Category Archives: latin america

The Story of My Teeth: Sometimes a Name is Just a Name

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There really is, in the city of Ecatepec, part of Greater Mexico City and not too far from the Basilica of our Lady of Guadelupe, a street called Disneylandia. Its cross-streets include California, Washington, New Orleans, Massachussets [sic], New York, Cabo Kennedy, and Arlington, collectively making a strange little subdivision that recreates an imaginary map of the United States, which mixes states with cities and counties, and which combines allusions to technology and the Space Race (Cape Kennedy), the Pentagon (Arlington), and mass entertainment. If this were all you knew of the United States, perhaps it would be enough? (Or perhaps it would once have been: surely today we would substitute Silicon Valley for Cabo Kennedy.) A little knowledge may be dangerous, but it is also the kernel around which we can elaborate an entire imaginary of the world. After all, is not that the way that Disneyland itself works, as a factory that produces fantasy out of caricatured snippets from the real world and its history?

I say that there really is a street called Disneylandia, because after reading Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth (2013), I felt I had to check. In the book, this is where the narrator, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, has his home: “I purchased two plots,” he tells us, “side by side, in the lovely Calle Disneylandia” (24), and here he builds a mansion and a warehouse side by side, with the warehouse to store his collection of, among other things, teeth. But Sánchez Sánchez, also known as Highway, is in this novel quite the fabulist. Moreover, this being a novel, we cannot necessarily expect all the placenames and names it contains to have real world referents. Yet the book seems to claim the truth of this particular reference in that, in a chapter devoted to images, it includes a map that shows the street’s location. 

On the facing page to the map, however, is a photograph with the caption “Highway’s House.” The photo appears to show a suburban house (built right up to the road) that has been built in the image of the Disneyland castle, with half a dozen or more spires and turrets, yet on an ordinary street complete with lamppost, sidewalk, and a couple of pedestrians passing by. The photo’s author, we are told, is Valeria Luiselli. But Highway is a fictional character, surely? In which case, whose house is this? And where was the photograph taken. Google Street View shows no such building on Calle Disneylandia. (In an interview elsewhere, Luiselli tells us that it is in Oaxaca.) The images that purport to validate the story told in the novel are not necessarily to be trusted. Hence I felt I had to check whether or not the street itself exists. It does, but perhaps as no more than one of those snippets of the real around which stories are told.

In some ways, this is common practice. No story, no matter how fantastic, conjures up a world out of nothing. When a novel refers to (say) chairs or tables, or even places such New York or Manchester, for the most part we assume, unless told otherwise, that the meaning of “chair” or “table,” or the geography of “New York” and “Manchester,” are more or less the same in the fictional world as they are in the everyday world. Likewise with the names of historical figures: when a novel references (for instance) “Margaret Thatcher” or “the Pope,” we take it that these are the same figures, with the same characteristics, as those with which we are already familiar from history books or radio and TV etc. But this is not true, or not consistently so, of Luiselli’s novel.

Especially when it comes to proper names, Luiselli repurposes signifiers, snippets of the real, often to put them to radically new use. For instance, Highway’s first job is working for a newspaper-stand owner by the name of Rubén Darío (8). Yet Rubén Darío is also the name of perhaps the most famous of Latin American modernista poets. What is the connection, if any, between that Darío and this one? To add to the confusion, Darío the poet’s most famous book was Azul, and Darío the newsagent’s wife is called Azul. Azul is said to having an affair with a “Mr. Unamuno,” described as “a pigeon-chested old codger who had a program on public radio” (9). Are we here to think of the Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno? If so, in what way is that Unamuno like this one? What point, if any, is being made by this correspondence?

Once alert to this system of references that are not quite references, we see or suspect them everywhere. Some are quite obscure. The man who teaches Highway the “art of auctioneering,” for instance, goes by a variety of names, but his Western name is Carlos Yushimoto. Can this be the same Carlos Yushimoto (whatever the “same” would mean) as the Japanese-Peruvian short story writer? The translator’s chapter, entitled “The Chronologic” (because yes, here the translator has her own chapter) would seem to imply as much. Other allusions are more cryptic: is the “Mr. Cortázar” who bequeaths to Highway’s family a “green velvet armchair” the same Julio Cortázar who, in his short story “The Continuity of Parks” describes a man reading in an “armchair covered in green velvet” who (strangely enough) ends up menaced by a character from the book he is reading? “Reader, beware!” it seems that we are being told. But beware of what? Of missing these references, or of catching them, and so of being caught off guard and possibly misled by a web of apparently arbitrary intertextuality? Does it help to know that Alan Pauls (here, a friend of Highway’s) is the name of an Argentine writer, that Emiliano Monge (here, an altar boy) is a Mexican short-story writer, or that Alvaro Enrigue (here, a bus driver) was Luiselli’s husband? And of course what Valeria Luiselli herself (or at least, her name) doing here, incarnated in the person of a “mediocre high school student” (129) taking elocution lessons?

The more famous and easily recognizable names are often Mexicanized. Hence we have Highway’s uncle Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, presumably some relation to the French novelist Marcel Proust, as well as another uncle, Miguel Sánchez Foucault, who invokes the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, not to mention Highway’s cousin, Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre. Is this then an indication that, throughout, Luiselli’s aim is a Mexicanization of a broader set of literary and cultural references, inserted almost at random (it would seem) in the story she is telling.

