The Dead Girls Read online

  Jorge Ibargüengoitia

  THE DEAD GIRLS

  Translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz

  With an introduction by Colm Tóibín

  PICADOR CLASSIC

  Introduction

  ‘The girl’s body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved T-shirt and a yellow knee-length skirt, a size too big. Some children playing in the lot found her and told their parents. One of the mothers called the police, who showed up half an hour later. The lot was bordered by Calle Paláez and Calle Hermanos Chacón and it ended in a ditch behind which rose the walls of an abandoned dairy in ruins. There was no one around, which at first made the policemen think it was a joke.’

  This is the opening of Part 4 of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, a novel first published in Spanish in 2004, a year after the author’s death at the age of fifty. The subtitle is ‘The Part about the Crimes’. The tone – distant, clinical, factual – is that of a witness statement or a police report, but it also includes an air of the casual, as though what happened was not of any very special public importance. This section of Bolaño’s novel chronicles the murders of an astonishing number of women in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, close to the US border, between 1993 and 1997 and also depicts the failed efforts of the police to solve the crimes.

  Bolaño wrote 2666 in Spain while suffering from the illness from which he eventually died and did not visit Ciudad Juárez or do any research there. He kept in touch, however, with journalists who were reporting about the deaths and disappearances of women there, including Sergio González Rodríguez, whose book The Femicide Machine was published in English in 2012.

  Of the disappearances, Gonzáles Rodríguez – who appears as a character in 2666 – wrote: ‘The authorities’ statistics regarding these disappearances are as inconsistent as those concerning the murder victims. Some speak of hundreds of cases, others only of dozens . . . Such ineptitude and fraud work to ensure the invisibility of the victims. And there are signs of something worse. In Ciudad Juárez, murderers destroy the corpses of victims in their entirety. Without a body, there is no crime.’

  In his book, Gonzáles Rodríguez notes the strange way the world began to deal with the grim reality of what was happening to women in Ciudad Juárez: ‘In 2010, the US-based cosmetics company MAC introduced a new line inspired by the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez. Created by the female designers of Rodarte, the post-Goth collection previewed in New York during Mercedes Benz Fashion Week . . . In “compensation” for this absurdity, the firm and its designers agreed to donate $100,000 to civil society organisations along the Mexican border.’

  Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s The Dead Girls was first published in Mexico in 1977. It was loosely based on a famous Mexican murder case in which Delfina and María de Jesús González, two sisters who ran a brothel, were put on trial in 1964 when the bodies of eighty women, eleven men and several foetuses were found on their property.

  Evidence was given that girls in their employ were lured into prostitution by advertisements seeking housemaids and murdered if they became ill or lost their looks. The men were killed because they had turned up with a lot of cash in their pockets. The two sisters were imprisoned for forty years.

  The Dead Girls is, in certain and uncertain ways, a comic novel; it is also a work of strange moral seriousness. It is written using the language and systems of reportage thus to parody these tones and methods. At times, however, the parody is so superbly managed that the energy released is ambiguous. The reader turns the page avidly because of the way in which the story is crafted and the way the scenes and characters are delineated. But the author also wrong-foots the reader, sardonically making clear the absurd and dehumanizing nature of crime reporting.

  The book begins with a crime of passion as Serafina sets about wreaking revenge on an ex-lover who works as a baker. Soon, the tone of dry statement takes over: ‘The fire damage to the bakery was estimated at thirty-five hundred pesos. Forty-eight regulation-caliber shells were found on the floor by the police. All the bullets were lodged in the walls.’

  Slowly, it emerges that Serafina and her sister Arcángela own two whorehouses. And they have a problem. One of the prostitutes has died and since they don’t wish to inform the authorities, they want to have her body disposed of quietly, secretly. The body is presented as a sort of nuisance, an unnecessary upset, something that can be best solved by paying someone.

  Captain Bedoya, who will become Serafina’s lover and accomplice, enters the picture. The date Serafina notices him is precise: 16 September 1960. He is riding a horse. Serafina needs to approach him because she is in search of a suitable pistol to shoot a former lover. When the captain takes her to Concepción, a small town, to teach her how to shoot, ‘Serafina stood among the shoeshine boys contemplating the square. It was at this moment that it dawned on her that Concepción would be an ideal town in which to open a third whorehouse.’

  The story unfolds courtesy of statements given to the police or to others by the main players or those associated with them. Their job is to narrate or outline the bald facts. It is up to the reader to read between the lines or get carried along by the factual tone.

  Arcángela, for example, describes the prostitution business: ‘All you have to do to be successful at it is to keep strict discipline.’ Her testimony is followed by one of the women who work for her, whose account of being ‘broken in’ is interrupted by a passage in parenthesis that begins: ‘A detailed description follows of her first experience, which is harrowing.’ The description is not included. It is as though the author who is amassing all this material is aware of the reader’s sensitivities.

  The reader, someone used to crime reporting, would prefer, it seems, for the story to move along. Like Bolaño in the final section of 2666, Ibargüengoitia is alert to the need to offer considerable detail and also to tell the story briskly at times, having bald data do battle with the detail so as not to slow things down, or leave room for simple comment.

