Three Messages and a Warning (2 page)
Read Three Messages and a Warning Online
Authors: Eduardo Jiménez Mayo,Chris. N. Brown,editors
Not only do Americans get it about that stuff, they admire those characteristics; they accept that as a kind of triumphant Mexican cultural imperialism, in a form of yanqui malinchismo. Americans can’t do that stuff very well, so they know they ought to gracefully accept it.
But there’s none of that in this story collection. Scarcely a trace of it, of that all-too-apparent kind of “Mexican-ness.” Instead there are ghosts, mermaids, mutant fireflies, alien vampire bats . . . an obsession with buried treasure that leads a man straight to hell, an artist who vanishes into her own painting, an eerie plague of urbanized lions. . . .
That’s what Mexican science fiction looks like when it’s being most Mexican, and also most modern.
Mexican SF is intensely fantastic, but it’s not very sci-fi. It’s a New World science fiction without the stabilizing presence of American engineers and American gadget magazines. The structure of publishing in Mexico has always been Mexican; it lacks any middle-class. So there’s a popular street level of wild-eyed fanzines, tabloids, and comic books, and an empyrean of Mexican fantastic literateurs who show an impressive awareness of Borges and Kafka. There’s no middlebrow. Mexican SF is a science fiction with no popular mechanics, no problem-solving stories, and very little ideational extrapolation. “Hard SF” never took root in that soil.
Instead, this book offers what science fiction offers to Mexicans: a fantastic laboratory for identity issues. Most of these stories are brief, heartfelt, and low-key. They do not yowl from the rooftops at the multitudes; they have an epistolary, diaristic, or confessional air.
Melancholy ghosts abound, commonly treated with black humor.
There are no Mexican futuristic utopias on offer, but there are post-apocalyptic landscapes where Mexico itself becomes the ghost.
Artistic figures are everywhere in these stories, but they never claim any great fame or wealth; instead, they claim great secrets. The visionary maestro has blind eyes; the president has no organs. They seek dignity. Dignity and meaning, but dignity above all else.
Mexico and the USA have a somewhat fraught relationship, but we’ve always been there for one another, and by the standards of most nations our size, it’s amazing how rarely we shoot each other. A European or Asian would have to conclude that we really do have a camaraderie, almost a sisterhood. It might not always feel that way on the ground, but the historical facts speak otherwise.
In today’s conditions of rampant globalization, that kind of physical intimacy between nations takes on a different meaning. While the border between the nations grows taller and harsher, much abetted by the ill will of global guerrillas, the civil populations grow more intimate. Two literatures, based in different forms of paper, nurtured, sheltered, and neglected by their national presses and publishers, now see publishing in collapse—not just nationally, but most everywhere that ink ever hit paper.
The societies are radically changing, and, with them, the genres. It’s about time to give the neighbors a second look. Things are not turning out the way the 20th century thought they would.
The United States of America is Mexicanizing much faster than Mexico is Americanizing. Ultra-wealthy moguls, class divisions, obsessions with weird religious cults, powerful factions who shun scientific fact, an abject reliance on fossil fuels and narcotics—these formerly Mexican characteristics have become USA all the way.
In conditions of globalization, you can always find new markets—or lose the ones you have—but you can never find old friends.
The face of an old friend can be better than a mirror, sometimes.
Eduardo Jim
é
nez Mayo
Probably no other anthology of contemporary Mexican short stories has accomplished such a radical departure from the fixed adoration of literary mafias as the volume the readers have before them. This compilation of recent short stories of the fantastic includes some of Mexico’s most established writers, spanning distinct generations; however, many of the authors appearing in it are considered emerging (in some cases marginal) voices on the Mexican literary scene. The editors have made a deliberate effort to uncover buried treasures of the fantastic from Mexico’s Galilees and Galileans, places and persons relatively ignored by mainstream media in the Americas.
Regarding the genre of the fantastic, the editors have been careful to select pieces that cover the gamut of possibilities. Ghost stories, supernatural folktales, and extraterrestrial incursions into everyday life contrast with grounded scientific narrations of highly complex mental disorders and diseases that chronicle unusually heightened states of consciousness in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Fixed stereotypes of Mexican identity are mobilized and transcended as the readers encounter the thoroughly cosmopolitan consciousness underlying these works.
The human fixation with disease, death and love constitutes a recurrent theme in this anthology. Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez’s “The Last Witness to Creation,” Horacio Sentíes Madrid’s “The Transformist,” and Ana Clavel’s “Three Messages and a Warning in the Same Email” present cases of delusional individuals who either come to terms with their illness or succumb to it. Leo Mendoza’s “The Pin” and Carmen Rioja’s “The
Nahual
Offering” provide similar portraits of dementia, while generating waves of social critique: the former of the middle-class work ethic, the latter of exploitation of the indigenous poor.
René Roquet’s “The Return of Night,” Lucía Abd
Ó
’s “Pachuca Second Street,” Edmée Pardo’s “1965,” and Liliana V. Blum’s “Pink Lemonade” form a quartet of death and resurrection of the apocalyptic variety. An earth devoid of life other than a lost colony of bats possessing obsessive ambitions to reproduce and thrive, the chaotic whirlpool of hyper-urban existence leading cataclysmically to physical and spiritual annihilation, the voluntary departure from the world of the living of two women who place their hopes in an extraterrestrial civilization, and a post-nuclear-holocaust planet in which men will kill for a glass of lemonade comprise the narrative repertory of this quartet.
