“Not Even the Dead” by Juan Gómez Bárcena [Excerpt]

Officially out last Tuesday, Not Even the Dead is a throwback—an ambitious, philosophical, grand novel taking on nothing less than the history of progress over the past four hundred years. In it, Juan—at the bequest of the Spanish government—pursues “Juan the Indian” across time and Mexico, almost catching up to him time and again, but instead finding a mixture of hope and wreckage left in his wake. 

From the recent NY Times review:

Below is an excerpt—translated by Katie Whittemore, whose translation of this novel is as ambitious and admirable as the book itself—from a section when Juan is approaching the US-Mexico border, and is in a place like Ciudad Juarez.

You can purchase Not Even the Dead from better bookstores everywhere, our website, Bookshop.org, or wherever you get your books.

*

Juan opens his eyes in the dark, not waking completely. He stays like that for a time, on the edge of his dream. He’s on the train, he thinks at first. And then: I’ve fallen off the train, the train has run over my legs, my arms, my head. He is surprised to be alive, if that darkness isn’t actually death. I’m dreaming, he thinks. I’m in Navaja’s car. I’m in the Chichimeca desert. On his horse. In the arms of the Little Widow. In the arms of my wife. Then he perceives the faint outline of square window, and on the other side, the red and yellow lights of automobiles speeding past on the highway. Much more slowly, memories return to him, in ambiguous waves. He feels along the wall until he encounters what turns out to be a switch and the light from the lamp blinds him like the flash of a gunshot. Gradually he comes into a heavy, viscous awareness of his surroundings. The lamp. The vase where the same withered flowers languish. The bed, his bed, immune to the train’s violent jerking and his horse’s trot. Finally, he remembers, or decides he remembers. Everything is calm. Only the same rhythmic sound persists; not the Beast’s vibration, but a hand knocking on his door.

He stands to open that door.

He sees a very young woman on the other side. A girl whose childhood. has been diligently erased, with deep red lipstick and dabs of makeup. She has a bottle of tequila in one hand and two small glasses in the other. A certain expression of neglect. Her eyes shine with a light that is at once familiar and remote.

“Can I come in, papaíto?”

She can. She does so, slowly, hesitant, with her too-short skirt, flesh-colored bra, and swing of her cheap earrings. She sets the bottle and glasses on the night table and then turns to him with something that isn’t quite determination but aspires to be.

“You’re not going to sit?”

Because she is already sitting on the bed, on the very edge of the bed, as if she would like to occupy as little space as possible. Juan is still standing, his hand on the door handle, looking at the girl’s bare legs. Her hands, so small, as if created to hold a piece of art. Her white throat. In some ways, she reminds him of the women he saw advertised from the train, depicted on huge signs on both sides of the train track; women who were stunningly beautiful but also a little faded, mistreated by the elements.

“They call me the Güerita,” the Güerita says.

“I’m Juan.”

“I know. They told me you’d be waiting for me.”

He waits a few moments before closing the door. Then he sits down beside the girl. He opens the bottle and fills both glasses. The girl accepts hers in silence; her hands don’t meet around the glass. She isn’t even looking at it. Her eyes have just discovered the book on the night table, open to the Padrote’s page.

“You know him?”

The Güerita is about to reply, but in the end says nothing. Her eyes are fixed on him again, with an intensity that might be confused for fear. Eyes very open but simultaneously afraid, as if they were plumbing the depths of a well. At first, Juan doesn’t catch the significance of that look.

“Am I so like him?”

She nods slightly. The glass doesn’t quite make it to her lips.

“Navaja says you’re brothers.”

“Half-brothers.”

They drink from their glasses at the same time. Between them, a silence has opened, made not only from a few centimeters of mattress, but from minutes or centuries of distance.

“He was the one who brought you here, right?” Juan asks.

“Yes.”

Juan takes another drink, long and full, to decide what he needs to ask.

“Did he force you?”

She shakes her head so vigorously she almost spills. No, no he didn’t force her. The Padrote, his brother, his half-brother that is, is a good man. If she’s there, it’s because it’s her choice; she wants to make that clear. She entered prostitution with all five senses, nobody forced her. She was looking for an opportunity to earn some pesos and the Padrote gave it to her. How could that be bad?

“You’re here because you want to be.”

“Yes.”

The girl takes another swig of tequila. It’s a long swig, deliberate, long enough to decide what she is going to say next.

“The Padrote is a good man,” she repeats.

