Last week, 2666 project contributor Maria Bustillos wrote about the passage in The Part About the Critics where a taxi driver is badly beaten. The scene is jarring. Three sophisticated, middle-class university professors are one moment in a taxi on their way home from a fancy restaurant; the next moment they are involved in a brutal street fight, unleashing a violence we didn’t even notice under the surface before. According to her post, “it is no surprise whatsoever that the first blows administered (predictably, by Espinoza) are described as ‘Iberian.’”
I hadn’t really thought of that myself, but that post immediately came to mind as I finished The Part About the Critics, which concludes with three of the critics making a trip to Mexico, to a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez. We’re not into The Part About the Crimes yet, which I expect to be beyond jarring, but there is a definite undercurrent of this violence the whole time the critics are in Mexico.
The first night they spend there, Liz Norton looks out her hotel room window in Mexico City and sees a taxi driver beaten by hotel employees. Their guide, El Cerdo (who has dirty fingernails), explains that there is a “war between taxi drivers and doormen”; this is an exotic place. In Santa Teresa, Pelletier finds a chunk missing from his toilet bowl: “It looked as if someone had ripped it off with a hammer. Or as if someone had picked up another person who was already on the floor and smashed that person’s head against the toilet, thought Norton.” The critics can feel the change, that “something strange was going on,” but eventually:
…[T]hey lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn’t the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn’t make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing.
Bustillos notes of the earlier violent incident, “I think that Bolaño is saying, here, that machismo is a literally uncontrollable source of violence; that no matter how ‘civilized’ a man is, he will always be in some danger of a catastrophe like Espinoza’s.” The critics may have no intention of raising their voices, but they’re in a strange and tense place, where so many women have been killed over the years that a native boy “had to repeat it two or three times because neither Espinoza nor Pelletier could believe his ears.” The cool English Norton leaves Pelletier and Espinoza in Mexico to continue in debauched style.
As he is good at everything else, Bolaño is good at dealing with this violent undercurrent. There is great brutality and control, and it has me both worried and reassured about what I know is coming up further on. The ambiance is already intense, but I trust that it’s part of something, in service to the whole.
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