Made of Crows: Fernanda Melchor's Ciphers (III)
On HURRICANE SEASON (cont.)
This is the third 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 and the second part here.
Melchor could have started the Witch’s chapter with the Witch. Instead she starts it with the Witch’s mother. Doing so allows her to define the daughter, our central character, against her mother. Whereas the mother kept men out of the house—she was rumored to have killed her own husband for his plot of land, as well as the sons-in-law who tried to seize it after his death—the daughter invites them in for sex parties, despite the threat they pose to her. Whereas the mother often worked practically for free, asking only for food in exchange for her services—and, near the end of her life, accepting just about anything they gave her, be it “a bar of raw sugar, a pound of chickpeas, a paper cone of rotting lemons or a worm-ridden chicken,” the daughter, when she takes charge, charges her clientele: “she turned up one day in the kitchen and announced in a throaty voice, unaccustomed as she was to talking, that the gifts the women had gotten used to bringing no longer covered the cost of their consultations . . . starting now, prices would reflect the complexity of the request.”1 We come to know the Witch by what she is not.
So the Witch’s chapter is really the Witches’ chapter. We start, as we have seen, with the daughter—“They called her the Witch, the same as her mother”—but by the second page, we are in the domain of the mother, and for the most part we remain there until we reach the chapter’s halfway point, when the landslide kills the mother and the baton is passed to the daughter, who takes on the title of Witch. Melchor chronologically presents their lives as if to suggest a through line from mother to daughter. That they ultimately share the same name suggests that they are, despite their differences, a sort of composite. Though they meet different fates, they both—like the women of La Matosa at large—suffer the “full, brutal force of male vice.”2 This is of course not their only similarity, but it is a crucial one in that it prompts a divergence in their paths. The mother, upon experiencing that brutality, practically eliminates men from her life; the daughter brings them in. The fork in their paths brings to mind Matthew Salesses’s advice for emphasizing a character’s transformation: “The easiest way to make the protagonist’s change stand out is to write a similar character who doesn’t change.”3 It is perhaps not the case that one Witch changes and the other doesn’t, but that, starting from the same place, they move in opposite directions.
I have been reluctant, I now realize, to reproduce the male vice depicted in the novel. But it comprises a good deal of the Witch’s chapter—and a good deal of the novel—and plays an important role in Melchor’s characterization-sans-interiority. We might first consider the violent scene that prompts the mother’s reclusiveness. Early in the chapter, the chorus of women speculates as to how the Young Witch was conceived, considering that the mother had presumably killed her husband long ago and had not been seen with any men for some time. When asked, the Old Witch “merely stared at them with a hateful sneer before replying that the Girl was the devil’s child.”4 The women take her seriously, later dreaming “that the devil was chasing them with his big cock as stiff as a rod and raring to impregnate them.” They confess these visions to the local priest, who nags them for going on believing in witchcraft, but as it turns out, the Old Witch was not exactly lying:
there were those who said that old Sarajuana, who was already getting on in years, used to tell the story of how a group of men turned up at her cantina one night, young kids not from around there, not from La Matosa, and maybe not even from Villa judging by the way they spoke, and these boys, who were already blind drunk, started bragging about how they’d just come from having fun with some lady in La Matosa, some bitch they say killed her old man and went around playing the enchantress, and Sarajuana pricked up her ears to hear them explain how they’d snuck into the house and beaten the shit out of her, to stop her from moving, the only way they could take turns banging her, because, witch or no witch, she was a tidy piece of ass, and you could tell that underneath it all she wanted it, from the way she squirmed and squealed as they fucked her, and besides, they’re all a bunch of sluts in this dump5
[estaban los que decían que la Sarajuana ya de vieja contaba que una noche llegaron a su cantina unos muchachos que no eran de ahí de La Matosa y posiblemente ni siquiera de Villa por la forma en que hablaban, y que ya borrachos empezaron a presumir que venían de cotorrearse a una vieja de La Matosa, una que había matado a su marido y que se las daba de muy bruja, y la Sarajuana enseguida paró la oreja y ellos siguieron contando cómo fue que se le metieron a la casa y cómo la golpearon para que se estuviera quieta y pudieran cogérsela entre todos, porque bruja o no, la verdad es que la pinche vieja esa estaba bien buena, bien sabrosa, y se ve que en el fondo le había gustado, por cómo se retorcía y chillaba mientras se la cogían, si todas son unas putas en este pinche pueblo rascuache]
Before we get into the content of this account, let us consider Melchor’s unusual use of perspective here. The account arrives via Sarajuana, an old woman who runs the cantina—that is, someone privy to the townspeople’s gossip, particularly that of the men. Though the account is delivered by her—though she is its witness—this section is not primarily from her point of view. The phrase “already getting on in years” does not, to my ears, belong to her; more likely it belongs to another townsperson, perhaps one of the women who frequents the Witch’s house. She reports—and this section does veer closer to her voice—that the men are “kids not from around there.” Does “blind drunk” belong to her? Maybe. But by the time we get into everything that follows “bragging about,” we are embedded in a brutal male voice for the rest of the passage.
