When I first read this part of the novel, I felt like it needed to be cataloged in some way. We’re doing that here with tracking all of the deaths and all of the dreams and whatnot, but I have been more detached from this part this time around and I am way behind on even posting a weekly summary of what happened in the novel. Apologies. Part of what confounds me is that there is just so much data to process I find it hard to dig in without either seeming like some grand, bird’s-eye-view of the world or transitioning quickly back and forth between topics and ideas (see tidbits previously and below).

As I’ve mentioned several times, there is a correlation between the femicides and the Holocaust. I believe that Bolaño’s motivation in writing this Part and this novel is not to exploit these murders for their shock value or because he loves describing horrific violence against women. I see no pleasure here. By describing over a hundred cases in some detail, I believe he is trying to honor them in some way. A belief that each life is important motivates many Holocaust works (fiction and nonfiction). Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust is called Yad Vashem—which comes from the Bible verse “And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem) that shall not be cut off.” (Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 5). The name, I believe, is important. [A little tangent: Yad Vashem bestows the title Righteous Among the Nations to non-Jews who helped Jews escape the Holocaust. Only three Americans have received this honor: the Sharp couple and Varian Fry. Fry helped thousands of artists, writers, and filmmakers escape Europe, among them: Hannah Arendt, Max Ophuls, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst. How is this guy not better known?] What do you think? Is Bolaño’s portrayal of the murders insincere or exploitative or does he end up honoring the lives of the women?

Looking back over my notes for this whole Part (volume 2 of the 3 volume set), I have a few tidbits I’d like to put out there for conversation. Apologies if some of these have been covered in the forums or on other blogs.

• On page 579, Hass says the name of the killer of women in Juarez is Antonio Uribe. We see a lot about the slipperiness of the Uribe family. In fact, one of the men arrested for the murders in Juarez is named Uribe. “Juárez bus driver Victor García Uribe was given a 50 year sentence on October 13 by a Chihuahua judge for the rape and murder of eight women whose bodies were found in a cotton field in November 2001.”

• I mentioned how parts of The Part About Fate reminded me of Tarantino and Pulp Fiction, well I was surprised to feel that parts of The Part About the Crimes reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson and Magnolia. I am particularly thinking of the behind-the-scenes TV show sections and this part about Reinaldo: “there was the famous host, Televisa’s star of the moment, sitting at the foot of the bed, with a drink in his hand…” which brought to mind a scene from Magnolia of Philip Baker Hall’s character, a famous TV show host sitting at the foot of his bed with a drink, feeling miserable, contemplating a confession to his wife. A tenuous connection, but just thought I’d mention it.

• In that same scene (page 566), Reinaldo realizes the famous TV host wants to kill himself and Reinaldo says “Anything I might say, I realized then, would be useless.” I think this is metaphor for the femicides. How can they be stopped? Should you intervene? What can you even say that will be useful?

• Way back on page 433, I saw this passage which reminded me of the themes of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King: “And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: 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 Juárez 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.”

• In our first bolano-l group read of 2666, Andrew Haley wrote: “The Part  About the Crimes is particularly tricky, as it obviously is based on real events, and apparently was inspired by a book length cataloging of the victims (Huesos en el Desierto; Anagrama, 2002) put together by the Mexican reporter Sergio Gonzalez on whom the character of the Mexican reporter named Sergio Gonzalez is based. Are we meant to read The Part About the Crimes as a kind of New Journalism? Is Bolaño using the vessel of his fiction to perform a political or social function that is essentially journalistic rather than literary? Is he in essence using 2666 as a vehicle to deliver Huesos en el Desierto to a broader audience?” Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez’s book does not appear to be translated into English yet (publishers: get on it!), although there is a French edition. Somewhat related is Diana Washington Valdez’s book The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women.

