On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  Pedro Páramo was Rulfo’s only novel—novella, really, at just over a hundred pages—and in my opinion a slight one, an elusive narrative of heavy hints, with an elliptical charm, suggesting (as poetry does) events or feelings rather than stating them. In other words, the reader is always somewhat at sea, and has to work to understand the chorus of voices and the time shifts. Obeying his mother’s deathbed request, young Juan Preciado journeys to haunted Comala to search for his father, Pedro Páramo, and in doing so encounters ghosts of the past and remnants of his father’s history. It is a novel of fragments, and a landscape sketchily described, of abrupt unexplained transitions, of dreams, and dialogue as whispers. Rulfo had planned to call it Los Murmullos (The Murmurs).

  When Juan dies midway through the novel, the narration is taken up by Dorotea, a beggar, who is—by the way—dead, but has witnessed the town in its better days and known Pedro, his love Susana, and the many other townspeople, a great number—priest, postman, local prophet, cook, and so forth. A literary puzzle of multiple narrators, it is static and mutely defiant like most puzzles, with a circular narration, revolving slowly rather than moving forward. Its handling of time—fluid, the sort literary critics call Faulknerian—and its blurred meanings infuse the narrative with an opacity some scholars believe to confer a mythical quality. The novel is squarely in the tradition of fictional obliquity, of the (God help us) “difficult” novel in need of explanation—you don’t read it for pleasure, you study it for a term paper. It’s the kind of baffling book that is assigned to a special category, to invite discussion, the book overexamined by postmodernist explicators (hardly a surprise that Susan Sontag, queening pedantically over its obscurity, wrote the introduction to a later edition of Pedro Páramo). The novel challenges the reader to find a meaning in it—quite a job, since Rulfo is so little help, assigning all his allusions the same value.

  As well as being claimed a masterpiece by Borges and García Márquez, Paz and Fuentes, the much younger Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa has also praised it. She knew Juan Rulfo as a friend and mentor, but though she is enthusiastic, her praise is off-putting: “The novel is about the Novel: the wonders of storytelling, the power of the literary word that spins so fast it never lets the reader catch it.” But I find Boullosa’s own novels, in particular Antes (Before), which is also about a complex search, more satisfying and readable, and just as important.

  When I said I had my doubts about Pedro Páramo, I was also thinking of a whole shimmering shelf of novels, self-consciously of a bygone literary movement, in this case fantasies and evasions. Like most self-conscious, programmatic literary movements, they obey a fanciful formula, ultimately a pointless parlor trick. This is not to disparage Borges, who is regarded as the father of it all, but only to say that reading Borges’s fiction, you’re lost on the forking paths of an inimitable and wordy underworld, and not the hard-up hinterland, and the hard-up hinterland is all I have come to care about, not just in Latin America, where magical realism was first defined in the mid-twentieth century (by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, who called it lo real maravilloso), but across the poverty-stricken world.

  Magical realism, once gushed over, now seeming somewhat dated and pretentious, was perhaps a third-world reaction to the horrific and hard to bear in daily life, a willful turning away from reality, a flight into banal bedazzlement, as Salman Rushdie, who has made his reputation producing it, described, in Imaginary Homelands: “‘El realismo magical,’ magic realism, at least as practiced by Márquez, is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely ‘Third World’ consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called ‘half-made’ societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called ‘North,’ where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what’s really going on.”

  I doubt this. Rather than expressing a third-world consciousness (and Naipaul is at pains to be scrupulous, plainspoken, and disenchanted in writing about “half-made” societies), I see it as at worst a third-world writer’s affectation and at best a third-world writer’s indirection, like a magician’s trick of distraction, a fiction that has arisen out of embarrassment, a literary reaction to shameful circumstances or origins. To this point, Naipaul has also said, “More and more today, writers’ myths are about the writers themselves.” Subjected to scrutiny, abused children make up such whoppers to disguise the reality that they come from unhappy homes. The poor pray for miracles, consoling themselves with fantasy and fables, and in Mexico sometimes enact them in rituals, as though to bring them to life. This combination of sympathy, yearning, and belief abounds in the communities of rural Mexico and permeates them with a consciousness of the supernatural.

