2024-09-08 03:01:00
In the prologue of Wherever I go it is always night, Mariana Enriquez He tells of the visit he made with Bernardo Esquinca to a cemetery in the Mexican capital. The place was closed and the prolific writer born in 1972, a reference of the so-called weird fictiona self-confessed morbid and superstitious man, put aside his good manners and gentle voice to shout for the caretaker of the San Fernando Pantheon. There was a dismembered dog there and some kids smoking and looking at them menacingly. “I tried to hide my apprehension and I think I did well, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to see that ghost caretaker appear, if he existed. I didn’t want to hear the door of some niche fall,” the narrator replies in the text that serves as an introduction to this imminent compilation that the Big Sur publishing house will publish in October.
Paradoxically, two weeks ago, the Guadalajara native came to Buenos Aires to present the book in which he achieves his goal of opening the doors of the underworld. Basically, in stories like “The Great Evil,” “Owls Are Not What They Seem,” or “Dream With Me,” he acts as a medium in a universe full of sinister Santeria. Flies, mental asylums, dolls and cursed manuscripts, and death – lots of death – emerge from a rarefied and recognizable place. One detail is that the eighteen stories in this publication were thought by the author “as a landing” for the local public. “I feel that there is a connection here with my work,” the author acknowledges in a chat with Page/12. Wherever I go it is always nighton the other hand, can also be read as a fat volume of its creator’s obsession with Mexico City. It is the city with its overwhelming historic center and its circuit outside the tourist gaze with stories that Esquinca, as Enriquez explains, “scatters his sleepless and broken characters in familiar places.”
Wherever I go it is always night It is an anthology that summarizes his Trilogy of Terror: Straw children; Dead Sea and Demonia. “It is almost a work for collectors,” the narrator seduces. As a bonus track, it has the illustrations of the artist Mike Sandoval, drawings that for the writer “fit very well with the nooks and crannies of my stories.” As a challenge, there are its harsh, dry and addictive beginnings. “I know they will come tonight.” “Nowadays nobody believes in vampires anymore.” “The small hands buried the needle in the eye.” “That dawn, amid the smell of vomit and urine and the prayers of his companions, there was a moment of calm in the kitchen.” As if Lovecraft were reading a bloody newspaper in a bar in Retiro, in Esquinca’s texts there is a profuse love for what he calls “the other literature.” Basically, the art of crossing fiction with sensationalism, pseudoscience and second-hand books. “The current canon would reject them, but from a distance all those texts on occultism and ufology, to name a few topics, can be read as fiction. They are forgotten volumes that I like to dust off. All of this in my narrative can affect the characters,” the writer argues.
-How was the selection work for the anthology?
-I left it in the hands of my editors. As the author of the stories, one does not have the distance to be able to say which ones are the most worthwhile. My editors gave me the index, and what I decided was to change the order, for reasons of rhythm and style. That was my greatest contribution. It was first published in Spain, but the original idea was that it would serve to present my work to Argentine readers.
-It starts with “The Secret Life of Insects” and that man who anticipates the reunion with his dead wife “in strange circumstances”…
–It was on purpose. I wanted to start with that story on purpose. Over the years, new readers always come to me and tell me about it. It’s at the top of my Greatest Hits. It has something in the Roberto Bolaño style of a big question that has an impact on the ending. It’s a story that represents me because it’s about something as classic as ghosts. I like to take those archetypes.
-There is cosmic horror, there is madness, and other archetypes of the horror genre, but always crossed by the context of Mexico City. How did you come up with that mix?
-I’m from the provinces. Well, Guadalajara is a big city, but nothing prepares you for Mexico City. When I arrived there 21 years ago, it was like a shock, to live there and start to make it my own. Little by little, I got into its guts, into that peculiar place that is the historic center with its alleys and some unpleasant places. And there are the layers of history, the legends, with all its characters. That’s when I had the idea of linking all that, the urban and human, with the literature that I like, which is that of the supernatural. It was quite organic. I feel like the city is asking me to tell its stories. I handle horror clichés, but my hallmark is that they occur in a very specific geography, which could not happen anywhere else in the world. That is to say, there you can touch the pyramids and that is not very common. It was a fortuitous encounter between that architecture and my obsessions. There are some that occur in other settings, a few, most occur in that territory interpreted and reinterpreted from the fantastic.
