This is a translation from the Spanish, written in labyrinthine sentences up to a page long, any one of which might range from the matted hair of the old Witch’s daughter when she was a little girl, hiding under the table to the rivalries of the women who seek her mother out for curses against the hussies leading their husbands or potions to kill the ‘seeds’ left in them by some bullying drunk. The style is chaotic, seeming to match the superstitious, hand-to-mouth lives of the inhabitants of the Mexican village. ‘Poor Witch, poor crank, let’s just hope they catch the fucker or fuckers who slit her throat.’ I’m guessing that this is the corpse found by the boys, but the only thing we know for sure is that this narrator isn’t in the business of spelling anything out. ‘They called her the Witch, the same as her mother,’ and it’s only at the end of the chapter, 20-odd pages further on, that we know she’s dead. And after the chapter ends with the smiling face of the corpse, we don’t know that it’s of the young woman whose life is briefly sketched out in Chapter 2. We don’t know who the dead person is, and don’t know if the body is what the boys where hoping or expecting to find. A gang of boys in some hot, wet countryside-we don’t know who or where they are-happen upon the upturned, eerily smiling, snake-infested face of someone who has drowned. The opening chapter is a one-page prologue.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |