Tr. Jennifer Shyue
Various I’s walk around countries, people. Texts, simulations, mise-en-scène. What remains is what’s left behind, the bones of biography.
The moment I first figured out the power of a well-staged fit of tears: I was holding a handkerchief when it hit me that I could achieve a lot with a bit of drama. I was four, and I wanted my papá to get in the same car as us. A driver sent by one of my father’s cousins was taking us to Arica, in Chile, by highway. We loved to travel. I remember how every weekend we would go to the river and have a meal on its banks, or go to the beach. We’d also go on long trips to Huaraz and Arequipa. This was a trip my parents had been cautiously planning for half a year. But then an uncle who liked to drink and play the fool wanted to go with us, and he started tugging at my mamá. My father’s younger brother. A young uncle, attractive and a womanizer.
My father didn’t show his anger. But he decided he’d go two days later on a bus. He asked the señor driving the car to be careful and have my mother go in the back with the girls, my uncle in front. At that point I took a handkerchief out of the little purse made of Andean cloth that my mamá had bought for me one market day, and started to whimper.
My papá, taken aback, asked: “What’s wrong? Is everything all right? I’ll be there in two days.” “No,” I said. “If you don’t get in the car, we’ll crash and never see each other again. That’s what the voice is telling me, I can hear it, I can hear it.” I started lying like I was possessed. It was the voice of someone who lives in my head. I never knew where I pulled all those bottled up tears from.
A few minutes later, my father decided we’d all travel together. There were four other people in the car: an Argentinian girl, a dark-skinned girl from Sudan, a very Catholic Irish girl, and a little girl who appeared to be dressed as a duck. I’ve never thought of myself as just one little girl, but as different characters and things. I am best represented by a dagger, a sharp instrument that could kill anyone when least expected.
Almost robotic, my transformation. Perhaps it comes from my ties to Asian symbolism, which ends up objectifying the universe, dehumanizing it to the point that the entire history of the intense world that is the West is minimized, into something like a manga or a comic explaining Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Cervantes, and Joyce.
***
When I met Julia Wong, I was surprised by how calm she was. I thought she would be authoritarian, full of arrogance and strange subtleties, but what I found was a girl deeply wounded by life. Wounded or earnest, I don’t know which of the two adjectives to use. In the Latin world, the words dolor and sentimiento generate a vaguely strange goodness, as if wounding oneself might induce filial piety no sound reasoning could achieve. That was also the day I knew I would kill her.
I have one hand. It’s not so terrible. As a boy I had an accident while playing with my father’s polishing machines, which I was forbidden to touch, but I couldn’t resist the naughtiness of moving all those picturesque parts. I accidentally pressed the wrong button and the saw cut off three fingers. Given that my hand was aesthetically irreparable, they decided to amputate the whole hand, and just the stump was left.
I don’t why I mention that. Maybe it’s hard to imagine a one-handed man making a better murderer than a man who drives two-handed with ease. I think being one-handed gives me an aura of doom that leads to any criminal or perverse act, or one of marked sexual or psychosocial deviance, being pardoned and even seen as aesthetically recommendable.
I killed Julia Wong. She was a crappy writer who repeated the tale of the girls traveling in a Chevy in Peru in all her stories. This writer had produced various books. I say “produced” because they read like missives typed up by a secretary more than they read like a literary creation, with a head and a tail, born of the spiritual world of Spanish letters.
That version with the girls, daughters of a strange Chinese man who traveled in a Chevy, I was sick and tired of it. Her books were in all the bookstores in Mexico.
When the version came out where the girls come to Veracruz and discover a spicy paradise of Mexican sandwiches, I decided to eliminate her. I killed Julia Wong in Guadalajara, Jalisco, the day of her book launch for the fifth version of the trip in the Chevy with her father and sister. It was a highly publicized book. The banners and posters were designed by the same publicist behind the million-dollar campaign for some famous donuts that come in every color and are sold all over the world.
So there was hope Julia Wong’s book would break sales records and far surpass the sales of Paulo Coelho, even with the proviso that, when she recounted certain sadomasochistic tendencies in the Chinese father who transported the girls in a Chevy, the book’s aura had a much more developed literary character than Paul Coelho’s inability to realize that his discourse on alchemy and healing the human spirit through boring stories with a moral was gathering dust in the libraries of cold housewives and economics professors with graduate degrees from the worst universities in the United States.
The decision to eliminate Julia Wong from the spectrum and all catalogues was an act of Christian purification and a favor to Hispanophone letters.
After reading all her books, I became convinced her obsession with repeating the same perverse story more than eleven times was a cancer, a kind of spiritual atrophy in the evolution of western thought, and it was more harmful than any book by Paulo Coelho. After the amputation, first of my fingers and then of my hand—I know this lack is what makes me possible, and pedagogically (according to criminology profiles) its avatar, though with different intentions. As if my stump had given me a very powerful numerical equation.
I’m not afraid of death, which is why I’m not afraid of eliminating anyone.
With my functioning hand I cleaned a gun, but it felt all too Mexican and ranchero. A pistol? How old-fashioned! A machine gun, an AK 47 or sophisticated “goat’s horn”? No. None of the above.
A dagger. A dagger bought in an antiques store. In Lagunilla, in Mexico City. A “vintage” establishment, with a large assortment of things.
I didn’t ask for a specific type of dagger. It felt like the shop assistant was waiting for me and could guess what I wanted. He even said the death of Julia Wong had been prepared beforehand by the same publicist who made her famous. What happened was, with time, he turned the writer into just another donut. And he presented her as such, instead of as a bookshopkeeper, writer, poet, or, at the very least, producer of repetitive stories.
***
The one-handed man killed one of the four girls traveling in the car. The police identified the girl’s body as Julia Wong, but the other three girls traveling in the Chevy, the Argentine, the little dark-skinned girl from Sudan, and the one who looked like a duck, were also named Julia Wong.
The one-handed man was exonerated because the dagger he used to stab the girl in the neck turned into a gold dagger that was very valuable on the London market, and the body of the girl disappeared, turning into a fistful of diamonds that were classified as highly pure and auctioned with the dagger at Sotheby’s Guadalajara (the branch undergirding the London one). With the sum from the sale, which was spectacular, a new highway was built from Lima to Arica, which was the journey driven by the girl Julia Wong’s father, in the Chevy with the girls in the back.
The girl eliminated as Julia Wong and turned into diamonds for an auction was the one who had been described as Irish and very Catholic. In her knapsack were a number of tomes of medieval poetry, Chinese monastic poetry, poetry written by cloistered nuns, and various texts about Saint Agnes, among which was the following:
Let go, Agnes, let go, if you don’t let go of those ideas, you’ll never be a saint.
Stop thinking that there’s a way to do it, that the lord awaits you in heaven, that your castration will carry you into his arms.
Let go, Agnes, you’re already a saint, no need for more strange spectacles in front of the people.
Let go, Agnes, you don’t know how to sing like Cecilia, scarcely had you met the mamá of Sor Juana and already you wanted to be mother of the leopards, you wear a borrowed dress and masks.
Let go, Agnes, let go.
Leap, Agnes, over your shadow, rise from the floor, take over the landscape with your prayers.
Let go, Agnes, of the rope to heaven and tie yourself to earth. Here there’s suffering, lies, fucking, eating, envy, begging.
Let go, Agnes, of your gladioluses, your white gardenias, your fleurs-de-lis, your beautiful orange blossoms, your blue heart, and your lavender hands.
Let me out, Agnes, of your womb, let me out.