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Fatigue, Mirrors, Inside/Outside, and a Theory

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

It’s been quiet around here lately, huh? I’ve got a bunch of things going on and, like many whose posts and comments I’ve read, have grown weary of the part about the crimes, so it’s been hard to get motivated to post. Even tonight, I don’t have it in me to write something obsessive or even particularly coherent. But I did want to make a couple of quick notes.

Bolaño is clearly doing something with the congresswoman and Norton. Both women wind up staying in a hotel room in Santa Teresa with one mirror by the door and another on the wall at the other end of the room. It seems likely (since this was a distinguishing characteristic of the room for Norton) that it’s the same room. And both — Norton in a dream — spend time trying to see themselves reflected in the two mirrors. Both are women who’ve had what vanilla folk like myself consider fairly racy sexcapades, and it seems reasonable (if not entirely charitable to Norton) to suggest that they’ve done so at times for personal, professional gain. Norton is associated in several places with the medusa, and the congresswoman describes the consumption of porn at the narcoranchos on page 628 in terms that bring medusa to mind. Norton furiously takes notes in her dream as the congresswoman establishes a detailed dossier on her missing friend.

It is Kessler who speaks, way back on page 267, about people living outside of society and how they’re perceived as expendable. He speaks of words used to avoid rather than to reveal, and he says that the crimes have different signatures and that everybody in Santa Teresa is outside of society. Kessler too is an outsider, of course, as is made all the more apparent by the pomp that surrounds his visit (the conversation described earlier in the book seems to be a follow-up visit a few years after the visit we’re told of late in the book). In my last post of any substance, I noted a number of instances of contrast between being inside and being outside. On page 609, the congresswoman bangs on the topic some more:

You think that from the inside you might change some things for the better. First you work from the outside, then you think that if you were inside the real possibiliteis for change would be greater. You think that inside, at least, you’ll have more freedom to act. Not true. There are things that can’t be changed from outside or inside. But here comes the funniest part. The really unbelievable part of the story (the sad story of Mexico or Latin America, it makes no difference). The part you can’t believe. When you make mistakes from inside, the mistakes stop mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes. Making a mistake, butting your head against he wall, becomes a political virtue, a political tactic, gives you political presence, gets you media attention.

Here at the end of this part of the book, we have the congresswoman, who has become the ultimate insider, tracking one murder while Kessler, the ultimate gringo outsider, is brought in to provide support for the investigation. It’s an interesting contrast, if not one I can really do justice to.

And finally, a theory. It’s not at all clear to me how tidy the end of the section is supposed to be. The parts about Kelly Parker are drawn out and seem important by virtue of word count, but they also seem sort of patched in and just about random. Why all this detail about one case all of a sudden (and why the one about a woman who changed her name to a very American-sounding name?)? Is it gesturing toward a source for a lot of the crimes? I can’t help wondering if the implication isn’t that a lot of the women being found dead are women Kelly has hired as prostitutes for her parties, and that there really is a big central case to blow wide open if only the police would do some police-work. If so, I fear that it’s obvious and I’m coming across as a moron for proposing it as some ground-breaking theory.

Anyway, next week: Archimboldi.

Studies in Coping Strategies: Avoidance

Jeff Anderson14 Comments

There’s not really anything in this week’s reading or last’s that I want to write a whole post about (in much the same way that Dan’s concerned about harshing the collective buzz, I’m chary of being the bad Zombie), so instead I’m going to backfill and give David a proper response to his comment of a month ago. He says:

This is my second time through the book and I have to say that it never occurred to me to describe Bolano’s attitude toward his characters as contemptuous, although I suppose its fair to characterize the dispassionate, almost reportorial quality of the narrative voice as dehumanizing. While there is more than one narrative register in the novel, for the most part the reportorial voice dominates, and while it doesn’t completely rob the characters of their individuality, it does flatten them out more than a little bit. Also, while its not fair to say that there’s no character development in 2666, there is an almost heroic effort to deprive the characters of the sense of psychological depth and wholeness that is one of the primary pleasures of narrative fiction. So if failing to fully flesh out characters, or to show how their actions fit within some kind of cosmic order, however indifferent or malevolent, equals contempt, then I guess that’s a fair assessment. It just doesn’t feel like contempt to me. More like studied indifference, although maybe indifference is equivalent to contempt when someone is in physical or existential peril.

