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Vice, Noemí thought and was reminded of the nuns who had overseen her education. She’d learned rebellion while muttering the rosary.
“Of a new beauty, Miss Taboada. Mr. Vasconcelos makes it very clear that the unattractive will not procreate. Beauty attracts beauty and begets beauty. It is a means of selection. You see, I am offering you a compliment.” “That is a very strange compliment,” she managed to say, swallowing her disgust.
She thought it was her refusal that amused him. He was, likely, not used to being refused. But then, many men were the same.
A little oil painting, showing a mushroom from different angles, had been attacked, ironically, by mold:
She thought that men such as her father could be stern and men could be cold like Virgil, but women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble.
And Noemí couldn’t help but think that even though nothing was exactly wrong, something was definitely not right.
Florence always knew how to cut you down with the succinct efficiency of a telegram.
She could imagine the letters he wrote, filled with sentences that feinted and amounted to an irritating nothing.
She recalled that Mary Shelley had rendezvoused with her future husband in a cemetery: illicit liaisons by a tomb.
“People said hatters were prone to going crazy, but it was the materials they worked with. They inhaled mercury vapors when they made felt hats.
“Go to sleep,” she said, but in her mind she thought fuck you, and her tone plainly indicated that. She snatched the lamp and left him in the shadows.
It was pleasurable, but in a terrible way, like when she’d had a cavity and kept pressing her tongue against it.
“So I’ll be wed in the Church of the Holy Incestuous Mushroom?” she intoned. “I doubt that’s valid.”
The mushrooms held her upright, anchored her to the wall, like a monstrous Virgin in a cathedral of mycelium.
Doyle had a keen interest in paranormal phenomena. Lovecraft was an avid science aficionado. Several of their stories contain racist elements. It seemed appropriate to name my character after them.
But Mexican Gothic is inspired by a real town, complete with an English cemetery: Real del Monte.
It’s also obvious in the town’s English cemetery, which, thanks to its variety of trees and the cold of the mountainside, looks like something out of a Hammer horror film if you visit it at certain times of the day when the mist clings to the tombstones, which are all oriented toward England (minus one).
