Made of Crows: Fernanda Melchor's Ciphers (II)
On HURRICANE SEASON (cont.)
This is the second installment of a craft essay in four parts, originally written in the spring of 2022 for a seminar at Syracuse University. Read the first part here.
Hurricane Season makes us believe in the Witch not merely as a myth but as a human—even without rendering her in the high definition prose through which we come to know its other characters. At the same time, its other characters—the origin of gossip about the Witch—color our interpretation of her. We see them seeing her, using her, projecting onto her. To that end, let us take a closer look at the chorus of locals through which we see her.
The women of La Matosa rely on the Witch for abortions, psychological and medical support, and hexes against their worthless boyfriends and husbands. The men rely on the Witch for drugs and sex parties, though their homophobia only permits them to admit to participation in the former. While both the women and the men hate her, only the women seem to pity her, if through a veil of internalized misogyny: “poor Witch, poor crank, let’s just hope they catch the fucker or fuckers who slit her throat.”1
From this dialectic between the masculine and the feminine voices of La Matosa emerges a portrait of a troubled but generous and kind woman. Who else would provide all those abortions? Who else would host those sex parties, booze and pills on the house? We feel for the Witch even through the cacophony of the chorus’s harsh judgements. The facts of her history—her orphanhood, her solitude—and her actions—often in service of others—are the raw materials through which we construct her character, from afar, as do the locals, but we arrive at different conclusions. When the Young Witch (I will refer to her as such for the time being) begins charging for her services after people begin to take advantage of her mother—the Old Witch—and continues doing so after her mother’s death for all but the most destitute of her clientele, the gossip is scathing: “it was about time they turned that bitch [the Young Witch] in to the relevant authorities, to the police, time they locked her up for loan-sharking, for preying on the poor, who the hell did she think she was, exploiting the people of La Matosa and the neighboring villages, but when the time came nobody did a thing: who else was going to lend them hard cash in exchange for their sorry belongings. . .”2 But are we really to deem the Young Witch criminal for charging for her services? How else is she to make a living while performing them? More gossip: should the Old Witch own the house she lives in? The gossip says no—that the Old Witch killed her partner, Don Manolo, so that she could keep it, and that she killed his sons when they came from out of town to seize it. The gossip describes the house as
a bona fide heirloom that had belonged to Don Manolo’s grandmother, a certain Chucita Villagarbosa de los Monteros de Conde, and that by both legal and divine right belonged to the boys’ mother, Don Manolo’s real wife, his legitimate wife in the eyes of God and man alike, not to that hack, that conniving, homicidal upstart, the Witch, who swanned around town like an aristocrat when she was nothing but a slut Don Manolo had dragged out of some jungle hellhole for the sole purpose of living out his basest instincts in the privacy of the plains.3
But the reader—this reader, anyway—imagines a more complicated portrait: of a woman whose husband has died being told she must leave her house so that his sons can flip it for a profit. Our sympathies are with her, not the greedy men from whom this piece of gossip derives. Unlike the locals, we see the gossip from above. And yet even with our bird’s eye view, we remain uncertain as to the absolute “truth” of the Old Witch’s character; she cannot be sealed off or summed up. Maybe she did kill her husband. Maybe she had reason to. All the contradictory and corroborating accounts imbue her character with mystery. This mystery makes her character feel inexhaustible—and therefore real.
It may seem that by calling the locals’ stories “gossip” I am diminishing them. Gossip can be rude, shady, and unreliable. But it is also sometimes all we have. This has especially been the case, Melchor has noted, in Afro-Caribbean communities such as Veracruz, where for generations enslaved people relied on the oral transmission of narrative. “To live in a city is to live between stories,” Melchor writes, “those that are written in books, those that circulate in newspapers and on screens, those that spread by word of mouth and mutate like viruses—those entities which, without even being alive, replicate themselves in their stubborn desire to remain in the world.”4 This is all to say that I do not use gossip in a pejorative sense, but to describe something like oral history, folktale passed through the generations.