One way to understand all this would be to say that these names add value. After all, that is Highway’s own approach, in auctioning off his collection of teeth: to attach a name (and therefore a story) to each item, to give it provenance, history, and worth, even if in the end what is being sold off is just another chunk of enamel. These stories–these stories of his teeth, the teeth he seeks to pawn off on others–drive the price up. They are patter, and perhaps like all patter they do not bear too much examination, but in the moment they dignify and fuel the act of selling.But is this not also then a critique of this mode of valorization, of name-dropping and discursive validation. The Story of My Teeth, we are told, is a novel co-written by factory workers. I am not sure they would have cared much for these allusions, except in so much as they constitute a set of jokes for which the butt is whoever thinks that references and allusions ensure legitimacy and interest. In the end, teeth are just teeth. And a name, infinitely transferable, makes nobody special. You can call a street “Disneyland” all you want, but it is still just a way to get from A to B, a place to put a home.

Symphony in White: Dancing over the Abyss

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There is a repeated image in Adriana Lisboa’s Symphony in White (2001) of a butterfly floating about a “forbidden quarry”: 

Once upon a time there was a butterfly that ripped the fresh mountain air and danced above a forbidden quarry where gray lizards warmed themselves in the sun. In the routine path of its flight, the butterfly could see, to one side, an abandoned farm and a house with plants growing on the roof. To the other side, a farm with animals in the pasture that looked like toys and a river that was a long golden thread. (161)

In several of the iterations of this image, we are told that this “multicolored butterfly open[s] its wings and hurl[s] itself into the abyss. It could fly” (175). It is as though this were a picture of frivolity in the face of danger, of a creature that is slight and nimble enough to dance in the face of a gravity (or gravitas) that might cause other creatures to tumble to a tragic end. It conveys a sense of innocence but also ignorance as to the dangers that lurk below: this is “a butterfly that flutters over a forbidden quarry and sees everything but imagines nothing” (162). And indeed this book ultimately aims to take us beyond the idyllic rural landscape of neat fields and toylike animals of provincial Brazil in which it is set, to plunge us into the violence that structures and disrupts that landscape, a violence of which the “damned multicolored butterfly” (91) will remain forever unaware.

The Brazilian dictatorship (which lasted from 1964 to 1985) is the backdrop for this multigenerational novel. At one point we are told, for instance, that “throughout Brazil things were happening on the sly and at that very moment there were torturers engaged in the task of making political prisoners confess (to anything) or go mad” (166). But the violence at the heart of this novel is more intimate, more clearly gendered, and the focus is less on society as a whole than on the fate of a family whose secrets are only revealed late on in the book.

The narration darts back and forth in time, from what appears to be an idyllic childhood to what could be a disillusioned middle age that in fact offers a fresh start. It is never too late, the book suggests, to seek a happiness without illusions. But getting there requires making one’s peace with a tragic interim, the abyss around which the novel’s plot turns.

It is not as though Clarice and Maria Inês, the sisters whose story this novel tells, are not given hints from the start that beneath the rural tranquility in which they grow up there is not a dark undertow. Stories circulate among their little group of childhood friends about the abandoned farm visible from the forbidden quarry: “they say the owner went crazy because he caught his wife with another man. He went to the kitchen, got a big knife. They say he was drunk. Maybe he was crazy. He got the knife and he killed his wife!” (6). Tall tales told by young kids, perhaps, but there is a sense that the landscape is haunted: in the farm’s ruined buildings, “among the streaked and peeling walls, ghosts howled” (93).

The latent threat becomes all too real when, as if out of nowhere (but in fact out of everywhere), their friend, Lina, is raped and murdered. This sudden trauma provokes some victim-blaming whispers (“Maybe she brought it on herself. Didn’t you notice how she dressed?” [54]), but is soon declared off limits to discussion: Clarice and Maria Inês’s parents “declared Lina’s death forbidden” (54). It coincides, in any case, with Clarice’s somewhat sudden removal to Rio de Janeiro, the big city where she is to go to school and perhaps to put her interrupted childhood behind her.

Time passes. Both sisters marry. Clarice, after a dalliance in the big city with a painter named Tomás, returns to the countryside and weds the son of a neighbouring landowner, Ilton Xavier, with whom she has had an epistolary courtship while she was away. The marriage does not last, however: she realizes that she is merely fulfilling expectations and so, in something like a crisis, she gives everything up for a while, leading a nomadic experience in boarding houses and surviving on the generosity of friends. Eventually she finds her way back to the countryside.

At first, Maria Inês likewise follows convention, marrying her second cousin (and childhood friend), João Miguel, with whom she moves to Rio, effectively changing places with her sister. They have a daughter, Eduarda, but their marriage too grows stale, albeit in the bourgeois comfort and sophistication of servants, entertaining, and frequent European travel. Maria Inês puts up with all this until, in the middle of one of her Christmas parties, she is told that her husband may be having an affair with yet another cousin’s ex-wife. Yet it is also suggested that he is equally or perhaps more interested in his tennis instructor or in a handsome young man in Venice. Perhaps it is the notion that her rival is female rather than male that makes Maria Inês decide then to return, after an absence of ten years, home to the farm, in what we take to be a break from married life that is almost as dramatic as Clarice’s, many years earlier. Unexpectedly, teenage Eduarda declares that she is coming, too.

And so the stage is set for the story that frames all this history: Maria Inês’s trip back to the countryside, which entails a reckoning with the past and perhaps the possibility of a path towards a different future. This will also involve, almost as in the last act of a Shakespeare play, a whole series of revelations, of re-encounters and delayed recognitions. And the climax of the plot takes place at the once-forbidden quarry, where the latent violence that undergirds the entire novel makes its appearance once more, albeit this time redemptively, settling accounts and allowing the butterflies who dance around the abyss to float free.