*

Juan Gómez Bárcena

The girl’s life encompasses twenty-one years—or that’s what the girl says, at least, although she doesn’t look more than eighteen—and takes as long to be recounted as the time she needs to empty three glasses of tequila. She talks about herself this way sometimes, in the third person, as if hers was a story she could better understand from a distance or from greater heights. Maybe this is why it doesn’t exactly seem to be a person’s life, but a chronicle of a character who never existed or the obituary of a girl already dead. There are, as in all the stories Juan has heard, certain common elements. The south. A birthplace that was poor or hungry or wretched. To the north, a drain that swallows up everything it touches, first her papa, then her mama; later, her older and younger siblings. One day, the gravitational force of that drain would end up catching her, too. She was eighteen at the time, although it seems to Juan that when the girl says twenty-one she means eighteen and fifteen when she says eighteen. Before setting off, she was told to leave behind anything that could identify her at home, so goodbye passport, library card, bills. Even shopping receipts. She was also told to neutralize her accent, because then there was no way to find out where she came from, and they’d have nowhere to deport her to. She followed those instructions to a T, and now nobody can guess her nationality. Try if you don’t believe me, papa.to, she says. Don’t know? Her clients often try, and they almost always fail. Guatemala, they say. Salvador, Honduras. They’ve even taken her for Argentine. And she says: Nope, nope, nope. But I’m going to tell you, papaíto. I’m Nicaraguan. From Managua. But only to you: to the police, I’m pure Mexican. Although if she really thinks about it, she says, staring into her glass, what is pure Mexican? What purity is there in anything, if we’re not talking about pure heroin or purebred dogs, which, by the way, die sooner the purer they are. Well. They told her not to take anything and nothing was what she took. Nothing except a few hundred dollars in her socks, and a suitcase with a change of clothes and a Virgin of Guadalupe prayer card. She packed the prayer card face up, so the Virgen could breathe. And the journey had its setbacks and its small tragedies; not all of those who accompanied her had the same luck, but thanks to God nothing happened to her, the Beast was good to her, maybe it respected her because she prayed a lot to the Virgin or maybe—and it scares her to think this—it was nothing but chance, plain and simple. The fact is she reached the border in ten or twelve days, safe and sound and with most of the dollars still balled up in her left sock. But in the end, it turned out she didn’t have enough for the crossing; the prices changed year to year, and in the previous eighteen months, the polleros’ fees had gone up: supply and demand, sister, they told her, this is America, this is the free market. And so she tried—unsuccessfully— to climb the border wall, along with two guys who also didn’t have the money to pay the pollero. And then they tried to swim across the Río Bravo—successfully, in a sense, because even though she didn’t manage to reach the other side, she didn’t drown either, not like one of the boys did. It was in that moment, soaked to the bone and shaking, when she decided to give up the dream, or a specific part of the dream, and settled down right here. In this city that kisses the border with El Paso and from that kiss, from that species of encounter or chat or intercourse between the two cities, nothing good is born. A city with a gentleman’s name, but that was better suited to the name of a murdered female, and there are so many to choose from. Of course, back then she didn’t know anything about this city, nothing about the murdered women, nothing, really, about almost anything. The worst thing about poverty, the girl says, is that it’s not just your pockets that are empty, but your head, too. It costs money to know certain things. And she had nothing, knew nothing, just what was advertised on TV, that Coca-Cola is life and that it’s a good time for the great taste of McDonald’s; that Vicente Fox is the change you need and Felipe Calderón wants you to catch his passion for México and you know that Peña Nieto will deliver. Because advertising, the girl says, is free. It might be the only free thing in this world. Anyway. She arrived in this city whose name she doesn’t want to remember with very little, with a couple hundred dollars and the address of her sister-in-law’s friend written on the back of a flyer. Her sister-in-law’s friend took her in as best she knew and could manage. The next day, that woman got her a job at one of the city’s textile