Week 8: Dreams

by Daryl L.L. Houston

422: In spite of a keen awareness of their differences, Juan de Dios Martinez has peaceful, happy dreams of Elvira Campos and himself living together in a rustic cabin in the mountains. They slept on a bearskin with a wolfskin covering them, and she sometimes laughed and ran into the woods. I’m reminded of Pelletier’s domestic dreams of Norton, in which she too is on the periphery. At least in Martinez’s dream, he has interactions with Campos that precede her receding to the margins.

434: Here and elsewhere, La Santa has visions. They’re not strictly speaking dreams, but it seems a similar type of experience.

447: Harry Magaña dreams of a street in Huntsville pounded by a sandstorm. He ignores pleas for help rescuing some girls at a bead factory and keeps his nose in a file containing photocopied documents written in “a language not of this world.” There are several similar things among the critics’ dreams.

456: La Santa sometimes dreams she’s a country schoolteacher at a hilltop school from which she watches girls on their way to class. Beyond, peasants make fruitful agrarian use of the land. Though they’re in the distance, she can hear their words clearly, and the words are unchanging from day to day. Here I’m reminded of Espinoza’s dream of the painting in his hotel room. Then: “There were dreams in which everything fit together and other dreams in which nothing fit and the world was like a creaky coffin.”

459: La Santa equates her visions with dreams. They keep her awake. In actual dreams, she sees the crimes as if they’re an exploded television set, and she sees various horrible scenes in the shards scattered around her bedroom.

Here’s a question: Is Florita something of a narrator of this section? It is a fragmented portion of the book, many of the murders ghastly reflections or maybe refractions of others. Paired with the ventriloquist as she is in this week’s reading, perhaps we’re to take her as an adopted voice or instrument through which many of the scenes unfold. Maybe we’re seeing the scenes as she sees them in her visions. I doubt this is the intention, really, as the stories are told mostly from a pretty straightforward, detached-narrative point of view (I also happen to know what Bolaño said about who narrates the book), but it’s an interesting thing to ponder.

Catching up

We’re running a little behind in posting this week. I’ve been traveling. But we will catch up. Onward.

Week 8: The Ventriloquist

by Maria Bustillos

A number of readers aren’t quite on board with Florita Almada, it seems.  A consensus has developed on Infinite Zombies around the idea that the legitimacy of her views can be called into question.  I’m posting most of my response here, because I’d like to know what others think on this point.

If you are afflicted by e.g. what you are reading in this book, what you see in the news, then Florita is saying that you can begin to address your own grief, guilt, shame etc. by looking to the quality of your own conduct toward others. It’s a matter of focus. What it’s saying is that human kindness IS fairness and justice. Something you have to think about specifically and put into action. That this is a real and practical way out for each individual man who can’t stand the horror.

There is, however, something in what you say about the author’s distance from this slightly maudlin-sounding prescription—that it’s “a piece of naivete for our affectionate amusement.”

You’ll recall that right before before Florita first goes on TV, there’s been a ventriloquist on. That ventriloquist’s name is, I believe, Roberto Bolaño. He is “an autodidact who had made a name for himself in various places,” and “who thought his dummy was a living creature.” This ventriloquist is really annoyed with, almost panicked by his dummy; the dummy has actually tried to kill him but is very weak, and could never manage it. This dummy (among others, of course, but this one right now) is Florita Almada, who is about to speak, right after the ventriloquist— that’s how it always goes, first the ventriloquist and then the dummy. Florita really likes the ventriloquist, though. And even to him, she shows a great deal of sympathy, she gives him advice, even though she’s not saying the stuff she’s supposed to be saying, just like a dummy who won’t behave.  (Pretty much any fictionalist will tell you how a character comes to life pretty much on his own, and comes to have his own agenda.)

The thing is, Florita really is a saint, with a strong and fixed moral position, with real comfort and advice for the afflicted. The ventriloquist doesn’t care for this! He finds her dangerous … she’s dangerous “for people like him, hypersensitive, of artistic temperament, their wounds still open.

She lets him have it, for sure.

Summary

There is an excellent summary of this week’s reading over on Ijustreadaboutthat:

There were seven killings in August 1995—one of whom was killed by her stepfather. The rest were unsolved.

Epifanio returns briefly to bemoan that judiciales never find a case.  And he reveals that he swiped an address book that no one even bothered to ask about or to use for evidence. Of course, he didn’t do anything with it either.

And next Sergio Gonzalez returns briefly. I loved the joke that arts reports were considered faggots “(assthetes, they called them)” (464) and I wonder if that was original in the Spanish or of that is just an awesome translation.

