I was just thinking,
“You know what else this book needs?
Prison rape with blades”!
(More later.)
One More Po
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.
Pages 404-465: El Chile
I post these comments at the risk of appearing as if I am attempting to dominate the conversation. It is just that I am heading into Mexico City early in the morning, and I never know whether I am going to get back out of there. I am optimistic, however. Otherwise, I wouldn’t go. By the time I get back, y’all will be off on your discussion of the next section, and I did so want to write something concerning the dumps.
The subject at hand is garbage. It is a subject on which Bolaño is rather relentless. There is reason for that. Back at page 305 Oscar Fate was contemplating what he thought were beautiful hills in the distance over a cold beer from the patio of a restaurant in the eastern part of the city. A man disabuses him of this notion, explaining with very little English that those hills were really huge piles of garbage.
I have tied to avoid writing any sort of travelogue. A comment is in order here, however. So far up north through expenditures of enormous amounts of money and other resources, garbage has been kept out of sight and out of mind for most of us not employed in the garbage collection industry. That is a little more problematic here.
In a country strapped for infrastructure and money, government funded garbage collection in urban areas can be fitful. In many smaller towns and villages and in rural areas, there is often no organized garbage collection effort. Poverty plays an additional role, too. If one’s choice is paying for food or paying for legitimate garbage disposal, one will pay for food. The only bright side to all of this is that poor people participate a bit less in the world consumer economy. Thus, they generate a bit less garbage per capita. But there are a helluva lot of them.
It should not be surprising then that the illegal dump is one of the less picturesque features of the country. The Mexican people are not particularly slovenly. Quite the contrary actually. It is simply that the circumstances that I have described bear down upon them.
Santa Teresa’s new legal city dump is active. It is “. . . a festering heap a mile and a half long and half a mile wide. . . ,” visited by more than 100 trucks per day. Page 423. It is noted there that illegal dumps proliferate. That brings us to the illegal dump slyly named El Chile by our author. It is in one of the passages about El Chile that we find what is for me one of the more haunting passages in the book. Even though I try to avoid setting out long passages in these outbreaks of mine, I am going to transcribe this one here because I don’t trust you to go to the cited page and reread it.
At night those who had nothing or less than nothing ventured out. In Mexico City they call them teporochos, but a teporocho is a survivor, a cynic and a humorist, compared to the human beings who swarmed alone or in pairs around El Chile. There weren’t many of them. They spoke a slang that was hard to understand. The police conducted a roundup the night after the body of Emilia Mena Mena was found and all they brought in was three children hunting for cardboard in the trash. The night residents of El Chile were few. Their life expectancy was short. They died after seven months, at most, of picking their way through the dump. Their feeding habits and their sex lives were a mystery. It was likely they had forgotten how to eat or fuck. Or that food and sex were beyond their reach by then, unattainable, indescribable, beyond action and expression. All, without exception, were sick. To strip the clothes from a body in El Chile was to skin it. The population was stable: never fewer than three, never more than twenty.
Page 372.
That is an image worthy of Cormac McCarthy, although I am starting to think that I ought to be measuring Cormac McCarthy again Roberto Bolaño instead of the other way around. The end of the line of the species homo sapiens graphically portrayed.
El Chile is mentioned again in passing at page 404 and perhaps in another couple of instances. Then after another body is found in the vicinity, we come to this great passage that could be right out of Catch 22:
The mayor of Santa Teresa ordered that the dump be closed, although he later changed the order (informed by his secretary of the legal impossibility of closing something that, for all intents and purposes, had never been open) to decree the dismantling, removal, and destruction of that pestilential no-man’s-land. For a week a police guard was posted on the edge of El Chile and for three days a few garbage trucks, aided by the two city dump trucks, ferried trash to the dump in Colonia Kino, but faced with the magnitude of the job and their own lack of manpower, they soon gave up.
Page 464.
A fair number of the bodies of murdered young women turn up in El Chile or the vicinity. It is hard to conceive of a better illustration of young Marco Antonio Guerra’s words, “[l]ife is worthless.” Page 220. So it is in the face of this sort of thing that we look for some hope in characters like Florita or in a different way, Lalo Cura, and that appears to be a grasping at straws.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
For those familiar with my fixation on glass shards embedded in the tops of walls, I neglected to mention that this is what Lalo Cura saw on his first trip into Santa Teresa as a child:
The lights of the highway ramps and then a neighborhood of dark streets and then a neighborhood of big houses behind high walls bristling with glass.