factories. Because sewing was among the few things the girl knew how to do. There, in that sort of stable or hothouse or mammoth cathedral, where all the people were women, bent over their sewing machines, strafing scraps of yellow canvas. It was so bright indoors that outside always looked like night. Very white light, like a highway gasworks. Or a hospital waiting room. Or the front window of a cafeteria open twenty-four hours. In fact, the factory was open twenty-fours a day, and inside you could eat lunch, shower, even work out in a kind of gym. When she earned enough, the girl told herself, she would cross the border. And that, earning enough, might still take a few months, because the pay was, shall we say, somewhere between low and really low, but her sister-in-law’s friend told her no, they couldn’t complain, especially considering what was going on. The girl, who knew nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather she believed something in a blind and irrational way, a way she herself couldn’t explain. She knew things had always been bad. And that they would continue to be bad. And that the poor would continue to find reasons not to complain. She was poor and—in accordance with her own theory—she didn’t complain. Besides, what was there to complain about, what with the trimestral bonuses for employees and labor conventions, her sister-in-law’s friend recited, impassioned; there were prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, employee of the month, employee of the week, social security, free uniform laundry service; they took out a life insurance policy for you while you were alive and paid for your funeral if, God forbid, you died. It was enough for the girl because the girl was going to leave. But between leaving and not leaving, while she machine-gunned scraps of yellow canvas in that stable or cathedral or hothouse, while she shared a mattress in a shared room in a shared apartment, while those things were happening, she says, other things were happening that she disregarded, at least in the beginning. There were tiny notices in the papers, between the crime section and the horoscopes. Flyers pasted on bus shelters or streetlights, and on them the faces and names of very young girls. Girls who weren’t old enough. Old enough for what? What does she know, old enough to be alone, to be lost; to be, basically, all blurry in a black and white photograph, as if their own disappearance had caught them off guard. It’s true that, in time, all or almost all of them turned up, poor things, mutilated and dirty with dust and blood, abandoned in the empty lots in Lomas de Poleo or the landfills of Santa Elena or the Cerro Bola hillside, under a jumbo inscription written in whitewash that said READ THE BIBLE. Just like that, in the imperative: Read the Bible. They turned up around there, and the newspaper devoted the same tiny space to them again, only now they were a female cadaver, and in the days following the press release someone, merciful or pragmatic, went around taking down the flyers with those photos that looked like they’d been taken for a First Communion. Other times, other bodies turned up, bodies no one identified or claimed, women for whom nobody had put up posters, and then the press release was even smaller. This is awful, I would say to my sister-in-law’s friend, the girl says, although it’s probably fairer to say that by that time she was not so much the sister-in-law’s friend as her own. The girl’s. What’s awful? the friend would ask. Well, the stuff about those poor little girls. And she, the girl’s friend, would gesture with whatever she had in her hand, a little scrap of yellow canvas, for example, she would make that gesture and say that it was sad, of course it was sad, but those little girls weren’t little girls; most of them, in fact, were lost. The girl didn’t understand: well of course they’re lost, haven’t you seen the posters? But her sister-in-law’s friend, the girl’s friend, didn’t mean that. She meant that they worked in prostitution, did she get it? They took drugs or sold them or both. They went out alone at night or in bad company or tempting men in roadside bars. They were girls who paid for the trip north with their bodies, the body’s ATM, the cuerpomático—and on saying this, cuerpomático—the sister-in- law’s friend touched her breasts. Oh, the girl says she responded at the time. That was all. And she was left thinking about the pictures she’d seen on the posters, which looked like they were from a First Communion, or a quinceñera at most. She thought about that for a few days, about their First Communions, about where and how they had celebrated their fifteenth birthdays, and about how their parents must have suffered over the bad lives their daughters were living.