  Since much of the story in The Dead Girls is told as though from the point of view of the sisters who run the brothels, then the reader is placed in the uneasy position of seeing the world from their perspective.

  These two are not given to introspection. The tone will not allow that. They are businesswomen.

  They know how to deal with power. In attendance at the grand opening of their third brothel are the private secretaries of the governors of two states, union leaders, a bank manager, ‘a number of businessmen; and the proprietor of a stable of over a hundred cows. Two of the three mayors who were invited arrived at two A.M., immediately after having concluded officiating over the Independence Day ceremony in their respective townships.’

  It seems possible as the narrative proceeds that this will be the story of the rise and fall of the fortunes of these two sisters in a Mexico that is fickle about many matters, unstable generally, a country that can encourage brothels and close them down on a whim. The book, at times, can seem like a parable for the country in which it is set, while remaining alert, it appears, to the country’s feckless charm and everyday corruption.

  At other times, however, the dark laughter that runs like an undercurrent through the book begins to unsettle more than amuse. This is done gradually and subtly as the focus moves from the antics of the two sisters to the plight of the women whom they employ. The beginning of a section headlined ‘Blanca’s character’ reads: ‘Even though she was separated from her family under false pretenses, sold for a price, and initiated into prostitution at the age of fourteen, everything seems to indicate that she was happy.’

  The tone used in outlining what happened to Blanca is carefully non-judgemental. No one is asking us to become in
dignant on Blanca’s behalf. Unlike Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, for example, the writer has done nothing more than write as though the statements about Bianca were being compiled, having been already made, from facts already known.

  There is a note at the beginning of the book: ‘Some of the events described herein are real. All the characters are imaginary.’ Ibargüengoitia is asking us to believe this story and accept that he has invented much of it all at the same time. But he is also asking us to become involved in a game that is more nuanced than that, a game in which the very tones and undertones refuse to yield to easy meanings.

  As the fate of Blanca, to take just one example, becomes more savage and outlandish, the tone remains stable. Just as Serafina and her sister and those around them treat what happens to Blanca as natural and necessary, the language of the novel does too, a language fully alert to its own clichés and its own failures, its own skill at concealing and normalizing.

  While Serafina and her sister, and the captain, are given desires in the book, and have their comic moments, the women who work in the brothel also have their comic elements, but they become known to us chiefly by their actions, or what is done to them. While the book seems at some moments to be a novel about the efforts of Serafina to find happiness and her sister to get rich, we slowly realize that this is a distraction, an alibi, a decoy.

  The novel is about the killing and secretly burying of the women who work in the brothel and how this happens.

  It takes us a while to realize that the women are, in fact, slaves. They can be bought and sold, as they can be beaten up and tortured; they can die and be buried in shallow, unmarked graves. All of this occurs as though it is part of some natural, casual order and requires not much comment. The deaths occur not because someone was evil, but because no one had the facility to imagine what was happening to the victims, what it meant for them to die. Serafina and her sister had other priorities at the time.

  The Dead Girls, then, offers us an example of a distancing register in which the most alarming events can be represented as haphazard, what Sergio González Rodríguez, writing of the same phenomena half a century later, called ‘the banalization of reality; a process of appropriations, displacements, and symbolizations derived by extracting reality from facts and turning those facts, now relieved of their weight and context, into simple data or signs.’

  What Ibargüengoitia has done in this novel with these ‘simple data and signs’ is slyly and ingeniously to offer them texture, so that the dryness in the tone, the withholding of judgment, and the absence of psychological depth, allow the novel to become rich with both ambiguity and buried indignation. Ibargüengoitia creates an unsettled fictional space. As in the fourth section of Bolaño’s 2666, what happened is not denounced, nor is it aestheticized, rather it is made clear.

  Three years after The Dead Girls was published, Ibargüengoitia moved to live in Paris with his wife, the English painter Joy Laville, whom he had met in Mexico in 1964 when he was thirty-six. Like Jean-Claude Pelletier in the opening of Bolaño’s 2666, Ibargüengoitia was in Paris during Christmas 1980, when Bolaño, who knew Ibargüengoitia’s work, was living in Girona in Catalonia, just over the border from France.

  Bolaño would die at the age of fifty; Ibargüengoitia was killed in a plane crash in 1983 at the age of fifty-five while on his way from Madrid to Colombia at the invitation of Gabriel García Márquez. In The Dead Girls Ibargüengoitia, eschewing magical realism, which was all the rage as he wrote, sought to find another fictional form which would deal with cruelty and murder becoming part of the normal world in Mexico, thus offering an example to Bolaño, who would dramatize the same material, as it became more pressing and urgent, in his final novel, published more than a quarter of a century later.

  COLM TÓIBÍN

  The Dead Girls

  Some of the events described herein are real.

  All the characters are imaginary.

  J.I.

