Lost in a Desert Fever Dream
Reviews
By Cory Oldweiler
Near the end of Mexican poet Clyo Mendoza’s entrancing debut novel, Fury, a young woman named Daniela, who works as a cleaner in a morgue, mentions that she and her lover Salvador, the morgue’s forensic surgeon, used to watch the same film over and over. Despite many opportunities, however, she never saw the middle of the film because they always started to have sex. She knows that the film opens with a man who “walks out of the desert toward the highway,” and that it ends with him recalling how his desire to be “lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him” was ultimately realized when he awoke “on fire [. . . ] blue flames burning the sheets of his bed,” abandoned by “the only two people he loved.” When Salvador first asked out Daniela, he recited part of that monologue to her, but she never grasped its significance. As she remarks the last time she and Salvador are together, she “could never understand how a man [in the film] who seemed so kindly could have done what he was saying he did: tie up a woman, go drinking, and try to make her jealous. But then it didn’t seem so very serious either; in fact, in some way, it was kind of romantic.”
The movie, which is never identified in the novel, is Wim Wenders’s 1984 masterpiece Paris, Texas, a lacerating portrait of a man emerging from an identity crisis brought on by his marriage falling apart. It’s one of two unidentified films (both from German directors) linked to Salvador, the second being Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In A Year of 13 Moons, his 1978 homage to his lover and frequent cast member Armin Meier, who died by suicide. As is fitting in such a twisty and twisted tale of identity, longing, and fate, identifying the references to the films enriches both the character and the novel as a whole.
Originally published in Spanish in 2021, Fury is newly available in English in an exacting translation by Christina MacSweeney. And while her edition rewards close, repeated readings, much of Mendoza’s often surreal story intentionally resists definitive interpretation, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Salvador and his childhood friend María. In a market flush with meticulously messaged, overly earnest contemporary fiction, the dizzying, knotty nature of Fury is a welcome delight. Which isn’t to imply that Mendoza shies away from capital-D discourse. She doesn’t. Her novel is all about the internal battle between competing versions of ourselves, whether those sides are aspects of our psychology, sexuality, or even corporeality. Fury also explores cycles of love and abuse, the corrupting force of violence, and the damaging emphasis society places on gender norms. And it does so in a way that is almost guaranteed to spark conversation, as all of these topics are addressed with a creative fearlessness that can feel deliriously untrammeled, starting with a timeline that repeatedly folds in on itself. This disorienting passage of time is perhaps trivial, however, when pitted against the fact that several people in the novel, mostly men, behave like or seemingly transform into dogs, in one case even fathering a litter of puppies with a woman.
MacSweeney’s translation rises to the heightened occasion throughout, registering alternately as chilling and clinical, capturing the lush, disturbing imagery of Mendoza’s prose with poetic precision: “Cicadas chirped, a frog freed the air trapped in its bulbous neck, dripping water murmured a damp psalm, horses shook themselves to scare off the flies and then moved in search of shade.” (The bigram “damp psalm” should win some kind of translation award, IMHO.) And again in the eerie observation that “only God and the Devil know how yucca smells when you set it afire near flesh.”
Set in and around the desert in a Mexico ravaged by interminable outbreaks of generic warfare, Fury focuses on the lives of three men—Lázaro, Juan, and the aforementioned Salvador—each of whom is a child of Vicente Barrera, an “itinerant seller of yarns” and feral pursuer of women. (The men have different mothers.) When he isn’t plying his wares, Barrera is based in Boca de Perro, a “miserable, dusty town full of ailing people” that acts as the omphalos for the novel’s disorienting fever dream, birthing broken, lonely souls desperate for companionship but often unable to find peace within their own bodies. The fact that Barrera hails from a place called Dog’s Mouth is notable, as he devolves into a canine, growling “like a rabid animal,” biting children until they’re black and blue, and spending “hours lying in the sun like a dog, like a drunk.” One character describes him (though he’s going by a different name due to the complications of the story) as “a dog that had once been a man, and if a man were to be changed into a dog, you can imagine how strong the fury of his confusion would be.”
War and warring forces—internal and external—are foregrounded from the start, as the novel opens with two opposing soldiers, Juan and Lázaro, deserting and becoming lovers living in a remote cave. Even the true identity of the nameless desert gets in on the act, as we are later told that “the desert had once been a sea.” Neither man remembers what he is fighting for, broken by the senseless violence. “Orders had taken away their will and, without it, they had become killers, killing themselves at the same time.” Juan keeps his own counsel and clams up when Lázaro asks about his past. He also chafes at his sexuality and physical desires, at one point saying that he wishes Lázaro were a woman so that he’d “feel like a regular man.” Lázaro has always known he was gay. He “delighted in being himself” and “never minded having, as he put it, a woman inside him.”