Page 388.
I am starting to conclude that with his repeated use of this image, Bolaño is implicitly posing the question of how much longer those walls with glass shards on the top will effectively keep the chaos and the anarchy on the outside from gaining entry to the lives of the wealthy behind those walls. Fences between poor countries and rich countries come into question, too, again by implication.
Pages 404-465: The Police
When I tell you of my own reaction to characters, in this case some members of the police force, I am actually expressing my curiosity as to whether others reacted to them differently. I am not proposing that my reading of them is the reading of them, God knows.
Yet, how can we not be favorably disposed toward Olegario Cura Expósito, a sixteen-year-old kid raised in poverty in Villaviciosa who displays integrity and no small amount of courage? And how does he make it out of poverty? Through his skill and courage amid violence. La locura. Lunacy.
Through him we are introduced to the two scumbags who are also bodyguards for Pedro Rengifo’s wife, one from the state of Jalisco and the other from Chihuahua—Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, to be exact. I do not recall any other mention of Ciudad Juárez to this point in the book. Santa Teresa is in the state of Sonora. (By the way, we are finally told explicitly that Pedro Rengifo is a narcotraficante at page 463.)
Then Lalo is a cop at the age of 17. Did you notice that he underwent any extensive training at some police academy? I did not. Nonetheless, he starts taking home and studying texts on law enforcement, texts in which obviously nobody else at the precinct has ever had any interest. He maintains his distance from drinking with the other cops or partaking in the gang rape of arrested whores in the jail. Page 401. The kid is going to be a good cop if he survives.
That in itself does not give us any hope that he will accomplish anything. This is the lesson that we take from Harry Magaña, I think. Harry is a tough, relentless, smart crime investigator. This place simply swallows him up and kills him.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Juan de Dios Martínez is a good cop, too, but as a veteran he appears to me to be only going through the motions of being a good cop. He seems to accept the incompetence around him as a limit on what he can accomplish with nary a protest. There is a fatalism about him.
Apropos of I don’t know what, consider this passage regarding one of his trysts with Elvira Campos:
Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him—of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him?
Page 424.
. . . of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? What is that all about? Perhaps it is post-coital depression, something I have only read about. Anyway, I do not know exactly, but this cannot bode well for his state of mind. Beyond that, it is remarkable how little we know of him given the amount of text devoted to him.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Epifanio is a comic incompetent. Someone elsewhere wrote of the incident when he retrieved Isabel Urrea’s address book, obviously a very valuable piece of evidence that everyone else ignored. As was pointed out, he himself did nothing with it either. But he goes further than admitting that he did nothing with it. He congratulates himself on the fact that he did not telephone some of the prominent people whose names appeared there and blackmail them. Page 463.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I was struck by a story told about Inspector Ángel Fernández at page 460. In spite of the fact that the medical examiner’s report stated that Emilia Escalante Sanjuán died of strangulation, in his report Fernández listed the cause of death as alcohol poisoning. Obviously, this was a way to close the file because Emilia was only a whore–practically a whore anyway. Page 460.
There follows immediately some of the most harrowing reading in this section of the book in the form of the cops’ discussion of “three-way” rapes, a full rape of all five orifices, etc. I think that all of us are willing to accept the proposition that policemen become hardened in their profession. They become hardened as a kind of psychological self-defense mechanism. However, coupled with the rape of the whores in the jail, I could not accept this in that light.
The good cops are the exception here, and they are impotent. The bad cops are the rule, and they are nasty bad.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
In the same sense that I earlier proposed that this is not a “crusader novel,” nor is it a “who-dunnit” novel. Has anyone else noticed that as we read on in this novel, the issue of who is killing the young women becomes strangely beside the point in a very real way?
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I still have written nothing concerning the illegal dump known as El Chile as I said I would last week. I will sometime.
