I meet the founder of something called the Shandy Conspiracy. Every time he sees me, he asks if I’m ready to be Shandyized. All I know about this process is that it will involve subtlety and darkness. He puts out a magazine (the epicenter of his conspiracy) whose masthead features a lion attacking a zebra. Instead of blood, the zebra’s neck issues jets of rainbow fluid. It’s Darwin on acid. I catch myself looking at all the artwork here in terms of sociopolitical fractals: How can I see the narco war contained in every illustrated zebra? It’s a strange feeling, watching quirk spew from the jaws of war—like a guttural cry, flayed and searing, this absurd fountain of rainbow blood. I bend everything according to the gravity of conflict.
More accurately put, I bend what I can understand. There’s so much that eludes me. In a crowd of bilingual writers, my Spanish is embarrassing, and this embarrassment starts to shade into a deeper sense of political and national shame. I’m afraid to talk about the current landscape of the narco wars because I’m afraid of getting something wrong. Americans are known for getting things wrong when it comes to conflicts in other countries. So I listen. I gradually get a sense of the terrain. The Sinaloa Cartel controls much of the Western Seaboard—where most of the weed is grown, and a frontier mythos maintains the drug dealer as outlaw—while the Gulf Cartel operates along the Gulf, trafficking coke and Central American illegals called pollos, peasants whom they either smuggle or extort.
Reading about the drug wars is like untangling a web of intricate double negatives. One cartel pays a prison warden to set prisoners free at night so they can act as assassins targeting the key players in another cartel, then the targeted cartel captures a police officer and tortures him until he admits to this corruption. They tape and broadcast his confession. The authorities step in, the warden is removed, the prisoners riot to bring her back; the reporters who cover the riots are kidnapped by the rivals of the cartel that released the videotape of the tortured officer. They counter-release their own videotapes of other tortured men confessing to other corruptions.
Got it?
Tracking the particulars is like listening to a horrific kind of witty banter in a language built for others’ mouths, finding yourself participating in a conversation in which you have no ability to speak. “Conversation” means something new in this place: a flood of words I can’t understand, the call-and-response patter of semi-automatics I’ve never heard.
I get to know another cast, not authors but killers: There’s El Teo, vying for control of the Tijuana Cartel, who likes to kill at parties because it makes his message more visible; and there’s El Pozolero (“the Stewmaker”), who dissolves El Teo’s victims in acid once their message needs to turn invisible again. The most famous drug lord in Mexico is El Chapo (“Shorty”), head of the Sinaloa Cartel and currently ranked sixtieth on Forbes’s list of the most powerful people in the world. That puts him behind Barack Obama (2), Osama bin Laden (57), and the Dalai Lama (39), but ahead of Oprah Winfrey (64) and Julian Assange (68). The president of Mexico didn’t make the list at all. In Mexicali, I find myself learning the statistics of two economies—authors don’t get paid advances for their work, hit men in Ciudad Juárez get two thousand pesos a job—and the contours of two parallel geographies, one mapping the narco wars and another the landscape of literary production. This first topography is tissued like a horrible veil across the second. Durango, for example, is where El Chapo found his teenage bride, but it’s also home to a poet who wears combat boots and spits when he reads his poems, which are mostly about tits. Sinaloa is home to its namesake cartel, but it’s also home to Oscar and his Heidegger study groups. The capital of Sinaloa, Culiacán, has a cemetery full of two-story drug-lord mausoleums, impeccably furnished and air-conditioned for the comfort of mourning friends and family. Across town from these palaces, Oscar lives in a house with his kitten, Heidie. I imagine an entire menagerie: a dog named Dasein, two birds named Tiempo and Ser. I imagine an air conditioner humming quietly next to the ashes of a man. I am trying to merge these two Sinaloas, to make them the same.