*

Word by word, drink by drink, the girl has drained her glass. Now she fills it again. Time for the second tequila has come and with it, the heaviest part of her story. Because the factory where the girl worked might have had labor agreements, and prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, and employee of the month, employee of the week, and social security, free laundry service for their uniforms, but it also had a very strict policy about punctuality. If you got to work late, even just a minute late, you didn’t get in. Two minutes. That was how late the sister-in-law’s friend was, the friend who was, by that time, the girl’s friend. At least that’s how the girl would remember her: as her friend. That’s how she has been fossilized in her memory: the wee hours of one morning in some summer month in such-and-such a year. It was two minutes past midnight: that she can state with certainty. Two minutes late and they wouldn’t let her in. That was as much as the girl knew and what she would later tell the police, when at eight o’clock in the morning she got home, never to see her friend again. She didn’t actually tell the police right at that time, because first she wanted to be patient, wait a couple of hours, and then because the Mexican police have their procedures and protocols. One was required to wait so many hours, entire days, before filing a report. How many hours, how many days? The girl doesn’t recall. What she does remember is that the commissioner who met with her was very gentlemanly, very polite, he pulled out a chair for her and even asked how she liked her coffee. She asked for it with a splash of milk because she’d heard that was a classy way to order, with a splash of milk, although she didn’t even like milk and only sort of liked coffee; but she was weakened by her tears and intended to please the police every way she could. I-don’t-know-what percentage of the muchachitas—that’s what he called them, “muchachitas”—reappear within seventy-two hours of their own volition. That’s what the commissioner said. The girl doesn’t remember the figure: it was a high percentage. And the other percent? she asked, coffee cup trembling in her hand. The commissioner raised his eyebrows. A short time later, they called to tell her that her friend belonged to the small percentage, not the large group. It wasn’t the norm: at least not according to the statistics. There were inquiries. There were witnesses who said they’d seen a black car stopped at the factory entrance, and also a white motorcycle, and a car that was a sort of a pistachio yellow. There was a small press release. There were posters with a blurry photograph. Her sister-in-law’s friend was nineteen and in the only picture the girl had of her, she was smiling and winking at the camera. That was how the neighbors would see her, multiplied and laminated and cyclostyled by the city’s streetlights and bus shelters. One afternoon, after posting a dozen leaflets around a block far from the apartment, she overheard a conversation between two boys who stopped to look at one of posters. The picture of her winking friend. She didn’t hear or didn’t recall hearing what the first kid said. But the second kid replied: One of those girls with the body’s ATM, he said, grabbing his balls. She started to cry and the boys asked her if she needed help and she answered that she didn’t need any help thank-you-very-much. But she didn’t cry, however, when the police called her. Identifying the body wasn’t as hard as she’d imagined, either: by then, she’d had lots of time to read plenty about the girls who got lost in that city. She knew what she could expect. She knew about ritualistic mutilations, nipples bitten off, rampageous rapes, the female cadavers—as they were called—that turned up with stiff arms, as if embracing the air; as if they were still embracing the last man who fucked them. In gynecologic positions, the experts said, which meant that the thing never ended, that, even dead, they looked like they were still getting fucked. As for her friend, the murder or murderers respected her, all things considered. Up to a certain point, at least. The deceased’s demise was caused by strangulation, and most certainly occurred the same day as the kidnapping. She had been raped, yes, but only vaginally; no matter how thoroughly they explored her rectum, no signs of abrasion, tearing, or dilation were found. That, the absence of anal rape, was of great consternation to the medical examiner. The modus operandi, he said with a sigh, appears to have changed. But she, the girl, wasn’t interested in the modus operandi. Over the preceding weeks she had read everything she could get her hands on about the wave of femicides, in the papers or online—because her factory, in addition to paying for your funeral if, God forbid, you died, also had a kind of employee internet café where they could call their relatives or play solitaire or do whatever they liked. She knew as much as could be known about the subject, which wasn’t a lot. She knew the guilty party was a serial killer who mimicked other serial killers, imitators in theory but just as lethal in practice. She knew blame lay with the patriarchy. She knew blame lay with excess: an excess of women and an excess of desert. Blame lay with the gringos, who crossed the border like they were going on safari, hunters ready to claim their female trophies. Blame lay with the Mexicans, who no longer believed in the Virgin of Guadalupe with the intensity of yesteryear. Blame lay with the government. With the narcos. With the narco-government. Blame lay with the women, who walked alone. Blame lay with the women, who walked in bad company. Blame lay with the women, who were pretty. Blame lay with shamanic rituals and black magic and the Santa Muerte and the Aztecs. Blame lay with living like this, partway between the city and the desert, between Mexico and the United States, between Heaven and Hell, on that irresolute land between something and nothing. Blame lay with values, with a lack of values. Blame lay with poverty. Blame lay with the desert. That’s what the girl read, and read, and read, like she’d read ads before, other claims, other highway signs and leaflets and billboards. Fuck it all. The factory, too: fuck it. As the deceased’s next of kin—her? she was her sister-in-law’s friend’s next of kin?—she was left a bit of money. With that money, she bought what she had come to buy. Prices had gone up again—supply and demand, sister, free market—but still she had enough, she had enough, and when she went to hand over the bill to the pollero, the girl, who, until that moment, had known nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather believed something blindly, irrationally, in a way she herself could not reasonably explain: that the price of her friend’s cheap death meant that she’d have to pay so dearly for the passage.

*

The end of the story lives at the bottom of the third glass of tequila. The girl looks down at it, and looks again before she finishes.

*

Purchase Not Even the Dead from better bookstores everywhere, our website, Bookshop.org, or wherever you get your books.