Bad Girls: Creatures in Travesti Heaven

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The girls whose lives are portrayed in Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (2019) may be seen as “bad” by outsiders looking on, but this book is written from their perspective and although it admits that at times “We had no idea how to be good or bad” (145), overwhelmingly it shows that they have a code of ethics and empathy that puts the rest of society to shame.

The “girls” in question are travestis, which a preliminary “Author’s Note” seeks to differentiate from trans women, although that is the term that would be the closest equivalent in English. But in Latin America, the word travesti, originally a slur, conjures up an image of marginality and precarity, inflected through class as much as sexuality and gender, and often linked with street sex work. In some ways it shares some of the semantic territory as the British term, “rent boy,” but with the addition of an association with performative femininity. As the “Author’s Note” puts it:

Far below, where the secret rivers of the world flow, appeared a word that stank of death, shit, semen, prostitution, the night, the cold, bribery, blood and jail, of misery and neglect. A word sharp as a knife, grime-encrusted and wounding. A word that spoke not just of the creatures we were and are but also of our poverty, of the acts that made us legendary, of the courage with which we headed out to live among families and communities. We didn’t want to look like women, we didn’t want to hide our struggles in any way, we didn’t feel trapped in the wrong bodies, we didn’t know what we were doing. But in the street, they christened us with that old, buried word, highlighting our beauty, which was like a home. (x–xi)

The novel is dedicated to tracing that beauty–and kindness, and love–even in the abject conditions in which travestis find themselves, which to some extent they also embrace. Specifically, it focuses on a loose group that haunt and ply their trade in a park in the provincial Argentine city of Córdoba. They come to life at night, and give life to the place even at the expense of their own poverty and suffering: “Every night, the travestis drag themselves out of a hell that no one would ever think to write about, to bring spring back to the world” (1). Early on in the book, this notion that the travestis can conjure and nurture new life from such unpropitious circumstances is literalized when one of them, Auntie Encarna, finds “a three-month-old boy abandoned in the Park” (4) and proceeds (informally and illicitly) to adopt him. One strand of the narrative then proceeds to follow the fate of this unlikely pair: the child and his new mother, whose breasts may be formed by backstreet injections of aircraft oil, whose “maternal instincts were theatrical but took control of her character so thoroughly that they felt authentic” (11). All the other travestis regard Encarna as their substitute mother, who welcomes them into her high-walled pink house, “the queerest boardinghouse in the world” (5). Why not also take in this baby who has known no other mother?

Not that Sosa Villada is prone to romanticization. This is not particularly the tale of whores with hearts of gold. They hardly have the space or time for sentimentality. As much as the travestis are in constant danger from their clients–any trick may go wrong at any point–from the police, or simply from the scorn of would-be “respectable” society, they also fight and squabble among themselves, sometimes viciously. Indeed, at times the worst violence is that inflicted on each other, or themselves, whether it be out of bouts of competitiveness or displaced anger that would be better directed at institutions that they feel unable to change.

In fact, it is striking that as much as the book stresses the humanity of these outcasts who are often treated as mere objects for quick and guilty sexual satisfaction (though they also make themselves “into an object, into valuable flesh, to live the only life that was available in that town” [105] and even “embrace[ their] role as slave, as an object” [111]), it is drawn too to their animality. They are described as a “pack,” “a small pack wandering the margins of the world” (54). They have “animal wisdom” (85) or sleep “sweating like animals” (96). More mysteriously still, one of them locks herself in her room once a month as she turns into a “she-wolf,” while another, originally Maria the Mute, starts to grow feathers on her chest, and by the end of the story has entirely transmuted into Maria the Bird, flying down into the narrator’s purse: “I let her settle in there” (191). As the adopted boy grows up, he takes to “whittling figures of all the animals we’d been: bird women, she-wolves, sad women, brave women, a whole mythology carved in figurines the boy created in his isolation” (181). We are all basically beasts, the novel seems to suggest, and women are one animal among others in a world in which the line between species is blurry and can be crossed, whether by accident, thanks to forces beyond our control, or through effort and determination. 

So perhaps the point is that the fellow feeling and support that the travestis (admittedly, intermittently) show each other comes from their recognition of our common status as creatures governed as much by instinct and desire, hunger and the most basic of needs for shelter and, ultimately, love. It is also notable that among the many pen portraits of clients and (less often) boyfriends, one of the most sympathetic is a zookeeper: “My zoo guard gave me tenderness, brought me hot coffee on cold winter nights, and several times dropped me off at home in his car, saying goodbye with a kiss on the mouth” (134). He takes her on midnight jaunts through the zoo, closed to the public, where they have sex among the cages, as she “rub[s] up against him like a horny dog.” “If it was up to me,” the guard tells her, “I’d open up the cages and let it all go to hell” (134). Everyone and everything deserves its freedom. The travestis perhaps lead the way in showing the life that can be lived on the wild side, beyond the cages that most of us do not even realize that we are inhabiting.

Power and its injustices, however, are all too obvious to a travesti. Hence their anger and resentment has a broad range, and is sometimes indiscriminate: “We were forever ready to burn the whole place down: our parents, friends and enemies, the middle classes with their comforts and routines, the posh kids who all looked the same, the patrician cocksuckers who scorned us so” (97). But often they feel powerless to do anything–or to be precise, too exhausted; a travesti ages quickly, we are told, “at an accelerated rate, the way dogs [and] wolves [. . .] do: seven years for every human one” (82). Yet they are also aware that, for all their exclusion and marginality, they are also central to the political and social economy that excludes them. Their clients are students, workers, politicians, supposedly happily married husbands, who may deny their own desire but cannot resist it. “Such is the power of travestis, we attract the gazes of the world. No one can escape the allure of a man dressed as a woman, the faggots who go too far, the degenerates everyone stares at” (149).

