Before Read online

  Praise for Texas: The Great Theft

  Nominated for the INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2016

  Shortlisted for the PEN TRANSLATION AWARD 2015

  Winner of the TYPOGRAPHICAL ERA TRANSLATION AWARD 2014

  World Literature Today’s 75 NOTABLE TRANSLATIONS of 2014

  “Brutal, poetic, hilarious and humane…a masterly crafted tale.”

  —SJÓN, author of From the Mouth of the Whale

  “Utterly entertaining—a comic tour de force. I loved the book and think it deserves a very wide readership.”

  —PHILIP LOPATE author of Portrait Inside My Head

  “Boullosa’s tale evokes a history that couldn’t be more relevant to today’s immigration battles in the US.”

  —JANE CIABATTARI, BBC

  “Boullosa’s tour de force account of this bloody legacy…is not a documentary. Rather, it is satire at its highest, presenting numerous grotesque biographies of the alien invaders, while also lightly reviewing the genres that have made Wild West literature part of the national identity and psyche.”

  —NICOLÁS KANELLOS, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

  “Many of the events in Texas seem as if they just happened yesterday… It’s a story that shows the foundation of many border issues today.”

  —MERCEDES OLIVERA, Dallas Morning News

  “Boullosa is one of Mexico’s most respected writers and, with a book as rich as this under her belt, it’s not difficult to understand why… We’re introduced to a cast list so extensive it rivals Dickens and a novel of such depth and scope that I can’t resist comparing it to Tolstoy’s work.”

  —GARY PERRY, Foyle’s Bookstore (LONDON, UK)

  “Historical fiction at its very best, avoiding all semblance of caricature or appeals to stereotype. The classic Western.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “What is both moving and also lucid about Boullosa’s prose, though, is her ability to take one in and out of a scene fraught with disorder and violence, and place one back in the rich spirit of humility encountering sublime beauty.”

  —MATT PINCUS, Bookslut

  “Think Catch-22 on the Mexican border. A surprisingly funny, intensely complex and occasionally shocking take on the revisionist Western.”

  —JUSTIN SOUTHER, Malaprops Bookstore (ASHEVILLE, NC)

  “Evidence that our ideas about postmodern cowpoke tales have been woefully premature…What is outstanding in Boullosa’s work is the deep sympathy expressed for every human encountered.”

  —ROBERTO ONTIVEROS, Dallas Morning News

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY CARMEN BOULLOSA

  A Narco History

  with Mike Wallace

  Cleopatra Dismounts

  translated by Geoff Hargreaves

  Leaving Tabasco

  translated by Geoff Hargreaves

  Texas: The Great Theft

  translated by Samantha Schnee

  They’re Cows We’re Pigs

  translated by Leland H. Chambers

  When Texas Recaptures Mexico: Essays

  translated by Nicolás Kanellos

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501C3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.

  Copyright © 1989 by Carmen Boullosa

  Originally published as Antes in Mexico City, Mexico by Vuelta in 1989.

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Peter Bush

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Phillip Lopate

  First edition, 2016

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-941920-29-9 (ebook)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2015960721

  —

  Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com

  Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.

  To José María Espinasa,

  to Jonás Aguirre Liguori, when you were still unborn

  to María José Boullosa, who I hope is resting peacefully

  Those of you who felt the heart beat of night

  those who through relentless insomnia heard

  the shutting of a door, the echo of a distant car

  a vague shuddering, a slight noise…

  In the moments of mysterious silence,

  when the forgotten arise from their prisons,

  at the hour of the dead, at the hour of repose,

  you can read these lines drenched in bitterness…

  As into a glass I pour them from my sorrow

  distant memories and sombre misfortunes

  the sad nostalgias of my flower-drunk soul,

  the mourning of my party-sorrowed heart,

  The pain of not being what I should have been,

  the loss of the realm that was made for me,

  the thought that at one moment I might not have been,

  the dream my life has known since I was born…

  All this comes amid the deep silence

  which night wraps around earthly illusion,

  and I feel an echo as from the heart of the world

  which penetrates and moves my own.

  Rubén Darío

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  INTRODUCTION

  Phillip Lopate

  Before, like Scheherezade, she produced her thousand and one novels, short stories, poems, plays, pamphlets, essay collections and literary critiques, before she wrote her historical fictions about Cleopatra, Caribbean pirates, Cervantes on the battlefield on Lepanto, and nineteenth century Texas border skirmishes, before she did her investigative reports of contemporary narco-terrorism and her rediscoveries of neglected women writers, Carmen Boullosa wrote Before (Antes), a haunting and haunted novella. It was brought out in 1989 by Vuelta, the publishing house founded and run by Octavio Paz. She was thirty-five years old at the time, and received the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for this novella, and for a volume of her poems and an essay collection also published that year. You might say, however, that Before launched her, and she has been soaring ever since.