Pages 404-465: Florita
At the half-way point I want to indulge briefly in a generalization about this novel, something that I have tried to refrain from doing. To this point I personally have not encountered one shred of text that leads me in any way to the thought that this is some sort of crusading novel, that it is sending out some clarion call for action along the lines of, “something must be done about these murders” or “something must be done about the working conditions on the Mexican side of the border.” Nor do I detect any sort of message like that from the tone of the novel.
When I speak of a “crusading novel,” I am thinking of something like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It is hard to miss the message in that novel that “something must be done about the corruption and working conditions in the meat industry.” Again, I can detect nothing like that in this novel. Of course, as sensitive human beings I think that we all want very much to see such a message. I simply submit that it is not there.
It appears to me that we are being presented with a particular vision of the nature of human existence by a man who takes pride in portraying the most troubling aspects of that existence with nary a flinch. That’s all. There is not a lick of redemption here nor is there held out the hope of any because that is the way he sees the truth of the matter.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
There is not much question but that Florita Almada is the star of the show in this section of the book. Daryl has thoughtfully discussed aspects of her character below. My own reaction to her was much warmer as has my reaction to Barry Seaman become much warmer as I have reread his speeches. I want to focus on a different facet of the poem to which Daryl referred.
As Florita scans the poem on page 432, she comes to a downright apocalyptic passage:
Old, white haired, weak, barefoot, bearing enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, though wind and storm, when it’s hot and later freezes, running on, running faster, crossing rivers, swamps, falling and rising and hurrying faster, no rest or relief, battered and bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten.
After considering this, she comes to this conclusion at page 433:
. . . (4) that if it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.
Superficially, that is heartwarming of course, the kind of simple, pithy observation that wise old people are capable of. But then consider it further. How, pray tell, did we get from the premise–the abyss–to that conclusion, the recommendation of fair and just treatment of people? It is a leap that made me laugh. She endeared herself to me with it, but it makes no sense.
Of course the better way to look at it is that it is a piece of homespun philosophy being presented to us rather than a piece of logic. The centerpiece of this philosophy is not human kindness in any form but rather fairness and justice. The idea is that even in the face of the ultimate void, we ought still to act with fairness and justice toward others.
Now is there some redemptive message here? Not for me. I cannot escape the conclusion that this being presented to us as a piece of naïveté for our affectionate amusement. I cannot believe that we are expected to take this from Florita seriously.
In other words, it seems clear to me that the author has spoken to us at times through several characters in this novel. However, I do not believe that he speaks to us through Florita.
Dead Center
Here we are at pretty much the dead center of the book this week, and Bolaño drops this on us in Florita Almada’s meditation on a poem that she mistakenly figures must be about little Benito Juarez:
(1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it’s human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juarez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall
A couple of pages later, she says that in her visions, she had seen dead women and dead girls in a desert, an oasis like those seen in films about the French Foreign Legion and the Arabs (this I suppose is a nod to French imperialism of the sort that Benito Juarez fought as president of Mexico and that I can’t help thinking of alongside Bolaño’s promiscuity of nationalities in this book, though what he’s doing with it I can’t say). The really kind of lovely little poem she talks about also addresses boredom:
O resting flock, who don’t, I think, know your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because you’re never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you’re calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no boredom.
Let’s think back to the front matter of the book, whose epigraph Bolaño borrows from Baudelaire: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!”
Florita Almada, whose very name means something like “little flower,” is well-versed in the application of plants for food and medicinal purposes. She’s one heckuva gardener, you might say. And the poem she speaks about calls to mind the story of the garden of Eden, the unfortunate acquisition of knowledge — and with it boredom — that resulted from the consumption of fruit from the wrong tree. Incidentally, I can’t help thinking of Florita’s role as seer and of the Greek Cassandra, whose ears were licked clean by snakes so that she could hear the future. Yet Cassandra proved an untrustworthy prophetess in a way, because her curse was that no one would believe her.