Yet they are both confined and cling to the shadows, seeking out invisibility and “transparency” as much as they also revel in their power to “dazzle” (121). Their stories go untold, or told only as cautionary tales by homophobic parents who predict sad ends to their non-conforming children. But for Sosa Villada, they are “there to be written about. To be immortalized” (96). And though their stories may not end well–this is a book haunted by death, which comes to its characters in many different ways, from sickness to suicide to murder–Bad Girls perhaps provides a glimpse of the beauty of “travesti heaven,” where they can “finally be compensated for [their] broken heart[s]” (28).

The Savage Detectives V: Was it Worth It?

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And so, after some 450 pages, with Part III of The Savage Detectives we are back with García Madero, who along with Belano, Lima, and Belano is barreling along the highway in Quim Font’s borrowed Chevy Impala, heading north to Sonora, in search (we now know) of the forgotten avant-garde poet and original visceral realist, Cesárea Tinajero. An instant has passed, with the clock ticking over from 1975 to 1976. It turns out that the whole of Part II took place not only over the twenty years of Belano and Lima’s itinerant wanderings, nor even only over the eight to ten hours of late night drunken conversation with Amadeo Salvatierra, but in the seconds that separate the old year from the new.

If anything, the end of Part I and the beginning of Part III overlap, as García Madero explains in the his entry for January 1: “Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday, I really wrote today.” Time, indeed, seems to have gotten out of joint (almost as though we were back also in Auxilio Lacouture’s time-travelling bathroom reverie): “What I write today I’m really writing tomorrow, which more few will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day” (591). By declaring this lapse of time to be insignificant or invisible, it is as though García Madero were unconsciously taking his revenge on his own invisibilization during the entirety of Part II.

For, after several hundred “interviews” in that “invisible day,” in conversation with over fifty informants, taking us from Mexico City to Paris, Austria, Israel, Africa, we are firmly back with García Madero as narrator, in a series of diary-style entries. Before long, we perhaps feel as claustrophobically ensconced with him, his thoughts, and his limited point of view, as if we were squished in the back seat of the car between him and Lupe.

Have we missed him? If we have, I suspect we very soon tire of him again, as he returns to the game (though no doubt he himself doesn’t see it as a game) with which he started the novel (way back on page four), of testing people on their knowledge of obscure rhetorical and poetic terms: “what is free verse? [. . .] a testrastich? [. . .] a sestina? [. . .] a hempiepes [. . .] a mimiambic [. . .] a zéjel” (591, 592). “Oh, Jesus,” says Lima (591). If this is García’s idea of fun, perhaps we’d rather he were banished from Part III, just as he was from Part II.

The others, however, get their own back (not that García Madero necessarily notices) by asking him in turn about his knowledge of street slang. Lupe starts turning the tables by asking “All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?” Belano instantly replies that it’s “a toke of weed,” but García Madero seems to be clueless. Similarly when he is asked for the definitions of “lurias” (“crazy”) “jincho” (“Indian”), “la grandiosa” (“jail”), and so on (597). We have a feeling that such terms are going to be of more use to this quartet than the arcane terminology of aesthetics that García Maduro has to offer them. 

For they are not only hunting a poet but also on the run from Alberto, Lupe’s enraged ex-pimp, and whatever reinforcement he has managed to bring with him. Phoning the Fonts back in Mexico City, they discover that, though they thought they had shaken him on the outskirts of the capital, he had gone back to Quim and got from him the name of their destination. The threat of violence hovers around their endeavours. Belano buys a knife. We may be in the last act rather than the first, but still the weapon is much like Chekhov’s famous gun: we know it will be wielded in anger sometime in the few pages that still lay ahead of us.

And so, behold, the book’s dénouement is indeed tragic–perhaps better, a tragicomedy of errors. In a dramatic confrontation on a dusty desert road, a confrontation ensues as Alberto and his policeman sidekick catch up with them now that Lima, Belano, et. al. have finally located the mythical (but ultimately, almost monstrously physical–visceral, if you like) Cesárea Tinajero. 

In a confused “blur” seen from García Madero’s limited perspective forever in the back seat (the only thing Tinajero ever says to him is “don’t move”), Lima and Belano end up killing both their aggressors and also Tinajero herself (641–42). García Madero overhears Belano telling Lima “that we’d fucked up, that we’d found Cesárea only to bring her death” (643). The two friends split from García Madero and Lupe, set to bury the bodies and head back down south. Perhaps it’s not now so far-fetched to think that their constant traveling, as documented in the novel’s Part II, is at least initially because they are on the run from the law–or, more likely still, from Arturo’s criminal associates if they ever got wind of why their buddy never returned from Sonora.

In the meantime: was it worth it? We can ask this question both of the book and also of the quest that has structured it. Lima and Belano get to meet and talk to Tinajero, but (seeing everything as we do from García Madero’s perspective), we have no idea what they may have said. Lupe, for now, has escaped her pursuers.

And García Madero’s final diary entries go from a list of placenames that presumably indicate ongoing peregrinations through remote towns in the desert north (“El Cuatro, Trincheras, La Ciénaga” [646]) to picture puzzles that remind us both of Tinajero’s sole published poem (“Sión”) and also the joke representations of “Mexicans” from above with which he had earlier passed the time with his companions. Either way, his earlier facility with language (or rather, with the meta-language of aesthetic terminology, as well as with the narcissistic self-reflection of the diary form) is replaced first by mere names, and second by line-drawn riddles.

