Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

He never saw Sergeant Fernandez again.

  Jesús was known in the DR wing of the prison for his conviviality. He ate very little, and his ribs poked out visibly when he was shirtless. He liked to visit the chapel first thing in the morning, and he tried to learn Hebrew but could never get past a few sentences. He wrote letters to anyone he could. He even sent one to Randy, though the letter never arrived. The convoluted script thanked him for illuminating his path and then cursed him for revealing that the God he believed in was an empty God.

  He wrote Sergeant Fernandez saying, “The Unnamed look for you even in dreams and do revenge for abuse my sister she goodness to do the trap.” He predicted unhappiness for the rest of his life and then a painful death. After a while Fernandez wrote back saying that he had spoken with his mother, who explained how “you were abused by an uncle when you were little, and at seven you fell into a ditch and broke your skull, which may never have healed properly.” “There are reasons,” Fernandez continued, “maybe everything can be explained by what happened in childhood, things you don’t even remember. But I’ve decided that reasons aren’t enough, that some things in life are unfathomable and that you are one of these unfathomable things and you have to accept the mystery of it.” He went on to say that he didn’t know and didn’t care how painful his death would be, and as far as the rest was concerned, there was no need for prophecy: he wasn’t happy.

  One day his lawyer showed up with news, that following an internal investigation, the state of Texas had reached the conclusion that it had executed an innocent man. New evidence determined that the fire that had caused the deaths of Cameron Willingham’s daughters had not been started intentionally.

  “That’s going to work in our favor,” Elizabeth said, shifting her long red ponytail from one side to the other. “The state is going to be more cautious from now on. They don’t want to make another mistake; it’s bad publicity.”

  “But one tiny detail,” Jesús said, “is I ain’t innocent.”

  “Your mental state. You weren’t aware of your actions.”

  But did she really believe that? Or was this all a big game and her way of showing him that she would stick with him to the end?

  Jesús thought about Cameron after she left. Who’d have believed it? He had such a guilty face.

  One of his last letters was twelve pages long, and it was addressed to a student who had a radio show at the university in Landslide. The program aired after midnight, but the broadcast that featured his story had been so popular that one of the prison guards recorded it and let him listen to it.

  Jesús wrote to the kid, named Sam, that he would go “craisdy” if he didn’t get this off his chest. He said that Janet Reno had betrayed him and the government wanted to kill him like they did David Koresh. He found out in prison that he was a Jew and that was why he was trying to study Hebrew. He said he forgave his sister María Luisa because they forced her to help capture him or she would “loose” her home, and they promised “residence and monetary help.” He said that he’d turned himself in because he didn’t want the bounty hunters to kill his wife and his mother. On the last page he wrote: “no tengo miedo sinse reality has not been good to me. I hear funy voises, like a person callingme, but no one callingme. I hear The Unnamed.”

  In his response, Sam asked Jesús to tell him more about the Unnamed. Jesús didn’t respond to the question but wrote: “amá is die if I die but I don’t die. three days I return. my body appear in Jerusalen and I fight enemies of israel. I am tempted by death more all the time and I may do it any time soon.”

  When Sam asked why he had committed the crimes, Jesús answered: “a evil forse come from the houses. the Unnamed send me to people need to die. I am avenging angel send by Unnamed folow hisorders.”

  His last written sentence was “I on a trip of no return on a train that go to ded and can’t get down. but I come back after ded.”

  Though his lawyer appealed to the Fifth District Court, Jesús was scheduled for execution for the capital murder of Joanna Benson.

  A week before the allotted date, he asked for a book of photos of the Mexican Revolution. One of the guards said he’d do his best.

  Five days later the book arrived. It wasn’t the same book he’d seen in one of the victims’ houses, but he leafed through looking for the photograph that had made such an impression on him, of a man standing before a firing squad with a defiant expression and a cigarette hanging from his mouth, the gesture of someone who wasn’t afraid of confronting death. He wanted to draw inspiration, confront death like that paisano.

