The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate,
translated by David Bowles
Copyright © 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Innsmouth Free Press
Vancouver, BC Canada
innsmouthfreepress.com
ISBN paperback: 978-1-927990-29-2
ISBN e-book: 978-1-927990-30-8
Cover illustration: Gustave Doré
Cover design: Innsmouth Free Press
Interior design and e-book design: Ampersand Book Interiors
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Prologue
Prologue
Epigraph
One: Demeter: From Varna To Whitby
1: Before the Storm
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Two: Log of the Demeter
23
16 July
17 July
18 July
22 July
24 July
25 July
28 July
29 July
30 July
1 August
2 August
3 August
Three: Voices Like Dust
Possibly from August 4 to 6
Afterword
Biographies
First published in 1998 by Grupo Editorial Vid in Mexico, The Route of Ice and Salt (La Ruta del Hielo y la Sal) was an oddity for several reasons. Grupo Editorial Vid was known for publishing comic books but was attempting to launch a line of science fiction and fantasy novels by Mexican authors. Most science fiction and fantasy in Mexico at that time – and still today – was imported and translated from the English language.
José Luis Zárate was an emerging writer in a small, tight-knit circle of science fiction and fantasy authors scattered across Mexico. His choice of subject matter was unorthodox in two ways: One, he was writing an epistolary take on Dracula. Two, it was a queer novella.
El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma, which, despite the title, is not about a vampire, had been published in 1979 and caused a sensation by focusing on the life of a young, gay man navigating the city. In 1998, gay rights had advanced and the Zona Rosa was a clubbing area for queer Mexico City youth, but finding queer characters in books, movies and TV was still a difficult task. The Route of Ice and Salt was a horror book but one with literary aspirations; a novel about queer desire, it was being released by an editorial imprint that had never published anything like it.
Grupo Editorial Vid’s goal of entering the book market ultimately failed. Science fiction and fantasy did not take much of a foothold in Mexican bookstores, where the only horror books available continued to be bestsellers by Stephen King and 19th century classics like, yes, Dracula.
Zárate went on to write more stories of the fantastic and also taught literature in his native Puebla. The Route of Ice and Salt became something of a cult item for Spanish science fiction and fantasy readers. It was eventually translated into French, and is now being presented in English for the very first time.
Along with this translation by David Bowles, there is a new prologue by the author and an afterword by Poppy Z. Brite. I hope this provides readers with a full picture of a book that has occupied an important place in Latin American literature of the fantastic yet which has nonetheless remained largely unknown to English speakers.
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2020
Canada
The rain wakes me up. Not because it is strong or dense - it wakes me because, without knowing, I’ve been waiting for it.
It’s a late rain. The cold has begun and winter is in the air.
I look at the clock at my side - 3 a.m. - but I twist it away because the glow of the LED doesn’t go well with the primordial murmur of the water. I get up and stretch my hand towards my clothes, but don’t complete the gesture.
I go to the patio; to the darkness.
There’s no more noise than the sound of water, and in that moment it is just my skin and the rain. I close my eyes, lift my face and wait.
The intimate warmth of the bed disappears in an instant.
I feel over me a slow caress. The water travels as if it wants to discover every centimeter of me.
The caress of a dead hand. A hungry embrace, fierce in its impatience to encompass me.
My body reacts to the contact, shivering, but at the same time, absolutely conscious of each part of me.
Here I am, practically nude.
Here I am, in the storm.
I shiver and I do not know if it is from pleasure or fright.
Perfect, I tell myself, returning to my bed.
I have a thread for my novel.
The story I wish to tell is a ghost walking the hallways of my mind. I can’t see it completely, but I know it’s there and I search for a way to make it discernible, concrete.
I read, without yet knowing why, stories of cursed voyages, the sad destiny of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the last lines of Moby Dick, where fury ends in disaster.
I take out the old VHS tapes and sit down late at night to watch the symphony in black, white and gray that is Nosferatu. One scene in particular: While the captain ties himself quickly to the rudder, Count Orlock approaches, full of power, hands like claws, the appearance of a human rat, surrounded by an air of disease and plague.
On the wall of my office, I stick a map torn from an atlas. I have marked with ink the trip that leads from Varna to Whitby; I look at it obsessively.
A trip from yesterday to today.
A past rabidly alive.
I mark all the countries to which the unfortunate schooner sails and I wonder what hungry yesterdays inhabit each one of them. What creatures, beings and spectres have been imagined, which come from death to feed on the living?