“What’s outside the window?” are the last words of The Savage Dectectives (648). They are followed by a broken rectangle, or a rectangle of broken lines: a dissolving frame perhaps, an illusory or precarious dividing line between inside and outside, between the thing and what holds the thing in place. What’s outside the book? Well, at last this long one is at an end, so maybe we’ll find out.

2666 V: Narrative Necrosis

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Drawing on narrative theory (Genette, Barthes, Todorov, Culler, etc.) Bede Scott argues that the fourth part of 2666, “The Part of the Crimes,” induces what he calls “‘narrative necrosis,’ whereby the tissue of the narrative itself undergoes a process of decomposition” such that “this necrosis fatally compromises the narrativity of Part Four, if not the entire novel, and thus serves as a discursive correlative for the decomposing bodies it describes” (“Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Serial Murder and Narrative Necrosis” 309, 316). Bolaño’s repetitive, relentless catalogue of the discovery of murder victims in and around the city of Santa Teresa, whose cases are closed almost as soon as they are opened, puts an end to any attempt to craft a story out of the events it registers.

Part Four takes us from 1993 to 1997, and describes 110 murders (strictly, 109 murders and one suicide), of which only 10% are resolved. Moreover, as the text breaks off, there is no end in sight. We are told that the “The last case of 1997” involves a body found “by the dirt road that runs along the border and then forks and vanishes when it reaches the first mountains and steep passes. The victim, according to the medical examiners, had been dead for a long time. She was about eighteen, five foot two and a half or three. [. . .] Both this case and the previous case were closed after three days of generally halfhearted investigations” (632, 633). And yet life continues: The Christmas holidays in Santa Teresa were celebrated in the usual fashion” (633). As Scott puts it, by the time we reach this point, we may have “the (perfectly justified) impression” that between this case and the first documented one, back in 1993:

there has been no transformation whatsoever in the intervening four years and 280 pages. At the end of the section, the various detective figures—who scarcely require individuating—are either dead or no closer to solving the crimes than they were at the beginning. The women themselves are still being raped and murdered with the same metronomic regularity. [. . .] And this is also why we have an ending that merely replicates the beginning—because the dialectic of resemblance and difference that makes a genuine conclusion possible has been destroyed; because this is a narrative in which closure uncloses and nothing comes to anything; and because both the beginning and the end of Part Four are ultimately arbitrary, neither inaugurating nor concluding the “narrative” they ostensibly frame. (315)

It is no surprise therefore that the Part simply stops, rather abruptly. Life goes on in Santa Teresa, but so does the series of murders and deaths. We should not expect any satisfactory resolution. In so far as the causes of the femicide are social (and even this is not exactly a case that is conclusively made), Mexico remains the same: all the conditions that enable and give rise to the crimes (machismo, migration, maquiladoras, drug traffic) are still in place. Resolution was always destined to elude the police and other state authorities–even granted that they put their full effort into investigating the crimes, which to be fair they sometimes do. The frustrated investigation into the case of Kelly Rivera Parker (whose body in fact never turns up), instigated and funded by her childhood friend, who is now a congresswoman, shows that not even political clout or money can make much headway in providing clarity or identifying those who are responsible. We learn more about Rivera Parker’s secret life (organizing orgies at isolated ranches owned by cartel kingpins), but information in itself is no solution. Indeed, we hardly lack for information over the course of what are almost 300 pages in which we are simply deluged with it. What we lack are the tools to determine what is significant or not. This, of course, has been a problem to which the book has been pointing since page one.

So the crimes continue into an indeterminable future. What then can put an end to this catalogue if not the author’s own death? Here, the knowledge that 2666 is a posthumous book (a fact to which a brief prelude, a “Note from the Author’s Heirs,” has alerted us to at the outset) puts the body of the author at the center of this (non)narrative. Alongside the women’s bodies that the text describes, as well as the body of the text (as Scott argues), there is the ailing body of Roberto Bolaño, writing in the “realiz[ation] that death might be near.” No doubt we have this sense of authorial mortality in reading any posthumously published text, but perhaps especially so here. The prefatory note establishes that the novel has not been published exactly as Bolaño himself intended (above all, in that it has been published as a single volume, rather than five), but does not tell us much more about the state of (in)completion in which the author might have left the manuscript. Perhaps he pretty much wrapped everything up in time. Perhaps there were further editorial interventions by his family or his publisher. Still, it is only death (the very literal death of the author) that puts an end to a catalogue of deaths that otherwise knows no end. 

The Savage Detectives IV: A Chill Descends from the North Pole

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Part Two of Bolaño’s novel ranges far and wide, both temporally and geographically. As its subtitle indicates, it covers the period from 1976 to 1996. And it takes us from Mexico to Europe (France, Spain, Austria…), the Middle East, and then Africa (Angola, Rwanda, Liberia).