  The photo wasn’t there.

  The night of his execution María Luisa was there, along with Sam and his friend, his lawyer, Sergeant Fernandez, and Joanna Benson’s husband.

  Jesús started feeling anxious once he finished his last meal, pozole, bread, and a can of Corona. He put on the white uniform he was to be executed in.

  When the police and orderlies escorted him to the gurney in the tiny green-walled chamber, he asked permission to read a few words. It was something his lawyer had suggested. Jesús had come to the conclusion that nobody ever listened to him and other people weren’t interested in what he had to say, so he wasn’t going to pronounce any last words. But Elizabeth persuaded him to read an admission of regret, of forgiveness, if only for María Luisa’s sake.

  “She betrayed me.”

  “Oh, drop it. Didn’t you say we’re all sinners? And that she’s the only person you’ve ever loved? Think about the rest of her life. Let her live those years in peace.”

  Jesús accepted Elizabeth’s reasoning. He read out: “I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me. You don’t have to. I know I allowed the devil to rule my life. I just ask you to forgive me and ask the Lord to forgive me for allowing the devil to deceive me. I thank God for having patience with me. I don’t deserve to cause you pain. You did not deserve this. I deserve what I am getting.”

  He spotted his sister in the group through the window and gave a half-smile. She didn’t respond. The guards positioned him on the gurney and secured his chest with a leather strap. They secured his arms and legs with metal restraints. They covered him with a white sheet from the waist down. Two doctors inserted intravenous tubes in each arm. Fernandez could see Jesús’s legs trembling. María Luisa’s eyes welled up with tears.

  Jesús said a prayer in Hebrew. He thought about the Unnamed and pleaded that He not fail him now. “I’ve done my part; it’s your turn now.” The person responsible for the execution pressed a remote control to deliver the sodium pentothal into Jesús’s blood to put him to sleep. Next came the muscle relaxant pancuronium bromide to stop his breathing, and finally the lethal dose of potassium chloride.

  Jesús felt a slight prick. A few moments later he was dead.

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  More than ten years ago I saw a newscast on CNN that told of a serial killer in the United States, an illegal alien who had been on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. The nickname—the Railroad Killer—caught my attention, along with the fact that he was Mexican. I had been living relatively near New York since 1977 and wanted to use the city’s subway as a scene for a story; but after reading about Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, I thought the US railway system could be an interesting alternative. Years later, around 2006, when I was reading a San Francisco newspaper in a café in Berkeley, I came across the story of the painter Martín Ramírez. By that time I had been throwing around the idea of a novel that brought in stories of Latin Americans lost in the immensity of the United States. I remembered Maturino. My intuition told me that he, like Ramírez, belonged in the novel.

  Jesús and Martín, the main characters of Norte, are freely rendered versions of Maturino and Ramírez. The books that most helped me imagine them are The Railroad Killer by Wensley Clarkson (St. Martin’s, 1999) and Martín Ramírez by Brooke Davis Anderson (Marquand Books, 2007). The story of Cameron Willingham that appears in the epilogue is based on the story “Trial
by Fire,” written by the journalist David Grann (New Yorker, September 7, 2009).

  I began writing Norte in July 2007 in Crescent City, California, and finished in Ithaca, New York, in January 2011. Over those three and a half years the manuscript went through many different incarnations. Many people read it and helped find the pathway, especially Liliana Colanzi, who was as demanding line by line as she was in her overall observations. Other important readings came from Maximiliano Barrientos, María Lynch, Valerie Miles, Mike Wilson, Raúl Paz Soldán, Marcelo Paz Soldán, Rafael Acosta, Yuri Herrera, and David Colmenares. Melissa Figueroa helped me revise La Jodida’s dialogues. Willivaldo Delgadillo was my guide in Ciudad Juárez, together with Aileen El-Kadi and Socorro Tahuencas. I’m deeply thankful to all of them. And last but not least to Silvia Bastos and Pau Centelles, who gave me the unconditional support I needed.