• If you are interested in seeing how some of the characters from this Part might look on stage, I’ll link to a post from last year about a theatrical adaptation of 2666. (Warning: Possible Spoilers)

• The affair between Juan de Dios Martínez and Elvira Campos seems awfully reminiscent of a relationship in a Manuel Puig novel, but I’m forgetting which one. Anyone remember if it’s in Blood of Requited Love or Pubis Angelical? There is a lot about being in dark bedrooms at dusk, looking out across the city.

• The passing mention of Sherlock Holmes on page 610 reminded me that Borges wrote a poem called Sherlock Holmes. His short story Death and the Compass also bears a strong resemblance to a Sherlock-type detective. There is even a novel wherein a character named Jorge Luis Borges is a crime-solving detective.

• Some quotes:
“If life is misery, why do we endure it?”
“Every hundred feet the world changes.”
“Trust in God, He wont’ let anything disappear.”
“When you make mistakes from the inside, the mistakes stop mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes.”

Once again, there is a fantastic summary of this week’s reading, with commentary, over at ijustreadaboutthat:

Since most of us in the online readalong also read IJ, we have a tendency to use it as a point of comparison (even though it really isn’t comparable at all).  But I will get in the comparison game as well, just to say that like IJ, each Part of this book ends with something way up floating in the air.  And while the IJ ending was initially discomfiting, upon later reflection, it works quite well.  I only hope that 2666 offers the same satisfaction.

571: This isn’t a dream, but as Florita tells Sergio about her visions of the killings, she explains that an ordinary murder (in her visions) ends with an image of liquid, as of a lake or a well being disturbed, while the serial killings have a heavy image, metallic, mineral, or smoldering. These images resonate with some of the critics’ dreams. The killers in her visions speak a mixed-up (made-up) language, another thread that ran through the critics’ dreams.

581: We learn that Kessler almost never dreams about killers and seldom remembers his dreams. He’s described as lucky for forgetting them. His wife dreams frequently, usually about dead relatives or friends they haven’t seen in a long time.

594: Kessler dreams of a man pacing around a crater and figures the man is probably himself before deciding it’s not important and losing the image.

605: Congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata, telling the story of her friend Kelly Parker, states a belief that when her friend began going by Kelly Parker rather than by Luz Maria Rivera, “she somehow took the first step into invisibility, into a nightmare.”

621: While in Santa Teresa investigating the case of her missing friend, the congresswoman finds herself pacing her hotel room, and she notices two mirrors — one at the end of the room and the other by the door — that didn’t reflect one another unless you stood in a certain place. Yet she couldn’t see herself in the mirrors from that place. She experimented wit positions as she tried to go to sleep. While this is not put forward as a dream, it bears an eerie resemblance to Norton’s dream about the mirrors in her hotel room. It’s almost as if Norton was dreaming the congresswoman’s experience somehow. I wonder if their hotel room was the same one, and I wonder how the timing of the two occurrences works out.

624: Reporter Mary Sue Bravo dreams that a woman was sitting at the foot of her bed. She could feel the weight of the body on her mattress but could feel nothing when she stretched her legs out to touch the body.

626: The following passage from the point of view of the congresswoman isn’t really described as a dream or a vision, but it must be one or the other, or something like it: “Those voices I heard (voices, never faces or shapes) came from the desert. In the desert, I roamed with a knife in my hand. My face was reflected in the blade. I had white hair and sunken cheeks covered with tiny scars. Each scar was a little story that I tried and failed to recall.”