The trustworthiness of La Santa is also sort of up for grabs, I think. She clearly has a more or less correct pipeline into something about the killings; her visions are presented as accurate and legitimate. But consider her speeches. The first is full of lyricism (I’m thinking of the pastoral poem in particular) and nuggets that at least resemble wisdom. Her second long spiel breaks down into garrulousness and even a sort of transparent egotism:
[I]t made her even more frightened and angry, and this she had to say here, in front of the cameras, on Reinaldo’s lovely show [insert here a list of the virtues of the show, and its wonderful catalog of guests]… and now that she was here, she said, it was her duty to take this opportunity to speak of other things, by which she meant that she couldn’t talk about herself, she couldn’t let herself succumb to that temptation of the ego, that frivolity, which might not be frivolity or sin or anything of the sort if she were a girl of seventeen or eighteen, but would be unforgivable in a woman of seventy, although my life, she said, could furnish material for several novels or at least a soap opera, but God and especially the blessed Virgin would deliver her from talking about herself, Reinaldo will have to forgive me, he wants me to talk about myself, but there’s something more important than me and my so-called miracles, which aren’t miracles, as I never get tired of saying… my miracles are the product of work and observation, and possibly, I say possibly, also of a natural talent, said Florita.
How much time can you really spend talking about how you’re not going to talk about yourself? She’s a loud-mouthed old lady back-pedaling from talking about her virtues while talking about her virtues. It’s comic. She got a taste of fame during her first visit to Reinaldo’s show and has returned to drink up some more. We scoffed at Barry Seaman earlier in the book, and much of La Santa’s speech resembles his, even down to the subject matter (food, dreams, heavenly bodies, how to live). Given a pulpit, they’ll just belch out whatever they have to say, and even though some of what they say may be wise (whether simple regurgitation of conventional wisdom or not), the power of their word is undercut by their method of delivery. They discredit themselves, in a way, at least to discerning readers like the lot of us.
The matter of the agency of (and thus trustworthiness of) voice is reinforced in this week’s reading by the appearance of a ventriloquist who believes his dummy is a living creature. Like La Santa and Seaman, he’s an autodidact. “Deep inside,” he says, “all of us ventriloquists, one way or another, know that once the bastards reach a certain level of animation, they come to life.” La Santa is something of a ventriloquist’s dummy to whatever spirit fills her with her visions. She’s overtaken by her trances, seized, possessed. And like the ventriloquist’s dummy and perhaps moved a bit by the desire for fame (maybe by weariness of her own boredom?), she comes back for that second visit and shoots off a bit at the mouth. Having reached a certain level of animation, she has come to life.
As I read about her trance and considered it in light of the ventriloquist’s peculiar belief about his dummy, I couldn’t help thinking of two lines of poetry that have always stuck with me. The first, from Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, reads “Who is the potter, pray, and who the pot?” The other is from Yeats: “How can we know the dancer from the dance.” Where, in other words, do you draw the line between agent and output, and at what point does one overtake the other? I’m reminded also of my childhood Ouija board experiences, my skepticism about the occult tested by the curious ability of the thing to spell out answers to things I didn’t think my older sister could know the answers for and yet reinforced by the perhaps more curious inability of the thing to move with just my hands resting on it.
I think Bolaño is toying here with trustworthiness of voice and of authority. La Santa has what seem to be authentic visions, and yet she herself isn’t immune to certain human tendencies to provide embellishments here and there, especially when a captive audience is present and all ears. We saw the same with Seaman. We see reporters covering subjects they know nothing about. We see reporters who should be doing more to cover the murders failing to do so (it’s implied, at least, that the exposure of this stuff isn’t great). And we see critics who decide they’re not sure they know what they’re saying, who have warred with other factions of critics about things they’ve made pronouncements about and later figured out they may not understand. Bolaño distrusts people who try to package things for you.
Of course, one can’t escape the fact that he too is a repackager. Just as the thoughts that seize a shepherd can gallop away with him, so can the thoughts of a seer, or of a reporter, or of a critic, or of an author.
A Rare Moment of Real Connection
So many of the human connections in 2666 are superficial. Even Pelletier and Espinoza, whom we think of as a strange mix of bosom buddies and rivals, have a brief chat about loyalty and (if I recall correctly) how it’s not worth much. Their relationship with Norton is strange, at times urgent and yet at other times disposable. Norton and Morini’s getting together was something of a bolt out of the blue and still, frankly, seems kind of strange, as if it fit formally the arrangement Bolaño wanted to create but with no real believable basis in the text itself.