  We turn to it now with the realization that there can already be found here many quintessential Boullosa stylistics and preoccupations: the rush of urgent speech, teetering between humor and panic; the agreeable pact with melancholy; the appearance of grotesque, supernatural and sensually erotic elements in everyday life; the female body as a contested site of wayward power and unrest.

  On a superficial level, the book is a compendium of childhood memories, touching almost randomly on ecstasy, shame, confusion, pleasure, envy, pride—the sort of material one expects to find in an autobiographical novel by an emerging writer. But several elements render it decidedly odd. First, it purports to be told by a ghost: the narrator states that she is dead, and therefore is summoning memories from the grave—though there is very little ghostlike about her, other than this assertion. There is none of the usual attention paid in ghost stories to the mechanics of mobility or corporeality, and the narrative voice is so lively, so present, that some readers may be tempted to refuse to believe that the protagonist is in fact dead, and
treat the claim solely as a metaphor (perhaps to the author’s horror), while still fully enjoying the tale. Second, the narrator keeps insisting that Esther, who is clearly her mother, is not her mother. Since she seems genuinely fond of the woman, this refusal appears, on the face of it, perverse if not inexplicable. Toward the end of the book, Esther even cries out, “Please say mom at least now!” and the girl finally relents, crying, “Oh Esther, I loved you so much, so much, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom…” At which point the mother dies.

  Why these two conceits? They might initially be seen as a deriving from an experimental mindset. Boullosa’s first novel, Better Disappeared, was an even more experimental text, and it set up the trope of Woman as in danger of being erased or negated, which is carried further along in Before. Perhaps the author, a feminist, was trying to say something about the difficulty of women asserting a self in Mexico’s patriarchal macho society. But I think there is more to it than that. Allow me to fall into the vulgar error of bringing certain personal facts about the author’s life into an analysis of a work of fiction.

  Boullosa’s mother, a psychologist, died when she was 15. Not long after, her father remarried, and Carmen did not get along with her stepmother. This was a very traumatic period for her: losing her mother cleaved her childhood in two, between a “before” and “after,” you might say. It seems to me the mother’s death is central to this novella. The book begins by stressing the narrator’s fear: “my fear, my panic, my terror.” Children are often afraid, but later on in the text the narrator tells us she was not the kind of kid to be afraid of the dark, or be thrown by little disturbances: she was in fact “brave.” So this particular fear could be a presentiment, the terror of possibly losing her mother, the worst thing that could happen to a child. Turning herself into a ghost (playing dead) and refusing to acknowledge that her mother is her mother would be two ways to avoid the full impact of that grief.

  The unnamed protagonist’s fear is characterized as a response to certain “noises” or, more often, “steps” that keep pursuing her, like in Cat People, that classy horror movie by Val Lewton, It could be argued that she is afraid not only of her mother dying, but of her body’s impending physiological changes. For those raised in a sexually repressive all-girls’ Catholic school, puberty can seem both catastrophic and liberating, and the blood of menstruation loom as simultaneously Gothic and normal. When the protagonist’s period finally comes, it coincides with the mother’s death, as though there were a causal link; and the narrator even expresses guilt by saying “it was my fault.” By becoming a woman, she has both emulated and competed with her mother, thereby “annihilating” her—just as, earlier, she had encroached on her artist mother’s field by doing some peculiar drawings.

  Boullosa intentionally invites us to conflate her heroine with herself by having the narrator state matter-of-factly that she was born in 1954 in Mexico City, exactly as was the author. She also makes a point of insisting that “everything I’ve told you is real. I haven’t invented a single word, I’ve written my descriptions trying as much as possible to stick to the facts.” But here I think she is playing with us, fudging the meta-line between nonfiction and fiction. For starters, Boullosa gives the narrator two older, distant, chilly half-sisters, while she herself had a home packed with half a dozen younger siblings. No doubt there are many other deviations from life in the book.

  More important than invention is the estranging, ritualizing angle of vision Boullosa applies to seemingly ordinary objects and mundane occurrences. Scissors pursue, eucalyptus trees sabotage, an embroidery needle pierces the maid’s hand, a turtle bleeds, red nail polish on a nipple becomes stigmata, panties get swiped while sitting on the toilet, petticoats turn up burned. “Making it strange” is of course a recognized part of the modernist aesthetic. It is also very Latin American. Though magic realism has become a tired, somewhat debased concept, one can nevertheless detect in Boullosa’s work certain correspondences with, say, Juan Rulfo’s intermingling of the living and the dead, or her friend Roberto Bolaño’s maximalist loquacity, or Borges’ rationalist love of fantasy, or Adolfo Bioy-Casares’ mastery of the novella form, or Clarise Lispector’s weird, body-obsessed stories. Boullosa’s magic is certainly more cheerful than Lispector’s: it begins as a child’s sense of wonder, then suffers loss of innocence, only to surface again as worldly re-enchantment. The heroine is no angel, and she gladly indulges in bad behavior from time to time as proof of her obstinate agency. Still, she is stunned to find that she can betray a friend so easily, or deface an expensive article of clothing for no reason. That the world is still a mystifying place, touched by the sometimes bitter, sometimes amusingly picaresque recognition of everyone’s robust capacity to act self-servingly, goes a long way toward accounting for that comic spirit which is irrepressibly present in all of Carmen Boullosa’s writing.

