The Colors That Remain

A Novel of East Los Angeles

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Ernesto "Neto" Vargas has been painting the walls of Boyle Heights for fifty years. His murals hold what the neighborhood cannot say for itself — its veterans and its dead, its mothers and its music, the freeway fights it won and the sons it lost. Now seventy-four and losing his sight, he watches as his greatest work, a four-story mural called La Madre de Todo, is scheduled for demolition to make way for luxury condos.

A graduate student named Isabel Cruz arrives at his kitchen table with a recorder and a notebook. She wants the history of the walls. He needs something else — someone to carry what he knows before his eyes go dark.

Over the course of a year, across twenty-eight sessions, Neto tells the story of every mural he has made and lost:

The corn god he painted in secret on a tortillería wall at twenty-two. The portrait of three Vietnam veterans — two who came home and one who did not. A weeping woman on a liquor store wall who changed how the neighborhood understood grief. The mural he painted for his son in eleven days without sleeping, after the phone call that ended everything.

And threaded through it all — Rosa. The woman who corrected his colors and ended his arguments by being right. The woman whose hands he painted into every wall for thirty-three years without ever painting her face.

As the demolition date approaches, Neto confronts the question his life's work has been asking all along: if a wall comes down, does the thing it held come down with it? Or does what remains live somewhere else — in the people who looked up, in the hands that learned from his hands, in the seven-year-old girl who painted the base gray in the corner and understood that the underneath is enough?

The Colors That Remain is a novel about art and impermanence, love and East Los Angeles, told in spare, devastating prose across fifty years of one man's practice.

For readers of Ann Patchett, Anthony Marra, and Héctor Tobar.