It’s funny, there’s a similar aloofness towards the genuinely contemptible characters in Nazi Literature in the Americas, but in that case the effect (to me at least) is to humanize them.

I guess I should preface my reply by revising my original remarks to say that they only seem to apply to the Parts About the Critics and Fate. I gave myself a pass there on the Part About Amalfitano (which doesn’t read like entirely good form, on revisiting), but I can’t honestly say that the Part About the Crimes has been contemptuous of anyone; in fact, it’s felt almost psychopathologically dispassionate. So, to crib from the Supreme Court, let me cabin my earlier opinion to parts 1 and 3.

Having said that, I still stand by that opinion. In the first place, Barry Seaman (as an example) is overtly ridiculous. For the narration to present that whole “sermon,” in all its extended nincompoopery, is to invite us to laugh at him. Yet he’s clearly sincere in his belief that this is useful, important advice. Clowns are funny (à chacun son goût, I know) because they willingly make fools of themselves; Seaman we snigger at behind our hands from the pews while he earnestly tries to help. Merolino Fernández (the boxer) doesn’t fare much better: how many pages of buildup? And he’s knocked out in less than a minute. These are characters who are introduced for us to mock.

That’s where I move into the second part of my argument. I’m concerned to find myself double-dipping at the well of authorial intention, but it’s relevant to what David says. I appreciate the distinction he’s making between what is done (the technique of the narration) and what it means (whether it’s contemptuous or not), between the thing and the interpretation of the thing, but I think in this case the one necessarily includes the other. He concedes that the narrating voice may be characterized as dehumanizing—which I think is fair—and to that I say: It was intentionally constructed that way. When “someone is in physical or existential peril,” indifference on the part of the actor who voluntarily put them in that peril must be contemptuous (at least). What bothers me most about the narration’s treatment of (most of) the characters in the first and third parts is that Bolaño has invented these characters in order to make fun of them and to make them suffer. That’s gratuitous and nasty; I’ve given up on authors for it before. (Ex.: Will Self.) It sounds somehow old-fashioned (and a little daffy) even to my own ears to hear myself complaining that the book is cruel to imaginary people who were imagined for the sake of being put through imaginary distress, but that’s basically what it amounts to. I find the introduction of characters for the purpose, among others, of inflicting ridicule and suffering upon them an unsavory practice, and it’s upsetting to read.

And to the objection that I don’t take the same kind of intransigent stance to the degradations that the characters of Infinite Jest undergo—and they are many—I have two related defenses. First, the characters in IJ generally retain their dignity at the hands of the narration, no matter how apparently awful things get. And second, 2666 just doesn’t earn the same slack from me. As Steve aptly put it, “There is not a lick a redemption here nor is there held out the hope of any.” To me, that makes the characters’ sufferings pointless in a way that they aren’t in Infinite Jest.

Pages 466-513: Just For Fun

StephenBrassawe2 Comments

I have already described two of the ways in which I have found myself responding to the renditions of the murders in Mexican Zoetrope below. First, the relentless descriptions of the state of one after another after another body that is found brings home the magnitude of the whole thing. Second, however, all seem to blend into one image of a single tortured young woman now dead.

There has been a third response to the details, too. Only occasionally do we hear about the events that led to a particular body’s condition. Even in those few cases when a murderer confesses and describes what he did, the events are only sketchily drawn for us. Usually, we are only given a description of the appearance of the body as it was found and facts from the medical examiner’s report. This is a Hitchcock technique in the sense of making what we do not see much more horrific than anything that we might have been shown.

I do not know how one can avoid imagining the infliction of multiple stab wounds, the mutilation of breasts, the strangulation, the torture while reading this section. If one reads it thoughtfully and attentively and imaginatively, the Part About the Crimes has to be one of the more harrowing sections of any novel out there. How does one avoid becoming introspective with untoward results in the face of this onslaught?

Then in the middle of it we encounter this unexpected piece of wisdom from Epifanio, unexpected because it is Epifanio, after all:

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On a lot of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you’re shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don’t hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you’re off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?

Page 511.

Earlier in the book we had some very quick allusions to this same subject. At page 298 Guadalupe Roncal had this to say:

On the flight here from Hermosillo I wouldn’t have minded if the plane crashed. At least it’s a quick death, or so they say. [Emphasis mine.]

