Poso Wells

by GABRIELA ALEMÁN

  PRAISE FOR POSO WELLS

  “By expertly weaving multiple narratives around the figure of Vinueza, the hapless (but wealthy!) presidential candidate who resembles so many corrupt (but wealthy!) presidential candidates in the modern history of Ecuador, Gabriela Alemán depicts with verve and humor the horrors and absurdities of a society intent on perpetuating itself.”

  —Mauro Javier Cardenas, author of The Revolutionaries Try Again

  “Gabriela Alemán has a rhythm worth watching . . . she does something unexpected, things fly apart, she leaps into the void, and you think, ‘there’s no way she can pull this off’—but no, everything fits together, falls into place, flows, and the story goes on.”

  —Pedro Mairal, author of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

  “Poso Wells is ironic, audacious, and fierce. But what is it, exactly? A satire? A sci-fi novel? A political detective yarn? Or the purest reality of contemporary Latin America. It’s unclassifiable—as all great books are.”

  —Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

  “Through scalding wit and straight-faced parody this no-holds-barred absurdist adventure that seems more a movie than a book will have you laughing till you cry as the cruelty of its South American reality sinks in. Imagine a mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Gabriel García Márquez. A small masterpiece.”

  —Michael Taussig, author of Beauty and the Beast

  “This compulsively readable book is Gabriela Alemán’s debut as a novelist in the English language. Sparklingly original, full of dry wit, and deliciously suspenseful, Poso Wells could well earn Gabriela Alemán a cult following.”

  —Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

  “Thriller and farce, Poso Wells is a magical realist sci-fi, a fierce and biting social allegory by turns hilarious and tragic, cynical and hopeful . . . this is a twenty-first-century cautionary tale of the war between humanity and avarice.”

  —María Agui Carter, director of Culture Shock and Rebel

  “Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells drops the reader, as if dangling from a helicopter’s ladder, into a riveting page-turner set in coastal Ecuador. Forces of global capitalism want to mine all that is profitable from the earth, no matter the consequences. By the end we’re not sure if Jacob’s Ladder leads to heaven or hell. The upshot of Alemán’s brilliant novel, however: for every rapacious action, there is an equal, opposite, and tenacious resistance.”

  —Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, author of Autobiography of So-and-So: Poems in Prose

  POSO

  WELLS

  Gabriela Alemán

  Translated from the Spanish by Dick Cluster

  City Lights Books | San Francisco

  Copyright © 2018 by Gabriela Alemán

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Dick Cluster

  All rights reserved

  Cover and book design by Linda Ronan

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Alemán Salvador, María Gabriela, 1968- author. | Cluster, Dick, 1947- translator.

  Title: Poso Wells / Gabriela Alemán ; translated by Dick Cluster.

  Other titles: Poso Wells. English

  Description: San Francisco : City Lights Books, 2018. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018000978 (print) | LCCN 2018008832 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780872867819 | ISBN 9780872867550

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ7889.2.A438 (ebook) | LCC PQ7889.2.A438 P6713 2018

  (print) | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000978

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

  261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.citylights.com

  CONTENTS

  PART ONETHE COOPERATIVE OF POSO WELLS

  The Candidate

  Yesterday’s Papers

  The Hole

  The Scar

  Waiting Forever for You

  Órale Pinche Güey

  A Mass for the Dead

  The Spur

  PART TWOAMAZONAS AND NACIONES UNIDAS

  Press Conference

  Minefields Express

  The Bottom of the Empty Glass

  PART THREETHE CLOUD FOREST

  Checkmate

  The Prosecutor

  The Sovereign People

  Without You . . .

