The Squanderer and the Seduced: On Fernanda Melchor's "Paradais"

Fernanda Melchor, transl. Sophie Hughes | Paradais | New Directions | 2022 | 128 Pages

Paradais, Fernanda Melchor’s second book translated into English, opens with two teenage boys drinking rum outside a luxury housing development. They come from very different backgrounds: Polo works for a low wage gardening rich people’s homes, while Franco lives in one of them. Down at the dock, the unlikely pair get drunk on the banks of a polluted river. Bacardí hot on his breath, Franco launches into an obsessive monologue about his neighbor, Señora Marián de Maroño. Polo doesn’t take Franco’s sexual fantasies seriously. He drinks and thinks about more pressing problems, like how his new boss is stealing his wages. (His mother takes the rest, and calls him “a little shit” for flunking out of school.) Polo envies his cousin Milton, who has recently joined the narcos and made a lot of money. He daydreams about running away, or more realistically, becoming a narco himself.

Franco, by contrast, is squandering a life of privilege. A bad student, he foregoes homework in favor of pornography. In an effort to combat his immaturity, his family decides to send him to a military academy. Franco despairs leaving behind his life of luxury, especially with his virginity intact. Seen through Polo’s eyes, this “spoiled rich kid” is a lecherous figure: a Portnoy shorn of any intelligence or charm. But they remain friends because Franco has money for booze, and Polo needs to drink.

Each night plays out in the same way: they drink themselves into a stupor, and Franco pantomimes the nasty things he would do to Señora Maroño’s body. He talks openly about rape, at one point admitting that he snuck into Señora Maroño’s house “to sniff her clothes and her pillow and swipe her panties from the dirty laundry basket in the bathroom.” Polo doesn’t believe Franco is actually violent, but he likes the idea of some light breaking and entering: he could snatch Maroño’s jewelry, steal her Jeep Grand Cherokee, and drive away from Paradais forever. 

As Melchor etches the crude outlines of the boys’ scheme, a sense of dread takes over the narrative. Each new section begins with Polo portending a violent event that will occur later in the book. (“That’s how it all began, he would tell them.” Or, “In the beginning he thought it was just talk.”) The novel hopscotches from illustrating backstory to foreshadowing future actions, often within the same sentence:

That’s why he’d been about to say fuck off to it all that Saturday, not just because he’d been made to stay until the end of that brat Micky’s party to clean up the filthy dregs, but because of something that had happened to him earlier that day, hours before the piñatas were brought out, when Polo was by the pool clearing leaves from the water’s surface with a net, lost in a world of his own.

Through the alchemy of translation, Sophie Hughes has reinterpreted the local slang of Melchor’s Mexican Spanish. The result is a linguistic marvel: a hybrid English that jumps between British and American dialects; a bastard tongue situated somewhere between LA pulp and something out of James Kelman. It’s a risky choice with an immense payoff. Hughes did equally virtuosic work on Melchor’s first novel, Hurricane Season, which covers similarly sordid terrain.

It is difficult to read an extended passage of Paradais without encountering sexist language. The sentences are stuffed full of it, picking up speed as they go along, the misogyny ever-escalating. Melchor isn’t merely trying to shock: this is how Polo and Franco speak. The boys don’t couch their sexism in the florid jargon of intellectuals; they swim in it. Their misogyny, we assume, comes from different sources—male entitlement for Franco, class resentment for Polo—but in the end, they both feed gender violence. The words they use are abrasive, and yet a tamer lexicon would be dishonest to the lived behaviors of violent boys.

Compared to the Faulknerian sprawl of Hurricane Season, Paradais is narrower in scope. Instead of switching point of view, Melchor narrates as Polo for the duration of the book, refracting every event through his thoughts and moods. His voice is fascinating, tragic, disturbing. Yet this close third-person has a major drawback: you never see Polo and Franco’s behavior from another perspective. There is nothing resembling the fifth section of Hurricane Season, where Melchor enters the mind of one of her female characters, Norma, a thirteen-year-old girl who has undergone a botched abortion. Norma is both a victim of and witness to gender violence, and her testimony serves as the skeleton key to a male-dominated book. No character plays this role in Paradais. We only see the violence from the perspectives of perpetrator and accomplice.

Yet maybe this doesn’t matter. At its heart, Paradais isn’t a novel about the effects of gender violence; it’s a novel about the people who enact it. Melchor aims to reflect Polo’s damaged psyche—a perilous task, yet a deeply moral one. In a final, climactic scene, when Señora Maroño begs Polo to stop Franco from hurting her, the gardener runs out of the room and drinks himself silly. The violence has manifested, and there’s nothing Polo can do to stop it. Still, Melchor suggests, the boy isn’t a monster, but a fearful teenager who has made “the worst fucking mistake of his shitty little life.” He is both a victim of a cruel society, and an agent of cruelty within it. Paradais ends on a despairing note, with Polo’s circumstances unchanged, his hopes unveiled as shams. It’s a fitting end to an unsparing work.