  Contents

  I. Double Revenge

  II. The Case of Ernestina, Helda, or Elena

  III. An Old Love

  IV. Enter Bedoya

  V. The History of the Houses

  VI. Two Incidents and One Snag

  VII. A Life

  VIII. The Bad Night

  IX. The Secret Life

  X. The Story of Blanca

  XI. Various Views

  XII. The Fourteenth of September

  XIII. Martial Law

  XIV. What Teófilo Did

  XV. The Run of Bad Luck

  XVI. Enter the Police

  XVII. Judge Peralta’s Justice

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  I

  Double Revenge

  1

  One can picture them: all four wearing dark glasses, Ladder, driving, hunched over the wheel, Brave Nicolás, beside him, reading Strength magazine, in the backseat, the woman, gazing out of the window, and Captain Bedoya, asleep, his head bobbing.

  The cobalt-blue car strains its way up Dog Hill. The January morning is sunny, the sky immaculate. Smoke from the houses floats on the plain. The trip is long, the road straight as far as the top of the grade, after which it descends, snaking through the Güemes Mountains between the cactuses.

  Ladder stops in the town of San Andrés. Finding the three asleep, he wakes the woman to pay for the gasoline and goes into the lunchroom. He breakfasts on pork cracklings in green tomato sauce, refried beans, and an egg. When he is on his second cup of coffee with hot milk, the three come in, groggy. He observes them with compassion: it is for him the beginning of a day, for them the end of a carouse. They take seats. The captain, proceeding with caution, asks the waitress, confidentially, “What would be nice and tasty that you could recommend?”

  Ladder gets up, goes to the street, and takes turns around the square with long, slow strides, hands in pockets, toothpick between his teeth. Despite the bright sun, an icy breeze is blowing that forces him to button his jacket. He pauses to watch a group of shoeshine boys pitching coins against a wall in a variation of the game unfamiliar to him. Continuing his stroll, he reflects on whether the Mezcala people could be any stupider than those of Plan de Abajo. He stops briefly again to read the inscription on a monument to the Boy Heroes: “Glory to those who died for their country . . .” when he sees his passengers emerging from the lunchroom, the captain and the Brave Man in civilian clothes combined with parts of their uniforms, the former wearing his cavalry boots and the latter an olive-green field jacket; the woman, Serafina, in a rumpled black dress which, as she steps into the car, bares a dark thigh and shows her armpit. Having settled back, they blow the horn peremptorily, summoning the driver to come and get them on their way.

  The road takes them by historic spots: through Aquisgrán el Alto, at the entrance to which there is a sign that says: “Mr. President, they stole our water!” and where Serafina orders a halt to quench her thirst with a bottle of orange soda; through Jarapato where Ladder stops to drop a peso into the collection box of a church being built with contributions from drivers; through Ajiles where they buy cheeses; past Cazaguate Hill where the captain asks to be let out to pass water—“to sign the roll,” as he puts it; and, to San Juan del Camino, which has a Miraculous Virgin, where they take a break.

  Serafina goes into the church (subsequently, it was learned that she lit a candle, knelt before the Virgin to pray for good luck in the undertaking, pinned a votive offering of a little silver heart on the red velvet hanging, and gave thanks in advance as though her wish were already granted). The three men, meanwhile, seated at a table in the ice cream parlor, order frozen custard, discuss what they are about to do, and reach the decision that it had best be done in the light of day. When Serafina joins them, she disagrees and orders the operation to be carried out at night.

  This means at least three hours to be killed, which they spend sleeping under a sapodilla tree just outside Jalcingo.

  * * *

  The sun is se
tting when the dogs of Tuxpana Falls begin barking at them. It is a wide, dark town with dusty streets, a naked electric bulb on a pole every two hundred meters. Tuxpana Falls is noted for its guava orchards. Every house in town is said to have one, but all their doors are shut. The children play in the streets.

  Ladder stops the car on a corner where a group of people are seated under a kerosene lamp eating pozole. Brave Nicolás gets out, approaches them, and, addressing the cook, says, “Pardon my rudeness, but where might I find a bakery?”

  She informs him that Tuxpana Falls has three bakeries and gives him directions. They drive from one end of town to the other and from bakery to bakery without finding what they are looking for until the last.

  “This must be it,” says the Brave Man, who has gotten out of the car three times and bought three bags of crullers.

  All climb out. The men go around to the trunk of the car as Serafina walks over to the bakery. The building is humble, its two doors are the only ones open on the street. Approaching cautiously, doing her best to avoid being observed, Serafina peers into the shop and sees a man seated behind the counter and a woman doing accounts. She returns to the car. Very deliberately, Ladder, a length of plastic hose in his hand, siphons gasoline out of the tank of the car into a can. The captain and the Brave Man remove two automatic rifles from the trunk, insert the magazines, snap the bolts to test them, making considerable noise. The captain hands Serafina a pistol.

  What takes place after that is uncertain. The Brave Man stands in one doorway and Serafina in the other. She addresses the man behind the counter, “Don’t you remember me anymore, Simón Corona? Maybe this will remind you!” And, aiming high, she shoots. The man and woman are under the counter before the gun is empty. The Brave Man lets go a burst into the bakery then says to the captain, standing beside him, “You fire now, my captain.”

  “No, I am covering.” His weapon is trained on the opposite sidewalk in case of an attack from the rear.