Book Report: Signs Preceding the End of the World

12. Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, translated by Lisa Dillman (2009/2015) (6/2/2020)

My friend Lynn dropped this book off for me, I don't really know why. Maybe because I'd mentioned that I especially enjoy short books these days, because there's a chance I might finish them in less than forever? This book is short—only 107 spare pages—but it is dense with life.

The story is of Makina, a multilingual switchboard operator in a remote silver-mining village in Mexico, whose mother sends her north, across the border, to find her missing brother. Her journey is told in nine short chapters with mythic titles—The Earth, The Water Crossing, The Place Where the Hills Meet, The Obsidian Mound, The Place Where the Wind Cuts Like a Knife, The Place Where Flags Wave, The Place Where People's Hearts Are Eaten, The Snake That Lies in Wait, and The Obsidian Place with No Windows or Holes for the Smoke. Herrera explained in an interview that

the structure of the novel—and its heroine’s journey—is bor-rowed from the Mexica world of the dead, Mictlan, a layered sequence of levels and challenges through which the dead must progress if they are to be cleansed and reborn. For the conquer-ing Spanish and their priests, who did so much to bury Mexica culture and history, Mictlan was simply a pagan hell. But the Mexica had neither hell nor heaven: for them the afterworld was neither final nor peaceful. Mictlan is where the dead are pre-pared for re-creation, a gauntlet across which—as they cross a series of nine underworlds with nine challenges and nine guardians—the deceased are purged of every element that made them who they were in life. Through this purgation, Herrera explained, they are prepared for rebirth. [this quote is actually from here]

After encounters with all manner of characters—including drug lords, a young punk on a bus in Mexico (who proves useful later on, over the border), an attentive hired thug (he ferries her across the Rio Grande), a woman in a restaurant (she points Makina to a house where her brother went to work), a policeman (whom Makina bests through her literacy)—she does finally find her brother . . . but he is lost to her, not through dissolution but through assimilation. And so she starts to make her way home, only to be stopped short and, as the myth goes, reborn (presumably).

The language is beautiful: poetic, each word important. Here are a few samples.

When she reached the top of the saddle between the two mountains it began to snow. Makina had never seen snow before and the first thing that struck her as she stopped to watch the weightless crystals raining down was that something was burning. One came to perch on her eyelashes; it looked like a stack of crosses or the map of a palace, a solid and intricate marvel at any rate, and when it dissolved a few seconds later she wondered how it was that some things in the world—some countries, some people—could seem eternal when everything was actually like that miniature ice palace: one-of-a-kind, precious, fragile.

*

They are homegrown and they are anglo and both things with rabid intensity; with restrained fervor they can be the meekest and at the same time the most querulous of citizens, albeit grumbling under their breath. Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people. And then they speak. They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it's like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.
 More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift. They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth, between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there.
 Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they'll last, who knows if these names will be adopted by all, she thinks, but there they are, doing their damnedest.

*

Her brother had sent two or three messages back with assorted migrants on their way home. Two or three and not two, or three; Makina couldn't say for sure because after the first one the one that followed and maybe one more were the same old story.
 The first one said:
 I haven't found the land [supposedly left by his father] yet, but it won't be long now, you'll see.
 Everything's so stiff here, it's all numbered and people look you in the eye but they don't say anything when they do.
 They celebrate here, too, but they don't dance or pray, it's not in honor of anyone. The only real big celebration is the turkey feast, which is a good one because all you do is eat and eat.
  It's really lonely here, but there's lots of stuff. I'm going to bring you some when I come. I just have to take care of this and then I'll be back, you'll see.
 The second one didn't mention the country or the land or his plans. It said:
 I'm fine. I have a job now.
 And the third, if it existed, might've made the same claim, this way:
 I said I was fine so stop asking.

And finally, here is what Makina writes when the anglo policeman is harassing a group of Mexicans he's rounded up:

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don't speak your tongue and don't know how to keep quiet either. We who didn't come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you'd never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.
 The cop had started off [reading aloud] in a mock-portentous voice but gradually abandoned the histrionics as he neared the last line, which he read almost in a whisper. After that he went on staring at the paper as if he'd gotten stuck on the final period. When he finally looked up, his rage, or his interest in his captives, seemed to have dissolved. He crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it behind him. The he looked away, turned his back, spoke over the radio to someone and took off.

No, one final final—the best description of baseball I've ever read:

The stadium loomed before them. So, what do they use that for?
 They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. He stopped, raised his cane and fanned the air. One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn't get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.
 Do you like it?
 Tsk, me, I'm just passing through.
 How long you been here?
 Going on fifty years . . . Here we are.

It's a beautiful book, full of understated emotion and insightful observation. I'm glad Lynn dropped it by, for whatever reason.

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Cases in Monterey County as of yesterday, June 1: 571 (up 64 since I posted on Saturday); hospitalizations, 65 (up 6); deaths holding steady at 10. Hispanics and Latinos account for 77.6 percent of cases.

Stay healthy. Exercise compassion. Not everyone is just like you. And that's a good thing.