  Translator’s Note

  Valerie Miles

  It was through an unexpected turn of events that I found myself entrusted with the translation of Edmundo Paz Soldán’s novel Norte. I had been circling its creative process in one guise or another since its author and I first talked about it back in 2008, but, as happens in the publishing world’s famous garden of forking paths, I ended up taking one route and Edmundo another. To quote Robert Frost, “as way leads on to way,” I never imagined that serendipity would bring the novel back around to me in any other role than that of a gratified reader.

  Edmundo had begun outlining the novel when we met during our respective sojourns in Madrid; I was the associate director of Alfaguara, the imprint where he was publishing his work, and he was on sabbatical from Cornell. Anyone who has spent time in Madrid can attest to the vibrant social and cultural scene there, which makes it famously difficult for a visiting writer to actually get any work done. But Edmundo’s enviable discipline prevailed, and I had the chance to read an early version of Norte in 2009.

  By then I had moved back to Barcelona, and he and Liliana Colanzi came to stay with us for a few scorching days in August. Poet Forrest Gander was also in Barcelona at the time, and with Aurelio Major we all had a long, memorable Spanish lunch at the iconic Flash Flash and deliberated on some of the issues Edmundo was setting out in the novel, particularly the way in which the United States absorbs and domesticates the splendidly variegated Spanish-speaking cultures under blanket terms like “Hispanic” and “Latino.” In the process, it invents a cliché on the undocumented worker, since society is often incapable of appreciating the singular in human experience, lumping personalities into sweeping typecasts for easy classification. The novel as form, luckily, being a work of the imagination, and by virtue a subversive one, counteracts this trend by exploring the space of individual experience, celebrating particularity and disputing the kind of intellectual indolence that turns a language spoken by people from over twenty-one different countries and their respective traditions into a shibboleth. As Azar Nafisi wrote in The Republic of Imagination, literature “enables us to tolerate complexity and nuance and to empathize with people whose lives and conditions are utterly different from our own.” So as I translated Norte, one of my first concerns was finding a way to capture the diversity of these voices, to differentiate the characters clearly and not domesticate them or their language into an easy typecast. They hail from different countries despite the fact that they have the Spanish language in common, and the two who are Mexican, Jesús and Martín, are from very different backgrounds, social circumstances, and generations.

  Some of the other concerns were how to capture the scenes of extreme violence without falling into the gratuitous, and how to strike the proper tone in depicting different forms of mental illness.

  Edmundo is a Bolivian expat, a Spanish speaker in an English-speaking country; I’m an American expat, an English speaker in a Spanish-speaking country. We share an appreciation for how easy it is to get lost in a foreign environment, for the things you forfeit and the things you gain. But what happens to immigrants who are emotionally or mentally crippled? What happens to those forced to struggle against economic hardship and denigrating prejudices, especially when civic and governmental institutions, police forces and prisons, universities and health care systems all fail?

  Edmundo was interested in mapping the lives of migrants who have gotten lost both physically and spiritually in the vast “North” as they scramble to find a better life for themselves. We kept the title of the novel in the original Spanish so as not to lose all the inherent cultural references that are immediately associated with the Spanish word. As it goes, if I tell you not to picture an elephant, you inevitably see a the pewter-haunched pachyderm; the image the word “North” conjures in an American reader’s mind is not the same one as if you read the word “Norte.” Meaning, it’s not about Canada, no. North is a cardinal location on a compass, but it’s also a space of the imagination.

  In Spanish there’s an expression, “perder el norte,” which means to lose one’s way, to lose sight of a goal, to lose control, to lose the sense of where is up and where is down on a compass. A few of the characters in the novel are based on real people who were uprooted, rendered anchorless, who lost their communities and their way in the vast, hostile territory that is the United States. Just as the border can be porous both physically and as a metaphor, identity too can be fluid; there is always a linguistic and cultural bleeding out in both directions, nothing is fixed, everything is in flux. Edmundo had been researching the life of Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, the real-life psychopath known as the “Railroad Killer,” a train-hopping Mexican drifter who served as inspiration for his character Jesús. Edmundo also became fascinated by the tragic life of self-taught outsider artist Martín Ramírez, the schizophrenic painter who had been swallowed into California’s rickety mental health system for over thirty years. The third set of displaced protagonists, Michelle and Fabián, were still being drawn out of the ether at the time we first met, though it was clear that they would be of Bolivian and Argentine origins, he struggling with drugs and depression, possibly bipolar.

