More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Penélope had gotten into a car with tinted windows and hadn’t gotten out again. By the description it sounded like a Peregrino
The next dead woman was Lucy Anne Sander.
Death of the American
We’re blue-collar workers, honey, she said in English. Like me, said the nurse, also in English.
Remaining American befriended by Mexican nurse
some friends said they had seen Mónica get into a black car with tinted windows, maybe a Peregrino or a MasterRoad or a Silencioso. It didn’t look as if she was taken by force.
long dark hair down to her waist,
Harry Magaña,
Miguel or Manuel,
preferred to drink and watch the crowd. Harry asked if he knew a girl called Elsa Fuentes.
The belt whistled through the air and left a red mark on the whore’s arm. Before she could scream, Harry Magaña covered her mouth with one hand and pushed her down on the bed. If you scream, I’ll kill you, he said. When the whore sat up again the mark on her arm was bleeding. It’ll be your face next time, said Harry Magaña. Where does he live?
When the fight was over, El Mariachi’s nose was broken and he was bleeding from both eyebrows, and El Cuervo was complaining of a rib he said was broken. La Vaca was on the ground. Only when they tried to hoist her up did they realize she was dead. The case was closed.
Demetrio Águila.
The big man Harry Magaña met playing pool
why go to the effort to leave the body on the second floor of a building under construction, with all the risks that entailed,
And at night they’d go out again, in her BMW or his Cougar,
Of Silvana’s murder he declared himself guilty and was only sorry he had tried to burn her. Silvana was a good kid, he said, and she didn’t deserve to be treated like that.
seer appeared on Sonora TV. Her name was Florita Almada,
The seer/nutritionist who met the cattle dealer.
So she soon abandoned the business and kept traveling, with her late husband’s dog and her revolver and sometimes her animals, which began to age with her, but this time she went as a healer, one of the many in the blessed state of Sonora, and on her travels she foraged for herbs or recorded her thoughts while the animals grazed, as Benito Juárez had done when he was a shepherd boy,
Of the thousands of books she had read, among them books on the history of Mexico, the history of Spain, the history of Colombia, the history of religion, the history of the popes of Rome, the advances of NASA, she had come across only a few pages that depicted with complete faithfulness, utter faithfulness, what the boy Benito Juárez must have felt, more than thought, when he went out to pasture with his flock and was sometimes gone for several days and nights, as is the way of these things.
Inside that book with a yellow cover
What yellow cover? First time yellow cover has been mentioned The thoughtz of Benito - the beginning of a dream trance seqience
Benito Juárez
Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice, where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we’ll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you’re not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Prose Poem
And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn:
the things she read, the shadows that watched her through the window, though they weren’t shadows, which meant they weren’t watching, it was the night, the night that sometimes seemed pixilated.
She was scheduled to speak after a ventriloquist from Guaymas, an autodidact who had made a name for himself in Mexico City, Acapulco, Tijuana, and San Diego, and who thought his dummy was a living creature. He came right out and said so. He’s alive, the little bastard. There’ve
Florita didn’t ignore him, she asked about his health, asked how many hours a night he slept, how many meals a day he ate and where, and although the ventriloquist’s replies were mostly ironic, addressed to the audience in a bid for applause or fleeting sympathy, La Santa got more than enough information to recommend (quite vehemently, too) that he visit an acupuncturist with some knowledge of craniopuncture, an excellent technique for treating neuropathies originating in the central nervous system.
Silvana Pérez
It’s always important to ask questions, and it’s important to ask yourself why you ask the questions you ask. And do you know why? Because just one slip and our questions take us places we don’t want to go. Do you see what I’m getting at, Harry? Our questions are, by definition, suspect. But we have to ask them.
The assholes thought it was a mugging gone wrong. There was talk about a Central American. Some desperate fuck who needed money to cross the border, an illegal, see? An illegal even in Mexico, which is saying a lot, because we’re all potential illegals here and one more or one less hardly makes a difference.
Usually they ended up at a bar frequented by whores in Colonia Guerrero, a huge lounge presided over by a seven-foot-tall plaster statue of Aphrodite, probably, he thought, a place that had enjoyed a certain louche glory back in Tin-Tan’s day, and since then had been in perpetual decline, one of those interminable Mexican declines, meaning a decline stitched together here and there with a muted laugh, a muted shot, a muted whimper. A Mexican decline? More like a Latin American decline.
