Week 9: Wall of Voodoo

by Maria Bustillos

The appearance of Klaus Haas produced an absolute brick wall for me in this book. Until now, I’d been able to enter into the narrative in a receptive frame of mind, just fluidly kind of taking it all in, but the incomprehensibility of this character stopped me cold.  I’ve reread the jail passage several times (not a pleasant task, though an absorbing one) trying to get a grip on what is being said, here.

It doesn’t seem to me that anyone could survive being sodomized with a shiv?  That’s one thing.  But the fate of the victim is left unclear, so far as I can make out–I mean it is difficult and expensive to repair a lacerated colon and you might bleed to death pdq in a Mexican jail?  So this guy is really violent, willing to kill, right from the outset. (Intelligence here welcomed.)

I had been operating under the assumption that the next time we run across any kind of a tall guero in Mexico, that person is going to be Archimboldi.  But Haas is not, in fact, Archimboldi, because it turns out he’s only forty.  What is the relationship then between these two tall Germanic blonds? I’m now guessing that they are blood relations, maybe? On the other hand, the internal landscape of Haas seems to feature no kind of reference to books or writing. I can’t really tell how educated Haas is but on balance the evidence is that he is smart but not literary, at least he’s not wallpapered on the inside with books the way most literary people are (including Amalfitano and the critics.)

Another point on Haas that struck me deeply. His mind works on these really grotesque lines, and I will not be surprised if he killed some of these girls. However, there is a freakish extra ingredient to the remarks and interior workings of Haas:  they’re intensely poetic. His nightmares are full of Boschianly horrible and yet intense and painterly imagery.  Also, he’s calling down in a kind of oracular way (as if he were the reverse of Florita Almada) the coming of an even worse evil than himself.  His warnings spook even these seriously vicious men in the jail; they have almost the lurid smack of santeria.

As a final point: the events in this section are real in two senses.  First, they are an imagined version of what has really been going on in Ciudad Juarez, events we’ve read about in real newspapers. Second, they’re real within the context of the novel; by this I mean, as we discussed earlier, the critics lived in a sort of bubble that real events of any kind just couldn’t seem to penetrate; they’re reading about the world rather than living in it.  Good luck with that in Santa Teresa! Look what happened to Amalfitano, reality in all its bloody splendor is positively stalking him until (thank god!) Oscar Fate comes along and saves Rosa. Actually any kind of horrible thing could have happened to him afterward. We didn’t exactly leave him in good hands.

And now we’re in the belly of the beast, right? Are Archimboldi’s books so fascinating to the critics because they partake of reality, which is what we desire no matter how dangerous and terrible it is?  Is this why the critics take their opportunity to beat up the Pakistani cab driver, when it comes, because all men are at bottom bloodthirsty, bestial creatures?  And they sort of subsume their real nature in literature, and subsume as well any feeling of connection with or responsibility to real events, whether criminal, political etc? Are we also absolving ourselves of the claims of reality just by reading this book?


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8 Responses to “Week 9: Wall of Voodoo”


  • Comment from nicole

    So this guy is really violent, willing to kill, right from the outset. (Intelligence here welcomed.)

    I was rather intrigued by the shiv in the shower scene myself. Haas has been put into a very unpleasant and dangerous place when he enters the jail, and the other inmates seem to expect him to be more submissive. He maintains his innocence of killing the girls, but is really not going to screw around when it comes to dominating the violence within the jail. In some ways I see this as similar to his ability to run a successful and seemingly normal business in a place like Santa Teresa; his remarks to his victim are very businesslike and he is just taking care of things, doing what has to be done. (Ruthless German efficiency?)

    It’s this coldness and impersonality in Haas’s violence that made me sincerely question whether he had committed any of the murders. I wouldn’t put it past him, but he also doesn’t quite seem like the type for such personal, intimate crimes.

  • Comment from Steve

    I agree with you about Karl Haas, Nicole. And when he claims that there is someone in prison who knows for a fact that he could not have done the murders, I think we are to believe him. However, I am not sure that we are to understand this statement in any conventional Agatha Christie sense.

    Now we’re in the belly of the beast. For sure, Maria.

    . . . reality, which is what we desire no matter how dangerous and terrible it is? I must ask, who is “we?” If “we” refers to some readers of the book, that subordinate clause probably holds. If “we” refers to human beings generally, that subordinate clause does not hold. Is not the entire history of mankind composed of various endeavors to avoid reality? I am right with Marco Antonio Guerra word for word:

    I agree with that. . .broadly speaking.

    But it is this question that intrigues me. Are we also absolving ourselves of the claims of reality just by reading this book? That could be a very neat question. The word “absolving” invokes some concept of relief from guilt or sin. Let me see if I can say back to you that which you are suggesting.

    We who read this book with some modicum of seriousness feel that we are looking some terrible truths about human existence straight in the eye. For a short time, at least, amid our banal day to day existence, we are not averting our own eyes or pretending that such truths do not exist or maintaining a willful ignorance, all of which are sins in the minds of those of us who feature ourselves as thoughtful human beings. In this little way and during this little time, we are not one of Marco’s rats. And we can do it in the comfort of our own living rooms.