93 — p.569 — Aurora Cruz Barrientos — 18 yrs — May 1997 — killed in her own home, multiple stab wounds, raped, a neighborhood prowler is suspected
94 — p.573 — Sabrina Gómez Demetrio — 15 yrs — June 1997 — stabbed and shot by men in a Suburban, she walks to a hospital before she dies
95 — p.573 — Aurora Ibánez Medel — 34 yrs — June 1997 — worker, found by the highway, strangled and probably raped, her husband Jaime Pacheco Pacheco confesses after harsh interrogation
96 — p.575 — unidentified — 20-25 yrs — July 1997 — found in a sewage ditch, dead for at least three months, wearing an expensive velvet glove
97 — p.576 — Ana Muñoz Sanjuán — 18 yrs — September 1997 — waitress, found behind some trash cans, raped and strangled
98 — p.577 — María Estela Ramos — 23 yrs — September 1997 — worker, found in an empty lot, tortured, raped, blunt trauma to the head
99 — p.579 — unidentified — 14-16 yrs — October 1997 — found near railroad tracks, tortured, strangled
100 — p.583 — Leticia Borrego García — 18 — October 1997 — found near the Pemex soccer fields, half buried, strangled, Lalo Cura is confused by the crime scene
101 — p.586 — Lucía Domínguez Roa — 33 yrs — October 1997 — waitress, shot in the abdomen supposedly by chance while walking in Colonia Hidalgo
102 — p.591 — Rosa Gutiérrez Centeno — 38 yrs — October 1997 — worker and waitress, found by the side of a dirt road, strangled
103 — p.595 — unidentified — November 1997 — female bones discovered by a group of hikers on the steepest side of Cerro La Asunción
104 — p.599 — Angélica Ochoa — November 1997 — looked more like a settling of scores than a sex crime, shot five times by her husband the pimp La Venada
105 — p.603 — Rosario Marquina — 19 yrs — November 1997 — worker, found on the back lot of a maquiladora, strangled, raped
106 — p.607 — María Elena Torres — 32 yrs — November 1997 — found in her house, she had marched in the WSDP protest two days prior, stabbed in the neck, probably by her boyfriend
107 — p.611 — Úrsula González Rojo — 20-21 yrs — December 1997 — worker, found in a dry streambed by a rancher who was hunting, stabbed
108 — p.616 — Juana Marín Lozada — December 1997 — worked at a computer store, dumped in an open field by the highway, neck broken, probably not raped or tortured
109 — p.620 — unidentified — December 1997 — bones discovered on the edge of a ranch
110 — p.625 — Esther Perea Peña — 24 yrs — December 1997 — shot to death at the dance hall Los Lobos, perhaps by accident
111 — p.630 — unidentified — 15-16 yrs — December 1997 — remains found in a plastic bag on some land a few miles from a farming cooperative
112 — p.632 — unidentified — about 18 yrs — December 1997 — remains found in a plastic bag on the eastern edge of the city, close to the border

Other deaths or disappearances:

p.615 — Josué Hernández Mercado — 32 years old, the reporter for La Raza de Green Valley, disappears. We can guess that he has been killed for covering the murders of women in Santa Teresa.

p.616 — Kelly Rivera Parker — Friend of politician Azucena Esquivel Plata, disappears in Santa Teresa. We learn that she organized sex parties for narcos, and is probably dead, or more or less dead.

p.626 — Francisco López Ríos — The supposed killer of Esther Perea Peña in the dance hall Los Lobos, but possibly a scapegoat killed to conceal the identity of the real murderer, a judicial on the narcotics squad.

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering.

Here is a fact that recontextualizes the crimes for us.  The weight of the crimes, not only the crimes against the murdered women but against the guys in the Santa Teresa prison, the guys who are stuck in the corrupt police force, and the crimes of the mass society, crimes of enforced poverty and ignorance, begin to assume new and different proportions in this week’s section.  As word of the crimes begins to spread, the whole world’s complicity begins to make itself felt.

The ‘snuff film’ section speaks very clearly to this alteration.  There is a real film called Snuff that was filmed in Argentina in 1971, that depicted a “Mansonesque murder cult.”  The film was originally called Slaughter. The directors of the real film are Michael and Roberta Findlay. According to Wikipedia:

Independent low-budget distributor and sometime producer Allan Shackleton later re-released another version of the film, unbeknownst to the original filmmakers. Having just read a newspaper article on the rumor of snuff films being importer from South America, he decided to cash on the urban legend and added a new ending to the film in which a woman is brutally murdered by a film crew, supposedly the crew of Slaughter[2]. Filmed in a vérité style by Simon Nuchtern, the new ending purported to show an actual murder. This new footage was spliced onto the end of Slaughter with an abrupt cut suggesting that the footage was unplanned and the murder authentic. This new version of the film was released under the title Snuff, with the tagline The film that could only be made in South America… where life is CHEAP

By this means and others that I’ll be getting to in the next few days, Bolaño demonstrates the involvement of pretty much everyone in the kind of mindset that would find the torture and murder of a woman … entertaining.