The geography lesson moves east: Tamaulipas is a region famous for the August massacre of seventy-two illegals who wouldn’t pay up when the Cártel del Golfo asked them to. Wouldn’t. Right. Couldn’t. But Tamaulipas is also home to Marco, the poet interested in Flarf. When I think of Flarf, I think of poems that deconstruct and splice together blog posts about Iraqi oil and Justin Timberlake’s sex life. It’s true that Marco is up to something like this, but his project is made of different materials and perhaps a bit less irony. He is repurposing the language of the conflict for his poems. He trolls Internet message boards full of posts from people sequestered in their homes. He takes phrases from the signs that cartels leave on the corpses of their victims, and scraps from the messages they scribble onto the skin of the dead. He cuts up quotes; fits the puzzle pieces of fear back together to make his poems. This is a new iteration: Flarf from and for and of the narco wars. Narco-Flarf. I wonder how this kind of work preserves that part of Flarf that feels so central: its sense of humor. I wonder whether this matters. To judge from how often Marco laughs (very), it matters a lot.
The whole encuentro is an odd mixture of revelry and seriousness. People speak constantly and painfully about the narco wars but they also do a lot of coke. They do it off one another’s house keys, just like I imagined they would, and I find myself wondering about those keys and the locks they turn. How many locks do people have in their homes? More than they did before? How often do they go to sleep afraid?
Just a few weeks before coming to Mexicali, Marco presented his work at a Los Angeles gallery called LACE. He named his piece SPAM. It was a wall hanging that showcased a poem he’d made from message-board fragments—in this case, posts from residents of Comales, a barrio on the outskirts of Tamaulipas that had essentially become a cluster of hideout bunkers.
Marco called the neighborhood zona cero. Ground zero.
On the Internet, and in Marco’s work, these zona cero voices find a mobility their bodies have been denied: “no se trabaja, no hay escuela, tiendas cerradas … estamos muriendo poco a poco” (“there isn’t work, there isn’t school, the shops are closed … we are dying little by little”). The language isn’t “poetic” because it didn’t start as poetry. It started as a cry. And now it’s something else. Marco, of course, abandoned his lyric self last year. Now his poems have no single speaker but a mass of ordinary voices that speak these desperate words, coaxed into cadence by his own sequestered hands.
SPAM was made in Tamaulipas and shown in Los Angeles, but it’s composed of materials from an immaterial network (the Internet) that hangs suspended, contrapuntal and infinite, in between these places and essentially in no place at all. The piece has some faith in the Internet but also understands how it abstracts experience into something nonsensical or illegible (spam!). The piece mocks borders but speaks explicitly toward them: “La pieza intentará crear diálogo más allá de las fronteras …” The piece is not simply a dispatch, Marco writes, but rather part of a conversation—the same conversation, I can’t help thinking, as the grenade explosion on his street.
Calexico
It’s right there, Calexico, just past the brown fence. You can see recycling bins overturned on its asphalt driveways. But it takes more than an hour to cross the border. And this is four thirty in the morning, when we go, and this isn’t even Tijuana. San Ysidro can take five hours if you hit it at the wrong time.
For some Mexicans, the border isn’t a big deal. Some lucky few get the border’s equivalent of a freeway E-ZPass. Marco thinks nothing of crossing here for a new pair of sneakers, though he shies away from crossing near home because the border is more dangerous in Golfo territory.
For others, the frontera is the edge of the world. Manuel, a keyboardist, explains that he’d love to play a gig in California but knows he never will. He can’t even spare the money for the phone call to make the appointment for the visa interview, much less sport a ba
nk account flush enough to get one.
I cross from Mexicali with Marco and a Peruvian novelist. We’re driving a dusty red Jeep. Our variety pack of nationalities sets the officer on edge. He doesn’t seem reassured by our explanation. An encuentro? Interesting. He gives me a hard time. This is also interesting. I’ve returned to America from many foreign countries. I’ve never been given a hard time. I’m always profiled, and it always works to my advantage. Now I’m with company. I’ve forgotten to remove a yellow-fever vaccination certificate from my passport, and apparently this is a problem. The border officer shoves the paper in my face. “What’s this?” he says. “You have a dog?” I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I don’t have a dog and I tell him so. “But you’re from the States?” he says, as if I’ve contradicted myself. I tell him I am, but I can hear something strange: the inflection of a question trilling faintly through my voice, as if I’m no longer sure. Perhaps I’ve done something wrong. Marco explains: “They try to trip you up.”
