The Artist of the People's Suffering
Bolaño, Balenciaga, and the Femicides of Ciudad Juárez
“I believed in literature: or rather, I didn't believe in arrivisme or opportunism or the whispering of sycophants. I did believe in vain gestures, I did believe in fate.” (Antwerp)
I first came across the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in December 2017, when I spotted a copy of The Savage Detectives among a street vendor’s wares and decided this was the title of a book that should be read. I’d just come back from a trip to Patagonia—southern Argentina and Chile—and it felt like kismet. Who was I to say no to the universe?
The novel’s 600 pages, which traverse the lives and legends of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, went by like a fever dream. For two days I had no desire to do anything except inhale this book.
To my surprise, there was more. I went on to read Bolaño’s novellas: By Night in Chile, Amulet, Distant Star, The Skating Rink, Nazi Literatures in the Americas, Antwerp, his short story collections: The Return, Last Evenings on Earth, The Insufferable Gaucho, The Secret of Evil, his essays in Between Two Parentheses, his books of poetry: Tres, The Romantic Dogs, The Unknown University, and finally, his last work, posthumously published, the sprawling, unforgettable, five-part thousand-page trainwreck that is 2666.
In the last five years, I’ve read all Bolaño’s published works, or almost all of them, and more than once. What’s wrong with me?
Beloved reader, allow me to unravel my scroll.
“We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie.” (Last Evenings on Earth)
Adolescence, for me, was an endless parade of activities—swim meets, tennis matches, fencing bouts, science fairs, school newspapers, violin recitals, film screenings, waiter jobs. I was always moving on to the next competition, and when there wasn’t one, I found myself exhausted. Whatever. The jarring thing now is that I don’t remember these activities all that well, even though they comprised the vast majority of my life at the time. They haven’t followed me, and I do almost none of them now.
In my earliest childhood memories, I am always reading. I don’t know why this is what stuck with me, or why I turned to books in the first place. An act of spite, most likely. But twenty years later, I’m still at it. I can only conclude that, in some way, the world of books seemed more real than the mechanical performance of accomplishment that was my life outside of them.
Let’s take it a step further: I have never not understood the impulse to censor books—ostracize, ban, even burn them—because literature, for me, is an alternative version of God.
“So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it’s always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love, the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of all dead writers. Literature, as an Andalusian folk singer would put it, is danger.” (Between Two Parentheses)
When I read Bolaño, I feel like I’m getting away with something. It’s too good to be true; it’s too true to be good. His characters all come from the same bustling late-night café, and the cast never changes—poets, professors, policemen, ex-soldiers, scarlet women, psychics, poets again.
Imagine a horde of insistent youths, all breathless idealism and guerrilla energy, shutting down a noir diner. They bicker endlessly, make ludicrous displays of love, hurt each other in ways they don’t understand. They show up for a beer and then disappear forever. They talk dirty and dream big and show up unannounced even though they are always letting each other down.
It all feels like one big joke, really, a romp in the style of Cervantes, that is, until it’s not a joke at all, and it’d be a sin to mention Bolaño in the same breath as the Beats. In case this wasn’t clear: Kerouac isn’t worthy to so much as shine Bolaño’s shitkickers.
Here, the slaphappy wanderlust and swashbuckling mask something much more humane: a stifled utopian dream, and a righteous nostalgia for a place and time which, violently, never came to be. On a very personal level, Bolaño understood that this kind of abortive destiny—the dream deferred of 1970s Latin America—can only reside in literature. The battle had been lost, but in his fifty years of life, he never let it go.
The weight of this guajiro dream is presented through real-life horror. For Bolaño, the battle lines are drawn for eternity. Wherever you live, whatever path you’re walking: Don’t think you aren’t implicated.
You are either on the side of life, a failed revolutionary, loyal until the last, or you are a jackal of Mammon, a sell-out to money, power, and bourgeois oblivion, and a co-conspirator in every instance of injustice wreaked upon the world. Heaven or Las Vegas. The choice is yours.
There is a reason why Plato banished poets from his republic. Their heresies were too compelling.
“Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.” (2666)
We live in a time of irresistible propaganda. The difference between dogma old and new is twofold: information no longer emanates from a single trusted authority, and it always arrives cloaked in the language of Enlightenment culture—the language of “facts” and “reason.” At this point, there are enough facts going around that society can now sustain wholly incompatible realities. And thanks to the invisible hand of the algorithm, the actual origin of these realities is unknowable.
Literature, on the other hand, makes no claim on truth. A book isn’t selling you anything other than a dream that would have died had it not been written down. Throw a few good books together, and you get a kind of collective consciousness. Across place and time, these authors decided their own counterfactual histories were so important that they had to be kept alive.
I say this with high conviction: if these stories had spoken the language of facts, they would have disappeared. They would have been consumed by the prevailing orthodoxy, the isms of the discourse, the master narrative. Explained away, disproven, de-amplified. Newspapers aspire to facts. Do they convince you of anything you don’t already believe?
If I have learned one thing from Bolaño, it is that this is what literature can do. A well-told story is an instrument of perception that strengthens each time we come back to it. Fiction gives shape to the torrent of “facts” passing through our brains.
It is the most powerful anti-propaganda tool available to us.
“A smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tending hundreds of barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings.” (2666)
In 1993, the bodies of young women began materializing in the desert expanse surrounding Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Patterns quickly emerged. Most of the victims were students, sales clerks, or workers at nearby maquiladoras, the multinational manufacturing plants that have exploded across northern Mexico since NAFTA’s inception. Most exhibited signs of mutilation, torture, and rape prior to their murder.
The killings never stopped. Nobody—the police force included—seemed to know who was doing this or why. What at first blush felt like institutional ineptitude began to look like complicity. According to a report by the Washington Office on Latin America, police repeatedly failed to collect evidence, mixed up DNA tests, destroyed evidence, and allegedly even returned victims’ remains to the wrong families. One State Attorney General said in 1999 that murder victims’ provocative dress triggered the attacks. In 2004, 13 state policemen were arrested for killing a dozen men on cartel orders. In the ensuing investigation, reports emerged that “police may have been responsible for abducting and killing women to celebrate successful drug runs.” As of 2005, 11 men had been convicted for approximately 20 of the murders. By this time, 400 bodies had been found.
To this day, women are still disappearing. Despite intervention by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and other international authorities, almost all the crimes remain unsolved.
This world—“our curse and our mirror, the unquiet mirror of our frustrations and of our vile interpretation of freedom”—is the landscape of Bolaño’s 2666.
A group of literary critics arrive in the sprawling border-city of Santa Teresa intent on locating the reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi. Their shepherd is Chilean-in-exile Óscar Amalfitano, an Archimboldi expert and single dad who will later go insane as his daughter Rosa disappears ever more into the city’s criminal underworld.
Slowly, inexorably, the gravitational pull of the fugitive author transposes onto the mystery of the killings. This connection finally resolves in the Part about the Crimes, an exhaustive forensic catalogue of every sexual homicide from 1993 to 1997, alongside the stories of the cops, politicians, lawyers, journalists, and drug lords involved.
It will be the most horrifying 300 pages you ever read. You will ask yourself, a hundred times over, why you are being asked to undergo this. The endless repetition, the cold scientific language, the hopeless inevitability: You will become desensitized. You will find yourself in limbo between fiction and facticity, intensity and alienation. Can poetry exist in a police report? You will be revived by hatred for your own numbness. And still you will be accused of a resistance to continue, of a desire to look away, to forget, to move on with your life, like so many others.
“No one pays attention to these killings,” says reporter Guadalupe Roncal, “but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”
“Society tended to filter death through the fabric of words… Everything [was] trimmed to fit our fear… During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the women killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation.” (2666)
In many ways, the Latin America of today stems from the political and economic tumult of the 1970s. In Mexico, the decade began in the shadow of U.S.-backed authoritarian suppression—the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, in which the military opened fire on civilians peacefully protesting the upcoming Olympics, and the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971, in which 120 left-wing student demonstrators were gunned down in the street, and even at the hospitals to which they fled. These events formed the backdrop of the so-called guerra sucia, in which Mexico’s PRI government used the pretext of Nixon’s War on Drugs to kidnap and kill hundreds of alleged rebels. It was into this bloody avalanche that Bolaño, who was living in Mexico City at the time, came of age.