There is a back-handed reference to this idea in the section concerning Harry Magaña:

Harry said his had died four years ago, a few months after he’d finished the course in Santa Barbara. I’m sorry, said the other man. It’s all right, said Harry Magana, and there was an uncomfortable silence until the cop asked how she had died. Cancer, said Harry, it was quick.

Page 440.

Surely, Harry used the term “quick” in a relative sense there.

It appears to me that through Epifanio, the author from his own personal place of torture is sending a message of truth to his readers who have not yet arrived at their own such personal place. Death with dignity is not possible, as the word “dignity” is so often misused to mean “absence of torture.”

The essence of that message is that everyone will get their turn with more or less torture in the nature of things, even the healthiest among us. I am of course using the word “torture” here in the broad sense. One might be tortured by Mother Nature in the form of a growing cancer, for example. One might be tortured by old age. One might be tortured by three thugs in a small, remote room with a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Moreover, Epifanio suggests that there is no escape in the form of “instantaneous death.” Albert Camus eloquently dispensed with that happy notion in his essay on the death penalty, “Reflections on the Guillotine” in the collection Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays. There is no doubt in my mind at this point that Roberto Bolaño was intimately familiar with Camus if not many others on this same point.

This may be one of those uncomfortable truths about human existence that Bolaño seeks to convey–doubly uncomfortable for those who cling to the illusion that they will be able to purchase “death with dignity” when their own time comes as if it were just another consumer commodity. In other words, the deaths of these young women and the manner of them are in a sense not an aberration but only one part of a larger aspect of human existence.

Although I have repeatedly disclaimed any expertise in matters of Latin American culture, I am convinced at this point, based upon my admittedly limited experience but feverish reading, that a Latin American reader, male or female, would probably be like a fish in the water with this whole concept. The idea of death with dignity would be laughable to the average Latin American reader if the possibility of such were ever presented to him or her. The Latin American reader, I think, would be more apt to aspire to death with courage. For him or her, then, only two questions remain. (1) How long will my own torture last? (2) Will my courage hold out until it is done?

But I could be wrong.

–Steve Brassawe

Resurfacing

jrlsberro3 Comments

Ah, the pit of despair as Daryl so eloquently put it below.  I’ve been wondering just where I was!  I have to admit that I bit off a bit too much this first quarter of 2010.  I believed I could take on an extra project at the office, serve on a grant review panel, read 2666, participate in the forums and post at least occasionally as part of the Zombies crew.  What the hell was I thinking?  Well, the extra project is finished, the funding recommendations have been made, and this is the first week I’ve been on schedule with the reading (actually slightly ahead).  High time to finally put some thoughts down in a post.

Full disclosure first – so far I just don’t like the book.  I don’t hate it, but I’m not loving it.  It’s just leaving me cold.  An odd experience for me, it’s pretty rare that I’m not at all moved.   As I really began to realize that I was not making any connection to it an idea began to gel for me.  I found myself thinking a great deal about a book that addresses some similar themes and that moved me greatly – Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.  Then over the past week the fates, serendipity, coincidence, whatever you want to call it, really pushed me in the direction of looking at these two works together.

I ordered a new copy of Blood Meridian; the lovely Modern Library edition with a wonderful introduction by Harold Bloom.  I read the intro Monday night and a couple of pages into the text.   The next day I checked in with The Morning News Tournament of Books to see which book was advancing in that day’s match up.  What do I find there?  The commentary includes an hysterically funny bit of back & forth about Nicholas Sparks and his dissing of Cormac McCarthy, specifically Blood Meridian, in a recent interview!  I read the interview referenced and found it horrific in its own right.  But the commentary also reminded me that both McCarthy and Bolano have been in the TOB in recent years – 2666 in last year’s Tournament; The Savage Detectives in 2008; The Road in 2007 (and the champion).  So I’ve been dipping into the matches and commentary on 2666 over there as well.

All of which is my very convoluted way of saying it’s obvious to me I need to keep exploring these two books.  I’m putting my first thoughts together and I’m looking forward to bringing them to you and hearing your comments.  Meanwhile, back to the litany of death!

The Little Engine that Could

Daryl L. L. Houston7 Comments

Even among those of us tracking various things over at bolanobolano.com, the fatigue of reading the part about the crimes is starting to take its toll. This is just a quick little note of encouragement for others following along who may also be growing weary. Just two more weeks until we’re out of the current pit of despair. I don’t remember a whole lot about the final section from when I read it a year ago, but I do remember that it was during that final part that I began to see why people thought this was a good book. Hold on for two more weeks, my friends, and things will get better. The best writing, if I remember correctly, is yet to come.