– In “The Other Night of Tlatelolco”, this is also palpable from the sensorial point of view…
– The square where the story takes place is the mirror city of Tenochtitlan. The last bastion of the Mexica empire. It is very peculiar because there are historical vestiges there, you have a colonial church built with archaeological stones and a multi-family complex building, a cement block where hundreds of people live. You have these three layers – the pre-Hispanic, the colonial and the modern – and the massacre of ’68 with the students took place in its square. It is very charged with energies and sensations. I reinterpret that with a zombie apocalypse. The Mexicas and the Aztecs believed that blood could renew life, that’s why there were sacrifices, all so that Huitzilopochtli could defeat the moon. Here the blood of the massacred students cries out for vengeance from the soldiers who killed them. Well, I enter those layers with my crazy mind (laughs).
-In your stories there also appears a very special idea of literature that consciously plays with the popular and with the journalistic methods of police sensationalism…
-I am interested in the narrative device, I want to tell the horror clichés, how you can get into them and turn them around. “Dreaming with me” is an example of this. It is a collector of haunted dolls, but at the same time there are little stories about each of these creatures. They are stories within stories. It is a literary game that I like a lot. I have also worked as a journalist, I did Sports, Culture, Entertainment, but never the crime news. The police reports. And I would have loved it. As a citizen, reader, writer and morbid person that I am, the crime news newspapers have this thing that they are very graphic and visceral in image and with titles that cause laughter. It is something very powerful. That is how we Mexicans deal with the violence of our society. We have a way of protecting ourselves from the horrible, because those things would always be happening to someone else. It’s something strange and very deep. They are fears that are filtering in like the insects that I fear so much.
-You say that you have almost no contact with social networks and it is paradoxical because much of what is “the other literature” is being developed there. Don’t you think that today’s crime news is the deep web?
-Indeed, the crime reporter has been disappearing. In Mexico, it had its golden decade in the 1950s. There were writers and photographers like Enrique Metinides who are legends today. There are no longer writers with the muscle to write about it. The media are changing, the technologies, but the need for the macabre and the tragic is not extinguished. It is natural that the crime reporter jumps there. It is very curious everything about the creepy pastaThey are phenomena that speak of how we are urged by the inexplicable and fear.
-You are part of a revaluation of the horror genre in Latin America. To what do you attribute this phenomenon?
-It is very interesting and it is true, I would say that the most remarkable thing is that it is headed by writers such as Mariana Enriquez, Agustina Bazterrica, Samanta Schweblin, Monica Ojeda, Liliana Colanzi or Liliana Blum. And not only horror, it is the most interesting literature that is being written now on our continent. The list is long, fortunately. It is not new, it has been happening, but luckily this literature is becoming more and more interesting. Throughout Mexico and the entire Southern Cone we are interested in narrating horror and many times that horror has to pass through the sieve of the supernatural to withstand the cruelties of the social fabric in which we live, be it poverty or violence.. The things we lost in the fire Enriquez’s is one of the best political metaphors ever written about what abused women suffer. There is something very powerful there.
-Besides speaking at your presentation and writing the prologue,Enriquez returned the favor and Did he take you to visit any cemetery in Buenos Aires?
-Yes, of course. I had a spectacular guided tour of Recoleta. It was a cloudy, cold, frightening day, the ideal atmosphere for going to a cemetery (laughs). What I experienced was amazing and beautifully macabre. What I had no idea about was the number of pagan tombs, only Mariana can discover them. They are pyramids and have strange symbols. Those people who dared to go against the grain of their time must have had a very unique life. There is a story to tell there. Or that of Rufina Cambaceres, who you don’t know if she is entering or leaving her tomb. The same goes for those vaults that seem to have been left open and you see the stairs. It is very sombre and there, waiting. It allows you to peek into the mystery. Nobody would want to go down there, even if you are tempted to do so.
-Which of all the characters in your stories would you like to give a hug to, and which one would you never want to visit again?
-She is the same: the protagonist of “Demonia.” It is based on a true story that I experienced when I was very young. At the Jesuit school, they took us to a very old house to do some spiritual retreats in Jalisco. It was in high school before entering university. And there was a classmate who was possessed by some demon, she behaved in a very strange way, with excessive force. There was no Internet or anything like that back then, so the only thing we could do was pray. It was a terrifying episode. The next day she didn’t remember anything of what had happened. There were dozens of us who witnessed that event. The story is like an essay, it tries to understand from psychiatry, theater and religion that which seems to have no explanation. It happens in one of those typical meetings of former students where what they had forgotten is awakened. They are all tormented and relive these traumas. I would give them a hug because they try to understand how it is possible that hell is present on earth. And for the same reason I would not want to return to those scenarios. I wrote it with all the lights on in the house while I was immersed in an inner darkness. Once I finished it I reset my mind.
-Where in your library would you place Wherever I go it is always night?
-I know that it is not exclusive to horror lovers, it is for those who like special, well-cared-for, comprehensive editions. The circle that closes is when your book reaches an antiquarian bookstore, and it would be great if that happened.