In
“First Cold,” a boy explores several imaginative loops in his head, from
visiting the Tarahumaras to racing through a galaxy of supernovas. The most poignant is imagining he comes
back as a respectable man to his startled mother, to tell her everything will
be okay in the future. Back in
reality, the boy is but twelve-years-old, three years before she commits
suicide.
The
son of Zachary and Angélica, in “The Framer’s Apprentice,” retells their first
meetings, somewhat romanticized. Then the son remembers his mother screaming at him as a
seven-year-old, “You’re the reason!
You’re the one!” that is, the reason she got married. This happens a year before she also
kills herself. Meanwhile the young
son escapes the present by making his own mathematical symbols, living in his
mind.
This
‘living in the mind’ dwells on the messy relationship between singularity and
abstraction. In “Green-eyed Girl
on the Cover of National Geographic,” the narrator is a young American man
studying art in Paris who falls for a Moroccan clerk. The out-of-place Chicano guards against over-thinking the
details because this leads to a “singularity of meaning.” What we find out in a later story,
“Centinela! Centinela! What of the
Night?” is that the father is telling this Parisian story to their daughter,
Mari, but withholds details of their night dancing, because this would “limit
the possibilities.”
The
reverence for imagination and abstraction and the disdain for details come to
a moral head in “The Puppy.” A
lonely assassin buys a meek, somewhat frightened puppy, and goes about taking
care of Snorkel. He plays with
Snorkel, and loves him apparently, until he gets a call to do a job in Mexico
City. The assassin then drowns
Snorkel in the tub, knowing the dog is only “species first and then
breed.” When the assassin is back
in town, he’ll buy another dog.
The
moral crisis, whether or not Chácon explicitly says it or realizes it, is that
over-abstraction can easily lead to inhumane behavior, to not ‘seeing’ the
individual in front of you. That
is an old problem in Heidegger’s philosophy of being-towards-death, for
example, the problem of fetishizing abstraction to such a degree that you start
thinking of your death as the only thing that matters in your life. Of course, that’s crazy, or another,
more philosophical way to put it is that human beings are more than just minds:
they are bodies, they are individuals, they have particular characters. That’s what matters in the moral world.
These
issues come to the fore in several stories where drugs or alcohol spur the
imagination from a “dull life.” In
“Mujeres Matadas,” a fifty-year-old El Paso man is listening to death metal
music surrounded by twenty-somethings, when a young guitarist, Mari(a), invites
him to see “something really evil” in Juárez, at an underground club. In an old maquila factory, the “viejo”
is transported to another world. But was it the music and the spectacle, or the “red pills” they took
before she steps on stage? Again,
in the last section “Hotel Juárez,” a professor of literature buys crack
cocaine and is pursued by his imagination and three boys. He ends up in a seedy hotel room, “his
head expanded into a universe of voices and images.”
The
literary and philosophical issues at the heart of Chacón’s excellent stories
are how imagination can save us, but also condemn us, and how too much
abstraction can encourage us to lose ourselves in the beautiful desert world at
our feet.
(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on June 16, 2013.)
(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on June 16, 2013.)