  We may also note her tonal humor, seen in the proliferation of exclamation points and rhetorical questions, the alternation of brusque statements with long chattering sentences, like the schoolgirls playing the game of “conversation,” imitating old ladies. Boullosa’s vigorously conversational style maintains a steady, intimate bond with her readers, even as it keeps us off-balance. Less noticeable, perhaps, is a current of anger that runs underneath the humor and high spirits, as when our protagonist thrashes a girl who had snatched her sister’s valise: “they tried to pull me off her, but the rage I felt was such that it wouldn’t let me open my jaws as the leg owner shrieked…” In Boullosa, there is always a trace of political anger or protest. Among other things, Before is a subtle portrait of the Mexican upper-middle class, circa late ’50s-early ’60s, who expect nothing but service from the lower classes. They seem shielded from the heavier blows of life, which is why the mother’s death comes as such a shock, almost an obscenity. This novella, germinated in grief, or what Thomas Mann called “disorder and early sorrow,” has been transformed through Boullosa’s literary art and salutary detachment into a lyrical, playful gem.

  New York City, February 2016

  1

  Where were we before we got to this point? Didn’t they tell you? Who could tell you if you had nobody to ask? And do you yourself remember? How could you remember? Particularly as you’re not here…And if I keep on? Well, if I keep on perhaps you’ll show up.

  How would I like you to be? I’d like you to be whatever you were! Just warm, not necessarily hot, a piece of dough, to touch, to feel…I’d be happy to feel something, feel it gently, to caress without scratching or hurting and with nothing but nothing at all left on my hands…nothing at all…not a single mark…

  But nobody’s with me. Nobody, apart from my fear, my panic, my terror…Fear of whom? There’s no way I can be afraid! I’ve shown in a thousand ways how harmless I am, like a duck on the lakeside waiting for children to throw me a scrap of food or leave something in the paper they carelessly drop…But they’re disgusted by me, disgusted, disgusted is the word. I dirtied their “day out in the country,” dirtied their lakeside breakfast, turned their breakfast haven into a sludgy mess…kids, I’m like you, leave something for me, someone wait for me, stay with me, just for a second, come on, kids!

  They leave. Their Dad will take them straight to school now. They didn’t have that disappointed look of wanting to breakfast here…

  But I’ll start at the beginning. Sure, I was like those children, I was one of those awkward children, and here I am cut off from their world forever. Children! I was like you once!

  I really must overcome my fear and start telling my story.

  I was born in Mexico City in 1954. I clearly remember the day I was born. The fear, naturally, I understand her and don’t reproach her—perhaps if I got to be in her situation (I never imagine I could be so lucky) I’d also feel afraid.

  The fear was because of grandmother, not to do with me. What about me? I still couldn’t see myself…I was so defenseless…More defenseless than any child of my age, than any other newly born child.r />
  I return to the fear, a woman’s fear: the young woman bathed in sweat, her body suffering the violence of birth stripped of all coquettish charms, visibly beautiful. That day she was paler than usual and when I saw her for the first time every small feature reflected the fear I never imagined would spring upon me and lock its jaw.

  Her name was completely different to mine. More resonant, a name I’d give to a son if I had one. Her name was Esther.

  Although I’d always seen her in a very distinctive light, I loved her as much as if she were my mother.

  How long did it take me to realize she wasn’t my mother? I always knew, but up to the day they came for me, everything acted as if she were.

  On the other hand I don’t remember him that night. What was he doing? I’ll say he was at work, give him the benefit of the doubt, but when I saw her pallor, the strange mess between her sheets and the cold (pitiless and uncaring) hands around her, I understood everything. What good was her defiant beauty if the man she wanted wouldn’t love her? Perhaps she was too beautiful to be loved by anyone. I don’t know.

  The moment I was born, my grandmother stopped talking outside the house. Complained no more. She took a breath and something or other soothed her. Was it I? She fell asleep immediately. The woman who ought to be my mother, on the other hand, did not sleep; she gave me a look that ran over my body, anointed every component part with its respective name, turned me upside down with a feeling similar to tenderness, as nobody has ever looked at me since.

  My grandmother looked at me disappointedly because I wasn’t the boy she would have liked. My dad…he didn’t look at me that day or any subsequent day, till I lost count. Then, when I stopped noticing he wasn’t looking at me, he did look and did play with me. He was fantastic to play games with.

  The girls had no idea about playing games. As a baby, she invented memories for me to send me to sleep. I remembered (played at remembering) how one of the two Esthers had played with me: at making tea, at mom and dad, at dolls, at whatever. She said that to soothe me while they lay their too-soft hands on me and sang out-of-tune songs. But I liked them a lot; not only did I doze off with them but when I woke up in the mornings my first thoughts were of those two, and when I left school it was no different. For most of my childhood.