Mariana Enriquez is very good at getting under the skin. I recently finished her epic novel, Our Share of Night, but her short fiction is still my favorite. [Spoilers below for the first story from her collection Things We Lost in the Fire. You can read “The Dirty Kid” online here. Translated by Megan McDowell.]
A middle-class woman1 chooses to live in a neighborhood “marked by flight, abandonment, undesirability;” a pregnant mother and her five year-old son sleep on a mattress on her stoop. The narrator thinks of the boy as “the dirty kid.” One day, the boy’s mother leaves her son alone for hours, so the middle-class woman attempts to feed and take care of him. As they walk, he hints to her of dark, supernatural horrors within the city’s depths. When his mother finally returns, she accuses the rich woman of stealing her son. They argue. The next day mother and son have disappeared from her stoop.
One week later a child is found in their neighborhood decapitated, brutalized, raped. The rich woman knows it must be the dirty kid. She dreams of him. Except a few days after that, the news uncovers the murdered child’s true identity. His family grieves on her TV. It’s not the dirty kid—not even a child from their neighborhood.
She runs into the mother on the street. The mother is wandering around without her son. Where is the son, the rich woman must know.
Before I tell you what happens next, let me say:
There’s a fair (read: wrong) argument to be made that this piece doesn’t belong on a “speculative lit” substack, because nothing unreal occurs in the story. (I use “speculative” as an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, surrealism, etc.) Although horrific things happen, the plot is, essentially, realist. The spooky bits could be explained away, if you really wanted to (why, though?). If Mariana Enriquez weren’t known as a speculative-horror-literary star, perhaps it would go under a different mantle.
Except that while reading “The Dirty Kid,” I absolutely believe there are demon-deals shaking down on the other side of the tracks, and I believe that the narrator’s dreams are oracular and the dirty kid might be the murdered child on the news. How? In describing the dangers the narrator constantly must avoid, we are primed to expect violence; the story reminds you that there are gangs capable of anything, disappeared people. You should watch over your shoulder. The narrator recounts the story of Gauchito Gil—a saint decapitated for deserting the army—vivid with the details of his hanging. Her friend Lala2 tells her about making offerings with chickens to Pomba Gira, of altars to Death, and about the “witch-narcos.” “There are skeletons back there,” the dirty kid whispers.
Innuendo is one of Enriquez’s best tricks.
When I reread this story, I realized how much I’d been mistaken about what was inside it. That I was set up to misremember its parts.
Sarita doesn’t utter the horror, just like the dirty kid doesn’t explain about the skeletons. Maybe it’s nothing. But a threat has been intimated to us, in connotation and gossip and metaphor.
This is Collected Fictions.
The narrator chooses to live in her family’s old house in this neighborhood not despite the danger, but because it makes her feel “precise, daring, sharp.” And I get that feeling: the attention to your surroundings a city requires, even rewards. That anxiety can have value, as a woman walking at night. She’s proud of the fact that she knows which streets will get your purse snatched, which won’t. And when she finds the dirty kid left alone and hungry, she takes him to get some food. That seems more than reasonable, too. She wishes he were more grateful, more vocal, when she helps him. This is unflattering, and realistic. And haven’t we all watched a tragedy unfold on a screen and imagined ourselves somehow personally connected to it?
As the narrator grows more obsessive, as the story twists underfoot, I can also see that she might be wholly unreliable. She never lies; that isn’t what I mean.
What kind of world is it? This is the basic suspense at the heart of speculative fiction.
Return to the confrontation at the plot’s climax, when she runs into the dirty kid’s mother, who is somehow (prematurely) no longer pregnant:
The prose—which generally is on the leaner side—blossoms for the description of the mother’s breath, which seems to contain the hazards and sickness of the entire city. By contrast the dialogue is bald, without dialect or subtext. Nowhere to hide, as a reader, in parsing meanings. There is only the demand—where is your son?—and a refusal to meet it.
As the violence ratchets, the action is clear, bright. It isn’t because the middle-class woman isn’t thinking—she considers whether or not the mother can feel pain, and figures she won’t remember their fight later. The prose simplifies because the narrator is decided, and indeed she has already crossed the line.