  For three hours now, he’s been sitting on one of the four benches that face the statue of García Moreno in the park between the Basilica and Calle Vargas in the center of the capital city, waiting for Salém’s call. Meanwhile, he’s been slowly eating his way through the bag of mangoes he bought for a dollar on the corner, watching the people come and go, reminding him of ants. By now, he’s sucked the juice from half of the mangoes. He’s saturated with the cloying sweetness of the fruit, his hands are sticky, and he’s desperately tired. He hasn’t slept in two weeks, ever since he promised his mother on her deathbed he’d stop drinking. Maybe he’s been waiting for the call here rather than in the streets by the courthouse because, close to the church, something might come along to solve his problems, some divine intervention perhaps. In his shirt pocket he’s got an image of St. Expeditus right next to his cell. When the phone finally rings he ignores the sound and continues sucking. With four dead bodies and no arrest, Salém ought to build him a monument. He didn’t want to kill her, the judge, not over a land dispute with a drug kingpin rotting in jail. During one of his sleepless nights he’d heard a psychoanalyst on the radio talking about how men who mistreat women have homosexual tendencies. He doesn’t want to be remembered as a faggot as well as a murderer. He stands up and walks toward the door of the Basilica, which is unusually packed.

  “What’s going on here?” he asks a shoeshine boy. He’s short of breath and sounds like an asthmatic dog.

  “The Jericho pilgrimage,” the boy says, knocking twice on the tip of the man’s shoe.

  Richard Zambrano looks at the boy. He puts one foot on top of the case full of cans of polish and dirty flannel cloths, while drying his sticky hands on his pants. On a flat sheet of rusted steel, the boy mixes some brown polish with a mustard-colored one.

  “The what?” Richard asks.

  “It starts here and ends there.” The shoeshine boy points toward El Panecillo, the breadloaf-shaped hill topped with a statue of the Virgin. “They say you get two wishes if you make it all the way up.”

  “Yeah?” the man says, interested.

  The boy nods and taps the tip of the shoe again. The man switches feet. When the boy is done, Richard tosses a fifty-centavo coin in the air and takes off running after the pilgrims.

  PART ONE

  THE COOPERATIVE OF POSO WELLS

  I

  The Candidate

  Poso Wells does not appear on any map. How could it? The last time anyone did a topographical survey, that huge mass of mud dredged from the estuary was still part of the river. And water flows. It’s not subdivided into lots. But there lies Poso Wells, objections be damned. If you were to ask any of its residents for a precise description of its location, they might tell you it’s the most stinking, forgotten hole on this side of the Pacific. Kilometers and kilometers of houses built of sticks and reeds held together by a mix of mud and stones, all resting on a suspension of sewage and moldy clay. Mangrove posts sunk into soft, unstable soil that cracks open in new places with every tide or current sweeping the high-tonnage ships toward the port of Guayaquil. But if that answer didn’t satisfy you, and you were to press on with, “But what street do I take, what corner do I turn, from the Beltway do I head north or south?” then most likely you’d be told to go to hell, and your respondent might mutter under her breath that an
yone’s idea of hell on a bad day would look a lot like Poso Wells. It’s in the mouth of the fucking devil, if you really want to know.

  And yet, though no one who didn’t live there would venture within a hundred yards of that place, when campaign time rolls around it suddenly turns into an electoral battlefield—because there are hundreds of thousands of votes to be had. Every inhabitant needs something, and offers come raining down. Especially housing. Houses are promised in exchange for votes, as are construction materials and building loans. Stages are erected, loudspeakers are hung, and along come the girls, immodestly clothed teenagers who have to be escorted by bodyguards because everyone wants a piece of them. Hundreds of thousands of hands, like tentacles, try to touch them on their way in. But once on stage, that sensation of being mauled fades away. The plaza is electrifying. The girls quickly forget that without the bodyguards, if the stage were to collapse, none of them would survive. They’d be lost in the labyrinthine twist and turns of the barrio, destroyed, only bits and pieces of them to be found. But not this time. Every four years, or sometimes every two, television crews descend on the barrio. Trucks full of cables and satellite dishes arrive. An entire brigade of national police is deployed while a city tractor fixes the roads, or at least fills them with enough dirt from the nearby Santa Elena peninsula to allow the entry of the candidates and their vehicles full of political party boosters and functionaries. In Poso Wells such gatherings always take place on a particular vacant lot, an enormous abandoned rectangle situated in the third phase of the Cooperative, that is, the third part, historically speaking, to be occupied by a wave of settlers. Nobody, in twenty-some years of democracy enacted via repeated election campaigns, has stopped to ask why no houses have been built on this lot, why it doesn’t even serve as a sandlot for sports, while elsewhere in the barrio any vacant expanse is invaded by squatters, one lot after another, by settlers who risk their lives to build on top of garbage that has only achieved the flimsiest hold on the riverbed. Why, even though this lot is surrounded by the only lampposts in all of Poso Wells, does no one ever gather there except at campaign time?

