by Daniel Hahn
I decided to walk to the offices of Trebazon Publishing. Walking offers up the thoughts that become poetry, steps to stanzas so to speak, and I am already thinking of The Next Thing. My follow-up to Rocinante. It will be a hard act to follow, I know, but necessary for the building of my oeuvre. London seemed quieter than usual. The bombing must have dissuaded a few more tourists from visiting (another plus). As I walked I imagined myself to be last writer in the country (which, in a sense, I am); a knight answering the call of his mistress in distress. That mistress being Literature herself.
The receptionist sent me straight to Stanley’s office. He limped towards me, ushering me to sit in the chair opposite his desk. The foreign editions of Carruthers’ works filled half the shelves behind his desk (proof that you can be fooled in any language). I ignored the wall of ordure and focused instead on the kindly publisher. If I had to choose one person to come out of the blast unscathed it would have been Stanley Wilson. He was a lucky man (given where the device was planted). The explosion had left him with a stutter and a ringing in his ears which I reassured him would pass as the bomb was not as primitive as the devices used in World War II. Stanley’s face had been cut with the shards of the Shard (a phrase I was sensitive enough not to share. Comedy is tragedy plus time as they say and two weeks was not quite enough time to make a joke, however clever, about that.). At first Stanley seemed a little subdued, but perhaps thoughtful is a better word. Rocinante would have given much to think about.
‘Thank you for sending your n-n-novel. It’s… ’ (I could see him trying to find the right word and, unsurprisingly, struggling.) ‘… unique. And… long.’
‘It could probably use a… trim,’ I said. (I wanted to show him I wasn’t precious about The Work.)
‘Yes.’ (A pause.) ‘Your covering letter was certainly the longest I have ever received.’ (The Letter was thirty-two pages and a work worthy of being published in its own right (which it may well be at a later date, of course).) ‘I was curious about something you said here.’ (He started to read from The Letter.) ‘“I have always felt a deep connection with Rocinante: sat upon, ignored, beaten and humiliated by fools with more famous names… ” And then you say, “The state of English letters is in p-par-parlous condition. Something needs to be done. For too long literature has been dominated by mediocrities (we all know who they are).” And then you list them.’
He put down the letter and looked at me. ‘I just thought it strange that the twelve writers you mention all perished in Bloody Wednesday.’
‘People say I have a gift for prescience,’ I said.
He became tearful again and I took it upon myself to lift his spirits.
‘Perhaps providence has kept you alive, Stanley. So that you can pass on the fictional flame to the next generation. Look, just when you have lost one of your… thoroughbreds’ (a forced, sympathetic nod to the wall of ordure) ‘Providence sends you Rocinante to join the Trebazon stable, as it were.’
I think this touched him because he was silent for a long, long time, nodding as if finally realising the significance of what I was saying. His silence encouraged me to be even more candid.
‘I think The Anthology Massacre, as I prefer to call it, is a sort of cull, yes. A slaying of a behemoth. Literature had become a dragon. And some dragons can only be brought down by fire.’
He looked at me, open-mouthed, the way people look at you when you tell them something they know to be true but simply haven’t seen.
‘Of course, it is… a shock,’ I said. ‘But it is also an opportunity. Sometimes you have to clear the field to let the horse run free.’
He didn’t know what to say to this. But truth needs no adorning.
How typical that the happiest day of my life coincides with an official day of mourning (they really are dragging this out). Nevertheless, while the nation shed tears over people they won’t miss and can still (let’s face it) read, I followed Stanley’s advice and began the painstaking work of trimming Rocinante. It’s a hard task, killing your darlings as they say. In a way, a writer’s work is never done. There is always something you can improve – a comma you can remove, a bracket you can add. I’ve been working for ten hours and am still on page 309, which is, if I recall rightly, the exact height of the Shard in metres.
I hear sirens. Not as many as on the night that literature was changed forever. But closer, almost loud enough to be in my street. I can see lights flashing against my curtains and there are now shouts and car doors slamming. More flashing. Banging. Quite a commotion. Some petty criminal – drug dealer or pimp – chased to some hideout perhaps? Some bank robbers cornered in a last stand? Or maybe a suspected terrorist plot pre-empted. The kerfuffle is hardly conducive to creative thinking but I press on (for writers must shut out the world). And as I sit here, pen poised, the sound of many feet coming up the stairs, I suddenly realise what is going on. Stanley, unable to keep to himself the knowledge of what I have done, has tipped off the media, and the media, unable to contain its excitement, has sent its representatives to try and get the first exclusive. Yes. It’s taken them a few weeks, but it seems the identity of the man who put a bomb under literature will soon be revealed to the world.
Shakespeare, New Mexico
Valeria Luiselli
translated by Christina MacSweeney
‘When will we get there?’ the children asked.
‘How much longer?’ they insisted.
It’s always the same. The car doors close and the boys have to ask for some kind of confirmation that the journey will eventually end. I told them it was just two more hours, that we’d arrive in the late afternoon. I don’t think they are ever really interested in the reply, though. I imagine those particular questions are a protest, nothing more. A protest just for the sake of it.