I sleep well, thinking of nightmares.
I sail towards them, in the midst of the storm and the furious waters.
A boat. A schooner. The Demeter.
I picture that name in the wood, gnawed by the salt.
And aren’t the sailors surrounded by it? What flavor do the sailors possess for the vampire? Salt, of course, of the sea, of the sweat and the skin, of the blood and every secret liquid, intimate, sheltered by the body.
And if someone else desires it?
What if someone faces the vampire in order to save, to taste, to love that salt?
And who else is most appropriate to fight for those men than the captain of the boat?
A homosexual captain.
I think about what it means to be one on a Russian schooner of the 19th century. In those days, it was easy to be lynched for the mere crime of being. While I walk through the streets of my city, I think and observe, and discover that 1996 is not that far from the 19th century.
Many stories of the sea are stories of increasing growth, of the young person who acquires, through penuries and adventures, the security that allows them to leave thei
r adolescence behind.
But what I am writing is a voyage of the damned.
And if I make it a story about decreasing? What if I snatch away the security and tranquility of the captain?
How cruel is the phantom of my interior.
Why write horror stories, stories of fear and darkness?
Most of the time, when people have asked me this question, it’s a complaint. There are more important things than monsters, they tell me implicitly. I wish I could believe them ….
I was born in 1966 and I ignored everything. At bedtime, nobody tells children dark stories of power and repression, nor that a murderous tyranny governs us. I was busy learning how to walk, busy with my first words, happily protected and unaware.
The judicial police had the power of impunity. They could do whatever they wanted without repercussion. They could claim that each one of their victims was guilty of political crimes.
This combination of hitmen and cops were called “madrinas” and they circulated freely through the streets. That you were innocent of everything couldn’t protect you.
Children know even if they don’t know. They may not understand the context, but the evidence is there.
I could not understand the conversation of the adults, but I understood the tone of their voices; the pauses filled with meaning and the heavy silence they forced upon themselves.
I remember, yes, the nocturnal glow of a television (black-and-white, with only two channels), and a movie where a silhouette of something shows against the window that protects the people from the night. A second before the glass breaks and the inconceivable darkness devours them, there is a pause, a silence.
The space of horror just before the bestial maw and blood.
The silence heard again and again from the adults.
Why do you write horror and not reality?
Why write a vampire story?
Back then, it seems, everyone loved vampires. Not old Lugosi, but David Bowie, modern and Gothic. The publicity for the film The Lost Boys proclaimed, “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” The game of Masquerade showed us the sons of Cain, sophisticated and filled with a security born of knowing themselves masters of the night. The last rebels, the urban pirates, whose fury, appetite and desire responded only to their will.
I couldn’t love them. I was upset by so much power, so much carefree impunity ….
Oh, come on, they said. Imagine yourself being a predator, carnivorous, the lion amongst the sheep.
But I looked at my fluffy wool and told myself it was dangerous to love assassins.
And despite this, I was fascinated by that world. I don’t know why.
I read about vampires, of the style found in the documents gathered in 1746 by Agustin Calmet, and found a fragment that fascinated me: the way of burying the impure.
You filled their mouths with rocks. They were decapitated. They were buried under crossroads so they remained lost forever and, as an added precaution, they were pierced with a stake. Not the cinematographical one, absurdly portable. The traditional stake was a clumsy lance, heavy and huge, which basically nailed the corpse to the ground, like a butterfly that should never fly again.
What kind of monsters deserved such treatment, such rage and contempt?
Vampires, yes, but also the bastard sons, the unbaptized ones, the inhabitants of other regions, the sodomites and those careless souls who allowed a black cat to jump over their dead bodies.
In short: anyone.
Anyone could be considered a monster. And monsters were assassinated with impunity.
Didn’t you know? Didn’t we all know? The grownups who hushed themselves to protect the children; the children who, without knowing how, discovered they were not safe from the darkness and death?
Perhaps that’s what fascinated me about the topic. But not from the perspective of the assassin.
How would his shadow be perceived? What do the gazelles think of tigers? What sensations exist when one falls into a winter that one knows will never leave?
What does it feel like to walk down streets that can devour you any second, where impunity and prejudice can decide to finish you off without any cares?
What does it feel like when you sail towards a shipwreck?
– José Luis Zárate, 2020
Mexico
from 5 to 16 July
1897
At night: the smell, the weight, the feel of salt.
Much more present than the water on the other side of the wood.
Who could have fathomed?
Nights spent, not in dreaming of sirens of uncertain sex, but in the eternal, tireless caress of the grains that lurk within the liquid.