As the only character comfortable in his own skin, Lázaro is soon granted the relative tranquility of death, while Juan must continue his search, wondering “what’s the point of life if you’re always afraid of yourself?” His journey leads him to confront his father, Vicente, whose relationship to Lázaro is revealed by a photo Juan finds among his dead lover’s possessions, and ultimately to link up with a broken version of Salvador who is calling himself María and behaving increasingly like a dog: “Salvador’s body was there, but he himself had gone.”
Salvador and María are the heart of the novel, and they are introduced in an episode related by a seemingly neutral narrator. In it, María enters a supermarket after saying goodbye to Salvador “as if she were never coming back.” Salvador wakes up in the parking lot at 5 p.m., though we don’t know how long he’s been asleep. He approaches a security guard to whom he initially says that he is looking for a woman, before becoming completely confused. “He couldn’t even remember if María was a man or a woman, because he couldn’t even remember the name of the person he was missing so much.”
This critical chapter comprises episodes from María’s point of view followed by episodes from Salvador’s. Some of these are individual incidents; some are shared history told from different, and often contradictory or confusing, perspectives. The many slight discrepancies and similarities in the stories are endless and endlessly compelling. María talks about her parents—a nameless prostitute who is committed as “schizophrenic” and a man she calls Jesús—but she also talks about getting a job at the morgue, which is something that Salvador does, not her. She talks about being abandoned at a supermarket by her mother at age four, and Salvador recalls his father ogling María when she was six. María says she was “perceived by Salvador. It wasn’t hard, he had this thing about smells and smelled me as if he were breathing me in.” Salvador says that the two started out in each other’s dreams. At some point María talks of catching Salvador with another woman, who we eventually realize is Daniela. But this seems impossible as the details of María’s story trickle out, because it seems clear that she died or disappeared from Salvador’s life as a child. Eventually Salvador believes her body is brought into the morgue, while others contend he ran off with “a woman called María, whom he’d suddenly started to mention but whom no one had ever seen.” (These details aren’t really spoilers, because the beauty of Fury lies in its execution, not in specific reveals. Also, the novel is so enigmatic that I could be completely misinterpreting it.)
Which brings me back to the novel’s two film references. Both Paris, Texas and 13 Moons bolster the view that everything we read from María’s point of view is really just a different aspect of Salvador speaking out. In other words, Salvador and María are the same person. Maybe they don’t start out this way, but that’s how they end up. In one of her sections, María posits two tests of human will: the first—and “greatest”—is “deciding, despite all, to continue existing”; the second is “deciding to love the same person forever.” Salvador is tangibly struggling with the first but committed to the second, with María being the object of his love. (She may even have always been him, but the case for that is much too complicated for this review.)
In the novel, María recounts a scene from Fassbinder’s 13 Moons where Elvira, a trans woman who used to be called Edwin, watches a Black man hang himself. Before doing so, the man—failing María’s first and greatest test—asserts that “the negation of the will to exist is a bold affirmation of the will. The suicide wants life, and simply rejects the conditions under which he experiences it.” María says that she wants Salvador to watch her “putting an end to it all,” too, but to resist the urge to follow, thereby passing her first test of will. “My absence would restore my body to his memory and would occupy the whole of his mind,” which is eventually what happens in the novel. In the film, Edwin only had his operation to try and win the love of a man who rejects him because he is not a girl (echoing Juan’s wishes about Lázaro). And in the end, Elvira ultimately rejects the conditions of her loveless life and ends it. Edwin becomes Elvira to try and prove his love but fails, just like Salvador becomes María to show that he has passed her test of human will and will love her forever, even if it destroys his mind.
Salvador’s identity crisis takes hold when he falls for Daniela, making him feel as if he is failing María—either the memory of her or the part of himself that is her. The scene from Paris, Texas that Salvador quotes to Daniela comes from the film’s emotional climax, when Travis and Jane, played by Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, reconnect after many years apart. The former lovers, seated on opposite sides of a one-way mirror, reflect on the causes and consequences of their estrangement. First, Travis explains how his abuse and jealousy led to the moment, quoted in the novel, when he awoke in a burning bed, abandoned by Jane and their young son. As tears of recognition roll down Jane’s cheeks, Travis tells how he started to run, and how he kept on running until “every sign of man had disappeared.” Before Jane talks about how she adapted to life on her own, she switches off the light on her side of the mirror so she can see through to Travis. When he turns toward her, his face is initially reflected back, perfectly framed inside her blond hair; the two former lovers become one, briefly reunited in a stunning image that Wenders’s cinematographer Robby Müller achieved without special effects. It’s one of the most hauntingly evocative images in cinema, and whenever I see it from now on, I will recall Salvador staring at himself and seeing María, even though he knows that they can never be together again.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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