  The novel was published in Spain in 2011 to wide critical acclaim and has since appeared in French under the imprint Gallimard and in Portuguese from the Brazilian house Companhia das Letras. In 2014, after I took on the task of translation, I traveled to the US for a conference on Roberto Bolaño, one of Edmundo’s models for parts of the novel along with Elmer Mendoza, and we took advantage to spend a few days discussing some of these early concerns. I had already pinpointed a few of the language issues and formal decisions that would have to be made. He gave me some references and source materials, which were invaluable, especially in rendering Jesús’s writing back into English, which was one of the trickiest parts of all.

  The real-life Railroad Killer, Maturino Reséndiz, had written several letters from prison, some of which are still floating around in creepy online auctions. As I researched and found examples of them, I could see that his spelling was as dreadful as could be expected and stayed that way even though his vocabulary improved over time, as did his usage and sentence construction. Following Edmundo’s lead, I tried to emulate that arc in Jesús’s diary entries. It was a delicate job; I had to render effect more than translate, and try to re-create a Mexican serial killer’s broken English in a comparative process of linguistic reconstruction. Edmundo had in effect translated Ángel’s broken English into Jesús’s Spanish, so I had to take these back into the original language in a way that was as true to life as possible and invent a sort of proto-language. The challenge, I feel, is recasting the author’s style while always keeping your own in check and subordinate to it, which is not always easy to do. It’s a tip from none other than Javier Marías when referring to his own process, particularly with his translation of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Nabokov’s poetry.

  We met again at the Bogotá Book Fair and a few more times in Madrid and Barcelona. Edmundo wanted to approach the translation as if working on a manuscript. Many writers find it excruciati
ngly tedious to go back over a novel that has already been published, but Edmundo chose to use this as an opportunity for another revision of the original, to continue polishing the ideas, sharpening the dialogue, tightening structure and some of the psychology that moves the characters along. So the American translation is not always a direct translation; it evolved as a result of this ongoing exchange into a new version of the original novel.

  Our conversations began tangentially at first, not directly on formal considerations such as the placement of dialogue but on the characters themselves, their emotional makeup, motivations, and how to strike the right tone for each voice. Are they based on real characters or not? If so, who and how closely? What materials did I have to work with that would help me gather a sense of their inner worlds, their outer surroundings? We talked about the American writers Edmundo read while preparing the novel: Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis. We discussed how to balance the tenor in the episodes of extreme violence, emphasize the suspense leading up to these scenes, and keep a smooth, tightly measured timbre when describing the action, as he does in the Spanish.

  I wanted to capture the slight linguistic estrangement of a Bolivian writer using Mexicanisms, Americanisms, and Argentinisms. He never falls into parody but is quite guarded against overplaying linguistic tics or pitches, though he sprinkles them in certain bits of dialogue to great effect. He writes in understatement, allowing the action to move the narrative forward, prioritizing drive and sense of pace, following a style predicated by Borges and Bioy Casares when writing as Bustos Domecq: the invisible narrator. The prose is largely free of adjectives, straightforward, close to the semantic tightness of the noir novel but sans winks to the genre’s parlance.

  In Norte, Edmundo Paz Soldán uses a sort of backdrop storytelling technique that, like bas-relief, allows the voices of the characters to rise up in contrast when he moves in and out of their consciousness in free indirect speech. I’ve tried to maintain that effect when possible, but in order to keep the fluidity, and because it’s difficult to render accents without falling into caricature, some of the dialogue that was inside the body of the text has been restructured into direct discourse inside quotation marks.