Week 9: Dreams

by Daryl L.L. Houston

471: This one’s not a dream proper, but it’s sure dream-like, and it seems to point back to his dreams of her in a domestic setting described on page 422. Juan de Dios Martinez daydreams of Elvira Campos in her apartment. Sometimes she’s naked in bed leaning toward him, and other times she’s on the terrace, surrounded by metallic, phallic telescopes. In these latter imaginings, she’s taking notes, and when he comes up behind her and looks at her notes, he sees only phone numbers.

488: Haas dreams of walking the corridors of the prison with eyes as keen as a hawk’s. The corridors are described as a labyrinth of snores and nightmares. He’s aware of what’s happening in each cell. Suddenly he finds himself at the edge of an abyss. He lifts his arms and tries to say something to a legion of tiny Klaus Haases, but he has the impression that someone has sewn his lips shut. He feels something alien in his mouth and rips out the threads to find that the foreign body was a penis (not his own). Then (in the dream) he curls up and falls asleep on the edge of the abyss. More dreams usually followed.

490: Not a dream here, but mention of one, as Haas tries to describe how his fellow prisoners know he’s innocent: “It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious. Suddenly someone dreams it and after a while half the prisoners dream it. But the noise you hear isn’t part of the dream, it’s real. The noise belongs to a separate order of things. Do you understand? First someone and then everyone hears a noise in a dream, but the noise is from real life, not the dream.”

506: Upon receiving a call from Reinaldo, Florita claims to have been dreaming about him. In the dream, she sees a meteor shower and a boy who looks like Reinaldo watching the falling stars. I’m reminded here of Seaman’s assertion on 252 that stars are semblances in the way that dreams are semblances. Given certain other parallels between Seaman and Florita, the echo can hardly be accidental.

Week 9: Deaths

by Michael Cooler

46 — p.466 — unidentified — 25 yrs — September 1995 — mutilated, found near the highway
47 — p.466 — unidentified — September 1995 — found in the dump El Chile
48 — p.466 — unidentified — 13 yrs — September 1995 — mutilated, raped, stabbed, strangled
49 — p.493 — Adela Garcia Estrada — 15 yrs — November 1995 — worker, found in the El Ojito ravine, mutilated and strangled
50 — p.493 — unidentified — 19 yrs — November 1995 — found in a vacant lot, stabbed
51 — p.494 — Beatriz Concepcion Roldan — 22 yrs — November 1995 — waitress, found near the highway, stabbed and mutilated
52 — p.495 — Michelle Requejo — 14 yrs — December 1995 — worker, stabbed, found in a vacant lot, tied up with the same knots that bound Estrella Ruiz Sandoval
53 — p.496 — Rosa Lopez Larios — 19 yrs — December 1995 — worker, found in a pine grove behind a Pemex tower, stabbed
54 — p.498 — Ema Contreras — December 1995 — shot by Officer Jaime Sanchez at home
55 — p.500 — unidentified — 30 yrs — February 1996 — Indian, found in an old railroad shed, stabbed
56 — p.501 — unidentified — 10 yrs — March 1996 — found between highway and a valley, stabbed
57 — p.501 — unidentified — 13 yrs — March 1996 — found between highway and a valley, strangled
58 — p.503 — unidentified — 16 yrs — March 1996 — perhaps a hitchhiker, found by the highway, stabbed, strangled
59 — p.503 — unidentified — 16 yrs — March 1996 — found on the slopes of Cerro Estrella, stabbed and mauled
60 — p.504 — Beverly Beltran Hoyos — 16 yrs — March 1996 — worker, found on a stretch of open ground, stabbed, raped
61 — p.504 — unidentified — 18-20 yrs — March 1996 — stabbed, raped
62 — p.507 — unidentified — 20 yrs — April 1996 — worker, found on the open ground east of the old rail sheds, stabbed, raped
63 — p.507 — unidentified — April 1996 — found in the desert, beaten, strangled
64 — p.508 — Paula Sanchez Garcias — 23 yrs — June 1996 — dancer, shot by her husband Julian Centeno while dancing
65 — p.509 — unidentified — 17 yrs — June 1996 — found by the highway, stabbed, raped
66 — p.509 — Erica Mendoza — 21 yrs — June 1996 — found by the highway, raped by her husband and his cousin, stabbed repeatedly
67 — p.513 — unidentified — 15-16 yrs — July 1996 — found near the highway, stabbed