The reporter answered that Santa Teresa was a center of the drug trade and most likely nothing happened there that wasn’t related to the phenomenon one way or another.
Stemming from the lawlessness
made him say, in exasperation, that in Santa Teresa they were killing whores, so why not show a little professional solidarity, to which the whore replied that he was wrong, in the story as he had told it the women dying were factory workers, not whores. Workers, workers, she said.
How can it be that such a pretty girl didn’t have any boys chasing her? he wanted to know. The friends laughed and said there had been lots of men who would’ve liked to date Estrella, but she didn’t want to waste her time. What do we need men for when we have our own jobs and make money and can do what we want?
another cause for the attacks on women
Well, find him and put an end to this goddamn business, said the mayor. But discreetly, if I may make one request, without sending anyone into a panic, said the man from the chamber of commerce.
Jaws 1975
It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious. Suddenly someone dreams it and after a while half the prisoners dream it. But the noise you hear isn’t part of the dream, it’s real. The noise belongs to a separate order of things.
Cabo Tepoca.
Enriquito Hernández
In September there were almost no killings of women.
and the body was tossed without further ado into the public grave.
Linda Vázquez,
According to Ordóñez, the expression on Lalo Cura’s face was very odd, not a look of surprise but of happiness. What did he mean by happiness? Was he laughing? Smiling? they asked. He wasn’t smiling, said Ordóñez, he looked serious, like he was concentrating, like he wasn’t there, not right then, like he was in the Podestá ravine, but at a different time, when the bitch got
And you read books, too, I suppose. That’s right, said Lalo Cura. The faggot books for faggots that I gave you? Modern Criminal Investigation by the late chief director of Sweden’s National Institute of Technical Police, Mr. Harry Söderman, and the former president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, ex-Inspector John J. O’Connell, said Lalo Cura.
Through the whole movie the Argentinean was waiting for the moment when the Mexican would touch his cock. But the Mexican didn’t do anything except breathe heavily, as if he didn’t want to miss a cubic inch of the oxygen previously breathed by the Argentinean.
he heard or remembered voices talking to him about the first Expósito, the family tree dating back to 1865, the nameless orphan, fifteen years old, raped by a Belgian soldier in a one-room adobe house outside Villaviciosa. The next day the soldier got his throat cut and nine months later a girl was born, called María Expósito. The orphan, the first one, said the voice, or several voices taking turns, died in childbirth and the girl grew up in the same house where she was conceived, which became the property of some peasants who took her in and treated her like another member of the family.
chingaderas son estas / Dimas le dijo a Gestas.
By then there were five generations of María Expósitos living outside Villaviciosa, and the little house had grown, with rooms added on and a big kitchen with a gas stove and a wood fire where the eldest prepared her brews and medicaments.
I counted 7
that was how she entered it in the register at the parish of San Cipriano, twenty miles from Villaviciosa, Olegario Cura Expósito,
The sixth generation in an unbroken line of raped mothers
I noticed there were two mirrors. One at one end and the other by the door, and they didn’t reflect each other. But if you stood in a certain place, you could see one mirror in the other. What you couldn’t see was me. Strange, I said to myself, and for a while, as sleep began to overtake me, I made calculations and experimented with positions.
Hans Reiter listened to, sitting cross-legged and eating bread and butter, without saying a word or adding any commentary of his own, although the truth is he knew the baron’s nephew, whose name was Hugo Halder, much better than the other servants, who seemed blind to reality and saw only what they wanted to see, which was a young orphan in love and distress and a young orphan girl (although the baron’s daughter had a father and mother, as everyone well knew), headstrong and awaiting a vague, dense redemption. A redemption that smelled of peat smoke, of cabbage soup, of the wind tangled in the
...more
Sometimes, however, as they sat on a café terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who’ve just given birth and are
...more
As the doctor left he mused that the lanky boy was probably a drug addict, and he wrote in his diary: how is it that in the ranks of our army we find young men addicted to morphine, heroin, perhaps all sorts of drugs? What do they represent? Are they a symptom or a new social illness? Are they the mirror of our fate or the hammer that will shatter mirror and fate together?
When the visitors returned to the surface, anyone, even the least astute observer, could have seen that they were divided into two groups, those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naïveté of the human race.
