Remixing the Dead
Reviews
By Atenea Cruz (Translated by Ellen Jones)
A nameless, faceless heroin addict arrives in a forgotten Mexican town, determined to kill himself. Except this won’t be the kind of suicide that’s over quickly to keep suffering to a minimum. On the contrary, the protagonist of this tale has planned his rite of passage into death with the utmost care: he is to have one last date with his beloved “Lady,” as he affectionately refers to heroin, having calculated and recalculated the exact dose that will deliver him into the abyss wearing the same expression he has seen on the faces of friends who have made it over to the other side: “They looked just like a junkie when he hits the sweet spot.” This man, who neither owns nor cares about anything anymore, aspires to achieve this one thing only. Thus begins Una cita con la Lady (Anagrama), the first novel by Mexican author Mateo García Elizondo, published in Spanish in 2019 and now in Robin Myers’s English translation as Last Date in El Zapotal (Charco Press, 2024). An award-winning poet and literary translator, Myers is a perfect match for García Elizondo, whose novel benefits from her phenomenal ear for language and generous approach to collaborative literary endeavors, not to mention her more than ten years living in Mexico City.
The book’s opening lines—“I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all . . . All I’ve got left are three thousand pesos, twenty grams of opium, and a quarter-ounce of heroin, which had better be enough to kill me”—are at once an homage to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and a casual salute to the history of the Mexican novel. They also establish the tone of the book, which goes on to remix the Rulfian motif of the rural ghost. Although the only soundtrack mentioned is raucous Mexican banda, the novel’s hidden structure is more closely linked to electronic music, a genre whose vocabulary lends itself well here: the protagonist’s obsession with getting back his syringe containing that longed-for final hit could well be a piece of techno music, guided by a beat that varies in intensity, hammering at the senses, and which, thanks to the effect of the drugs, seems to expand the very confines of time.
The motivations of this anonymous and somewhat unreliable narrator are far from enigmatic. Thus, the Lady’s power to help us escape pain, the deep pleasure experienced after consuming her, the resulting out-of-body experiences the narrator finds so enlightening—all these form part of an endlessly repeating loop, such that the text sometimes feels less like a novel than a long love poem to heroin: “I think that’s what makes an addict: not the drugs, but that sense of peace. You’d give anything to feel it again.” The narrator returns to this claim over and over, like a broken record, although readers may come to see this as a way of emulating that guilt-ridden obsessiveness of the dead, who are denied eternal rest until they settle their affairs on earth.
“Heroin is a portal to the world of the dead,” writes the narrator on one of the first pages of the diary where he keeps a detailed record of his suicide. For this is not his first failed attempt, and during his stay in El Zapotal there will be several more. Unfortunately for him, death is not quite how he always imagined it, and surrendering to the Lady’s final embrace will be more complicated than he expected, not least thanks to the memories still tying him to life, as well as to a piece of unfinished business that seems impossible to resolve in this godforsaken town: how to get his hands on a decent hit. Because at some point during all his deranged rushing around, he managed to lose the kit containing his syringe prepared with the exact dose to bring about a gentle death.
This story, written in the first person, in which relatively few events occur, comes together thanks to detailed, sometimes poetic, and overwhelmingly reflective descriptions that make the narrative rhythm a hypnotic, almost ecstatic downtempo. The town’s desolate, rural landscape and sullen inhabitants are in keeping with the loneliness the protagonist suffers after the few people in the world who matter to him—his girlfriend, a couple of friends, his dog—have died, all at the hands of the Lady. Because no matter how many ghosts—his own and other people’s—appear vividly to him, bearing messages, he always ends up remembering, and perhaps understanding, that after all they are merely the dead, even though he often considers himself to be a living corpse.
García Elizondo returns to Juan Rulfo in the passages where the protagonist talks to the dead inhabiting El Zapotal. The references to Pedro Páramo are explicit from the outset—“I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all”—and they persist throughout the text: for example, in the name of the only local cantina, El Rincón de Juan. Incidentally, the cantina is a kind of portal into the underworld, where the Devil, too, seems inspired by Rulfo: close-mouthed, cunning, gaunt, and disillusioned. Rulfo’s Comala can be glimpsed as well—in the arid landscapes, almost always depicted at night, and in the town’s suffocating, oppressive atmosphere.
The passages where the narrator encounters the dead are particularly successful, narrated with a naturalness that doesn’t diminish their uncanny aura. As he wanders through the limbo he himself has created out of El Zapotal, these encounters fruitfully bring together intriguing locations—the cantina/entrance to the underworld, the local graveyard, the old hacienda containing a hidden treasure, a secret teenage Ouija board session—with dialogue that manages to give each character their own unique voice. It is these chapters, in which the protagonist is removed from his opium dreams and the memories of an addict, that help move the plot forward and lead us toward an ending in which his death no longer makes so much sense and his behavior suddenly does.
The reader won’t learn the protagonist’s true origins, because he seems to have been born when he took his first hit, and the only moments he experienced as an individual were when the effects of the drug in his bloodstream began to wear off and he urgently needed to get himself more. In a moment of tragic irony, the narrator will only feel a deep desire to experience life in its totality, with all its complications and simple pleasures, when he manages to distance himself from the world of the living. The result of his confession, written from the no-man’s-land between life and death, is an intimist novel revolving around the emptiness of human existence, like bodies dancing wildly for a DJ at a rave in the middle of the nowhere.
Atenea Cruz (Durango, Mexico, 1984) is the author of the books of shorts stories Las yeguas nocturnas, Hágalo usted misma, Corazones negros and the novel Ecos. She has won the Fine Arts Award for Hispanic American Short Stories “Nellie Campobello” 2024, the National Award for Fantasy and Science Fiction Short Stories 2017, the scholarships of the creative writing residency program Under The Volcano and FONCA/Jóvenes Creadores. She has collaborated in magazines such as Rio Grande Review, Letras Libres, Tierra Adentro, Luvina, Punto de Partida UNAM and Playboy México.
Ellen Jones is a literary translator from Spanish, an editor and a writer. Her recent and forthcoming translations include This Mouth is Mine by Yásnaya Elena A. Gil (Charco Press, 2024, winner of a PEN Translates! award), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (Seven Stories Press, 2023), and The Remains by Margo Glantz (Charco Press, shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023, shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2024). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her short fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine, Slug and The London Magazine.
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