Why relay Sarajuana’s account in the voice of the men? This question is complicated by the translation. If it can be said that the translator Ann Goldstein elevates Elena Ferrante’s prose, so that the translation is more elegant than the original,6 it might also be said that Sophie Hughes here filters Melchor’s prose into a more uniform grittiness. In Hughes’s translation, the men are “blind drunk” as opposed to simply “drunk” (borrachos). What Hughes translates as “some bitch they say killed her old man and went around playing the enchantress” translates literally as “one [the antecedent here is still just vieja] from La Matosa who had killed her husband and acted like [or “fancied herself”] a witch.” And what Hughes translates as “they’d snuck into the house and beaten the shit out of her, to stop her from moving, the only way they could take turns banging her,” translates literally (and poorly, like all these literal translations) as “how they got into the house and how they beat her so that she stayed quiet and they could fuck her between them all.” It isn’t until Melchor gets to the phrase “witch or no witch” (“porque bruja o no, la verdad es que la pinche vieja esa estaba bien buena, bien sabrosa,”) that we descend into the violent colloquial register of the men: “pinche vieja” translates to “bitch,” and “bien buena, bien sabrosa,” (literally “very good, very tasty”) bears the vulgarity captured by Hughes’s phrase (“tidy piece of ass”). What in Spanish remains a less certain perspective—perhaps Sarajuana’s, perhaps, temporarily, an omniscient narrator’s—is in Hughes’s translation shifted almost immediately to the men. In any case, the same shift happens: the violent male voice (which Hughes, like Melchor, renders unflinchingly) takes over. We witness a double silencing—first of Sarajuana, in the relaying of the account, and then of the Old Witch, as she is assaulted. Melchor formally heightens the brutality here, and we feel for both women.
If Sarajuana’s horrifying testimony is true, it is likely that the Young Witch’s conception is the result of rape. From the Witch’s comment we infer that the evil behind this violent event is attributable to, or indistinguishable from, the devil’s work: the women’s vision of a devil eager to assault them is apt. In the wake of such trauma, we understand the Witch’s decision to “[brick] up all the windows with her own bare hands—using cinder blocks and cement, timbers and wire mesh—and even the front door, made of dark, almost black oak. . . even this door had been boarded up with planks of wood and bricks.”7 This boarding-up is what we get of the Old Witch’s response. The narrator does not describe her experience of the rape itself. In the account of the rape, Melchor imposes silence on the Witch, sticking strictly to the voices of the men who harmed the Witch, even as they take pleasure in their violence, even as they distort it into something in which the Witch takes pleasure, too. It is not a complete silence—we see the Witch squirm, we hear her squeal—and though these actions are misconstrued, we understand them for what they really are: evidence of her suffering. One experiences a great deal of discomfort while reading this passage in part because that suffering is suppressed by the narration—as if to suggest that the victim’s experience of such violence is unspeakable—even as one feels its presence (or rather, its absence). The reader becomes enraged at these men. Perhaps the greatest irony of the passage, then, is that this rage is mimicked in the response of the fellow drunks at Sarajuana’s bar, except it isn’t the misogyny to which those drunks take offense—it is merely the fact that the boys have called La Matosa a “dump” (“pinche pueblo rascuache”).
The mother’s defensive response—boarding-up—makes sense as an attempt to secure herself against the threat of male violence. But it does not—could not—in itself bring her peace. She will become, as we have seen, a bitter and neglectful mother, one who perhaps resents her daughter because of what her daughter represents. At the risk of psychoanalyzing Melchor’s characters, one can imagine how the daughter’s upbringing—lonely, rejected by her mother and her peers (what peers?)—might inform her departure from her mother’s tactics for engaging with the community. While the mother kept a tight seal on her emotions, the daughter confides in the women who visit her: “she couldn’t hide the swollen bruising on her eyelids, the scabs where her lip and bushy eyebrows had split; the only women to whom, very occasionally, the witch would profess her own sorrows8 . . . and they would even crack jokes and try to tease a smile from her to take her mind off the cuts and bruises and make her open up and tell them the names of the bastards who’d attacked her.” (The language here softens as if in sympathy for the Young Witch; we hear of her “sorrows.” The Spanish cuitas translates literally to “griefs” or “troubles.”) While the mother kept a tight seal on the house, the daughter opens its doors to the “bastards” whom she pays for sex and whose names she protects: “a constant pilgrimage of boys and grown men would fight over who got to go in first; and sometimes they’d just turn up to hang out, arriving in pickups, the radio blaring and loaded with crates of beer that they took in through the kitchen before closing the door behind them.”9Again we see the strength of Melchor’s characterization through secondary characters; though we are not privy to the Witch’s interior, we can infer her motives from her context. The novel’s sense of history, a history in which the mother plays the lead role, brings the Young Witch into focus even as the narrator keeps her at an arm’s length.