Fate sees some moments of connection at his mother’s neighbor’s apartment, but he’s not really involved in them. He’s not exactly close to Guadalupe and in fact almost abandons her. Rosa Amalfitano he develops something of an across-the-room crush on, and he does wind up rescuing her, but I don’t know that there’s anything to that acquaintance that I’d call an especially close or connected relationship. Rosa’s father and mother are about as distant as can be imagined, and though Lola begins living with her graveyard lover, it seems to me that it’s as much a financial arrangement as one of true and lasting affinity. Lola’s connection — a very close one in her mind — with the poet she pursues is imagined.
In last week’s reading, we met Juan de Dios Martinez and Elvira Campos. He desperately wants connection, but she keeps him at arm’s length. Sure, she’ll nail him on a rigid twice-monthly schedule, but forget pillow-talk afterward, much less anything gesturing in the direction of a meaningful relationship.
The backdrop for all this aloofness, it should be noted, is a series of grisly crimes perpetrated as acts of unwanted connection.
At last, on page 408, we have a real connection. Erica Delmore is looking for her friend Lucy Anne Sander, who is later found murdered. She finally starts going to hospitals to ask if any American women have been admitted. At the last one, she has this experience:
[A] nurse suggested she try the Clinica America, a private hospital, but she answered with a burst of sarcasm. We’re blue-collar workers, honey, she said in English. Like me, said the nurse, also in English. The two of them talked for a while and then the nurse invited Erica to have coffee at the hospital cafeteria, where she informed her that many women disappeared in Santa Teresa. It’s the same in the United States, said Erica. The nurse met her eyes and shook her head. It’s worse here, she said. When they parted, they exchagned phone numbers and Erica promised to keep the nurse posted on any developments.
It seems an empty enough gesture. How often do we say, even to people we consider to be fairly close friends, that we’ll call, with no real intention of doing so? But get this: Just a couple of pages later, after they’ve found Erica’s friend, she calls the nurse to let her know the body has been found. When she gets to the morgue to identify the body, the nurse has, unasked, come to help her through it:
As they were waiting in a corridor in the basement, the nurse appeared. They hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. Then she introduced the nurse to Henderson, who greeted her distractedly but wanted to know how long they’d known each other. Twenty-four hours, said the nurse. Or less. It’s true, thought Erica, just a day, but I already feel as if I’ve known her for a long time.
It’s tempting to call this a Good Samaritan moment, though I’m not sure the politics of the different cultures (somewhat distrustful of one another) in Bolaño’s vignette quite lines up with those in the source material. Still, it’s a nice little moment of human connection, an oasis of friendliness in a desert of aloofness.
Of Bladders and Blasphemy
Up through last week, I turned each page of this book with dread, knowing that every one I left to the left was one fewer between me and the Part About the Crimes. As that wall of pages visibly thinned, I tried to steel myself against the ghastly proceedings to come. Traces of the feminicidios wisp through the first third of the book like fish in a mirror, coalescing around Oscar Fate and rerouting his part of the book. That we will encounter the deaths is obvious; that they will make for distressing reading is suggested by (among other things) the flat brutality of Pelletier and Espinoza’s battery of the cabbie, and by the garish sordidness of Charly Cruz’s den.
I mentioned last week the aggressive shock that the Part About the Crimes begins with—blammo! Here’s a dead body—but after the initial jolt, it’s not as crudely executed as that. I want to highlight Paul’s and Maria’s takes on the start of this part, because my own reaction shares in both. Maria captures the defensive inattention that I find myself wrestling, and Paul is surprised like I am at the strictly comparative ease of reading in this section.
But more surprising than that, for me, is the story of the Demon Penitent. It was only when the “church desecrator” appeared that I finally understood the awkwardness of the title of the Part About the Crimes. Why not “The Part About the Murders”? I had been unwittingly wondering. The answer: Because they’re not the only crimes under discussion. And so far I very much like that the Demon Penitent is included. I find him (his plot thread, etc.) interesting, but I also think he’s very useful to the book.
Dan makes the argument that it is preposterous and ghoulish to aestheticize the situation in Santa Teresa (particularly because of its factual basis), and to a certain extent I see his point. We probably all agree that it would be disgusting to turn the actual violent deaths of the actual women and girls of Ciudad Juárez into a symbol or object to serve some literary purpose. Nobody gets to claim those deaths for personal use. At the same time, the importance and, yes, utility of shining a light on them seems obvious; to draw attention is (hopefully) to inspire or force action. So in making the valid choice to write about those deaths, Bolaño has put himself in a bit of a bind with respect to what he can actually do.