Page 466-513: Karl Haas

StephenBrassawe1 Comment

In considering Karl Haas, we do well to revisit Guadalupe Roncal’s description of him for the benefit of Oscar Fate in the last part. Karl has eyes so blue that he looks blind.

He has the face of a dreamer, but of a dreamer who’s dreaming at great speed. A dreamer whose dreams are far out ahead of our dreams. And that scares me. Do you understand?

Page 300.

Oscar did not understand, nor could I at that point. In this section at page 488, however, I got a peek at one of Karl’s dreams, the most bizarre dream of the countless dreams recounted for us in this novel. In addition to the graphic content of the dream, Karl also features the prison to be a castle on the edge of a bottomless abyss. At the conclusion of his dream he curls up on the edge of the abyss and falls asleep to dream some more.

It is difficult to come to grips with the meaning of his ruminations that immediately follow to the effect that “[r]aping women and then killing them seemed more attractive to him, more sexy” than Farfán and Gómez’s sexual activities. Are we to take this idea to be a self-incriminating one? I do not think so. It can just as easily be taken as a way of expressing his deep revulsion when considering Farfán and Gómez. In any event this leads him to his fantasy about murdering those two men and throwing their bodies in the abyss. “. . .that will be the last of them.”

Whatever the case, Karl Haas is a disturbing man. His dreams have violence and sex all blended together in a truly macabre way. This is displayed in his conduct, also, as we witnessed in the gruesome scene when El Anillo attempted to rape Karl in the prison shower wherein the author finally comes through with the prison rape with blades to which Jeff refers below. Page 484.

Karl illustrates something nicely. Without a confession–and Karl is expert at avoiding that pitfall–the police are essentially powerless to investigate and solve a case.

It is Epifanio who has the lead in the investigation of Karl Haas. On the surface it appears that Epifanio actually does some decent police work for a change. However, I have no faith in the purity of Epifanio’s motives at all. The mere fact that Epifanio is the moving force behind Karl Haas’s incarceration is that which most persuades me that Karl did not commit any of these murders. Karl is a handy scapegoat for the police, and a scapegoat may be just thing that Epifanio is seeking. Obviously, that is saying a much different thing than that Karl is an innocent man, however. There are very few if any innocent men in this book.

Which all brings me back to the observation that I made somewhere else. The issue of who is actually torturing and killing these young working women has become strangely beside the point.

Lastly, there is this intriguing monologue from Karl at page 506 to which Daryl refers below in his discussion of the claustrophobic aspects of this section:

Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside. But someone worse than me and worse than the killer is coming to this motherfucking city. Do you hear his footsteps getting closer? Do you hear them?

So Karl Haas is not Nietsche’s Superman after all. Nietsche’s Superman is apparently yet to come. . .at least that is the way that Karl sees it.

–Steve Brassawe

The Great Perhaps

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

This is off-topic for the current group read, but as this is kind of my literature blog, the post goes here.

A few years ago, a friend gave me a short story collection entitled Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, by Joe Meno. I haven’t read it in years, and — who knows? — my opinion of it may be different were I to read it again, but I do remember really liking it. The stories were short, little vignettes of what I remember as whimsical people telling sometimes folksy, sometimes improbable stories. The stories were simple and easy but engaging. Delightful is what they were. The book was a real delight to read. Ever since, I’ve had it in the back of my mind to read more by this guy. His books haven’t been at the top of my must-read pile, but a couple of them have been on my amazon wish list. For my birthday, I finally got one of them, his most recent, The Great Perhaps.

I suppose my expectations were high.

The first line certainly drew me in: “Anything resembling a cloud will cause Jonathan Casper to faint.”  Clouds of varying types (by which I mean not merely cumulus and cumulonimbus but supernatural and nuclear and inkish and rhinosceric) figure prominently in the book but wind up being, for me, an unsatisfactory and in fact a downright forced conceit. Meno tries to use clouds as a vector for making a point about complexity vs. simplicity, a dichotomy he he also touches on with references to evolution and a strange psychoanalysis of Casper’s fainting, seizing spells.