Yet in another sense, all this is encompassed in a single night in a Mexico City apartment, sometime presumably in November or December, 1975, in which Amadeo Salvatierra talks to the “boys,” Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, about the forgotten poet, Cesárea Tinajero. Part Two opens with Salvatierra’s account (apparently recorded in January 1976): “My dear boys, I said to them, I’m so glad to see you, come right in, make yourselves at home” (143). We also periodically but consistently return to their conversation as Part Two continues, breaking what is otherwise the chronological order of events and interviews. And it ends back in Salvatierra’s apartment, with the dawn breaking and the streets outside the windows beginning to fill up with people, with one of the boys (we do not know which) leafing through the magazine containing Tinajero’s sole published poem, and the other asleep or half-asleep on the sofa but still somehow responding to Amadeo’s query as to why they want to find Tinajero now: “we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. [. . .] we’re going to find Cesárea Tinajero and we’re going to find the Complete Works of Cesárea Tinajero” (587–88). This, however, elicits a “shiver” from Salvatierra, and the sense, as one of the boys puts it, that “the North Pole had descended on Mexico City” (588). Part Two ends with a chill, perhaps a blast of cold air sweeping over the boys’ youthful ambitions. Or are those ambitions themselves the source of the chill that seeps into Salvatierra’s apartment? Or is it that the aged Salvatierra, looking around the wreckage not only of one drunken night but also of a lifetime (“my books, my photographs, the stains on the ceiling”) knows that the path Lima and Belano are taking will lead them only to failure and disillusion?

The book is not yet over (we still have Part Three to come), but Lima and Belano’s stories are now done by the time Part Three ends. Their fates, and that of the other visceral realist group, are briefly summarized by one Ernesto García Grajales, who claims to be “the foremost scholar in the field, the definitive authority” but also “the only person who cares” (584). Not that García Grajales seems to care all that much: all this is merely fodder for a “little book” that he hopes “will do well” (585). And so he goes down the list: “María Font lives in Mexico City. [. . .] Shte writes, but she doesn’t publish. Ernesto San Epifanio died. [. . .] Ulises Lima still lives in Mexico City. [. . .] About Arturo Belano I know nothing” (594–85). And of course, of our voluble narrator from Part One of the novel: “García Madero? No the name doesn’t ring a bell. He never belonged to the group. Of course I’m sure. Man, if I tell you so as the reigning expert on the subject, it’s because that’s the way it is” (585). So much for expertise, of course. (We know otherwise, and better.) But also so much for García Madero, so full of hope and expectation when we last caught sight of him, over 400 pages ago, but who has been completely lost to memory, either official or unofficial, almost as though he had never existed.

What mark does our passage through this world leave? What impact do we have on those around us, or even on fate or destiny? What remains of us when our story comes to an end? Who will tell our story when we are gone? These, I think, are some of the questions Bolaño asks us, and his answers may sometimes leave us chilled.

2666 IV: A Snowball in the Sun

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All roads lead to Santa Teresa: is that the “fate” of the “Part of Fate,” which inexorably leads us ever closer to “the killings in Sonora” first glimpsed by the critic Morini in an article in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. That article was written, we were told, “by an Italian reporter who had gone to Mexico to cover the Zapatista guerrillas.” On reading this, it had 

struck [Morini] as odd that she had gone to Chiapas, which is at the southern tip of the country, and that she had ended up writing about events in Sonora, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, was in the north, the northwest, on the border with the United States. [. . .] He imagined her in the Mexican capital. Someone there must have told her what was happening in Sonora. And instead of getting on the next plane to Italy, she had decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to Sonora. (64/43)

Something similar happens to Oscar Fate, the protagonist of this, the third part of Bolaño’s novel. He, too, finds himself waylaid (in fact, repeatedly so) and inexorably drawn towards the US/Mexico borderlands, and the terrible crimes that seem to have impregnated the entire landscape there. He, too, arrives in Mexico for another purpose but ends up equally fascinated and horrified by these killings that hide (we are told, almost at the end of this section) “the secret of the world” (439/348). Perhaps, as the novel proceeds, we will come to have a better idea of the nature of this secret.

In the meantime, we continue to fumble our way onwards. Fate is a New York journalist, who writes for a magazine called Black Dawn, based in Harlem. His normal beat is “political and social issues” (354/279)–we are told that the first story he had published in the magazine was the last Communist left in Brooklyn, a story which resonates with a dream that Amalfitano has had about the “last Communist philosopher” (290/227). This sense that it is the end of the line for a politics of liberation, or at least that the forms in which such a politics took in the twentieth century are now almost unimaginable, resonates with the vision with which Bolaño’s Amulet ends. Politics seems to be in abeyance. No wonder that the Italian journalist turned from covering the Zapatistas. Nor is it too surprising that Fate is shifted abruptly to covering sport, and sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match between a promising heavyweight from Harlem and a Mexican counterpart.

Once in Mexico, however, various sources tell Fate about the murdered women. Tired of pretending to be a sports reporter–and in any case, the fight turns out to be a dismal washout–Fate contacts his editor back home to pitch him the story: “This is more important,” he tells him. “The fight is just an anecdote. What I’m proposing is so much more. [. . .] A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world [. . .] a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake” (373/294–95; translation modified). Yet the editor turns the proposal down, on the basis that this is a story about Mexicans rather than the Black men that are the magazine’s principal preoccupation. If there are no “brothers” involved, the editor is not interested.

Fate describes the boxing match as an “anecdote.” The irony is that 2666 itself often feels like a book of anecdotes, with its countless stories within stories. Here, for instance, we are reintroduced to Rosa Amalfitano, Oscar’s daughter, who meets Fate at a party and who subsequently tells him tales she herself has been told by a friend who was also at that same party, or recounts conversations between her father and her lover about a “magic disk” that, thanks to the brain’s habit of persistence of vision, can make two unrelated images appear to overlap. All these stories no doubt have some bearing on the novel’s broader theme (it is hardly a coincidence that the example given of a magic disk involves a “little old drunk [. . .] laughing because we think he’s in prison, [. . .] laughing at our credulity” [423/335]), but still they are surely anecdotal in nature, and they sometimes feel as though they were taking up time and space, postponing “the part of the crimes” that is yet to come.

