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  PRAISE FOR SANTIAGO’S WAY

  ‘A visceral look at madness ... Laurent’s squelchily descriptive passages of bodily function and dysfunction ground this tale in a solid reality, and make the extremes the possessed narrator is driven to seem even more alarming.’ – Metro

  ‘A dazzling experience. I can only compare it to Salvador Dalí’s Mona Lisa with Drawers, the enigmatic image of woman from whom emerge astonishing, shocking and touching images of a woman who is many women.’ – Alfred MacAdam, editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, translator of Fuentes, Cortázar, Carpentier, Pessoa, et al.

  ‘Patricia Laurent’s prose vibrates with wit and vigour. Santiago’s Wayis a jewel of a novel, funny, catastrophic and perverse.’ – Carmen Boullosa, Mexican novelist

  SANTIAGO’S WAY

  Imagine that all your life you’ve been guided by someone else. Someone who’s steered you away from trouble, taken you across the world, brought you success. He’s called Santiago and he lives in your head. And now he’s turned against you ...

  The unnamed narrator of this debut novel blunders through life, never quite getting things right until the arrival of Santiago, a male presence who appears in her mind when she’s fourteen. Thanks to Santiago, the naive innocence that has led her into trouble so many times is gone, replaced by a street-smart wisdom that makes her attractive and successful, with a ruthless streak that gets her out of sticky situations time and time again.

  But as time goes by, Santiago’s good advice becomes increasingly paranoid. From his operations room inside the narrator’s mind he tortures her with old photos maps and videos: the story of everything that has ever gone wrong in her life. He causes fits and hallucinations, anything to get his way. Suddenly Santiago is dangerous and will stop at nothing to be in control.

  A huge hit in Mexico, Santiago’s Way draws on both magic realism and the surreal tradition of Cortazar to tell an exhilarating story that should catapult Patricia Laurent to the front rank of international writers.

  PATRICIA LAURENT was born in 1962. She is the author of several prize-winning short stories and numerous articles and creative writing pieces for Spanish language newspapers and magazines, and two of her stories have been filmed. She lives in Monterrey, Mexico. Santiago’s Way (winner of the Nuevo Leon Literary Prize 2001) is her first novel.

  Patricia Laurent

  Santiago’s Way

  Translated from the Spanish by Geoff Hargreaves

  Peter Owen

  London and Chicago

  Prologue

  I should make it clear at the start that three things menace my wellbeing: a sense of abandonment, the sight of a cradle that ceases its rocking and a sudden onset of darkness. If I listen to torrents of water I am also filled with dread. I can recall no worse experience than taking a bath in the ocean. My recurrent nightmare is of an enormous wave that surges to a height of twelve feet or more but never comes crashing down.

  The rest of the terrors, as indecipherable as flashes of lightning that curdle the blood, belong to Santiago, the intruder who invaded my body when I first opened my veins.

  The fourteenth year of my existence was the saddest I’d ever known. Not so much because of the scandal in my family, somewhat so because of my failed suicide attempt but, principally, as a result of a hallucination that threatened my reason.

  Before Santiago found refuge in the currents of my blood, he used to circle around me. Invisible, he breathed hotly on my shoulder. He pestered me, behaving like the very opposite of a guardian angel, as he waited for my moment of greatest weakness to unite his missing dimension with mine. While he was tracing out the topography of my encephalic routes, which harbour him today, his proximity distracted and disturbed me, forcing me to stand guard in case he stole all the memories I had stored up from those early years when Mina and I thrust our way past life’s rules and limitations with the impetuous enthusiasm of hummingbirds.

  Lord and master of his dwelling places, he now guards, inside his intricate web of caves, a multitude of photos designed to provoke shame and repentence as well as movies he plays over and over on the screen of his disgust. In a leaky canoe he travels along the currents of my being. The broader the river, the further he infiltrates up the white-water rapids.

  His quickest shortcut lies through dreams. He opens up galleries in them and exhibits there images of my life: a ruined building floating on slimy waters, a lover who changes into a metallic-blue wasp that deposits its eggs in the abdomen of a paralysed tarantula, my mother who transforms into a toboggan of stone.