The truth doesn’t necessarily serve you too well, either. Let’s say you’re an old Mexican woman with grown children who live in the United States. You’d better not mention them at your visa interview. You might think they’d be a reason to grant you entry, but really they’re the best possible reason to keep you out. This woman was real, Marco tells me. He stood behind her in the consulate line. There are probably six of her, ten of her, a thousand of her all across the border. As they say: she actually happened. She’d already been denied three times, kept paying a hundred dollars to apply again, kept talking about her kids, was running out of cheeks to turn, was running out of money.
Calexico is a small town with an ugly main drag full of casas de cambio (currency exchanges), but the fields on the outskirts of town are lush and emerald in the dawn. Everything around Mexicali was dry, dry, dry. “The grass is always greener,” says Marco, and I laugh. Is this all right, that I’m laughing? I think so.
We pass an interior immigration station, a second layer of defense constructed in lieu of designing any kind of decent immigration policy. It flaunts its statistics like the scoreboard at a sporting event: 3,567 immigration arrests, 370 criminal arrests, 9,952 pounds of drugs seized. Marco asks, What do these numbers mean? There are no dates. The figures are simply toys, emptied of context and significance. Presumably, the stats are meant to scare illiterate pollos by osmosis or maybe flood the hearts of visiting Americans with that elusive sense of national security we crave.
I start to think maybe it’s another kind of poem, this board of numbers. It wants to make people afraid and to console them at once; it wants to give them the sense that they are in the middle of something larger and more powerful than they can ever understand—this traffic of drugs and bodies, this barely tethered and unquiet thing, danger itself, so porous and fluid. For every 3,567 immigrants caught, we imagine, there are always another ten thousand who aren’t. The persistence of fear can be a useful thing. Official pronouncements are full of loud gaps and festering line breaks and margins throbbing with unspoken threats and promises.
So the conversation continues. Drug lords write messages on corpses, and these messages say fuck you to the border control and its 370 criminal arrests. Poets get ideas and they get visas and they get on flights to Los Angeles. They tell Americans about Mexicans in a little barrio called Comales. They get home and the cartels are exploding grenades that tell them: Stay home and shut up. Everyone is trying to talk loudest. Everyone is simply hungry for the chance to speak.
As we drive away from dawn, toward San Diego, Marco tells me about another piece he made just after the August massacre. It was designed to resemble his local yellow pages. It listed all the stores and services named for the Gulf: Siderúrgica del Golfo, El Restaurán del Golfo, Transportes Línea del Golfo. In the spot where El Cártel del Golfo would have fallen, the line read: Puede Anunciarse Aquí. Addressed to the cartel, to its rivals, to its victims: You Can Advertise Here.
MORPHOLOGY OF THE HIT
We begin with the first function.
I. One of the Members Absents Himself from Home.
I didn’t exactly leave home for Nicaragua. I’d been leaving home for years. Nicaragua was just the farthest I’d gone.
Near a city called Granada I taught Spanish to kids who knew their language better than I ever would. I worked in a school with two concrete classrooms sometimes invaded by goats or stray dogs. The dogs were skinny. Some of the kids were too, though they were always buying treats from an old woman who sold old bags of old potato chips and bright pink cookies from huge straw baskets. She sat in the shadows beside their rusty swings.
I liked the kids. They touched me—literally, my arms, legs, my whole body—more than anyone else I’d known. I knew their families by sight and sometimes by name. Many of their mothers sold chewing gum and cashews in the parque central next to the bus station. Their fathers and brothers called out “¡Guapa chica!” every time I passed. I should have been offended. I wasn’t.
