Atdtda35: What he was seeing was anybody's guess, 990-995 #2

[Paul Nightingale]

In El Quetzal Dormido Frank’s routine includes his relationship with
Melpómeme. She has ‘that boomtown certitude some young folks possess of
knowing where the money is being spent least reflectively at any given
season’, which suggests she might be in the business of exploiting those who
set themselves up for exploitation. In previous sections, as outlined above,
the narrative has dealt with capitalist exploitation; here we find that
Melpómeme also feeds off the labour of ‘pickers, tree-shakers, nurserymen,
bean-polishers, guayuleros, and centrifuge operators, none in a mood for
moderation of any kind’ (990-991). One thinks of Reef/Yashmeen/Cyprian
‘pass[ing] a few profitable weeks at Biarritz and Pau before the seasonal
lull as English tourists gave way to those from the continent’ (the opening
of Ch64 on 931; similarly, later in this section, the ‘ceremonial arch’ in
Frank’s trance will recall the Halkata on 955).

Yet immediately we go into the passage describing ‘giant luminous beetles’
(991), ‘shining all over their bodies, so brightly that by the light of even
one of them you could read the newspaper, and six would light up a city
block’. At the beginning of the previous section we saw ‘[t]he light,
initially golden, steadily darken[ing]’ (988). Subsequently, Ibargüengoitia,
stands out (‘by contrast’) in his ‘white tailor-made suit and crocodile
shoes to match’. A page later the Angel is set against ‘the declining
sunlight’ (989) and appears to be, as he sees it, communicating with Frank.
However, if Pancho is capable of any kind of thought or reflection, the
reader is denied access: ‘what he was thinking was anybody’s guess’ (991).
Nonetheless Frank (on 985, ‘Doctor Pancho’) reads Pancho as he did the
Angel, ‘[coming] to understand that this bearer of light was his soul, and
that all the fireflies in the tree were the souls of everyone who had ever
passed through his life’ (991).

The narrative offers an introspective Frank; but then Günther’s speech
interrupts his thoughts, adding (‘amplif[ying]’) a reading that Frank (‘Too
German for me’, 992) might be reluctant to accept. Günther’s reading offers
interpretation, one that understands the beliefs of Chiapas Indians through
the dominant discourse of Christianity: ‘... occupies an analogous position
to ...’ etc. And then he invokes telepathy (‘Special Relativity has little
meaning in Chiapas’) before Melpómeme (‘tapp[ing] herself lightly on the
center of her forehead’) gives advance warning of the attack by Mazatecos.
Perhaps Günther’s explanation of local beliefs is as ethnocentric as his
explanation of the modernised plantation on 987, set against tradition, ie
‘the more usual form of either family vendettas or what some called
“banditry” and others “redistribution” ...’ etc. If the ‘ceremonial arch’ in
Frank’s trance does indeed recall the Halkata, we might also consider
Yashmeen’s (rather more ironic) response on 955: ‘... another local curse.
Just what we need’. At the bottom of 992 ‘[p]olitical experts’ are set
against ‘people down here [who] underst[and] it more as one of those
town-against-town exercises that had been simmering in Chiapas since long
before the Spaniards showed up’. Here, it seems, a rejection of
modernisation cannot be reduced to the irrational, a clinging to
superstition. On 993 Günther reconsiders the use of crude analogy, a form of
translation, as ‘like the telephone exchange’ becomes, upon consideration,
‘is the telephone exchange’.