521: Thinking of the Caciques, Haas considers them lost in a dream.

534: Elvira Campos dreams of selling her properties and belongings to get enough money to fly to Paris and having plastic surgery to turn back the clock to her early 40s. When the bandages are removed, they fall to the floor and slither not like snakes “but rather like the guardian angels of snakes.” She approves of the surgery’s results, and with a nod, “she rediscovers the sovereignty of childhood, the love of her father and mother” and steps back out into Paris.

542: The cameraman for the original snuff film thinks he’s lost in a nightmare as they make their way to the ranch at which they’ll film.

554: It’s not presented as a dream, but as Lalo Cura thinks about his lineage, he’s “half asleep, drifting between sleep and wakefulness,” and he hears or remembers voices telling him the stories of his family tree.

561: Sergio Gonzales visits Michele Sanchez’s mother, and she tells him of a dream in which her dead daughter — not her youngest in fact — was the youngest of her daughters, a baby of two or three years who was there and then suddenly not there.

562: Haas contemplates, “as if in a dream,” some of the Bisontes moving around in the prison yard as if grazing. Some of the inmates seemed, he thought, to move in slow motion. This resonates with some other mentions in past dreams about time being somehow slowed down or sped up.

Pachuca – Guadalupe Elena Blanco had moved to Santa Teresa from here less than a week before she was killed in July 1996. (p. 513)

Secondary School 30, in Colonia Félix Gómez – Marina Rebolledo was found here in August 1996. (p. 516)

Colonia Plata – Angélica (Jessica) Nevares, a dancer, lived here. (p. 516)

Culiacán, Sinaloa – Angélica Nevares was from here before moving to Santa Teresa five years prior. (p. 516)

Morelos – Perla Beatriz Ochoterena was from here before she lived in Santa Teresa. (p. 517)

Colonia Mancera – Adela García Ceballos lived here with her eventual killer, Rubén Bustos. (p. 518)

Pueblo Azul – Lola and Janet Reynolds are found dead near here at the end of September 1996. (p. 519)

Rillito, Arizona – the Reynolds sisters were from here. (p. 520)

Nayarit – María Sandra Rosales Zepeda was from here. (p. 522)

Podestá ravine – Luisa Cardona Pardo’s body is found here in November 1996. (p. 524)

Colonia La Preciada – Luisa Cardona Pardo lived here. (p. 525)

Podestá ravine – Lalo Cura and Ordoñez discover another body here. (p. 525)

Colonia El Cerezal – Estefanía Rivas and Hermania Noreiga, half-sisters, are found in a house here in December 1996. (p. 526)

Yuma, Arizona – Ronald Luis Luque’s father tells Juan de Dios Martínez that this son planned to go here. (p. 530)

Paris – Elvira Campos dreams of running away to Paris and starting over. (p. 535)

Colonia Del Valle – Sergio González and Marcario López Santos talk to General Humberto Paredes at his home here about snuff films. (p. 536)

Buenos Aires – an Argentinian correspondent for a newspaper from here spends three days in Santa Teresa. He visits El Rey del Taco and watches a snuff film in a house in northern Santa Teresa. (p. 540)

Los Angeles, California – the Argentinian correspondent interviews actors here for his article on Santa Teresa and the snuff film industry. (p. 541)

Buenos Aires – Mike and Clarissa Epstein invent the term “snuff film” here in 1972 while filming a movie here. (p. 541)

Tigre, Argentina – the Epsteins and their crew shoot part of their film here. (p. 542)