When the midday sun dries the sails, dampened by breeze or storm, they crust over with that omnipresent granular white that seeps in with the salty mist of the night sea, finding its way into our hair, between our fingers.
No place is safe. It burrows into every crevice of the ship, into the metal bunks, into our provisions, into the treasures that we attempt to keep from rust. Its presence is a mocking smile.
And when the men strip away their clothing, they find it between their thighs, hidden where groin and testicles meet.
The sailors are Lot’s wife.
Creatures of salt.
When I go to the forecastle, redolent with the absurd heat of bodies that rest in the midst of the swelter, I can almost see it accumulating on their indolent skin.
Who has tasted it? Who has savored ocean and flesh in that hidden place?
Not I.
I cannot.
I am the Captain.
Impossible that I order one of my men to come to my cabin and ask him to undress, much less insist he stand still and permit me to clean him with my tongue, lightly biting his flesh, trembling with craving for his skin.
And if there is no flavor?
That would mean that some other has saved him from the salt.
Then I should have to demand an accounting, impose discipline, require they reserve for me alone their salt, their warm sex.
But I cannot demand an accounting.
Not when the days are so long and we drift beneath the sun upon the windless water, measuring the hours by the slow drip of sweat.
In the distance, one can see the horizon move, a useless mirage: water in the midst of water, boiling.
At such moments, it is not difficult to imagine that we burn there.
How to deny them aught if these waters deny us all?
Is it not better to know that an immemorial hunger was satisfied, that one offered himself—entirely of his own volition—to an appetite that creates us as it devours us?
Their bodies are their own.
Not mine or of some possible lover.
Theirs that sweat and the sweat of any man to whom they grant it.
The salt of life ….
It is in those moments that I yearn for the icy routes. The Gulf of Botnia. The Baltic Sea. The North Sea.
Such strictures. The crew’s rooms sealed. Men hidden in blankets and coats. Under siege, attempting to prevent the entry of the eternal, indifferent cold. We can slide over it or die upon it. It cares not.
Captains trapped in sudden ice, harkening to those deadly sounds—boats torn open by icy needles, metal giving way, crumpling under the weight of a million transparent blades—will not believe that the cold is not an enemy.
I have seen ice form on the horizon, huge landless isles drifting away from our route. The cycles of winter and snow have naught to do with the ships that cross their path.
The Northern Lights flare up and burn, though no man perceive them.
Ice is for other beings, its rhythms and reasons beyond our ken, its starkness for alien eyes.
The i
ndifference of God, murmured by the world.
The cold suffices unto itself; the heat demands that we partake.
We can take refuge from the frost. It does not belong to us. We can cover ourselves with furs and approach the fire.
But what to do when the heat comes from within?
In the dead of night, our blood is like a sweat inside the body, warm sea nestled within our flesh, skin feverish and throbbing.
How to seek shelter from that which runs through our very veins?
Whoever dies frozen drifts away from his body, leaving in the midst of a merciful dream.
Whoever dies by fire remains trapped within that roiling flesh until the final moment, screaming until death comes like a balm.
Such notions occupy a man’s thoughts beneath the motionless sun, when the shadows of the schooner are but warm shade. Steam rises from the waters. Sweltering air pursues us.
How delightful to walk naked in such heat.
But flesh fragments under the sun. First, cracks appear, then sores scoured by salt.
So, I must forbid it, order them to wear acidic clothes, astringent shirts, pants stiff with salt.
I ask them to seal themselves up with sultriness under those fabrics.
Not even below decks can I enjoy the sight of their bodies. If I stare too hard at them, they take my frank look as another order. They stand, saluting to their own chagrin before getting dressed to mine.
Their sweat (could it be otherwise?) makes me imagine firm muscles, taut veins.
Other captains ask why I choose men from certain lands, why sailors with exotic accents work with me.
I cannot answer with the truth, that it matters not to me whence they come, nor their race, nor the words that dwell in their tongues.
I look for smooth bodies, muscles along which sweat can freely run, liquid flowing, sliding.
Therefore, am I quite strict about their clothing.
For I know that beneath, there is almost no hair, naught to hinder wet caresses, fingers sketching desire.
Or eyes that also seem to touch the path of salt.
And so, I abandoned the glacial route, the seas of ice, the dark blue.
An ill decision.
But this I knew from the beginning.
The sun dries men, overwhelming them with its weight. It makes them aware of themselves, aware that they swim in some sweltering miasma.
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