This oral-historical register is clear from the first sentence of the Witch’s chapter: “They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Young Witch when she’d first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch.” By starting with the childhood of a person we imagine to be dead—the antecedent of “her” being “the rotten face of a corpse” at the end of the previous chapter—the novel enters into an almost biographical mode: it starts with childhood, and will end in—and dwell on—death. But the Witch is not the sort of subject you’d find in a monograph; her history is legend, exchanged between the locals, embellished and mutated, perhaps, but otherwise nonexistent. By flashing back to her childhood, the novel reveals that she was a kid once too. Before we arrive at the disturbed, La Llorona-esque5 image of the Witch—a projection of the locals’ fears—we must pass through her vulnerable and impressionable years as a child. The locals may flatten her into a myth, but they are not shaping the narration; rather, the third-person narrator is selecting from their testimonies, presenting them in a way that allows us to experience more of the Witch’s humanity than any given character. The use of the third-person is essential here in that it allows us access to parts of the characters’ psyches that they would not be likely to disclose were they speaking in the first-person.
Maybe we are getting ahead of ourselves. The question that first springs to mind upon reading this first sentence: who is this they? Then: how did the Young Witch end up alone? From the start the novel instructs us in its roundabout logic. We do not hear straight away that the Young Witch’s mother perished in a landslide, orphaning her daughter, or that we are hearing from any one person or group of people in particular. The “they” used here feels vague, a sort of “one” or a general “you” (you know what they say. . .). “They” also establishes an important opposition—a tension between the Young Witch and everyone else. Equally ambiguous is the content of this opening; we do not even know our central character’s name. Practically everything we know about the Young Witch, right down to that moniker, will be filtered heavily through the other characters: “if at some point she’d been given a name and surname like everyone else in town,” the narrator says in the sentence that follows, “well, no one had ever known it, not even the women who visited the house each Friday had heard her called otherwise.”
It is characteristic of Melchor to delay the source of information, to bury the identity of a character until you are already lured into that character’s voice. Thus we find that the “they” in this opening, and in the chapter more broadly, narrows into “the women who visited,” likely the only ones in the community who would care to tell the Witch’s story in the first place. But there is an unreliability to even this point of view, which destabilizes just as it seems to settle. Let us consider the sentence that immediately follows—and undercuts—the claim that they’d never heard her called otherwise, one of our first introductions to the long, capacious sort of sentence that will comprise a good deal of the narrative to come. I will break this sentence up into numbered parts to mark its subtle shifts in perspective, and so that we can refer to them without having to requote it at length:
(1) [The Young Witch had] always been you, retard, or you, asshole, or you, devil child, if ever the [Old] Witch wanted her to come, or to be quiet, or even to just sit still under the table
(2) so that she [the Old Witch] could listen to the women’s maudlin pleas, their sniveling tales of woe, their strife, the aches and pains, their dreams of dead relatives and the spats between those still alive, and money, it was almost always the money, but also their husbands and those whores from the highway,
(3) and why’d they always walk out on me just when I’ve got my hopes up, they’d sob, what was the point of it all, they’d moan, they might as well be dead, just call it a day, wished they’d never been born,
(4) and with the corner of their shawls they’d dry the tears from their faces, which they covered in any case the moment they left the Witch’s kitchen, because they weren’t about to give those bigmouths in town the satisfaction of going around saying how they’d been to see the Witch to plot their revenge against so-and-so, how they’d put a curse on the slut leading their husband astray,
(5) because there was always one, always some miserable bitch in town spinning yarns about the girls who, quite innocently, minding their own business, went to the Witch’s for a remedy for indigestion, for that dipshit at home clogged up to his nuts on the extra-large bag of chips he ate in one sitting, or a tea to keep tiredness at bay, or an ointment for tummy troubles, or, let’s be honest, just to sit there a while and lighten the load, let it all out, the pain and sadness that fluttered hopelessly in their throats.6
This sentence, like the chapter in which it appears, is narrated in a roving close third-person plural. We start section 1 with an account of all the names the Young Witch has been called by her mother. As we’ve noted, this is a contradictory account—they’d never heard her called otherwise, yet they’d heard her called “retard,” “asshole,” etc.—which suggests that we are dealing with a composite perspective; perhaps some local women only heard her called the Witch, while others heard her called all those names. While the narration here aligns with the women’s perspective, this account softens us to the Young Witch. It shows us that she is mistreated and neglected by the one person obligated to care for her. It also gives us, early on, one of the few direct quotes from the Old Witch that will appear in the novel—her voice will ring in our heads as we read on.