A ranch in the pampa, Argentina – Estela’s ranch is here, where the Epsteins and JT and their crew spend time shooting their movie. (p. 542)

El Rosario, Santa Teresa – Guadalupe Guzmán Preito is found here in March 1997. (p. 545)

Cerro Estrella – Jazmín Torres Dorantes is found here in March 1997. (p. 546)

San Miguel de Horcasitas – Carolina Fernández Fuentes’ parents live here. (p. 547)

El Pajonal – three students and a history professor from UCLA find the skeleton of a girl here at the end of March 1997. (p. 547)

Guanajuato – the González Reséndiz family, who believe a body found in El Chile to be that of their daughter, Irene, are from here. (p. 549)

Hermosillo – Juan Arredondo, the second medical examiner in Santa Teresa, is from here. (p. 550)

Medellín, Colombia – Arrendondo traveled here once to represent the Institute of Forensic Anatomy and the University of Santa Teresa at a symposium held here once, and came back a changed man. (p. 550)

Irapuato, Irapuato – Rigoberto Frías, the third medical examiner, is from here. (p. 550)

Colonia Serafin Garabito – Frías lives here. (p. 550)

Villaviciosa – the entire line of María Expósitos lived here. (p. 555)

Colonia México – Rafael Expósito stays here briefly with a whore he meets before killing Celestino Arraya in 1934. (p. 557)

Ensenada – the secretary for Santa Teresa’s Department of Sex Crimes moved here, leaving only Yolanda Palacio working there. (p. 563)

Cerro Estrella – another woman is found here at the end of September 1995. (p. 466)

Colonia Lomas del Toro – Estrella Ruiz Sandoval’s older sister lives here. (p. 467)

Casas Negras – Rosa María Medina’s father found the stone outside their house here. (p. 468)

Downtown Santa Teresa – Klaus Haas’s computer store is here. (p. 474)

Colonia Veracruz – Juan Pablo Castañón, the boy who works at Haas’s computer store, lives here. (p. 475)

Tijuana – Haas owns another computer store here. (p. 476)

Denver, Colorado – Haas lived here briefly, according to Juan Pablo – though he didn’t, really. (p. 476)

Colonia El Cerezal – Haas lives here. (p. 477)

Tampa, Florida – Haas lived here and was accused of attempted rape by Laurie Enciso, among other things. (p. 477)

Bielefeld, West Germany – Haas was born here in 1955. (p. 478)

Colonia Centena – Haas owns another computer store here. (p. 478)

El Alamillo – the rancher in one of the four private cells in the Santa Teresa jail is from here. (p. 481)

Cananea – Enrique Hernández was born here. (p. 491)

San Blas, in northern Sinaloa – four gunmen show up at a warehouse here and kill two watchmen, then steal the shipment of coke they were guarding. (p. 492)

A road between La Discordia and El Sasabe – one of Campuzano’s trucks was attacked and stolen here. (p. 492)

El Ojito ravine – Adela García Estrada is found here in November 1995. (p. 493)

Colonia La Vistosa – another dead woman is found here on November 20, 1995. (p. 493)

Colonia Sur – Beatriz Concepción Roldan is from here. (p. 494)

Colonia Morelos, near Morelos Preparatory School – the body of Michelle Requjo is found here in December 1995. (p. 495)

Colonia Las Flores – Rosa López Larios, found in December 1995, was from here. (p. 497)

Colonia Álamos – Ema Contreras, also found in December 1995, was from here. (p. 498)

El Obelisco – a settlement just outside Santa Teresa, sometimes called El Moridero, near where two bodies were found in early 1996. (p. 502)

Cerro Estrella – another girl is found here in March 1996. (p. 503)

Colonia Carranza – Sagrario Baeza López, whose work ID showed up on the body of a victim in the first week of April 1996, lives here. (p. 507)

Guadalajara – René Alvarado was from here. (p. 508)

Colonia Madero-Norte – Paula Sánchez Garcés, a dancer at El Pelicáno, lived here. (p. 509)