Other deaths:

p.492 — The narco Enrique Hernandez goes to prison for killing four people from the same family. He appears to retaliate by having his gunmen steal a shipment of cocaine from Estanislao Campuzano, killing two warehouse watchmen in the process. Later two more of Campuzano’s men, a truck driver and his companion, are killed while transporting drugs to the U.S.

p.500 — Jan 1996 — No women die, but three men are shot in a bar in a drug dispute, a Central American man is found with his throat cut, and a man kills himself playing Russian roulette.

p.508 — A twenty-one-year-old prisoner commits suicide.

Bolaño in Brazil

I wanted to point out an excellent new blog that is translating the many interviews of Roberto Bolaño into Portuguese:

http://estrelaselvagem.wordpress.com/

Also, 2666 will soon be published in Brazil. Here is the cover:

What are some other resources for Bolaño fans in Brazil?

Week 8: Locations

by Sara Corona Goldstein

Huntsville, Arizona— Lucy Anne Sander lived here. (p. 406)

Mississippi — Lucy Anne Sander was born here. (p. 406)

Calle Verdejo, in Colonia Centro-Norte — the American consulate is here. (p. 407)

Diego Riveras School, in Colonia Lomas del Toro— Monica Duran Reyes was kidnapped from here. Rebecca Fernandez de Hoyos is found in this Colonia, also. (p. 412)

Oaxaca — Rebecca Fernandez de Hoyos is from here. (p. 412)

Internal Affairs on Avenida Madero-Norte — a whorehouse where Harry Magaña befriends Demetrio Águila. (p. 415)

Calle Luciarnaga in Colonia Ruben Dari­o — Águila has a house here, where he lets Magaña stay. (p. 415)

Churcarit — Magaña discovers a love letter written to Miguel Montes by a girl from here. Magaña and Águilar agree that this is Montes’ hometown. (p. 422)

Calle Alondra, in Colonia Podesta — in November 1994 a woman’s body is found here in on the second floor of a building under construction. (p. 424)

Profesor Emilio Cervantes, in Colonia Lomas del Toro – Silvana Pérez Arjona attended school here until she had to drop out. (p. 426)

Nácori Grande — Florita Almada (La Santa) was born here. (p. 429)

Villa Pesqueria — Florita Almada and her family move here. She marries a livestock dealer. (p. 429)

Hermosillo — Reinaldo’s TV show, on which Florita Almada appears, has its station here. (p. 434)

Guaymas — the ventriloquist on Reinaldo’s TV show is from here. (p. 434)

Churcarit — Harry Magaña travels here, meets María del Mar Enciso Montes, and visits Miguel Montes’ house. (p. 437)

Tijuana — Magana travels here, calls his friend from the LAPD, and meets Raul Rami­rez Cerezo and Chucho. (p. 440)

Calle Santa Catarina, in Colonia Carranza — Magaña goes to Elsa Fuentes’ house here. (p. 445)

Toconilco, Durango — Elsa Fuentes’ mother lives here. (p. 447)

Calle Portal de San Pablo — Magaña goes here, to Francisco’s house. (p. 448)

Querétaro — Paula Garcia Zapatero is from here. (p. 454)

Sage, California — Abe (Conan) Mitchell, the American consul, spends time in his cabin here. (p. 455)

Escondido, California— Mitchell’s wife stays here with her sister while he is in Sage. (p. 455)

Michoacan — Monica Posades and her family are from here. (p. 461)

Vasconelos Preparatory School, in Colonia Reforma — Marisa Hernández Silva attended school here. (p. 463)

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.




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