[Our library has a copy of 2666 in Spanish, so I’m delighted to have been able to look up this word. The page numbering is different (of course) and I’m delighted that even with my minimal Spanish, I was able to track down this section with relative ease. I would never bother working on any other translation in the book, but this word really stood out. And so, in the original, we get “(periodistas <<pulturales>>, los llamaban)” (581). Using Google translate I’m getting the “pul” part to mean neatness/fastdiousness and the “ultrales” means culture. It’s a funny joke in Spanish but I love that Natasha Wimmer came up with “assthetes.” What a great translation.]

Excellent! Go read it!

Week 8: Speaking words of wisdom: Let it Be

by Maria Bustillos

she wasn’t ashamed of being what she was, because what God takes away the Virgin restores, and when that’s the way it is, it’s impossible not to be at peace with the world.

The extraordinary person of Florita Almada appears right after the terrible murder and burning of Silvana Perez Arjona by Carlos Llonas.  This Llonas is, “according to his friends,”:

a good-natured man, a drinker but not a drunk, and a person who read books in his spare time, which was unusual and gave him the aura of someone exceptional.

Though the jealous Llonas’s “exceptional” cultivation didn’t prevent him from stabbing Silvana Arjona in the chest and setting fire to her dead body any more than their elevated nid-nodding over Archimboldi prevented Pelletier and Espinoza from beating a Pakistani cab driver half to death.  Llonas observes, after he is arrested and confesses to the crime, that “Silvana was a good kid, and she didn’t deserve to be treated like that.”  Oh yes?! Very astute. I really wanted to throw the book across the room at this point in a rage, but it also seemed absolutely like what some drunken macho murdering fool would really say.  How “exceptional” was Llonas? Not much.  He is par for the course, just like every other raping, murdering beast in this horrible place.

So right on the heels of this unbelievably sordid story there appears another reader, the first person with whom I believe the author must have felt a strong identification: Florita Almada, a/k/a La Santa. I certainly find that the two are very much alike (“the miraculous laws of symmetry.”) Florita Almada is a polymath, an almost incredible autodidact whose voluminous stores of information pour out in all directions, voluble expressions like songs or poems, altogether unpredictable, full of tantalizing, half-hidden connections, and delivered in a discursive, dreamy style peculiar to herself and to her creator. Florita, however, is stuffed to the gills with what I believe is called “marianismo,” meaning the feminine opposite of “machismo” in gender-theoretical circles: a doctrine of the superiority of women, or an idealization of the feminine principle. Pious, passive, maternal, giving, chaste. Life-oriented, pure, noble, selfless. Someone to show us that reading has its uses, provided you pay attention.

One guy who made no use of his reading, whose reading didn’t enable him to escape this misdeed.  And then this old woman!!

And what use did she make of her learning? She’s talking about Santa Teresa.

I would say that Florita has got her ear closely attuned to the goings-on in the mine we heard tell of, earlier in this book.

Week 8: Deaths

by Nicole Perrin

23 — p.406 — Lucy Anne Sander — 26 yrs — spring 1994 — American tourist who disappeared from a plaza, stabbed, raped, mutilated, dumped near border fence; her death instigates an unofficial investigation by Harry Magana
24 — p.411 — America Garci­a Cifuentes — 24 yrs — spring 1994 — strangled, no signs of rape, dumped near Hermosillo highway
25 — p.412 — Mónica Durán Reyes — 12 yrs — May 1994 — kidnapped from school in a black Peregrino or MasterRoad, strangled, raped, dumped near highway
26 — p.412 — Rebeca Fernández de Hoyos — 33 yrs — June 1994 — strangled, “probably not” raped, found in her own bathroom
27 — p.417 — Isabel “La Vaca” — around 30 — August 1994 — beaten to death by two friends
28 — p.423 — unidentified — 15-17 yrs — October 1994 — strangled, raped, found at the new city dump
29 — p.424 — unidentified — around 30 — November 1994 — strangled, raped, dumped on the second floor of a construction site
30 — p.425 — Silvana Perez Arjona — 15 — November 1994 — stabbed, raped, burned; her lover confesses to the crime
31 — p.449 — unidentified — unknown — January 5, 1995 — skeleton found in a field; impossible to determine cause or time of death without sending the remains to Hermisillo or Mexico City
32 — p.449 — Claudia Perez Millán — 31 yrs — January 15, 1995 — strangled, raped, left in a white blanket in a dumpster; her husband strongly suspected
33 — p.450 — María de la Luz Romero — 14 yrs — February 1995 — stabbed, raped, beaten and dumped by the highway after being kidnapped on her way home from a nightclub
34 — p.451 — Sofia Serrano — around 35 — April 1995 — cocaine overdose, found in hotel room registered to Alejandro Peñalva Brown
35 — p.452 — Olga Paredes Pacheco — 25 yrs — April 1995 — strangled, raped, found next to a trash can with her skirt on backwards
36 — p.454 — Paula García Zapatero — 19 yrs — July 1995 — strangled, raped, found in the yard of an auto repair shop
37 — p.454 — Rosaura López Santana — 19 yrs — July 1995 — raped repeatedly, found along the highway
38 — p.459 — Aurora Muñoz Álvarez — 28 yrs — August 1995 — strangled, beaten and whipped, found on the pavement of the highway; had been seen getting into a black Peregrino
39 — p.460 — Emilia Escalante Sanjuán — 33 yrs — August 1995 — death due to strangulation or alcohol poisoning, with multiple hematomas on the chest and neck, found in an intersection
40 — p.460 — Estrella Ruiz Sandoval — 17 yrs — August 1995 — strangled, raped, found next to the highway
41 — p.460 — Mónica Posadas — 20 yrs — August 1995 — strangled, possibly “raped three ways,” mutilated; found in a vacant lot; her stepfather confesses to the crime
42 — p.462 — unidentified — 16-23 yrs — August 1995 — shot, found on the highway
43 — p.462 — unidentified — unknown — August 1995 — state of decomposition made it impossible to determine cause of death without sending the remains to Hermosillo or Mexico City; found near victim 41
44 — p.462 — Jacqueline Ri­os — 25 yrs — August 1995 — shot in the chest and abdomen, found next to the highway
45 — p.463 — Marisa Hernández Silva — 17 yrs — September 1995 — had vanished in July on her way to school; strangled, raped and mutilated