Colonia San Bartolomé – Ana Hernández Cecilio, mistakenly pronounced dead, lived here. (p. 510)

Colonia Maytorena – Arturo Olivárez lived here. (p. 510)

68 — p.513 — Guadalupe Elena Blanco — 17 yrs — July 1996 — found near the border, strangled, raped
69 — p.514 — Linda Vásquez — 16 yrs — July 1996 — beaten and
stabbed by her boyfriend and his friends, who are jailed
70 — p.516 — Marisol Camarena — 28 yrs — July 1996 — found in a drum of corrosive acid after being kidnapped by seventeen men
71 — p.516 — Marina Rebolledo — 13 yrs — August 1996 — found behind a school
72 — p.516 — Angélica Nevares — 23 yrs — August 1996 — found near a sewage ditch
73 — p.516 — Perla Beatriz Ochoterena — 28 yrs — August 1996 — found hanged in her room, an apparent suicide due to the femicides
74 — p.517 — unidentified — 16-18 yrs — August 1996 — found in a field, stabbed and raped
75 — p.518 — Adela García Ceballos — 20 yrs — August 1996 –
stabbed in her parents’ house by her boyfriend, who confesses
76 and 77 — p.520 — Lola and Janet Reynolds, sisters — 30 and 44
yrs — September 1996 — shot, possibly related to drug trafficking
78 — p.520 — unidentified — possibly young — October 1996 –
decomposed, probably stabbed
79 — p.522 — María Sandra Rosales Zepeda — 31 yrs — November 1996 — shot while leaning into the window of a black Suburban, probably with a Czech-made Skorpion submachine gun
80 — p. 524 — Luisa Cardona Pardo — 34 yrs — November 1996 — found in a ravine, beaten
81 — p. 526 — unidentified — unknown — November 1996 — found by Lalo Cura in the same ravine as victim 80
82 and 83 — p.527 — Estefanía Rivas and Herminia Noriega, half
sisters — 15 and 13 yrs — December 1996 — kidnapped from outside the younger sibling’s school, the girls are later found tortured and killed in an empty house; Herminia died of a heart attack while Estefanía was shot
84 — p.545 — Guadalupe Guzmán Prieto — 11 yrs — March 1997 — strangled, battered, likely raped; date of death in the first half of
February
85 — p.546 — Jazmín Torres Dorantes — 11 yrs — March 1997 — died of hypovolemic shock after more than 15 stabs, raped; had been kidnapped 20 days before
86 — p.546 — Carolina Fernández Fuentes — 19 yrs — March 1997 — five stab wounds to the neck
87 — p.547 — unidentified — 16-20 yrs — March 1997 — strangled, mutilated
88 — p.547 — unidenfified — young woman — March 1997 — strangled; skeleton found by a group of Americans
89 — p.548 — Elena Montoya — 20 yrs — March 1997 — stabbed, beaten
90 — p.549 — Irene González Reséndiz — 16 yrs — March 1997 — found in El Chile, died more than a year before after running away from home
91 — p.559 — Michele Sánchez Castillo — 16 yrs — April 1997 –
severe head trauma, not raped
92 — p.564 — unidentified — 28-33 yrs — April 1997 — body in
advanced state of decomposition, massive cerebral contusion

Other deaths:
p.522 — Six members of the Las Caciques gang are killed in prison, in revenge for the murder of Linda Vásquez, whose family had money. Klaus Haas witnesses two of the victims being castrated before they are murdered. The prison guards also witness and photograph the killings.

p.540 — There are no women killed at the begining of 1997, but deaths included a longtime thief, two men with ties to the drug trade, and a dog breeder: “uncinematic deaths, deaths from the realm of folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn’t scare anybody”

p.557 — Rafael Expósito, a family member of Lalo Cura’s, murders the bullfighter who raped his sister. This is part of the story of Lalo
Cura’s heritage, in which each female family member is raped. Most of the characters in this section have died of natural causes by the time The Part About the Crimes takes place.

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?