The story puts us in the midst of a family breaking apart. Jonathan Casper and his wife Madeleine are undergoing a second separation and career crises while their teenage daughters confront angst, in the case of the older, and a desire for fulfillment through a misplaced and overzealous religion, in the case of the younger. Everyone in the novel is searching for something, and no one seems to be anywhere near finding it. Naturally, by the end, they’ve found it, and it all ties back in neatly to the notion that oversimplification breeds unhappiness, that complexity is beautiful.

Although they all show development from the beginning of the story to the end, the main characters are all very flat. The obsessed scientist. The woman juggling a career and domestic life and being particularly successful at neither. The rebelling, asshole child. The child interested in nothing but religion. It seems to me not to be enough to show development of flat characters into slightly rounder, or at least more fulfilled, characters. Meno concludes that complexity is beautiful, but he declines to imbue his characters with any complexity. There’s very little satisfaction to be had here.

The book insists upon a few things that seem bizarrely naive or off key. For example, Jonathan Casper studies squid and nurses a hope of finding in their genetic makeup something to help him discover “a unified idea about why the world is the way it is, and where, as human beings, we truly come from.” This seems a stretch, but then Meno goes on: “In his search for the prehistoric squid, Jonathan is looking for a single, uncomplicated answer to the mystery of human life: there must be one somewhere, he is sure of it” (21). This strikes me as a feeble attempt to unify the strands of a story that, like the mystery of human life, may simply defy tidy unification. There are several such things in the book. They feel like feints, almost. They feel contrived.

Contrivance turns out to be the book’s primary flaw, I think. Fiction is naturally contrived. It’s the throwing together of characters and situations whose intersection makes a neat story. In the best fiction, however improbable the intersections or the situations (take wheelchair assassins descending upon a tennis academy, for example), it all feels somehow merited or forgivable or even wonderfully inventive. The Great Perhaps feels to me like something that began as a neat enough idea but whose central conceit required more buttressing than was optimal, done at last with weaker struts than were needed. It feels, in a way, like some of my own efforts at writing fiction, in which something fundamental collapses out from under me and I scramble to jam something in its place. It’s not half-heartedly exactly. It’s more as if whole-heartedly (over-heartedly?) but in service of something that simply needed rethinking altogether.

Meno does some interesting things formally in the book. Sections about Madeleine Casper are often in something like numbered list form. And Jonathan’s father — who appears in some of the best writing of the book, I think — writes one-liner letters to himself that are sprinkled throughout the text; these I found quite lovely.

The Great Perhaps concerns itself at least obliquely with war, and its most interesting sections, from the childhood of Jonathan’s father, take place in the very middle of the war. Meno mentions terrorism and war in the modern context (the action of the book takes place at the time of the Bush/Kerry election) and even makes what I imagine seemed to him like a dramatic reveal pertaining to that most horrific cloud of all — the mushroom — and yet he never really ties it all together. Had he done more with that complex, conflicted father and his experience of the war, I think Meno might have had a great book. As it turned out, I get the feeling he started with the central image of the mushroom cloud and worked backward to build up a weak set of stories to support a cloud motif that was more contrived than beautiful.

All in all, it’s inadequate. Not bad exactly, but inadequate. I like Meno’s writing, and this book doesn’t turn me off to reading his other books, but it did disappoint me in some of the ways that writers like Powers and T.C. Boyle — though considered good, serious writers — sometimes disappoint. I suppose there’s worse company for Meno to keep.

In and Out

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

On page 506, I underlined the sentence “That same night, in bed in his cell, Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside” and drew an arrow to my own note: “There’s a lot of this contrast (in/out) in this part (at least) of the book.” Once I was finished with this week’s reading, I went back and did a very quick scan of the text to find a few of the instances of in and out or inside and outside that had jumped out at me. Here’s a brief (but not necessarily complete) catalog:

470: Of Estrella Sandoval (the girl whose murder eventually points back to Haas), her friend says that she went in and talked to Haas and was mad when she came out.

475: Haas’s desk is horseshoe shaped, an enclosure.

475: There’s a reference to a couple of kids boxing. A boxing ring is an enclosure (enclosing violence).

477: Epinfanio asks if he can come into Haas’s house. Surprisingly, Haas lets him in.

479: Haas invites policemen on a subsequent visit to come into his home, but they decline before arresting him.

480: Haas, in possession apparently of endless stores of energy, makes his interrogators, shut in a soundproof room with him, lose patience.

481: Haas is put in a private cell.