Liberation, repression, genocide. The same tragic story—a bill footed by U.S. leaders in the name of the Cold War—played out across the rest of 1970s Latin America. In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, and Chile, militaries seized power.
In 1973, Bolaño had returned to his homeland of Chile to embrace Salvador Allende’s new socialist democracy. That same year, Pinochet’s military staged a coup d’état and Bolaño himself was arrested on charges of terrorism. He was eventually released; his prison guards, it turns out, were old childhood friends.
The U.S. was fighting its own internal battles at the time. The setting might seem familiar: decades of loose monetary policy, profligate spending, uncontrolled expansion of credit, two major oil crises, a culture of speculation. By the end of the 1970s, inflation was running over 11 percent per annum.
A movie, in short, which is currently being remade. The bill is coming due on another wave of American spendthrift, and the far-right is once again on the rise in Latin America. Despite our “strong” economy, the majority of U.S. citizens are already living in a silent depression: in fact, real GDP growth per capita is actually lower than in both the Long and Great Depressions (1873-1896, 1929-1947).
We are turning back the clock.
In 1980, newly elected Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker tightened the federal funds rate to 20 percent in an effort to contain inflation, plunging the global economy into a deep recession. Interest rates spiked worldwide; the U.S. dollar reached escape velocity. For a Latin America awash in dollar-denominated financing, this was a body blow. Currencies collapsed as debt burdens soared. By 1982, 16 countries, from Argentina to Mexico, announced they could no longer service their debt.
The resultant international “rescue”—led by the U.S., no less—may have been a lifeline for Latin America, but it was made contingent on the acceptance of domestic economic reforms. “The missionaries of civilization,” as Enrique Dussel called them, had spoken. Across Central and South America, the authoritarianism of the 1970s rebranded itself in the neoliberal terms of the Washington Consensus: market-based economies, deficit caps, free trade, and liberalization of foreign investment.
Despite staving off the abyss, the economies of Latin America never left purgatory. Most couldn’t navigate the austerity measures foisted upon them. Unemployment shot higher, and wages plummeted. A Lost Decade began.
With the advent of NAFTA, a door opened in the North. By the turn of the millennium, Ciudad Juárez had emerged as an industrial gateway, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Impoverished migrants arrived from all over Latin America in search of work.
“And they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of the starving-to-death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighborhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and, sometimes, in the distance, the silhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.”
“Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that’s a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence.” (2666)
Where did the crimes begin and end? As with any systemic problem, the issues raised by so much history are interconnected and complex. Change happens faster than we can process it, much less assign responsibility, and then a hundred years pass, we learn to look away, we forget things haven’t changed at all, and our children’s children are still looking for the answer.
Don’t think you aren’t implicated.
How do books change with time? We change.
In the beginning, reading was pure escape—a way to experience the many places and ideas that very much did not exist for a prepubescent young buck in the Deep South. Books weren’t an emotional exercise; I hadn’t accumulated enough life experience for real empathy to resonate. I also felt little ownership over where my life was taking me; mostly I was just doing things people told me I should do. I read an unhealthy amount of fantasy.
Around when I went to college, books took on a normative quality. I was just starting to find my footing in a world that still felt boundless, and with reading came the promise of learning, assimilation, and idealism. There was some urgency to this; it was as a student that, for the first time in my life, I started experiencing bouts of serious depression. Books were a fast car out of the echo chamber of my brain. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Kafka and Mann. Swann’s Way, Memoirs of Hadrian, Sebald’s Austerlitz. I learned to take joy in language. I could make myself smile at lyrical turns of phrase. Slowly, the voice in my head began to speak in different words. What did it mean to live a good life?