  The answer is not very interesting—and even less so for those who are charged with the task of covering the news. Those who live in the Cooperative know that something isn’t right, but they are not likely to explain. If forced to say what it is about this particular patch of sterile and cursed ground, they couldn’t. They simply know, everyone knows, that certain parcels must be avoided. Because all over the barrio, things disappear. A bunch of bananas can’t be left outside the door, because it will vanish. It has to be safeguarded inside the house, though padlocks are not much use either. Something crouches in the streets of Poso Wells, and it attacks the nerves like a persistent drumbeat. Whatever it is haunts the dreams of the residents, panting in their faces, slobbering them with noxious saliva and septic-tank breath, leaving their bodies sticky and dirty when they wake up. This sensation of danger cannot be shaken off by a mere act of will. The residents live with it all day long. In the evening it just becomes more palpable, because what vanishes then is not just food. People disappear, too.

  At campaign time, the threat diminishes. There are too many electric wires, too many workers, too much equipment turning everything upside down. The music reverberates as the girls dance their way through choreographed moves again and again, though they’ve been selected for their looks, not their skill. They put on their best faces for the cameras and smile.

  In 2006, the campaign in Poso Wells has picked up steam. The first round is over and the winner, who has edged ahead of his opponent by four percentage points, needs to make the next encounter with the electorate more spectacular than the one before. He arrives in a chartered helicopter under the last rays of the late-afternoon sun. The light is diaphanous, ethereal, seemingly infinite as it reflects off the shell of the aircraft. The occupant is as eye-catching as the machine that bears him: Chinese silk guayabera, creamy linen pants that flutter around his gym-toned legs, iguana-skin shoes custom-made in Italy. Long, curly hair falls to his shoulders and down his back, while prominent cheekbones accent his rugged face. His movements are graceful, in the way of those favored by divine Providence or an overstuffed bank account. He isn’t tall, but on the stage he’ll look enormous. He’ll offer to fulfill desires and confer salvation. This time, like every time, he has ordered sacks of cornmeal and flour to be distributed, along with containers filled with lard. While he’s still hovering over the cityscape, his boosters distribute these gifts in the plaza. That’s why a crowd has piled into the space that had been cleared for the helicopter to land, and now the pilot doesn’t know what to do. The candidate sweats, prodigiously, soaking his clothes and tracing a design of wispy wings down the back of his guayabera while he wipes his face with an impeccable handkerchief. He has six more of these waiting in the back pocket of his trousers. Before boarding the copter, he fortified himself with two large bottles of beer and five glasses of whiskey, one after another, at the headquarters of his political party. Now he needs to urinate. Desperately. But, flying over the vast spread of the barrio, he tries to forbear.

  “Motherfucker, I can’t hold it any more. Get those people out of the way!”

  “How?” the pilot asks.

  “Get down lower and give it a try,” the candidate responds, barely moving his lips and blinded by sweat. “Where there’s a will there’s way.” He takes a deep breath and repeats the adage like a mantra—“Where there’s a will, there’s a way”—while the pilot nods and attacks the sea of bodies.