Other deaths:

Harry Magana, the sheriff from Huntsville, Arizona who goes to Santa Teresa on an unofficial mission to investigate the death of Lucy Anne Sander, disappears, most likely murdered. Miguel Montes, whom Lucy
Anne met when she was visiting Santa Teresa, is also likely dead, and Magana likely walked in on his killers disposing of his body.

Also, at the end of this section Epifanio tells Lalo Cura about the notebook he stole from the evidence related to the case of Isabel Urrea (death #4 in week 7), noting several things in it that were “a mystery,” but saying, “I could have done something. I could’ve called some of the names I’d found and asked for money. But money doesn’t do it for me. So I kept the notebook, fuck it, and didn’t do anything.” Another sign of the “do nothing” attitude of several of the (male) characters in the novel.

Week 7: Vocabulary

by Meaghan Doyle

abated
to decrease in force or intensity

anarchic
lacking order, regularity, or definiteness

antagonism
opposition of a conflicting force, tendency, or principle

aversion
a feeling of repugnance toward something with a desire to avoid or turn from it

berserk
frenzied, crazed

cassocks
a close-fitting ankle-length garment worn especially in Roman Catholic and Anglican churches by the clergy and by laypersons assisting in services

chilango
Mexico, slang, from Mexico City. Often used derogatorily by those living outside the capital

colonia
neighborhoods in Mexican cities, which have no jurisdictional autonomy or representation

compadre
a close friend

craniocrebral
involving both cranium and brain

guaco
vine-like Central and South American, and West Indian climbing plants, reputed to have curative powers

hyoid
a U-shaped bone or complex of bones that is situated between the base of the tongue and the larynx and that supports the tongue, the larynx, and their muscles

insolent
insultingly contemptuous in speech or conduct

litany
a resonant or repetitive chant

macabre
having death as a subject

parochial
of or relating to a church parish

reprisals
a retaliatory act

sacristy
a room in a church where sacred vessels and vestments are kept and where the clergy vests

scourge
a cause of wide or great affliction

tumefaction
an action or process of swelling or becoming tumorous

Week 7: Locations

by Sara Corona Goldstein

pp. 353-404

Colonia Las Flores —the body of Esperanza Gamaz Saldana is found here in January 1993; the first of the victims to be counted. (p. 353)

Colonia Mancera — Luisa Celina Vazquez is killed here at the end of January, 1993. (p. 354)

Calle El Arroyo (between Colinia Cuidad Nueva and Colonia Morelos)— in April 1993, a knife sharpener discovers a badly beaten woman and calls the police. She dies before they can help her. (p.356)

A dump between Colonia Las Flores and General Sepulveda industrial park — another woman’s body is found in May 1993. (p. 358)

Calle Jazmi­n in Colonia Carranza — Guadalupe Rojas is killed outside her apartment here in May 1993. (p. 359)

Cerro Estrella —the body of the last dead woman in May 1993 is found here. Police Chief Pedro Negrete visits the site alone. (p. 360)

The church of San Rafael on Calle Patriotas Mexicanos – the church desecrator appears here at the end of May 1993. (p. 361)

The church of San Tadeo in Colonia Kino – the church desecrator appears again here. (p. 365)

The church of Santa Catalina in Colonia Lomas del Toro – another church desecration happens here. (p. 367)

The church of Nuestro Señor Jesucristo in Colonia Reforma – the Penitent goes beserk here a few days later. (p. 368)

El Chile (illegal dump)—the body of Emilia Mena Mena is found here. (p. 372)

Ciudad Guzman —Emilia Mena Mena’s boyfriend was suspected of fleeing to his uncle’s house here. (p. 373)

Morelos Preparatory School — the janitor finds another woman’s body here. (p. 373)

Colonia Maytorena — Margarita López Santos’ body is found here in June 1993 after being missing for 40 days. (p. 375).