A note on this distance: it is not so unwavering as I have made it out to be. There is a brief section in the Young Witch’s chapter that gets closer to her interior than any other part of the novel. It is the section that immediately follows her mother’s death, in the wake of the landslide, when the Young Witch—in the spirit of the novel, I will call her the Witch from now on—wanders Villa, the town neighboring La Matosa, and observes the local boys at work:
that black-clad specter who spent her time haunting the remotest parts of town, the plots where crews of new boys—the new recruits, paid peanuts—toiled, smooth-faced and supple as rope, the muscles on their arms, legs, and stomachs wrung out from the grueling labor and the scorching sun and chasing after a rag ball on the local football pitch come evening, and their frenzied races to see who would be the first to reach the water pump, the first to dive into the river, the first to find the coin thrown from the riverbank, who could spit the furthest while straddling the trunk of the fig trees suspended over the warm dusk waters, hollering and hooting, toned legs swinging in unison, shoulders all touching in a row, backs lustrous like buffed leather, shiny and dark like the seeds of a tamarind, or creamy like dulce de leche or the tender pulp of a ripe sapodilla. Skin the color of cinnamon, of mahogany and rosewood, skin glistening wet and alive, which, from afar—from that tree trunk several yards away where the Witch spied on them—appeared smooth, taut and firm like the tart flesh of unripened fruit, the most irresistible kind, her favorite, the kind she begged for in silence10
This moment of proximity arises from necessity: in the absence of the mother, Melchor needs a way to shift the chapter’s center of gravity. Approaching the Witch’s interiority does just that. At the same time, as if to prevent that distance from being breached altogether, she heightens the register of the prose, moving us away from a colloquial third-person ventriloquism and into a dense lyrical mode. In this mode, Melchor brings us away from the Witch (“that black-clad specter”) only to bring us back to her again, back to her body (“[skin] which, from afar—from that tree trunk several yards away where the Witch spied on them”) and even to her wishes (“smooth, taut, and firm like the taut flesh of unripened fruit, the most irresistible kind, her favorite, the kind she begged for in silence”).
What is perhaps most striking about this passage is its positivity; it is not about the Witch’s suffering, or about her guardedness, but about her desire, her immense longing for connection, more precisely for touch. She herself would not likely describe the boys as “smooth-faced and supple as rope,” but this metaphor, offered by the narrator, cues us into the nature of her desire for something at once strong and dangerous: we will see in the following chapter just what rope can do, when the character Yesenia receives a thrashing with her grandmother’s weapon of choice: wet rope. And even here, in the passage that veers closest to the Witch’s point of view, we do not only see her, but what she sees; she is revealed by what she notices. Her later decision to allow those “bastards” into her home despite the harm they cause her makes sense in the context of this desire; she is so desperate for connection that she is willing to accept a connection which often denigrates her and at times puts her life at risk. The Witch’s character is deepened by this desire, the presence of which wards off any icky psychoanalytic readings that might chalk her reckless behavior up to, say, the death drive. Writers of bleak relationship stories are often asked: what keeps X character in this relationship? Melchor plays her Constraint Violation Card wisely here, abandoning narrative distance to offer us a slice of interiority, a sliver of beauty in search of which her protagonist journeys, perilously.
The fourth and final installment of this essay will be published on Wednesday, January 31. Receive it via email by subscribing below.
HS, 11.
HS, 24.
Matthew Salesses, Craft In The Real World, (Catapult, 2021).
HS, 13.
HS, 13-14.
“Reading her in English isn’t the same experience. Ann Goldstein has translated all of Ferrante’s work, and many bilingual readers feel that she has improved the prose. It may not be a coincidence that Ferrante has called translators her “only heroes.” Translation, she wrote recently, “draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.” Goldstein has nearly perfect pitch for Ferrante’s voice, yet it has an accent on the page that English cannot quite capture, which is itself the echo of another language—the harsh, often obscene dialect of Campania. Ferrante balks at using dialect explicitly, yet her prose bears its imprint like the welt marks of a slap.” Judith Thurman, “What Brings Elena Ferrante’s Worlds to Life?” The New Yorker, 2020.
HS, 15.
HS, 24. In Spanish: “no bastaba para disimular los moretones que le inflaban los párpados, las costras que partían la boca y las cejas tupidas; las únicas a las que a veces la bruja les confesaba sus propias cuitas”
HS, 22.
HS, 19.