  But try as he might, no one moves. What do they care if the rotor blades cut off their heads? In the whirlwind, matchbook houses tremble and threaten to fall. The blades cut through TV antennas and pirate electrical wires. On the fourth try, the pilot swoops down close to the designated rectangle while lowering an aluminum ladder, the only way to deposit the candidate on the ground. Under the continuous rush of wind, seven houses perched on rotten posts collapse, accompanied by the crying of children and the screams of women, while husbands and boyfriends try to pull themselves and the women and children from the rubble. But all of this can barely be heard as the loudspeakers saturate the atmosphere with decibels. It’s as if the doors of heaven had opened for celestial choirs and trumpet blasts, for all the angels of heaven to proclaim the second coming of the Lord. On stage, the girls shake their hips with frenetic, hypnotizing rhythm. The people shout, jump, sway, swing. No one can hear the protests of those who have just lost their homes. The candidate, his hands spread like a man on the cross, descends through space—the crush around him acts in his favor now—until he touches the earth where his waiting bodyguards surround him. From the viewpoint of the great mass of people, he seems to levitate as the bodyguards lift him bodily to the stage. That’s when he realizes he has no place to discharge his bladder in peace. He sweats and sweats, with few options left. He is going to pee, and he’s going to do it in front of the hundreds of inhabitants of Poso Wells. He’ll be discreet, he’ll allow a stream of urine to slide down his linen pants while he moves about the stage to avoid forming a puddle under his feet. In the heat, what his clothes absorb will evaporate quickly. The rest will slip though the gaps in the stage. While he struts about and waves to the clamoring crowd, he puts this plan into action, until his party loyalists close around him in a great human chain and someone hands him a microphone. The electricity can be felt in the air. At this moment, he stops moving and the puddle at his feet takes on a certain depth. It wouldn’t bother him, no one would notice it, really, except that he is holding a cable connected directly to one of the high-voltage streetlights, and he’s standing in a pool of liquid.

  Bad combination.

  Before the wires explode and the lights go out—the lights that the organizers of the event have stolen from the lampposts erected by the municipality a few months before—the people see the candidate rise above the stage, encircled by a celestial halo. The glow shoots like lightning through all of his e
ntourage.

  Really, it’s a sight to behold. Of a strange, extreme beauty. Extraordinarily so.

  And then, a smell of meat on the grill. A stench of scorched flesh that permeates every square inch of the usually vacant lot.

  And then, finally, pitch black.

  II

  Yesterday’s papers

  He came in search of clues for an article about the disappearances, which had happened months before he arrived. When he realized what a large and difficult task it was going to be, he decided to meet with his editors to ask for more time to investigate and more column inches for his story. The answer was no to both requests. All that had been reported on TV so far was that three or four people, all of them women, had disappeared near the island called Trinitaria in the so-called Cooperative of Poso Wells. It didn’t take long for him to discover a lot more: that there was a pattern dating back at least fifteen years, and the number of women who had disappeared was not four but nearly fifty. All this was buried in a tangle of half-finished legal procedures and official neglect: cases never filed, no money to pursue them, dead ends, leads never followed, no clear priorities established, migrants who went back to where they had come from, leaving the names of daughters, wives, and nieces forgotten on the shores of the saltwater estuary. But now, in light of the most recent events, everything that went on in Wells needed to be reevaluated.

  Varas had managed to reconstruct those events, in a rudimentary way at least: The candidate who’d won the first round of the elections had been incinerated in a flash, along with all of his possible replacements except one, the lone survivor, who had either been kidnapped or disappeared in the confusion and chaos that ensued. Thus, Varas had the story of the year in his hands. Because of the blackout, the TV cameras had no footage, while Varas—who had asked to cover the rally—had been right there on the stage. He sold the article under any number of pen names to whatever media outlets wanted to buy it, and he proposed to his own paper that they allow him to investigate the disappearance of the late candidate’s only possible successor. This time, the owners of the paper did not hesitate to offer him whatever he needed. The story was not missing women, but the country’s future. The opposing candidate was already proclaiming his victory, while the Congress met with a slew of legal advisors to try and figure out what procedures to follow. Meanwhile, the charbroiled candidate’s backers had thrown their unconditional support behind the missing man—whom, furthermore, they considered anointed by fate. Having narrowly cheated death, he was destined to chart the country’s future. At this point, his image was for sale at every stoplight in every city, on every corner throughout the land.