María Isabel Aguirre’s “Today, You Walk Along a Narrow Path,” Iliana Estañol’s “Waiting,” Claudia Guillén’s “The Drop,” Yussel Dardón’s “A Pile of Bland Desserts,” M
Ó
nica Lavín’s “Trompe-l’œil,” Ana Gloria Álvarez Pedrajo’s “The Mediator,” “Óscar de la Borbolla’s “Wittgenstein’s Umbrella,” and Guillermo Samperio’s “Mr. Strogoff” constitute attempts at capturing human ambivalence in the face of death. Some may have reached the age when death would seem to be a phase of life’s natural course, while the unexpected appearance of the undertaker may surprise others in the flower of their youth. Yet who among us, of any age, would not admit to spiritual perturbation when faced with the ultimate unknown: death, or, if one prefers, eternity? These stories comprise a myriad of ingenious yet vain attempts to assuage such perturbation through frantic imploration, physical comradery, home remedies, culinary enterprises, artistic representation, religious zealotry, philosophical exercises, and violent resistance.
Having arrived, finally, at the subject of love, we discover in Donají Olmedo’s “The Stone,” Hernán Lara Zavala’s “Hunting Iguanas,” Agustín Cadena’s “Murillo Park,” Beatriz Escalante’s “Luck Has Its Limits,” Queta Navagómez’s “Rebellion,” and Amélie Olaiz’s “Amalgam” the most tender and cruelest manifestations of this emotion. Love’s sublime power to transform our perception of reality arises in a truly mystical fashion in the first three stories, while the others emphasize the temporality or outright impossibility of mystical union in daily life. Personification, idealization, hallucination, prestidigitation, imagination, and recreation, respectively, become the literary resources that sustain the plots of these tales.
Although disease, death, and love form the cluster of themes most commonly encountered in these stories, we must not ignore the ultimate fixed idea of the genre of the fantastic as we know it today: that is, the fixation with the meaning and value of writing itself. Bruno Estañol’s story, “The Infamous Juan Manuel,” incarnates this theme in a most spectacular fashion. An aged treasure hunter opts for eternal condemnation over eternal peace upon learning that in hell he will be able to relive forever the contemplation of his belatedly discovered treasure. We would encourage a figurative reading of this story, if it were not for the fact that too many great writers and their works fall into oblivion.
True to the genre of the fantastic, the contemporary Mexican short stories in this anthology attempt the impossible—capturing the extraordinary moment when humanity’s fixed ideas on disease, death, and love inexplicably loosen and take flight thanks to the regenerative power of the literary imagination.
Chris N. Brown
During a recent vacation to the Mexican coast, I acquired an unusual souvenir: a hand-painted votive plate featuring the Virgin of Guadalupe fighting Osama bin Laden to prevent him from detonating any nuclear weapons in the Americas. In the plate, Osama is a much bigger figure than la Virgen, who is herself just a little bit larger than the devil over Osama’s shoulder. When I asked the shopkeeper, an expat Italian woman typical of the sandalista-occupied Mayan town of Tulum, where she had found the piece, she explained that “it was made by ancient peoples.”
The stories in this anthology were not made by ancient peoples. They were made by 21st century people. But they share with my virginal Osama plate a confounding of our expectations of what Mexican artistic self-expression is supposed to look like. While our cover features some skeletons with monarch butterfly wings, you will not find any Day of the Dead tropes in these stories, or any images from the Frida Kahlo calendar. You may find some things that you are inclined to categorize as magic realism, but you will be hard-pressed to situate them in some humid post-colonial cultural haze.
This anthology endeavors to collect stories that express a 21st century perspective, of a multicultural, media-drunk, post-postmodern society. Stories that participate in a panoply of cross-cultural conversations, while doing so in a uniquely Mexican voice that runs through the stories, even though the authors may come from very different ends of the Mexican literary scene. This is a literary culture that still enjoys mass appreciation of the importance of verse, where large crowds gather in public plazas to hear poets read their work. But it is also a culture whose everyday consciousness includes, alongside folkloric traditions and indigenous cuisines integrated into the fabric of daily life, memories of seeing a space probe’s photos of the surface of Mars, and minds plugged into the mediated networks that dominate our global perceptions.
The stories come from a culture that itself would probably never collect these authors in a single volume. Perhaps reflecting the diverse interests of the editors—a scholar of Spanish literature and a science fiction writer who independently approached the same publisher with a very similar idea (and who, oddly, both also happen to be lawyers), this anthology includes established figures of the literary mainstream alongside products of the indigenous Mexican science fiction scene. While the regard for the likes of Phillip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard espoused by writers such as Roberto Bolaño has given more credibility to sf as a literature of worth among Mexican culturati, Mexican writers who declare themselves authors of
ciencía ficción
often feel like outsiders, no more welcome at the party than a pulp space squid at a reunion of Raymond Carver characters. But grouped together here, one can see a common perspective that reveals the pieces as flowing in the same river.
These are all stories in which rational explanations for remarkable things are not required or expected. Products of a world that the authors all understand cannot really be explained with numbers and laws, a world full of phenomena for which the priests, policemen, and psychics have no credible answers. Perhaps these authors recognize that some things are better left without explanations, just as they realize that some stories do better without too much “story” structure —products of a literary culture in which paragraph-long atmospheres count, and in which catholic rules of time and tense, point of view, and the separation between reality and fantasy can be broken without sanction or permanent banishment to generic ghettos. These are stories that can walk through walls. Even border walls.
The stories, and their authors and editors, also owe a great debt to the translators who have undertaken the difficult task of bringing these works of a uniquely Mexican Spanish into a form we hope preserves them largely intact for English language readers to fully experience their magic. Our translators are all volunteers, some of them young American scholars of Spanish literature, some American writers with an adequate dose of Spanish language competency and a strong desire to decode the work of another, and in some cases Mexican or expat friends and neighbors of the authors. This was not an easy book to collect and compile, but we hope you agree the effort has produced fantastic results.