The shout upends the power dynamic. Suddenly, the narrator is uncertain, which the word repetition and the dangling, run-on syntax reflects.
The strictly realist interpretation of the world is the one that disempowers the narrator the most. If the world is sane and civil, then perhaps she is not. The violence of the city has found its outlet in her. It’s done. There are no covens, no human sacrifices. She was wrong.
Or.
The nominal distance between the mother (>“bitch”>“dying teenager”>“addicted kid”) and her son has collapsed. The characters bleed together as the Real and the Unreal, the literal and the figurative, both assert themselves as true. The mother has also regained the power of the grotesque, the potency of the unnerving image, and her position reflects that power, as she is framed in the middle of the block, beneath the attention of the street lamp’s glow, centered in our imagination. Not wholly human, disgusting. Monstrous, she is ennobled.
The narrator tries to run after the mother, pathetically claiming to a passerby that she was robbed. She fails, slinks home, and listens for the “soft knocking of the dirty kid’s sticky hand” at the door. The story ends with her alone as she waits to be haunted.
“I gave him to them!”
David Naimon, in an interview with Mariana Enriquez on the excellent podcast, Between the Covers, says:
When I talked to Fernanda Melchor for the show, we talked about how she felt like there was something almost carnivalesque about the violence in Mexico, the way the dismemberments and beheadings were happening in her region on the Gulf Coast. We talked about a Gulf Coast cartel Los Zetas who would barbecue their victims or scalp them alive and then make these phone videos of these human spit roasts called Mexigore. I brought up the New York Times Review by Julian Lucas of her book Hurricane Season where he compares Hurricane Season to both Flannery O’Connor and Marlon James. The critic brings up a philosophy of Marlon James. I brought the philosophy up with James himself when he was on the show but I also brought it up with Melchor, the idea that sometimes one needs to risk pornography in the portrayal of violence.3 The New York Times critic thinks Melchor risks it when he says, “At times, she enters so deeply into the psyche of sexual violence that she skirts the voyeurism risked by any representation of cruelty. In his posthumously published novel ‘2666,’ Roberto Bolaño deployed a device of alienating repetition to narrate the murders of women in Mexico, clinically detailing so many cases that they begin to lose their tabloid charge. By contrast, ‘Hurricane Season’ is saturated with the language of abuse: men ecstatically molesting their daughters; boys boasting about how exactly they’ll rape a friend.” “By design, Melchor offers little vantage beyond this world of predators.” “The crime is not an act but an entire atmosphere, which Melchor captures in language as though distilling venom.” I brought this up with Fernanda because on the one hand, I feel like her impulse to write the book was to critique femicides and gendered violence. But within the book, there’s no overt voice of critique, there’s no distance from the violence. We disappear into the violence.
“The Dirty Kid” is such a risky story, and not just of pornography (as it risks when splaying the bleeding gums of a drug addict). It risks your hatred of the narrator-protagonist, for one thing. In ambiguity, it risks the suspension of your disbelief. And finally, it risks your guilt.
The point of view enacts the problem of understanding. In this case, the perspective troubles over facts and characters who won’t satisfactorily come into focus. Because both speculative and realist interpretations remain alive by the end, the reader cannot assume their version of events is correct. There is no safe position to step back and disavow the narrator’s biases. We are too close. There’s no distance from the violence. Even more so, perhaps, when the violence is off-stage or ambiguous, when we must guess at the evils gossiped about and sensed in shadows, when we must—we cannot help but—do some of the inventing ourselves.
Isn’t it entertaining, to wonder what Sarita knows, and won’t tell? Is it worse than what happened to the dirty kid, to the child on the news (did you hear they took out his eyes)? It’s a very human and ruthless curiosity.
Well-meaning, normal, we are complicit in the creation of a violent world.
The narrator refers to herself as “middle-class.” She owns a large home from generational wealth, so I sometimes refer to her as “rich.”
Lala is also her hair-dresser. They spend time outside of the salon together, so the narrator isn’t totally off-base to say “friend,” but the fact that Lala is paid is important here.
Emphasis mine.