Theory Ponce and his brother Róldenas, heirs to a bankrupt printing company, travel the west coast of Mexico, the drug zone, looking for a friend, the missing theater actress Orsina. In her odyssey, you will find a thousand stories of death, of people who have gone to who knows where. The Mexican engineer Eduardo Ruiz Sosa (Culiacán, 1983), resident in Barcelona –and director of the Latin American literature festival held annually at the Gabriel García Márquez library– recounts it in the novel The Book of Our Absences (Candaya), of which He speaks to this newspaper at the headquarters of his editorial in Poble Sec while he uses a cigarette rolling machine to pipe a few with pipe tobacco.
The literary ambition of the work is surprising, its multiple narrator... What was he proposed?
The first draft is from 2006, in fact my first novel, Anatomy of Memory (2014), was a part of the same project, which broke off. The idea is that it was a total book about absence and the disappeared. How to talk about absence without turning it into a mere anecdote? Speaking from the very absence, with another language.
With one that owes a lot to the theater, to poetry, to those narrators who have played with punctuation...
The idea is that, when we suffer, there is no language, we cannot articulate words and, little by little, it recovers, but there is no language at the moment of maximum emotion. For this reason, in a chapter of the book, the words are broken down.
Any nearby missing person cases?
Yes there are, several. All Mexican families have disappeared. Around 2012, just going out on the road in Culiacán or Sinaloa was almost a death sentence, if you were unlucky enough to run into these people.
And in his case?
In 1996, I was thirteen years old and I saw a play that had an impact on me, The Fifth Commandment, a kind of metafiction about a crime. At that time, three very young boys disappeared, 16, 17 and 18 years old, one of them was the brother of a classmate of mine from school, a neighbor of my parents' house. That is the origin of this book. Another case: in 2013, a professor from the Faculty of Letters went to visit a friend in a ranch 30 km from Culiacán, and they found him murdered, a good guy who only did reading books and watching baseball.
Did you live in drug territory?
In October 2019, not so long ago, the drug traffickers closed Culiacán, kidnapped the entire city and the families of the soldiers, so that they would release an arrested drug trafficker. A war broke out, with weapons of the highest caliber and burning cars. No one was left in any doubt that they are the owners.
Many people see Mexico as a dream tourist destination.
The two stories coexist. Tourism, the great literary fairs and then extreme violence and drug trafficking are different layers that, at some point, come into contact and an explosion occurs.
At what point did Mexico get screwed?
With Felipe Calderon. Until then, the PRI government had agreed with the drug traffickers, each one did their thing and they were left alone. Until 2007, drug trafficking was a problem only in northern Mexico. The enormous numbers were after Calderón took the army out into the streets and proposed a frontal war against the drug traffickers that at the same time created various divisions between them. There have been horrible massacres that have consisted, for example, in killing all the people in a city.
The place is important...
It is a very high region, it quickly goes from a tropical climate on the coast to a cold mountain, with snow, that is the region where the drug traffickers hide, in the golden triangle between Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango, where the police do not enter nor the army. It is a place where poppies grow wild, from where opium is extracted.
What about the bureaucratic part?
The bureaucracy around death in Mexico is a very strange and tiring labyrinth. The husband of one of my cousins disappeared, and it took him many years to get the death certificate, they didn't give it to him, what if he had left because of his will? There are many in that limbo, there are 52,000 unidentified bodies throughout the country. There is even an industry dedicated to making dolls for families to bury and stay calm.
What Semefo, the forensic service, says is a Dantesque hell...
In fact, it has nine scales, as in the Comedy. I take the scenes from real journalistic investigations: in Culiacán the refrigerators for corpses had broken down, and they had them in the patio, shrouded with sheets of plastic and lime.
But the thing about the truck where they put 273 bodies...
That is true, they found it in 2017 in Jalisco, an abandoned truck in a vacant lot. It started to smell bad, it was leaking... it turned out that it was full of bodies. But it wasn't the drug traffickers, it was a refrigerated truck rented by the State to store corpses that no longer fit in the morgue. Something happened to the driver who left the vehicle and when the engine stopped, the cooling stopped working. When the person responsible was arrested, he said: "They have found a truck, but we have many more."
There are many eyes, one-eyed characters, some that serve to see the past, others for the future...
The eye has been an obsession for me. In Palinuro de México, a novel by my admired Fernando del Paso, there is a general who has a hundred glass eyes and he wears one when he is drunk, another when he is happy... I, here, speak of eyes that, despite being prosthesis, are a receptacle of memory, and have qualities such as seeing beyond or transmitting images at a distance.
The visitor José de Gálvez appears, who was the Marquis of Sonora.
He has a historically documented delusion, which is described by his relatives. He saw a mountain and yelled 'shoot them!' Even though there was no one and the soldiers started shooting into the air.
