Made of Crows: Fernanda Melchor's Ciphers (IV)
On HURRICANE SEASON (cont.)
A brief note for those who live in New York: tonight, Alexander Sammartino will be in conversation with Dana Spiotta about his brilliant first novel, Last Acts. 6:30pm, McNally Jackson Seaport. RSVP here: https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/alexander-sammartino-presents-last-acts-conversation
And below is the final 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, the second part here, and the third part here.
I hope it is now clear that, like any novel that values its own life force over the authorial scaffolding that helps bring it into being, Hurricane Season violates its constraints where it needs to. To draw on the list at the start of this essay: the final chapter does include paragraph breaks; the third-person narration is in each chapter hijacked by a non-central character, who monologues at the chapter’s protagonist; these monologues are rendered in either the third or first person. If none of the chapters repeats a protagonist from the previous, the novel is still more interested in some characters than others. Needless to say, the Witch is one of these characters, but there is also Luismi, her lover, the only character besides the Witch to appear in all of the central chapters (except hers). His name—aside from hers, he is the only character to be nicknamed—marks him as the same sort of character: a cipher, half-known from afar. Though he does not get a chapter to himself, he appears in each as a sort of shadow protagonist, a glue that binds the novel’s disparate perspectives. The witness, Yesenia, the black sheep of her grandmother’s household, which she runs, is Luismi’s cousin; the accomplice, Munra, an alcoholic who forever damaged his leg in a car accident, is Luismi’s stepfather; the patient, Norma, a thirteen-year old fleeing her home, where she has been sexually abused by her stepfather, is Luismi’s girlfriend, though she becomes closer to his mother, Chabela, who notices that Norma is pregnant and takes her to the Witch for a homemade abortifacient that nearly kills her; the killer, Brando, an angry, closeted young man addicted to bestiality porn, is Luismi’s friend, and desires Luismi, though he cannot admit this, not even to himself, and therefore wants to kill Luismi too.
What Melchor does with the Witch in Chapter II—characterize the protagonist through a chorus of secondary voices—she does with Luismi on a larger scale in the chapters that follow, chapters which, taken together, constitute their own chorus. “We never get to see him from the inside,” Melchor said in an interview. “We never get to understand why he did what he thought he had to do.” What he thought he had to do: kill the Witch. (To the reader confused by this statement, having been told that Brando is the killer: it is not clear who exactly killed the Witch, only that the murder was Luismi and Brando’s doing.) In that double movement by now familiar to us, the deeper we come to know, or fail to know, Luismi, the deeper we also come to know the Witch, with whose fate his is intertwined. To that end, I’ll spend some time, in a coda of sorts, asking how Melchor “scales up” the effect of Chapter II.
As with the Witch, Melchor animates Luismi, in many ways a lifeless character, through contradiction. A good-for-nothing pillhead if you ask Munra (his mother Chabela would say the same but has a soft spot for him); a pampered family favorite if you ask Yesenia; a gaunt, tender, sexually disinterested lover if you ask Norma. Like the Witch, he is a person of action despite his ghoulish proclivities: he takes Norma under his wing when he spots her on a park bench, being prayed upon by the pedophilic sadist drug lord Cuco Barrábas; he frequents the Witch’s sex parties, where he sings alongside her (his nickname, Brando realizes near the end of the novel, is a riff on the Mexican virtuoso Luis Miguel); much to the Witch’s chagrin, he takes other lovers, one of them Norma, one of them a truck driver who emptily promises to get him a job; he takes revenge, or what he considers revenge, on the Witch, who he thinks has poisoned or cursed Norma out of jealousy, when in fact she was trying to help the girl terminate a late-stage pregnancy, on what she believed, thanks to Chabela, was his behalf.
Luismi first appears in Chapter III, filtered through Yesenia. It is at that very river in which we saw the Witch’s corpse floating that Yesenia encounters him:
That day, Yesenia had gone down the river early for a dip, and she was already on her way back when she spotted him: he came stumbling down the path, barefoot and shirtless, clutching a burnt tin can against his chest, his knees scraped and bloody from where he’d fallen along the way. He must have been drunk or high because he had the nerve to bounce straight up to Yesenia and ask her how the water was, to which she replied, as bluntly as possible, without so much as looking at him, deeply offended that it had even occurred to her cousin to address her, as if nothing had happened between them, as if they hadn’t spent the last three years avoiding each other, that the water was crystal clear, before turning on her heel and heading home with her mind racing, going over all the things she could have said to that little shithead, all the trouble his fuckery had caused, the hell he’d put the family through
The first words of this chapter, “That day,” inform us of an important temporal constraint: that we are oriented towards the day of the Witch’s death. They also strike a testimonial chord—another constraint of sorts—which of course raises the question of the occasion for speech. We will discover that Yesenia’s soliloquy, like those of Munra, Norma, and Brando, is to some extent directed at, or solicited by, the authorities, as in a confession. Just as Chapter II channeled other characters at the Witch, this one channels Yesenia towards Luismi (and, by extension, the Witch). Indeed, Yesenia is hardly introduced before the “camera” swerves to an unnamed male figure who is clearly in a bad way. Our foreknowledge of the Witch’s death trains us to read the scuffed up, bloodied aspects of this figure as evidence, and to regard him with suspicion. That Yesenia assumes he is inebriated teaches us that it is a common state for his character. And we gather from that phrase “he had the nerve” that Yesenia resents Luismi, though we are not yet sure why. What has he done? He has asked her how the water is—a banal question, but an unusual one for him to ask, we realize, given their history: they have not spoken to each other for three years. In just a few lines, then, Melchor has conveyed to us both the default state of a character who is new to us and implied that he is not his usual self.
Yesenia’s presence is key. If Luismi alone were depicted, we would not know what to compare his state to. Melchor could establish his “default” through free indirect discourse, but doing so might suggest an outsize lucidity on his part—he would know he is out of whack. The default could be given to us via omniscience, but that would bring us into a hypothetical backstory which would then have to be explained, and probably tediously. (Imagine: “He came stumbling down the path, barefoot and shirtless, clutching a burnt tin can against his chest, his knees scraped and bloody from where he’d fallen along the way . . . He saw his cousin, who hated him, and he asked her how the water was.” Or imagine the soliloquy of a man who has just killed his lover—one in which it would be very difficult, I imagine, to resist melodrama.) By narrating from Yesenia’s point of view, then, Melchor frees the narrative to be about Luismi, rather than through him. Yesenia, familiar but out of touch, is best able to convey his unknowability in this moment. That unknowability—that sense of mystery, to draw on Melchor’s vocabulary—speaks to reality, to the mystery of Luismi’s being. Melchor’s formal choice yet again suggests that violence carries in itself something unspeakable. Where we might hear the psyches of the central victim and the perpetrator-accomplice, there is only white noise.
I started this essay by mentioning its uses for my own work. I’ll end by offering a few takeaways in a few words: denying your central characters interiority can be a useful way to imbue them with mystery—but that alone will not make them compelling. When a writer denies herself access to a character’s psyche, she must deepen that character through other means: chiefly (at least here) a proliferation of secondary voices (if these voices are in tension with each other, all the better) that conveys the character’s physical state, comments on the character’s actions, and speculates about the character’s motives. The writer of a complex character must herself know, even if only intuitively, that character’s particular fears and desires. What drives them to behave as they do? What are they looking for? What are they running from? Even if the character through whom we see another character cannot grasp that other character’s humanity, the text itself can convey its knowledge of that character’s humanity to the reader.