  This oral tradition of the supernatural has been appropriated by others for fiction. But the term “magical realism” is an academic justification—that is, a pompous way of avoiding the term “fantasy.” It is a literature of denial, a literature of hokum, a form of extravagant literary nostalgia for an earlier, animistic era, a culture of masks, sacrifices, apparitions, and fairy tales. It is my friend Salman Rushdie and other literary refugees shrinking from the horrors of India to sit in New York or London and serve up flapdoodle and farce and comic tales of bedazzlement about a prettified peasantry, while half a billion Indians living in poverty on the subcontinent struggle to find their next meal. I admit the wisdom and vitality of García Márquez’s novels and short stories, and the power of his imagination, his avoidance of whimsy, his great comic gift. He is the best of this bunch, writing about the hard-up hinterland, yet even his work seems a brilliant confection, fable and allegory not being to my taste. “It’s like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole,” Gulley Jimson says. “It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?” I have spent my reading and writing life, and my traveling, trying to see things as they are—not magical at all, but desperate and woeful, illuminated by flashes of hope.

  But here is the protestation of a Mexican magical realist, the middle-aged, middle-class editor and modern novelist Ignacio Solares: “I believe in every possible manifestation of spiritual strangeness. I believe in all possible escapes. The only thing I cannot endure is reality, whatever it may be. I believe that the writer is defined by the constant necessity of creating a world, to depart from this world. Literature is more concerned with misery than with happiness. Writing is directly related to frustration. It is a reflection of personal desperation. The writer is profoundly disgusted with his reality.” And in an interview in a Mexican magazine, Revista Zócalo, Solares said, “It so happens that the one thing unbearable to me is the ‘real reality’” (“Lo que pasa es que para mí lo único insoportable es la ‘realidad real’”).

  Consider this: Solares is from Ciudad Juárez, border city of narco mayhem, of executions, lynchings, disemboweling, cartel exploitation, and beheadings—the guts spilled and the blood puddled on the main roads, the bodies hung from lampposts or stuffed into trunks, and the heads arranged like tainted cantaloupes on the hoods of parked cars, to suggest to passersby the realities of rough justice.

  What rational Mexican—or anyone else—wouldn’t find that “insoportable”? Yet it is the fiction writer’s duty, through the prism of the imagination, to cast a cold eye, and to depict life as it is, life as it should be. In spite of his stated aversion to reality, Solares doesn’t seem to scare easily. Provoked by his experience of six members of his family being alcoholics, and three uncles suffering from delirium tremens, he published a powerful account of drinking to oblivion, including interviews with alcoholics, called Delirium Tremens: Stories of Suffering and Transcendence. He has, as well, written historical novels, short stories, and plays.

  Like most prominent Mexican writers, Solares lives in Mexico City. But you can become lost in the crosscurrents and cliques of literary Mexico—the fantasists, magical realists, dirty realists
, poets, novelists of narco lit, and the various literary movements, such as the Boom (Fuentes and others), the Crack Manifesto, and the Wave (La Onda), which produced the younger generation who call themselves the McOndo, and lastly the naturalistic novelists.

  One of the many paradoxes of modern Mexican literature is its cosmopolitan influences, especially from Spain and the US. Another paradox is that the movement of writers is toward Mexico City and the wider world, rather than to the hinterland. The regional novelist or short story writer—Mexican versions of the rusticated Chekhov, the Wessex-dwelling Thomas Hardy, the gentleman farmer William Faulkner—hardly exists in Mexico. Mexico is without a Cormac McCarthy scribbling in seclusion, or a sequestered Thomas Pynchon—though Pynchon himself wrote some of his novel V while living in Mexico, perhaps in Mazatlán, a town pointedly mentioned in The Crying of Lot 49.

  Carlos Fuentes suggested a reason for the attraction of Mexico City, and the absence of regionalism, in his introduction to Yankee Invasion, Solares’s novel—a realistic one—about the humiliating siege, capture, and occupation of Mexico City by the US Army in 1847 and 1848.