Mexico City —Sergio Gonzales writes for La Razón, a newspaper based here. (p. 376)

Colonia Michoacan — Elvira Campos lives here. (p. 383)

Villaviciosa — Pedro Negrete travels here to hire someone (Lalo Cura) for his friend Pedro Rengifo. (p. 384)

Colonia Lindavista — another dead woman is found in September 1993. (p. 389)

Lomas de Poniente — Feliciano José Sandoval, alleged killer of Gabriela Morón, was from here. (p. 390)

Arsenio Farrell industrial park – Marta Navales Gómez was found here in October 1993. (p. 391)

Francisco I School, near Colonia Álamos – a Salvadorean immigrant finds the body of Andrea Pacheco Martínez here in November. (p. 392)

Colonia Morelos – Ernesto Luis Castillo Jiménez is found wandering here after he murders his mother on December 20, 1993. (p. 393)

Colonia Madero – while Pedro Rengifo’s wife is visiting a friend here, Lalo Cura is involved in a shoot-out with two gunmen. (p. 394)

El Ajo, a bar off the Nogales highway—the first dead woman of 1994 is found here. (p. 399)

Paquita Avendaño in Hermosilla — Nati Gordillo and Rubí Campos are locked up here after being accused of the muder of Leticia Contreras Zamudio. (p. 401)

Colonia Veracruz – Penélope Méndez Becerra’s family lived here. (p. 403)

Week 7: Tidbits

Sometimes the only way to digest this book is in tiny chunks.

Throughout this section we get mentions of many of the colonias in Santa Teresa. Colonias usually have their own postal code, but are in not involved in municipal governance. The term barrio is more prevalent in the U.S. than in Mexico.

page 360: “He remembered that his son, who was studying in Phoenix, had once told him that plastic bags took hundreds, maybe thousands of years to disintegrate.” If this is May, 1993, then maybe those bags will be mostly disintegrated by say 2666?

page 372:

The dump didn’t have a formal name, because it wasn’t supposed to be there, but it had an informal name: it was called El Chile. During the day there wasn’t a soul to be seen in El Chile or the surrounding fields soon to be swallowed up by the dump. 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.

Another name for these trash-pickers, unique to Mexico, is pepenadores. Teporocho is much more derogatory: it implies a homeless alcoholic, or a drunk layabout. What do you think?

This is really the first section where we start to see talk of “Indians” or native culture in and around the city of Santa Teresa. None of the critics are Mexicans, Amalfitano is from Spain, Fate is from the US, Archimboldi is not Mexican, only the crimes and the criminals are native to the land. Perhaps this section of the novel finally gives us a look at the “real” Santa Teresa. Here are a few of the mentions:
– Page 361: “a young woman with Indian features went in to confess.”
– Page 366: “There used to be an Indian settlement here, remembered the inspector.”
– Page 368: “Three priests and two young Papago Indian seminarians who where studying anthropology and history at the University of Santa Teresa slept in an adjacent building.
– Page 394: “a Yaqui Indian who almost never talked.”

The most famous Yaqui Indian has got to be Don Juan.

Week 7: Dreams

by Daryl L.L. Houston

386: The Santa Teresa police chief dreams about his twin brother. They’ve gone out to roam the scrub hills and hunt for lizards, and upon their return at dusk, they see lots of trucks with cutesy phrases painted on them. The brothers, of different heights but of otherwise like appearance, have identical movements as they walk back into town. The dream “vanishe[s] little by little in a comfortable yellow haze.”

387: Epifanio dreams of the female coyote left by the side of the road. He just listens to her pain and doesn’t help her or put her out of her misery. Next, he’s driving Peter Negrete’s car along a long track into the mountains. When he accelerates, he hears a noise under the car, as if something is jumping. A huge dust plume (“like the tail of a hallucinogenic coyote”) rises behind him. He stops the car to check and see what’s making the noise and discovers a body tied up in the trunk, still alive. He closes the trunk without removing the cloth from the person’s head to see who it is and drives toward the mountains, though they appear to be burning or crumbling.



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