When I started working full-time, having serious relationships, traveling, spending money, growing up, reading changed again. I had built a life, or a semblance of it, and that life suddenly felt like a direct consequence of choices I had made. I reached the end of various ropes. I quit, I moved away, I started a company and left that too. I lost friends and made new ones and some of the old ones came back to me. Books became, finally, a tool of reflection—something like a two-way mirror, a journal kept by my unlived lives. What dreams did I still have? What parts of myself could I not let go? What was being asked of me? This is when I found Bolaño.
Literature is a living constitution. Your experience of it is always evolving, and in the course of that change your life is revealed to you. Ram Dass was right: Treat every book you read like God in drag.
What does it mean to be implicated? Bolaño’s memories are, of course, hardly my own. Bolaño himself never saw Ciudad Juárez. The facts do not connect us. But in the right kind of light, or the curved space of literature, we are all standing in each other’s reflection.
Is it possible for two people to close their eyes and see the same thing?
Here is what I see: A woman standing in a park with her suitcase, surrounded by trees. A man in a suit standing over a Red Bull and a beer, loosening his tie with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. A murmuration of starlings in Copenhagen, marijuana in the air. A python dangling from a tree in a pagoda, as a nun eats a bowl of rice below. The moments just before someone I love steps on a train. Waiting in line for a tarot reader at a wedding in Delhi. The woman in front of me will be brought to tears by her fortune.
For three hundred pages, we ask: Who is responsible for this?
There is no answer. In the case of the femicides, the act of killing went far beyond the act of murder. There were innumerable accomplices, cover-ups, cartel associations, dirty cops, dirty politicians. There was also the U.S., who spent an entire decade subsidizing the massacre of democracy in Latin America, who inflicted a perverse form of indentured servitude upon those same countries in the decade that followed, and who blew open the gates of globalization at the expense of a generation of exploited labor in the decade to come.
“If a maquiladora is the factory where the miller (the multinational corporations that own the twin-plant industry) grinds the wheat, and if the wheat represents the poor brown female labor force that is ground down, exploited, and discarded, are the murdered women and girls of Juárez the maquila, or miller’s compensation—the extra ounce of revenue in a system that already profits in the billions? Or are they simply the price that Mexico (the farmer) is paying for the privilege of free trade?” (Gaspar de Alba, “Poor Brown Female: The Miller's Compensation”)
All of this is what Bolaño meant when he said, with one foot in the grave, that literature is a high-stakes game. A war is being fought over the bylines of history. The mystery of the crimes is also the secret of the missing author: Who is the artist of the people’s suffering?
Poets, detectives, revolutionaries—for Bolaño, they all transact in the same currency. That is, they ask a single question, making good on a debt reaching farther back in history than we can see, to 1970s Latin America and beyond.
Four years ago, when I finished 2666, I came across this Ashbery line:
Because life is short / We must remember to keep asking it the same question / Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer
It is the question of a lifetime.
// end of part I //
P.S. My b.f.f. and work husband Mauricio González-Aranda wrote a brilliant essay about Ciudad Juárez, where he was born, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Léela.
***
What does this have to do with Balenciaga? I’ve always wanted to say that.
Here is an aside I don’t have the energy to explore: In World War II, while Balenciaga himself was out hobnobbing with Francisco Franco, his fashion house got rich making dresses for the wives of Nazi generals.
Their “subversive” clothing still sells, of course. You can buy a pair of cream-colored running shorts, carbon-neutral, for $795.
This made me so happy to read. I discovered Bolaño at university with 2666 and was then re-radicalised by The Savage Detectives a couple years later. I love your point about fiction being a lens to shape understanding in a post-truth, as those books had that effect on me. I think the most lasting idea that his books imprinted on me was that it is absurd to imagine that a story, life, should have a clear plot - all of the pleasure and truth of it comes in the experience of it.
I have been afraid to revisit these books as they are so tied up to my early twenties: the stories are so intertwined with my own memories of the excitement and trauma of growing up. There was an eroticism in that. My girlfriend and I would send each other cryptic allusions to page numbers of the most sensual passages. Perhaps I worry that in re-reading I will erode those truths by discovering new, less keening ones.