But maybe they are also a way of telling us they won’t put up with having to look at our backs, won’t tolerate us not looking at them. It undoubtedly unsettles them to be able to see only the crowns of our heads over the high front seats: my lopsided bun, like something a superannuated samurai might have; my husband’s thinning black waves. From behind, we can’t have been a very inspiring sight. An ordinary man and an ordinary woman, former dancers with the Ballet Folklórico Mexicano de Chicago. Two people – who happen to be their parents – resigned to following the straight line of the highway with the same docility they confront everything else in life.
At times, as we progressed through this enormous country, their father told them stories – also thinning and wavy, uninspiring. When it was my turn to provide some entertainment, I didn’t tell them any stories because I don’t know how. Instead, I set them riddles I’d learned so many lives ago that I couldn’t even remember the answers:
A cowboy goes into a saloon. He’s soaked through. He asks for a glass of water, and the bartender hands him a pistol. Then, the cowboy says ‘Thank you’ and leaves the saloon.
‘That’s it?’ asked the eldest.
‘That’s it,’ I confirmed.
‘That’s the end of the story?’ said the little one.
‘Yes, my love, that’s the end of the riddle,’ I said.
‘Is it important to know that he’s soaked, Mom?’ asked the eldest.
‘Yes it is.’
‘Was he really soaked, Ma?’ checked the youngest.
‘No, I didn’t say he was really soaked. But he was at least wet.’
‘OK,’ they both said, and began a long deliberation about the cowboy, the glass of water and the pistol, until their thoughts strayed and developed into a game with rules so arbitrary and capricious, they were impossible to understand or follow from the front seats. Just as so often before, the game gradually turned into a debate about the rules of playing it. The boys argued until sleep unravelled them. In the car, they both sleep with their mouths open, their heads hanging to one side, or drooping forwards, always in positions that give them a sinister similarity to dead bodies. They only woke when
we finally pulled over at the entrance to the town.
Right from the start, we discovered a rule for getting through the slow, laborious trek from the Midwest to the Southwest of this country: we had to lie to the boys. If we generated high expectations about the place where we were going to spend the following months – telling them exaggerated, even false stories about it – the whole thing would be much more bearable for them and, consequently, for us too. It didn’t matter that, afterwards, reality would completely betray those expectations. Anyway, we thought, disappointments are character-forming. The boys needed that, because what awaited them was not an easy life. It was a tolerable, perhaps even interesting life, but not easy. They were going from being little Chinelo dancers in the Ballet Folklórico in Chicago to being real actors in the American West.
Our auditions for the Southwestern Re-enactment Company had begun two years earlier. We were in the changing room of a high school in downtown Chicago, where the four of us had gone to dance with our company, and had seen several of the flyers pasted on the walls: the Southwestern Re-enactment Company was looking for families willing to move to New Mexico or Arizona, no previous acting experience required, and the age range was from four to sixty-five. A phone call to the number provided filled in the rest of the details: the auditions were to be held during the last week of March in the State Auditorium in Tucson, the scene to be performed would last at most three minutes, and participants would be notified of the results by email on the Sunday evening, that same weekend, the last weekend in March. If we were selected, our contracts would start on 1 June.
My husband had been more enthusiastic than me about the prospect of moving to the Southwest to work as actors for a historical re-enactment company. He was tired of dancing Huapangos and Jarabes, and thought that, at least for our children’s sake, we had to assimilate better into the United States. It was about time we did, he said. Besides, we had to stop representing something that even in Mexico was considered foreign.
I had my doubts about the change. My only experience of acting had been humiliating. At the age of twelve or thirteen, I’d memorised Macbeth’s soliloquy after Lady Macbeth’s death, when the English soldiers, guided by Malcolm, are about to enter the castle to oust and kill the unlawful king – Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and so on. When I auditioned for Macbeth’s role, my drama teacher had congratulated me on my good memory and fine diction, but afterwards suggested I take the role of a tree. The trees were important, she’d said: they were not actually trees but soldiers in disguise, covered in branches and leaves to intimidate Macbeth and finally drive him mad. In that production, the trees would actually be seen advancing from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane during the traitor’s last hours.
But the trees didn’t speak a single line and that bothered me. Gathering up my dignity, I’d refused the offer, and never again trod the boards as an actor. Instead, I’d spent my whole life representing the traditional parts of China Poblana, Jarocha, Indian Woman and even an Adelita in folkloric Mexican dances, and had never opened my mouth on stage, except to brighten up the tapping of my heels with a polite smile.
In March, as we’d planned, the four of us flew from Chicago O’Hare to Tucson, via Phoenix. We auditioned for the roles of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Big Nose Kate and Doc Holliday. They didn’t hire us.
In the email turning down our application, they gently informed us that, considering we were Mexicans, it was recommendable to audition for Mexican parts rather than those we’d originally selected. My husband and I talked it over, and agreed that we could perhaps start out as Mexicans and little by little make our way up to more important roles.