  “Mexico has had a highly centralized cultural and political history,” Fuentes wrote. “Since the reign of the Aztecs (to 1521) and the colonial (1521–1810) and independent (1810 to the present) periods, Mexico City has been the crown and magnet of Mexican life. A nation isolated within itself by a geography of volcanoes, mountain ranges, deserts and jungles, Mexico has always found a semblance of unity in the capital city . . . The majority of Mexico’s writers, whatever their regional origin, end up in Mexico City: government, art, education, politics, are all centered in what was previously known as ‘la region más transparente’ where the air is clear.”

  “An incomplete country,” Fuentes said in This I Believe (En Esto Creo)—another way of saying an underdeveloped country, or in newer, politer usage, an emerging economy. “Mexico is the portrait of a creation that never rests because its work is still unfinished.” He goes on, “The search for a national identity—the nation-narrative—has left us perplexed for centuries.”

  This is not surprising, since regionalism is so underrepresented—rejected by being prettified or consigned to the shelf of old-fashioned narratives, along with Agustín Yáñez, On the Edge of the Storm (Al Filo del Agua), set in Jalisco, or Rosario Castellanos’s (as yet untranslated) Balún Canán, set in her native Chiapas. Both those writers lived in Mexico City, and Castellanos ended up in Israel. Apart from the Zapatistas—to their credit, in their self-governed, self-regulated state—anyone with education or ambition or a dream of ease or modernity, anyone yearning for transformation or to achieve escape velocity, ups and leaves for Mexico City.

  It is perhaps a reflex of wishful thinking that impels the Mexican novelist to create the fiction of the small village as a place where amazing things happen. One example is Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s The Dead Girls, a narrative of mysterious murders and disappearances set in a village in Guanajuato (a state that recorded sixty-two murders in the first ten days of 2018). Another is the high-octane hullaballoo and time travel (magical realism again) of Elena Garro’s small-town saga, Recollections of Things to Come (Los Recuerdos del Porvenir). But these are brilliant exceptions, for in most Mexican writing there is little nostalgia for the village, only a hatred and fear of its severity and suffocating provincialism.

  A village is where you’re reminded you are poor, where you starve and die; it is a place to flee. (“Take me with you—take me away from here,” an old woman said to me later in my trip in a village in the Isthmus. “I don’t care where you come from. I want to go there.”) These days a village is seen as insecure, the haunt of thieves and cartels and drug traffickers. Although relieved by the occasional fiesta, the village is the epitome of Mexican isolation, because of “a geography of volcanoes, mountain ranges, deserts and jungles.” In Octavio Paz’s bewitching metaphor, this geography encloses a labyrinth of solitude.

  Yet it seemed to me, after spending some time there as a volunteer teacher, that Mexico City was much more of a labyrinth, a place from which—in spite of the stimulation of its street life and jollifications, its gourmet food and its hundred museums—I longed to escape, to see the villages, in order to know Mexico better. A pair of novellas, published under the title Lost in the City, by Ignacio Solares, are a good example of the Mexico City nightmare and give a taste of the Mexican tendency toward the surreal and the impressionistic, a book like a bad dream.

  We are never quite sure why Cristina, in Solares’s novella “Tree of Desire,” decides to leave home. She is ten years old. Her father is violent, but his violence is unexplained. She tells herself, with the squinting vagueness of a child, “Someday one has to leave.” And so she does, taking her four-year-old brother, Joaquín, with her. What follows is a plotless ordeal, as the two children confront one brute after another—and this includes a priest who drives them out of a church. They meet a humpbacked beggar, Angustias, who befriends them and takes them into her shack, where they meet her abusive partner, Jesús, and they soon realize they are captives. They are beaten, Joaquín is tied up, Cristina is forced to steal, and the children living in squalor witness Angustias and Jesús in drunken fornication a few feet away, a scene of sexual horror that Cristina, with an air of detachment, finds mildly amusing. It is only when Jesús stabs Angustias to death that Cristina is provoked to flee on a train. In a final irony, she comes face-to-face with her hideous father at the railway station, and is left to an uncertain fate.