    Is that close?

    Whether it is or is not, I have other questions if you will permit.

  • Comment from Steve

    [Damned XTML. What was wrong with the old stuff? Perhaps someone with administrative privileges could pull down my butchered one above.

    In the meantime, let me try this again.]

    I agree with you about Karl Haas, Nicole. And when he claims that there is someone in prison who knows for a fact that he could not have done the murders, I think we are to believe him. However, I am not sure that we are to understand this statement in any conventional Agatha Christie sense.

    Now we’re in the belly of the beast. For sure, Maria.

    . . . reality, which is what we desire no matter how dangerous and terrible it is? I must ask, who is “we?” If “we” refers to some readers of the book, that subordinate clause probably holds. If “we” refers to human beings generally, that subordinate clause does not hold. Is not the entire history of mankind composed of various endeavors to avoid reality? I am right with Marco Antonio Guerra word for word:

    People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I’m telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat.

    I agree with that. . .broadly speaking.

    But it is this question that intrigues me. Are we also absolving ourselves of the claims of reality just by reading this book? That could be a very neat question. The word “absolving” invokes some concept of relief from guilt or sin. Let me see if I can say back to you that which you are suggesting.

    We who read this book with some modicum of seriousness feel that we are looking some terrible truths about human existence straight in the eye. For a short time, at least, amid our banal day to day existence, we are not averting our own eyes or pretending that such truths do not exist or maintaining a willful ignorance, all of which are sins in the minds of those of us who feature ourselves as thoughtful human beings. In this little way and during this little time, we are not one of Marco’s rats. And we can do it in the comfort of our own living rooms.

    Is that close?

    Whether it is or is not, I have other questions if you will permit.

  • Comment from Dan

    I think Steve above is pointing to a different moment when Klaus Haas refers to his innocence, but it reminded me of this, which also ties into Nicole’s question about Haas’s authority within the prison. When Haas speaks with Sergio González over the phone, he reflects on why he hasn’t been killed in prison, and a prisoner who seems fairly disinterested in the murders or in accusing him:

    Then I asked him if he thought I had killed them and the bastard said no, not you, gringo, as if I was a fucking gringo, which inside maybe I am, although I’m becoming less and less of one. What are you trying to say to me? asked Sergio González. That here in prison they know I’m innocent, said Haas. And how do they know it? asked Haas. That was a little harder for me to figure out. It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious.

    Now I think, to an extent, Haas’s description of the contagious dream holds some truth to how the inmates have come to perceive him. But why does the dream take hold? This is another way of asking why he hasn’t been killed, and it has to do with some other kind of authority than what he has attained by violence.

    And I wonder if this is where the seemingly innocuous aside about being called a “gringo” comes in. Klaus is a foreigner, and a white foreigner at that. Does his exotic whiteness give him a kind of power in the prison (and maybe explain some of his power in relation to the media as well)? Keep in mind, as well, that our first physical encounter with him has come from Fate (extremely conscious of race), who sees him as “an enormous and very blond man,” which mimics in turn the description of Haas that Guadalupe Roncal gave. In fact, Roncal uses his blue eyes, blond hair, and height as a lead-in to stating “he has the face of a dreamer.” I want to say she’s romanticizing Klaus in just the way the prisoners do, at least if they are as Klaus describes them in this conversation.

    (Beyond that, hello to the group–I’ve followed along lurking for some time now but am only just posting.)

    • Comment from Eric

      Dan – this is interesting. Didn’t Fate also have some social power in Mexico, as an outsider?

      • Comment from Dan

        I’m not sure he does. I had to skim back over that section to refresh my memory, so I might be missing something you are thinking of. He does meet Omar Abdul, who suggests he (Omar) has or would have it easy living in Mexico. Chucho Flores seems happy enough to meet Fate but also not very impressed with his job. With the other American reporters he meets it seems like he has the kind of interactions he might have in the states. Fate’s biggest moment seems to come when he decides to put on his “terrifying Harlem” look to rescue Rosa–interesting in light of his earlier (I think right when he gets to Mexico) reflection that he wasn’t sure if he was “African-American” or just “American” after crossing the border. Is his decision to put on the mask a moment of clarity or self-deception?

        Of course, all the Americans referenced have the ease of crossing the boarder as they please too, versus the repeated references to attempts cross the border without getting caught–but that hardly protects those Americans that make use of it (Magaña, maybe Fate depending on what exactly has happened).

  • Comment from Maria Bustillos

    Very close indeed, broadly speaking.

    Add in the question of wanting not only to hear about the truth but wanting to know it, and that’s all I got.

    You can’t be seriously asking me whether I want to know what you think about all this.

    I got my copy of Wittgenstein’s Mistress this morning and it’s got the most splendid epigraphs, the first of which (from Kierkegaard) is:

    What an extraordinary change takes place… when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.

  • Comment from Brooks Rooke

    thanks for the great post


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