Ghosts in a Machine: On Fernanda Melchor's "Hurricane Season"

Fernanda Melchor | Hurricane Season | New Directions | March 2020 | 224 Pages

There are kinds of places that, when encountered, will set off warning signs in the head of any fan of horror literature and film. It could be a dilapidated asylum, or a barn with a caved in roof in the middle of a corn field. Even a drive through the suburbs of the American northeast in fall can be enough to get Halloween’s theme song stuck in one’s head. The space of Mexican fiction, particularly of the macabre or mysterious sort, has signifiers that are just as effective, if less well known outside of the Spanish-speaking world. All this is to say that when one comes across a desolate town in rural Mexico, dark secrets, desperate circumstances and brushes with the supernatural are likely to begin swirling about like the breezes that precede a storm. Temporada de Huracanes, (newly published as Hurricane Season in English,) by Fernanda Melchor, tells a story set in just such a rural Mexican town called La Matosa, in the coastal region of Veracruz. The story that unfolds in La Matosa draws on a long tradition of literature of the macabre in Mexico, bringing out questions about the complex roles of gender and sexual desire in the abject corners of extractive economies, exemplified in this case by the oil industry of the Gulf Coast. A pulsing, sprawling tale of intimacy sought in a space defined by exchange and casual violence, Hurricane Season, like the force of nature it is named for, is best described as a text that is experienced, even survived.

Both the content and narrative style of Melchor’s text merit attention, and for clarity’s sake a description of the former should precede the latter. The story swirls around the murder of a transgender woman known only as the Witch, whose mother (also known as the Witch until her death) raised her in a dark, dilapidated hacienda on the outskirts of La Matosa. The (daughter) Witch ostensibly keeps to herself, yet at the same time has connections with most of the town, as she cooks up potions and spells for the women, and hosts drug-fueled parties attended by many of the men from the town. The story of the murder (whose culprits are known from the outset) is unraveled from the outside in, as the sister, stepfather and bride of one of the murderers narrate their own stories, through which the young man Luismi flits in and out as the story begins to revolve and center around him. Pill-addicted and disinterested in anything outside of drinking and partying, Luismi and his childhood companion Brando fall down a rabbit hole of seeking sex, be it with prostitutes or the “fags” that bribe them in cash or cocaine for sexual favors, that is until Luismi comes across a thirteen-year-old girl, Norma, who has escaped a sexually abusive home. The pair become ostensible lovers, though each is hounded by their own pasts: Luismi in the form of the Witch’s house parties, and Norma by her secret pregnancy at the hands of her step-father. Though, strange as it seems, Norma and Luismi seem to better each other’s lives, the town of La Matosa demonstrates that is not a repository of fairy tale endings, Witches, old Fairies and magic abortion potions notwithstanding.

This brings us to the structure of the narrative, which echoes and amplifies the grisly and at times bizarre content of Melchor’s novel. One of the unifying elements of the various narrators, from Norma to Luismi’s stepfather Munra, is their incompleteness and self-centeredness. Although the previously outlined events are the eye of this particular tale, fundamentally each character is telling the story of their own life, though perhaps rather than narrators we might think of the characters as ghosts in a machine, as technically the whole novel is primarily written in a third person that slips in and out of the voices, thoughts and even persons of the characters it focuses on. For instance, Munra’s chapter is given ostensibly as a statement to local police after the commission of the murder, as indicated by his repeated claim of ignorance to Luismi and Brando’s intentions, but Munra flickers throughout, sometimes grasping to the narrative in first person, at others slipping into obscurity behind the moniker of “the witness” (80). Time, space and perspective whip around the novel like crossed breezes, but the text is given force by its uniformly biting and at times brutal tone and format. As mentioned, Hurricane Season follows a tradition of macabre Mexican fiction: Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Ámparo Davila’s El huésped come to mind, as they explore ruined hacienda towns and trapped women respectively. Themes of queer and gender bending life in rural Mexico are a similarly salient topic, markedly touched on in the 1978 film El lugar sin limites. However, these narratives are in style more indebted to the slow pace of Gothic fiction, as well as the turns towards psychological rather than physical distress per se.

Hurricane Season, meanwhile, surprises its readers by managing to be both strenuously fast-paced and grueling. The former is due to the text’s lack of paragraph breaks, sparse dialogue markings and stream-of-consciousness/digressive narrative style. The latter primarily rests on the mingled effects of the frenetic narrative style with descriptions of scene and personalities that linger on the specific flaws, ugliness and coping methods of each. Luismi’s pill addiction, for instance, is described by Munra as follows: “but those pills, which Luismi guzzled like candy, had only ever given Munra a terrible urge to lie down, to do absolutely fucking nothing and sleep, you don’t even dream of crazy shit or hallucinate like people say you do on opium, no, they just sent you headlong into a deep, deep, lazy-ass sleep from which you woke up gasping, head pounding and eyes so swollen you could hardly open them, with no idea how you got to bed or why you were covered in dirt or even shit….” Clear in this passage as well is the cursing that weaves together much of the narrative. In this English translation, by Sophie Hughes, this aspect is reminiscent of Stephen King’s writing of Jack and Danny Torrance in The Shining, especially given the murderous subject matter.

And it is death that animates the plot, and serves as its beginning, if not necessarily its end. The first of two epigraphs, this one from Yeates, ends with the declaration that “a terrible beauty is born.” Indeed, the Witch’s murder is born out of Brando’s plan to run away with (and possibly kill) Luismi, his childhood friend with whom he is obsessed, after hearing him sing karaoke at one of the Witch’s parties. One potentially illuminating frame for the nebulous issue of queer desire in Hurricane Season (which especially colors Luismi’s relationships with Brando, the Witch, and Norma) is Lee Edelman’s concept of the queer death drive, expounded in 2004’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman’s philosophical project does not jive well with summary, but for the purpose of thinking through the sexual culture of La Matosa, it resonates with the themes of death and childhood in particular. Both Edelman and Melchor seem to have a bone to pick with the figure of the child-as-future that animates normative familial and social structures. In Hurricane Season, children seem to spring out of the ground, and grow where they will, raised by a grandmother, cousin, step-father or group of friends. Norma, who both is a child and is with child, seems to sum up the attitude of the text towards the idea of a newborn as a symbol of hope when she drinks an abortion potion from the Witch and soon after wakes up shaking, covered in blood, and gives birth to a stillborn fetus which she buries in Luismi and Munra’s backyard. Brando is also begged by one of his lovers, a woman named Leticia, to father her child in secret from her husband, but he refuses. These and other refusals to accept the state of life in La Matosa lead to the closest thing that the novel provides to a possibility of hope: After being beaten and questioned by police about the Witch’s death (and the location of her rumored fortune) Brando and Luismi are reunited in prison. The meeting is described from Brando’s perspective: “Luismi, in the flesh, that cocksucking son of a bitch Luismi, right before Brando’s watering eyes. His. Fuck. Finally his to squeeze in his arms.” We see that rather than birth and futurity serving as the “outs” to the dismal conditions laid out in the text, an irrepressible queer desire is the cobbled together solution to living between one hurricane and the next.