  In the accompanying novella, “Serafín,” the eponymous child Serafín, who is about eleven, decides to go in search of his father, who has abruptly left the village for Mexico City—the search for a missing father another link with Pedro Páramo. Their village, Aguichapan, is probably in Guanajuato (a nearby town, Tierra Blanca, is mentioned); it is poor, backward, forgotten, hopeless—reasons the father gives for leaving, though he has a local girl, “Cipriano’s daughter,” in tow, to debauch. Like Cristina, Serafín encounters in his search the hostility of strangers, the ugliness, indifference, and violence of the city, and he becomes lost in dreams and in ambivalent memories of Aguichapan. He is at last picked up by a terrifying old man, who turns out to be Jesús, the murderer from the previous novella, who brings Serafín to his slum shack, where he describes the stabbing of his lover. Serafín escapes, meets people who have known his father, and after many conflicts tracks him down, the father bringing the story to an end by saying blandly of the reunion, “What are you doing here?”

  What ought to make these stories nightmarish is that the main characters are small children—strangers and afraid, in a world they never made—resourceful but impressionable and vulnerable, indeed innocent victims. Though presented as horror stories, and though the terrors and monsters of the city are portrayed in every particular, the settings themselves, the villages (or slum, in the case of Cristina), are hastily depicted. What saves the stories from being terrifying is that they are unconvincing.

  Ixtepec, the small, remote town in Elena Garro’s Recollections of Things to Come (1963), is a stop on a railway line, but otherwise remote and existing in oblivion. Like other Mexican towns in fiction, it represents failure, neglect, isolation, and decay—the Faulkner attributes, crushed by history. Though Pedro Páramo was published in 1955, Garro’s work is credited as the first Mexican novel to anticipate magical realism. Incidentally, Garro was married for twenty-two years to Octavio Paz, and the breakup of their marriage was so acrimonious that one of her publishers reported, “Garro herself said that everything she did was driven by hatred for Octavio Paz: she had breakfast hating Octavio Paz, she had lunch hating Octavio Paz, and she wrote hating Octavio Paz.”

  The paradox of the title is reflected in the book, a typical sentence of which is “He struggled with various memories, and the memories of what had happened were the only thing that was unreal to him.” The first half of the book concerns the sudden appearance of a man in the small town, who is wh
ispered about as “the stranger” and finally discovered to be Felipe Hurtado. He is a disrupter of Ixtepec because “he came for her”—the woman being the young, beautiful Julia Andrade, “the love object.” Julia is the mistress of General Rosas, a commanding presence in the town, a jealous and arrogant bully and the embodiment of Mexican machismo.

  The love story is suspenseful, but the novel, emphatic in its distortions of reality, plays tricks with time in the same way as the townspeople do. One of the servants, Felix, stops the clock every night in the grand house so that the family can exist outside time: “After dinner, when Felix stopped the clock, he let his unlived memory run freely. The calendar also imprisoned him in anecdotic time and deprived him of the other time that lived within him.”

  General Rosas suspects that he is about to be subjected to being cuckolded, the worst of Mexican masculine indignities. In a memorable scene, abasing himself, he appeals to his lover: “Julia, is there a part of your body that no one has kissed?” When she says she is pure, “her lie grazed the nape of his neck.” Julia and Felipe’s escape from the town ends the first part of the novel.

  Set during the Cristero Rebellion of the late 1920s, the novel shifts, in part two, to a narrative set in a specific historical period, but with fantastic flourishes. The family of Joaquín and Matilde Meléndez, the occupants of the Hotel Jardín, and the patrons of Luchi’s brothel are as central to the town as they are central to the novel. But the town is isolated in wilderness. The religious persecution in the second half is violent—stabbings, beatings, humiliation, and hangings, with a massacre at the end. An Indian is whipped to death, and the Indians living on its margins are hated by the landowners for their perceived primitivism. “If only we could exterminate all the Indians! They are the disgrace of Mexico!” and “Indians all look alike—that’s why they’re dangerous.” Written with passion and a particularity in observation that gives it life, the book leaves the impression at last of the inhumanity of the dominant characters and a brutishness that arises from the town’s isolation; the notion that a Mexican village or small town is always a dead end.