Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 5

2666 pp385-484

This week’s reading has been difficult, comprising as it did in large part a lengthy list of victims found, the state they are found in, and summations of what happened to them immediately before and after their deaths. Having said last week that the narrative had remained principally interested in its characters rather than events, this aspect of this week’s reading was a departure, and to my mind an unwelcome one. The litany of victims became quickly tiresome, and I found myself wondering what purpose it serves in the novel. I don’t think it’s there to shock. For one thing, whilst we encounter victim after victim, we come to them all once they are dead, and the manner of their deaths is relayed using a kind of flat, analytical language as though the omniscient narrator is, in part, relaying the findings and theories of the law enforcement and medical professionals that attend the aftermath of these crimes. Whilst the reader certainly experiences a pang of revulsion the first time they read that a woman had been ‘anally and vaginally raped’, that same feeling cannot sustain as the same phrase repeats in paragraph after paragraph and in case after case. (That exact wording appears seven times in Section 4 of the novel, and there are other variations also.)

There have been a couple of shocking instances of violence in the novel: in particular I think back to Espinoza & Pelletier’s sudden racist outburst and beating of the taxi driver in the novel’s first section. This was shocking principally because we knew the perpetrators and the behaviour seemed out of character and inexplicable, but it was also shocking because Bolaño makes us witness it on the page as it happens. Conversely, it seems to me that Bolaño presents this series of dead women in Section 4 in a manner designed to reflect how they would appear to someone reading a newspaper in Santa Teresa: their deaths are reported as facts already realised, and we are presented with the details in a kind of flat reportage (“Is that French, nigger? Since when do you speak French?” [295]). The paragraphs mount up like newspaper clippings, and we are kept at a remove. We witness the toll of an epidemic of violence against women as the drip-drip-drip of daily life, just a sad fact that the police seem to be nearly powerless to do anything about. That sinking feeling of encountering yet another paragraph depicting the aftermath of a woman’s abuse and murder is Bolaño asking us to confront the fact that the newspapers in Santa Teresa’s real-world counterpart Ciudad Juárez must read like this every day for decades. Amnesty International reports that 370 young women were murdered and another 400 missing in Juárez and Chithe years 1993-2005 alone.

Though it could be my misreading, I have found the depictions of the ineffectual police activities to be part of this too. We are given several names of the officers in charge of cases, and this is the last we hear of them. We witness a few investigatory dead ends, a couple of arrests, and nothing seems to happen to stem the tide of dead. The police move in circles and drink in the same bars and frequent the same prostitutes. As readers of a novel we play amateur detective and notice when a certain model of car reoccurs, or when one pattern of injuries matches another and when it diverges, and wonder whether the preponderance of victims who worked in maquiladoras is pertinent of demographically insignificant. But we can’t get anywhere either — not until Bolaño allows us to.

In amongst these repetitive, dour paragraphs we find a few regarding The Penitent, almost as though our newspaper had found a more colourful story with which to sell some copies. Although someone does get stabbed in one instance, The Penitent’s crimes are less serious and their motivation is less sickeningly obvious. The manner in which The Penitent pops up (and we kind of get to witness his first… activity in real time as opposed to having it reported to us), commits a few puzzling crimes of disorder, and then seemingly disappears, is curious. Will we get to the bottom of this later in the novel? How does it relate, if at all, to the other action of Section 4 (or the novel as a whole)? Is it merely a device to bring Elvira Campos and Juan de Dios Martínez together and allow them to ponder the human condition and the loss of the sacred? We’ll have to wait and see; I don’t have answers for you because I’m not a floromancer!

Which brings us to the other high point of the week: Florita Almada, whose introduction is a most welcome source of some levity and balance and colour. Arriving at one of Florita’s passages felt like an escape precisely because it reintroduces some of the magical-realism aspects of the narrative that are pointedly missing from the drudgery of policy ineffectuality and brutal crime upon brutal crime. She provides the escape of once again blurring the lines between reality and dream, whereas elsewhere in Section 4 we feel trapped in stolid reality. As elsewhere Florita’s dreams are intriguing but difficult to interpret. A great deal of them, and of the conversations she has with others, seems to be about one’s place in the world and in the grand scheme of things; I suppose that in some sense this is the principle concern of all divination.

There were dreams in which everything fit together and other dreams in which nothing fit and the world was like a creaky coffin. [457]

This preoccupation with death pervades the current section of the novel, both in relation to the innumerable murders and in Florita’s narrative. It bears remembering that Bolaño composed 2666 whilst suffering from liver failure, and very much aware of his own impending mortality (he was on a transplant list, but did not reach the top before his death). I was reminded of this several times in the chapter, as the subject of the void or abyss recurs:

at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. [432]

the kind of revelation that flashes past and leaves us with only the certainty of a void, a void that very quickly escapes even the word that contains it. [436]

This image seems to be in competition with a concept outlined by Florita on a couple of occasions. She speaks of the inability of something to truly disappear entirely:

Whether you believe it or not, Harry, sometimes a stone wants to vanish, I’ve seen it. But God won’t let it happen. He won’t let it happen because He can’t. [421]

and of the inevitability of that which is lost being returned:

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. [431]

This last in particular is a beam of sunlight within a dark section of the novel. We might read it cynically given the material with which it is surrounded (so many endings without justice), or we might take it as a cypher with which to approach the liminality we’ve witnessed elsewhere in the novel: for every space that loses something perhaps there is a twinned space into which it passes.

It is all too easy, and perhaps misleading, to read this in terms of Bolaño’s situation at the time of writing the novel - though surely he cannot have written a character like Florita Almada (whose names evoke both flowers and mothers, none-more-potent symbols of renewal and birth) without contemplating his own fate. Perhaps a more immediate (and answerable) question for us as readers of the novel is around Florita’s relationship to Santa Teresa. During her first televised paroxysm she memorably calls out:

It’s Santa Teresa! It’s Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. They’re killing my daughters. [436]

Given this, and her nickname of ‘La Santa’, we might wonder at her purpose in the novel’s magical-realist architecture. This is something I’m hoping and expecting the novel to develop as we move further in. There is no escape for us this week from ‘The Part About the Crimes’, so hold tight and enjoy the week’s reading to the extent possible.