That’s where the Demon Penitent enters the picture. He most blatantly provides authorial cover for Santa Teresa to not care about its women, but that’s pretty gracelessly done. Yes, I get it, the people of Santa Teresa are more concerned with offenses against an incorporeal god than with the murder of those they walk among. The addition of a clumsy countersubject does not improve my outlook on the matter nor increase the artistry with which the point is made.
The best possibility the Demon Penitent opens up is the symbolic, and that’s where he really adds to the section. In the first place, the story of a man who relentlessly imposes his bodily functions on spiritual places is inherently a symbol of the tension between the physical and the supernatural. His focus on serial desecration through excretion, as well as the sheer volume of his bladder, is so outlandish and unusual that it acquires a kind of literary charge; it must mean something, because it’s just too peculiar to be mere plot. With regard to Christianity (the religion I’m most familiar with), there’s a lot we could say about the church(es) in terms of continual appeals to the supernatural as an authority over the physical—look at sacerdotal and conventual celibacy, for one very conspicuous example—and the Demon Penitent draws all this into play. Additionally, he at least activates associations with the religious function of conceptualizing and managing the afterlife; one of the things religion has always been concerned with is the transition from physical to no-longer-physical existence, which is a transition that’s been happening an awful lot in Santa Teresa lately.
In an interesting way, though, the Demon Penitent is also an attack on the symbolic. His intent, remember, is to leave his waste all over the church and behead or destroy statues; the killings are essentially incidental. His goal is to deface the symbols of his faith, and he in fact adapts his methods in order to minimize the chances of feeling forced to harm anyone. I may be pressing the point a little too hard (or the next 250 pages may befool me), but I see his profanations as an assault on the value of any kind of symbolism, at least in the context of Santa Teresa. Facts in that city must be addressed, and to withdraw to a second-order experience of them, to see them as anything other than stark reality, is to refuse to confront them. Symbolism is cold comfort when it substitutes for action or tries to organize a set of events that are so immediate and horrible. In this sense, the Demon Penitent makes the same argument that the Part About the Critics does regarding criticism: The enormity of the events in Santa Teresa requires engagement. There is no neutrality or aloofness in the matter, because more will die without wide-scale intervention.
* I know that should be “sacrilege” in the title, but think of the sonority!
Vampires
As I write this, I have the strangest notion that somebody has beat me to it, that somebody else has mentioned vampirism with respect to 2666, but if so, I can’t find the reference. If I’m inadvertently ripping you off, please speak up and take appropriate credit in the comments. Maybe I just have the Infinite Summer read of Dracula still on the brain.
The things I’ve noticed (probably not an exhaustive list; I found these in a quick skim after reading this part a week ago):
- There’s the obvious draining of life force from industrious women.
- The man held in connection with the crimes is a tall, pale man. Even though he’s locked up, the crimes mysteriously continue. He’s obviously sneaking out at night as a bat.
- In a bit of mischief running parallel to the murders, we have an elusive sacraphobic breaking idols (Dracula hates a cross, don’t you know?).
- The Penitent pees in prodigious amounts. Vampires drink lots of blood. Vampire bats, which can consume half their weight in blood within a 20-minute feeding, begin to pee within a couple of minutes of feeding. One assumes they pee in impressive volume.
- Inmates at the mental hospital are made nervous by the wind. I’m reminded of the storm that preceded Dracula’s arrival to England and his later association with a mental hospital in Stoker’s novel.
- The director of the asylum has small, sharp, white teeth.
- The filmmaker Rodriguez, probably best known for his vampire film From Dusk till Dawn, is featured in the prior section of the book, with a credit on what seems to be a snuff film oddly premonitory (or emblematic) of the killings in Santa Teresa.
- One victim has a stake driven through her. Usually we think of this as the vampire’s fate, but then, vampires spread the love to others who must also be staked.
- The left hand of one victim rests on some guaco leaves, which are supposed to be good for mosquito bites. Mosquitos are another blood sucker.