The second time around, in March the following year, we were better prepared. We’d researched the history of the region, and watched new and classic Westerns. Stagecoach was our favourite. We’d studied a few film scripts and plays featuring Mexican outlaws and Mexican families, memorising scenes and immersing ourselves in the gestures, accents and way of life of the old Southwest. We fell in love with it all, if somewhat vicariously.
In the end, I don’t know if any of that preparation was necessary. The only thing my two boys had to do in their audition was beg for money in a mock-up of a railroad station where a gunfight later took place. For my part, I was just asked to lean out an imaginary window and shout ‘Juan’. I did it pretty well, considering I only had five seconds to be convincing. My husband had the scene requiring the most dramatic skill. It was the re-enactment of a confrontation that had originally taken place in 1879 between a Mexican outlaw and the legendary sheriff of Cochise, Arizona. After the sheriff had pulled out his gun and fired at point-blank range, came the following dialogue:
Sheriff: You gonna do somethin’ or just lie there and bleed to death?
(Mexican Outlaw bleeds to death.)
Sheriff: No, I didn’t think so.
This time, the email arrived a few days late, on the Wednesday night, when we were already back in Illinois and had perhaps lost hope. We were delighted to discover that, of the three Mexican families who had auditioned, we’d been selected. We were less delighted to discover that we had been assigned roles not in Tombstone, Arizona – a more settled community with a long tradition of historical re-enactments – but in the town of Shakespeare, New Mexico: a small, godforsaken place outside of Lordsburg, where a minuscule cabin and a combined salary of twenty thousand dollars for the whole season awaited us.
But the decision had been taken. When I phoned my mother to tell her we were going to live in Shakespeare, and would spend six months there – June to December – she expressed very little interest in my impassioned explanation about what it meant to be a historical re-enactor, and simply said:
‘And don’t get it into your head that I’ll visit you there. Those places are full of pale-faced murderers.’
Her scepticism didn’t touch me. Filled with enthusiasm for the life ahead, I packed the few belongings we would take with us, and we hauled them along to the other side of the country.
Between 1870 and 1890 – when the real-life events we would re-enact had occurred – there were around twenty Mexicans in Shakespeare, all miners, labourers or domestic servants. We, as a family, would represent the Bacas: Juan Baca (35), Juana Baca (28), Teresio Baca (6) and Victor Baca (4). As there were more male roles in the town than available actors, my husband Juan Baca would also play, as required, Mexican Outlaw, Mexican Smuggler and Mexican Bandit, just so long as those parts didn’t coincide with his scenes as Juan Baca, a peon with more duties and a higher status than any other Mexican in town.
Shakespeare had been founded in 1856, and was later re-founded several times with equal lack of success. In 1879, there was a small mining boom, but the town never expanded enough to warrant the construction of either a school or a church. When the railroad that entwined the country in a single, powerful commercial route was finally built, the nearest station ended up being three whole miles away, in Lordsburg, and this fact buried the town of Shakespeare in the dust. The last of its residents left in about 1893.
Years later, in 1935, Frank and Rita Hill bought the abandoned town, or what remained of it. They set up a ranch, and when that went bust, they transformed it into the rickety site of historical re-enactments we were now driving into. With the passing of the last generation of the Hill family, which had – again, with no great success – carried on the traditions of the town and its re-enactments, the company in Tucson that had held the auditions purchased the concession, with the intention of making maximum profit at minimum cost.
That was the story of Shakespeare, at least in the version delivered to us by a lame and taciturn Doc Holliday, whom we met at the entrance to Shakespeare upon our arrival. Very soon, he was comparing his misfortune with ours. As he was showing us to our cabin, at one end of town, he confessed that he, too, would have preferred to be Tombstone’s Doc Holliday rather than Shakespeare’s. He’d worked in the latter for two seasons now, and the wages weren’t even enough to give his
family – in California – a decent life. He was making arrangements to go back to them, and for some time now had been secretly preparing for an audition as Mickey Mouse in Disney – three times his salary as Doc Holliday. He could hardly wait to get out of Shakespeare.
We also learned from him that, in addition to earning comparatively low wages, the actors in Shakespeare worked much harder than those in Tombstone, let alone Disneyland. In order to make Shakespeare a going concern, the company managing our historical re-enactments had decided that we would offer an experience that was ‘more real than real life’. In practice, that meant the actors in Shakespeare lived right there on-site, wore period costumes every day, and were permanently in character, so that when any tourists turned up in the town, they would have the impression that they were voyeurs in a real place, and not the audience in some artificial, ephemeral tourist trap.
In addition to the accurate representation of daily life in the late nineteenth century, we offered re-enactments of the seven most iconic events that had put Shakespeare on the historical map as a cowboy town: ‘Just One Diamond’, ‘Death Over an Egg’, ‘Happy Bob Passes On’, ‘Lynched on the Porch’, ‘The Hanging of Arkansas Black’, ‘Silver Nuggets Visit Shakespeare’ and ‘Death of a Government Contractor’. The golden rule was that these re-enactments, unlike those in any other so-called ghost town, were never scheduled. They happened spontaneously. That’s to say, when one of the actors involved in a scene pronounced a phrase or part of a speech from it, the scene in question would run from that line.