In section 2, we see a reversal of this process, a shift towards the Young Witch’s perspective that at the same time hardens us to her. The narration there distances itself from the women reporting on what the Young Witch was called in their presence: would those women refer to their own pleas as “maudlin”? Would they describe their problems as “sniveling tales of woe”? The contemptuous descriptions of the women’s suffering is more likely attributable to the Old Witch herself, frustrated as she must be at having to constantly endure their tales. At the same time, this narratorial derision is off-putting; no matter how justified, we balk a little at the blatant disdain for these vulnerable women.
Section 3 heightens that discomfort by lurching directly into their first-person testimonies while interjecting with dialogue tags (“they’d sob,” “they’d moan,”) to remind us of the fictional filter through which we are being granted access to those testimonies in the first place. Still we lean towards the Old Witch’s perspective—we can imagine her exhaustedly relaying these testimonies—but in section 4, we swing back towards the women’s perspective: we see them hide their identities as they depart from the Old Witch’s home. We see that they cover their faces after leaving the Old Witch’s kitchen; we are privy to information the Old Witch does not have. The women are ashamed of their visits to the Old Witch because they fear these visits betray something broken about their lives (one does not see the doctor if one is well). They want to avoid ending up the subjects of gossip, the possibility of which introduces us to yet another perspective: that of other women in the town (“big mouths”), not to mention the men, whose characterization begins here. They are cheaters, though the blame, in a classic turn of misogyny, is on the other women (“sluts”) for leading them astray.
Section 5 rebuts those other women’s criticisms. That phrase “quite innocently” belongs to the women who frequent the Old Witch, while at the same time demonstrating that these women are, like the Old Witch, burdened and disdainful caretakers themselves, seeking treatment for the ill men in their lives—like the Witch in section 2, they can hardly contain their contempt—and, ultimately, seeking relief from the cost that providing such care exacts on them. In a double-motion, this section complicates the Old Witch: she is not simply there, or even primarily there, to cast revenge-curses, as her name suggests. Rather, her primary function is as a sort of health worker, treating the ill women in a community where, needless to say, for lack of resources, there is not a functional system of medical care. Melchor thus shows us that the depth of our primary characters can be a byproduct of the depth of our secondary characters. Bringing the women of La Matosa, the Old Witch’s “clientele,” into sharper focus permits us to know the Old Witch more intimately. Even if they fail to empathize with the Old Witch, or the Old Witch fails to empathize with them, these failures, taken in tandem, allow us to empathize with them both—to “assume their humanity.”7
The third installment of this essay will be published on Tuesday, January 23. Receive it via email by subscribing below.
HS, 25.
HS, 12.
HS, 7.
Aqui No Es Miami, translation mine, (Literatura Random House, 2018), 9. [At the time of writing, Sophie Hughes’s far superior translation into English, This Is Not Miami, had not yet been published.]
Melchor describes La Llorona as “the weeping woman who drowned all her offspring in a vile killing spree and was condemned for the rest of eternity to roam the earth as a ghastly apparition with the face of an angry mule and hairy spider legs, lamenting and bewailing her foul sin.” HS, 20.
HS, 5-6.
In a review of Hurricane Season, David Kurnick writes, “Hewing close to her painful material—and refusing to let her narrator philosophize about it or apologize for it—Melchor reveals something distasteful in the common notion that the task of fiction is to ‘convey the humanity’ of people in extreme circumstances. Hurricane Season demands instead that we assume the humanity of its characters.”