I’m not saying this is a vampire novel, or a vampiric section of the novel. The bits about the pee in particular are almost certainly a stretch. Still, there are some pretty evocative images and circumstances that a credulous reader like me can find a way to tie together in a post about vampires. Boo!
Pages 353-404: Mexican Zoetrope
I speculated in the Fourth Installment on Fate entry about the possibility that when Bolaño was writing the passages concerning Professor Kessler and Hugh Thomas’s book, The Slave Trade, he was considering how he might use words in the service of revelation rather than avoidance in writing The Part About the Crimes.
Then Matt in his Tidbits piece got me focused on Professor Plateau and his invention that ultimately lead to the zoetrope.
I have finished my second reading of pages 353 through 404 of The Part About the Crimes. I originally gauged Bolaño’s intentions here to be to bring to each of these murder victims some small identity—to force us to contemplate them each individually for a moment. Words in the service of revelation rather than avoidance. The same sort of purpose the Vietnam Wall is designed to serve for 55,000 dead, in that case with severe space limitations. Some better feel for the magnitude of it all. I still think that.
However, as the crime victims fluttered by me this time, they became as individual images in an animation machine and a kind of persistent perception was implanted in my mind. The victims blended back together again into one image. The body of a girl with long hair, about five feet seven inches tall (tall for a Mexican woman), partially clothed, lying out in some vacant area along with garbage. No animation results, however. As this image slowly develops, it becomes a character in the novel that keeps reappearing. (There is a lot wrong with that whole metaphor, but still, I like it.)
Consider Epifanio’s dream of that female coyote dying by the road. Page 387.
And this was the last death of 1993, which was the year the killings of the women began in the Mexican state of Sonora, under Governor José Andrés Briceño of the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), and Santa Teresa Mayor José Refugio de las Heras of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), decent and upright men who did the right thing, without fear of reprisals, prepared for any unpleasantness.
Pages 393-94.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Charly Cruz at page 315:
And there’s no sense of the abyss anymore, there’s no vertigo before the movie begins, no one feels alone inside a multiplex. Then, Fate remembered, he began to talk about the end of the sacred.
See Daryl’s entry below on the sacred.
It is difficult not to think back on Oscar Fate’s ruminations on the sacred when we are confronted with the Penitent. The Penitent is only an inadvertent murderer, whom the interestingly named Juan de Dios Martínez began to like when the Penitent perfected his technique to eliminate the bloodshed. Page 368.
Thanks to Elvira Campos, another aspect of Fate’s experience comes back to mind, one that we have not discussed. Fate saw an eerie mural on the side of a building in Detroit. It was an image of a clock. Where each of the twelve numbers would normally have been, there were depictions of people working in the factories of Detroit with a recurring character, a black teenager. The mural looked like the work of a lunatic.
In the middle of the clock, where all the scenes converged, there was a word painted in letters that looked like they were made of gelatin: fear.
Page 241.
Elvira Campos brings these two abstractions, fear and the sacred, together nicely with her theory that the Penitent suffers from sacraphobia:
There are odder things than sacraphobia, said Elvira Campos, especially if you consider that we’re in Mexico and religion has always been a problem here. In fact, I’d say all Mexicans are essentially sacraphobes.
Page 381.
Even the Virgin of Guadalupe takes a hit from the Penitent at page 365.
(Will the asylum at which Elvira Campos is director be the one where Amalfitano eventually takes up residence?)
The Penitent is gone as quickly as he appears in the novel. Juan de Dios Martínez and Elvira Campos slowly fade from the picture, too. Sergio González, the arts writer from La Razón, files his story on the Penitent for the Sunday Magazine and promptly forgets about it all. It is as if these characters were invented and introduced solely to provide us with insight, if insight it is, into this confluence of fear and the sacred.
I guess we have to acknowledge, also, that Juan de Dios Martínez and Elvira Campos engaged in some ritualistic sex. She reminds me a bit of Liz Norton. But that all appears to be a throw-in. I liked these two, of course, but I had the odd feeling that the author was keeping me at some distance from them.
There’s for openers. I look forward to reading the thoughts of others. Later in the week something further concerning Olegario Cura Expósito, the illegal dump, El Chile, and some odds and ends.
Infinite Zombies 