483: Inmates in private cells could go out into the yard or spend their days inside. Twice on this page we see the phrase “The first time he went out into the yard.”

485: Haas acknowledges that at some point he’ll have to leave his private cell, so that his “in” becomes another “in.”

486: There’s a reference to a labyrinth.

488: There’s another reference to a labyrinth and a couple of references to an abyss (to a prison, which is very much an “in,” built on the edge of the abyss). He also feels (in a dream) something sewn inside his mouth. My puzzler for the day: Is an abyss in or out or something else altogether?

490: “Here, to a greater or lesser degree, everyone is sensitive to what happens outside, to the hearbeat of the city, you might say… Then I asked him if he thought I had killed [the women] and the bastard said no, not you, gringo, as if I was a fucking gringo, which inside maybe I am… That here in prison they know I’m innocent… It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious.”

502: There’s mention of the changing of a city’s limits, a shift in what constitutes in and out.

506: “The killer keeps killing and I’m locked up. That’s an incontrovertible fact. Someone should consider that and draw conclusions. That same night, in bed in his cell, Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside.”

513: Elvira Campos wants to ask Juan de Dios Martinez more about the crimes, but “doing so would only deepen the relationship, lead them, together, into a locked room to which she alone held the key.

I’m reminded of a discussion way back in the part about Fate between two men in a diner. Steve highlighted the section a few weeks ago, but I’ll requote the pertinent parts:

The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were.

and

“All right, then,” said the white-haired man. “I’ll tell you three things I’m sure of: (a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus…”

As is often the case, I don’t have a tidy theory to assemble these fragments into, but it does seem to me that Bolaño is doing something with insider and outsider status (even among the critics, with the different cliques) in the book and that, in this week’s section including several scenes in jail, he adds some color to the vague dichotomy of insider/outsider by providing lots of examples of specific ins and outs.

One More Po

Jeff Anderson9 Comments

I want to add another rogue to Steve’s lineup. Like he did, I invite you all to chime in if you disagree—I’m curious about counterarguments. The fellow I’m talking about has actually been getting some positive press this week (in Steve’s post as well), so I expect some pushback. I refer, of course, to Harry Magaña.

Here’s what I recognize as admirable about him: He tenaciously pursues some kind of redress for Lucy Anne Sander’s murder. He works his connections to try to get to the bottom of things. He puts himself to an awful lot of inconvenience in the process, when he’s not really obligated to do so. He seems to be a nice friend to Demetrio Águila. He misses his dead wife.

And I think that’s it. On the other side of the ledger, he’s corrupt, violent, and larcenous, he’s willing (at least) to torture, and he evidently feels he’s above the law.

Look at his first appearance:

When the bartender left work Harry Magaña was waiting for him outside, sitting in his car. The next day the bartender couldn’t come in to work, supposedly because he’d been in an accident. When he came back to Domino’s four days later with his face covered in bruises and scabs, everyone was shocked. He was missing three teeth, and if he lifted his shirt he revealed countless bruises in the most outrageous colors on his back and chest. He didn’t show his testicles, but there was still a cigarette burn on the left one. (414)

The bartender’s explanation is that he was jumped by a group on the street and they beat him up. Yes, I’m sure a cigarette to the scrotum happens all the time in street beatings. I strongly suspect this is our hero’s handiwork, and it’s appalling. We know he whips Elsa Fuentes with a belt to get information from her, threatening to mark her face and even to kill her. He breaks into three houses, cavalierly helps himself to whatever’s there, puts the make on a 16-year-old who’s in love with someone else, and lets his cohort—a police officer—pull a knife on a pimp to get more information. Have I missed anything?

The way he acts in this section, he’s just another lawless cop who thinks that what he’s trying to do is more important than the principles of law and justice he’s supposed to uphold. Are we supposed to be cheering him on? I understand the impulse to root for the only person who seems to be on track to accomplish something (you know, until he disappears), but surely his dehumanizing methods indicate caution there. I read his behavior as more than just dismaying, but as of a piece with (if not, obviously, as horrendous as) the pervasive narcissistic discounting of other people’s humanity that permits the conditions in Santa Teresa to arise. To me it’s clearly problematic to acclaim Harry Magaña in contradistinction to the people he’s trying to catch when they’re in some ways so similar. I’m reminded of the chemotherapy Magaña’s wife may have undergone: It’s effective in its fight, but that doesn’t make it less destructive and dangerous.