane Josefowicz is the author of a novel, Ready, Set, Oh (Flexible Press, 2022), and a novella, L’Air du Temps (1985), coming in March from Regal House. She serves as Books Editor at Necessary Fiction.