I turned twenty-four in a bar called Café Bohemia. I made sangria with local fruits and wrote notes from the Internet café that said: I made sangria with local fruits! I told everyone I was enjoying the easy commonality of being a foreigner among foreigners: None of us are where we usually are! I said. We are lost together! The keyboard was strangely arranged under my fingers. I still hadn’t gotten used to it. It made me confuse certain punctuation marks. Fruits from the market? my notes said. We are lost together?
I never know how to start this story. I just don’t. That’s why I need functions. That’s why maybe we need to go back further. Vladimir Propp was a man who lived in Russia through the Revolution and two wars. He wrote a book called Morphology of the Folktale that no one talks about much these days, except to disagree with it. It’s basically a map for storytelling, a catalog of plot pieces arranged into thirty-one functions: commencements, betrayals, resolutions.
Propp’s elaborate system of classifications—letters, numerals, headings, subheadings—pegs these plot points like taxidermy specimens: trickery, guidance, rescue. They mark moments where the action takes a different direction. Propp claims that you can break any story into an accumulation of these parts shuffled into constant rearrangements. Essentially, he is making a claim about disruptions. He says everything proceeds from losing our place.
III. The Interdiction Is Violated.
Now we’re out of order and we’ve hardly begun. Propp maps imperfectly onto the story. I keep coming back to his functions anyway. This is the third one. This interdiction was an old one: Girls should never be alone in the dark. This is wisdom from the fairy tales.
Afterward they said I shouldn’t have been walking at night. In that neighborhood. On an empty street, alone. Here’s what “alone” really means: without a man.
It was mainly men, saying this last one.
Some said it kindly. Others sounded annoyed. The point is nobody had really said it before. Which means we’ll have to rearrange the functions. We return to the second after the violation of the third.
II. An Interdiction Is Addressed to the Hero.
I hadn’t been instructed not to walk alone. I’d been instructed not to be afraid. Granada was safe. Nicaragua wasn’t just violence. That was an idea that belonged to Americans, the ones who didn’t know any better.
This is the function that baptizes the hero. Its pair of points—the rule and its transgression—is what makes him a hero in the first place.
My prohibition was fear. I was told to keep my fear within bounds. Or at least keep it to myself. My friend Omar said: “All of you are so afraid here.”
All of you: women, Americans, visitors. I was all of these, but I would learn not to be. I’d learn how to be different, try harder, walk through the streets without watching for some stranger in the shadows. I’d arrived somewhere I’d never been invited.
For starters, there was the question of history. Which wasn’t my fault, exactly, but did make me involved. T
he history was studded with absurdities: the Contra War, the arms scandal. Reagan everything. Bush everything. Omar recited the best bits of Bush’s debates with Hugo Chavez—Chavez, still something of a hero in that country—and I laughed louder than anyone. I hated Bush too. I needed them to know that.
Maybe I didn’t have the right to need anything from that place. Maybe that didn’t make it right that I got punched in the face. But maybe I wasn’t entirely innocent, either.
So now I’ve given away the ending. I got punched.
I’m still looking for the proper function for this part. What is morphology anyway? I looked it up and found this: “The study of the shape or form of things.”
Which is how we keep something trapped in its place: we give it a form.
Maybe VI. The Villain Attempts to Deceive His Victim in Order to Take Possession of Him or of His Belongings.
There was no trickery. Only a man coming at me from behind, turning me around, hitting me hard. No deception. One of the most honest gestures I’d ever seen.
Maybe V. The Villain Receives Information about His Victim.
Propp cites examples. The many species of reconnaissance: Spies are sent. Hiding places are found. A villainous bear uses a talking chisel to find some missing children.
On that street in Nicaragua it was simpler. A man was sitting on the curb beside a vacant lavandería. He saw me and he sized me up, just like that: Gringa. Chica. Tourist.
The Empathy Exams: Essays Page 8