At the end of this part, however, even though Oscar Fate has failed to convince his editor that he should be writing about more than a boxing match, he accompanies another (Mexican) reporter, who is writing about the killings, as she visits Santa Teresa’s jail to meet a putative author of the crimes, imprisoned awaiting trial. The suspect turns out to be a German-speaking “giant”–shades, in short, of the mysterious literary author, Archimboldi, of the “part of the critics”–who sits down in front of the journalist and tells her: “Ask whatever you want.” But as the very last words of this section recounts, “she couldn’t think what to ask” (440/349). All that suspense, but when we finally think we may be at the very heart of this Mexican darkness, words fail us.

Not that words fail Bolaño: by this point we have read plenty of them, and we are still not even halfway through the novel. (In fact, almost two thirds of it remains.) Elsewhere, when Fate first learns of the killings, he is told that “Every so often the numbers go up and it’s news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work” (362/285–86). Presumably therefore the question is how to produce words (sentences, pages, books) that will not simply melt once the sun comes out, words that will stick in the mind and perhaps even change something somehow. Does a longer book have more weight and heft? Or is it no more than a larger snowball, that will merely leave a bigger mess once it melts? And once it does, it flows back into what the novel elsewhere, in a critique of metaphor, calls a “sea of appearances” (322–23/254; translation modified). Is this every novel’s fate?

The Savage Detectives III: A Joke Covering Up Something More Serious

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A little over half-way through The Savage Detectives (on page 369 of 648), it feels as though things may be starting to come together. According to Luis Sebastián Rosado, it is Luscious Skin who at last outlines the structure of this “unlikely story”: “Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. [. . .] they’d gone to look for Cesárea Tinajero” (369). This, of course, is the journey with which part I of the novel concludes. At last we understand why Lima and Belano were heading out of town. And our knowledge (or our knowledge of Lima and Belano’s knowledge) of Tinajero is bit by bit being filled in as we read Amadeo Salvatierra’s testimony (which opens most if not every chapter in part II) about his drunken night with the boys, digging into the archive of the Mexican poetic avant-garde. We may be beginning to see why Lima and Belano should be drawn to track down Tinajero. But it seems as though something must have gone wrong somewhere in the Sonora desert.

As Luscious Skin puts it, “After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City together, and then to Europe, separately.” This, too, we have seen, as reported through the various interviews or testimonies that comprise part II, and which relate the traces of the two friends as they pass through variously Paris and Barcelona, campsites and caves in rural Catalonia (which may turn out to be “the last time [they] see each other” [279]), then in Lima’s case Israel and Vienna before he is arrested and then returns to Mexico. In Luscious Skin’s account, Lima comes back home because he thinks the coast is finally clear: “Maybe he thought the whole thing had been forgotten, but the killers showed up one night after a meeting where Lima had been trying to reunite the visceral realists, and he had to run away again.” Hence it is that Lima takes a solidarity trip with other Mexican writers to revolutionary Nicaragua, only to disappear almost as soon as he gets there.

But can there really be “killers” on the trail of Lima and Belano as a result of whatever happened in their search for an aged avant-garde poet? Rosado doubts it, and pushes back on Luscious Skin’s convoluted and conspiratorial story: “When I asked Luscious Skin why anyone would want to kill Lima, he said he didn’t know. You didn’t travel with him, did you? Luscious Skin said he hadn’t. Then how do you know all this? Who told you this story? Lima? Luscious Skin said no, it was María Font who’d told him (he explained who María Font was), and she’d gotten it from her father. Then he told me that María Font’s father was in an insane asylum” (369). This is a much-mediated story whose original author, it turns out, is certified insane. This sends “a shiver up [Rosado’s] spine. And I felt pity too, and I know I was in love” (370).

But we of course know (as certainly as we can know anything in this book) that someone did indeed accompany Belano and Lima on their trip north: García Madero and Lupe, of whom we have still heard absolutely nothing in any of the proliferating accounts that have taken up now 250 pages (what would otherwise be a full novel in itself) of part II. If we could hear from them, perhaps more light would be shed on things.

What we do get, thanks again to Salvatierra’s accounts, is a better sense of Tinajero, as we finally read a visceral realist (at least, a first generation visceral realist) poem… “her only published poem” (397). Still, the fact that we can read her poem does not entirely dispel the suspicion, voiced also by Luscious Skin in an earlier passage from Rosado, that “Belano and Lima might have made her up” (373). For the poem, “Zion” (though the title here is untranslated: “Sión”), is wordless and looks rather more like a child’s drawing than a poem. It consists of three horizontal lines, in each case with a little rectangle attached. The first line is flat. The second is gently undulating. And the third is a zig-zag.

“It’s a joke,” the boys comment to Salvatierra. “The poem is a joke covering up something more serious.” “But what does it mean?” (398) insists Salvatierra, even though Belano and Lima have just told him that “a poem doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, except that it’s a poem, although this one, Cesárea’s, might not even be that” (397). Readers push for significance even when they are warned not to.

Might similarly Bolaño’s novel also be “a joke covering up something more serious”? If so, what is it covering up? And might it, too, not “necessarily have to mean anything”? If not, what is it doing?

2666 III: Order with the Possibility of Suicide

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“The Part of Amalfitano” is, at almost exactly eighty pages, the shortest of the five parts that make up 2666. It expands on the character, circumstances, and history of Oscar Amalfitano, a professor at the University of Santa Teresa and “expert in Benno von Archimboldi” (150–51), to whom we have already been introduced in “The Part of the Critics.” He is, we could say, the fifth critic, though his part in no way advances our knowledge of Archimboldi, who is not even mentioned in this section of the book. It looks as though Bolaño is going to make us wait quite some time before the mystery of Achimboldi is resolved. . . if indeed it ever is.

Meanwhile, if this book’s first part was relatively disparate and uncohesive, then its second part is even more so. There are perhaps three main elements to it. First, there is the tale of Amalfitano’s wife, Lola, who, when they are living in Barcelona with their young child, takes off hitchhiking with a friend (Imma) in pursuit of a poet who turns out to be interned in an insane asylum in the Basque Country.

At the asylum, Lola (who is relating her adventures to Amalfitano via a series of letters) and Imma meet a doctor who tells them he is writing a biography of the poet. “Someday,” he explains, 

all of us will finally leave Mondragón, and this noble institution, ecclesiastical in origin, charitable in aim, will stand abandoned. Then my biography will be of interest and I’ll be able to publish it, but in the meantime, as you can imagine, it’s my duty to collect information, dates, names, confirm stories, some in questionable taste, even damaging, others more picturesque, stories that revolve around a chaotic center of gravity, which is our friend here, or what he’s willing to reveal, the ordered self he presents, ordered verbally, I mean, according to a strategy I think I understand, although its purpose is a mystery to me, an order concealing a verbal disorder that would shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it, even as spectators of a staged performance. (224–25; translation, page 174)

This description of uneven and varied stories that “revolve around a chaotic center of gravity” seems to be almost equally apt for the book (2666) that we ourselves are reading, though perhaps we are still unsure even as to what that center of gravity is for Bolaño’s novel. Are we being kept from it precisely because it would “shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it”? Is this why the true subject of 2666 (if indeed this book, or any other, can be said to have a “true subject”) has to be postponed so long?

The second element of “The Part of Amalfitano” comes when the professor has relocated to Santa Teresa and stumbles across a book in the boxes of books he has had packed up and delivered to his new abode, but this is a book that he cannot remember ever buying or owning. It is written by a Galician poet, Rafael Dieste, though rather than poetry it is a book of geometry, with the title Testamento geométrico or “Geometric Testament.” We are told that on its front flap the book is described as “really three books, ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole’” (240; 186). Again, we may wonder whether, with this description of a book within the book, Bolaño is also telling us something about the book that we ourselves are reading. Are all books within books metaphorical in this way? Or would that be synecdochal: a part for the whole? Which may then make us wonder about the roles of the “parts” in this long book. What is the “whole” that is 2666? Is it more than its parts?

In the case of Dieste’s Testamento geométrico, Amalfitano comes up with a novel reading (or non-reading) strategy, albeit not quite so novel in that we are told that the idea comes from Duchamp: he hangs it up on a clothesline in his garden, exposing it to the wind and the sun, and presumably also to whatever rain may fall in these dry latitudes. He puts it to the test of everything that is summed up in the (very Bolañoesque) word, “intemperie”: “bad weather, the outdoors, the open sky, the elements.” As he explains to his daughter: “I hung it there just because, to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate” (246; 191). But this “just because” is already something more than a “just because”: hanging the book on the line also stages a conflict between literature and nature, perhaps between civilization and a (barbaric?) climate hostile to human habitation. Or as Duchamp is said to have put it of his own experiments in hanging books out on a line: “in its exposure to the weather, ‘the treatise seriously got the facts of life’” (246; 191).

Meanwhile, we are told that Amalfitano has other strange little ideas, beyond this one of treating a book like an item of wet clothing. He has some “idiosyncratic” thoughts about jet-lag, for instance: that people in other time zones in fact do not exist, or are at best permanently slumbering, such that 

if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. (243; 189)

We are told of such odd “ideas or feelings or ramblings” that they

turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. (244; 189)

Is this then another clue to what this novel is doing–or what novels do, on the whole, if they come to comprise a whole? They create “neatly structured stor[ies]” out of “incoherent howl[s] with no beginning or end,” but at the price of madness or suicide, freedom that turns out to be (a line of) flight? Is Bolaño trying to give us some insight into the process by which “order” is processed out of “chaos,” even as inevitably we look for that order and prefer to suppress or pass over the enabling substrate that is its chaos, which the order that prose brings both reveals and represses?

Finally, the third element (though in truth there are plenty of others) in this “Part of Amalfitano” concerns the university rector’s son, Marco Antonio, who appears out of nowhere on the street one day and takes Amalfitano to a rather dubious bar on the outskirts of town and gets him to try a brand of mezcal called Los Suicidas: 

drink up and enjoy, said Marco Antonio. At the second sip Amalfitano thought it really was an extraordinary drink. They don’t make it anymore, said Marco Antonio, like so much in this fucking country. And after a while, fixing his gaze on Amalfitano, he said: we’re going to hell, I suppose you’ve realized, Professor? (275; 215)

Los Suicidas: The Suicides. This oddly-named drink is, incidentally, the same brand of mezcal that, at the outset of the second section (or part?) of The Savage Detectives, Amadeo Salvatierra serves to Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano when they come to interview him about the forgotten poet, Cesárea Tinajero. But is this repetition or resonance only incidental? Is anything incidental in Bolaño? Or is, by contrast, everything no more than one incident after another, from which we are forced (as is our habit, as readers of novels) to find significance in their mutual interconnection, as we seek to fabricate a cohesive and unified story where in essence there is none?