  I intuit his presence curled up on some neuronal mound. ‘I am the sole mistress of my body,’ I assert defiantly.

  He argues back that we are one and the same.

  Out of a doughy mixture of slippery facts I try to reconstruct Mina. She is still out there somewhere, in the indigo-blue, past deep wells, wide lagoons and abandoned buildings. For years now Santiago has been hiding her behind this menacing landscape. He annuls my optic nerve so that he won’t even be seen to approach the tunnel that leads to her.

  He refuses to contribute from his hoard of metaphors and syntax the language I need to imagine Mina, the alternative to him.

  ‘That would be going too far,’ he snaps peevishly.

  I calm him down with a short selection from Mozart. I offer my body a shot of dark-roast coffee, while I speak of the horror of being unable to tell a convincing story.

  Sufficiently appeased, Santiago finally agrees to let me have enough vocabulary to ensure a reader’s understanding. He will act as a faithful mirror to my rudimentary alphabet. He will observe, comprehend, assert, and I can tell my story. But he is afraid of being judged too harshly. In fact, he would prefer not to continue at all with this compromising act of cooperation.

  1

  To prove that he has always inhabited my body, Santiago flourishes a packet of photos taken from the time of my birth up to the moment when I tried to declare my independence from him. Like a professional gambler, he fans out the photos and selects one at random.

  Here my father is drinking with his mates. It isn’t clear whether they are in the living-room or the kitchen. He calls on his children, one by one, to perform the tricks he has taught us. Because I have almost no appetite, my body is extremely skinny, and my performance consists of spinning around on my axis while he blows on me. I pretend to be trapped in a whirlwind until I fall and hit the floor like a plank. His friends laugh and clap. Intoxicated by success, I retire to the bedroom where my older brothers and sister are planning mutiny. The ringleader is Javier. At this time he is twelve years old and he fancies Consuelo, the daughter of my father’s friend Garces. Javier’s party piece (his inability to refuse to perform this babyish trick drives him wild) consists of simply twirling his hand from front to back. With the palm facing forwards, he sings, ‘I have a little hand.’ Then he turns the back of the hand to his audience and sings, as if they were all two-year-olds, ‘I don’t have a little hand, because it’s fallen to pieces.’

  Santiago possesses a whole collection of such photos, slides and transparencies that he will go on showing to me over the course of our sickly union. He is I and I am he, he claims. All the rest is just astral sleight of hand. There is no way I can treat him lightly, and he warns me to watch out for those moments of throbbing wildness when I act like a person in a dream, totally out of control. Any deviation from the norm makes him nervous. He assures me that my problems are the predictable result of a pathological compulsion. He urges me to read a good book on health maintenance.

  Why do I drink so much? Smoke so much? It all ends in dreadful hallucinations. How can I hope to achieve physical harmony when I pollute my body all the time?

  2

 
For ever floating, unable to reach land and change into my real self, I rehearse the gestures of other bodies: how they eat and laugh, how they carry their books to school. I imitate my classmates. I tread in the footsteps of neighbours when I go to the corner shop. I learn what I’m supposed to do when it rains: spin around with my mouth open and catch raindrops on my tongue. It’s as if I explore level ground with the passion of a hill-climber. With my eyes half open I practise staring at the sun for long periods.

  My sister and my brothers were excellent models for what a body could be. I filched sketches of behaviour from them and signed them with my own name. I stole their love stories and made myself their protagonist. I faked the musculature of my brother Alejandro and had fights with other girls on the strength of an insult or a laugh.

  The one thing I could never copy was their way of really understanding things. I lived with a defect in that area. When it came to comprehending the rules of a game I battled in vain.

  A marble, for example, is something you hold in your fingers. You look at it. You rub it between your hands and warm it up, so you can enjoy its round little body. Then you give it away to somebody or other.

  No, they tell me. That’s not it. No and no again. Marbles are for hiding in a drawer. I can take them out when I’ve finished a page of handwriting practice. I knock them against other marbles and wait until somebody tells me if I’ve won or lost, because I never figured out when I was doing it right. I trusted my siblings’ sense of fair play. They were the judges. They pronounced the verdict.

  Sometimes I thought I had a talent for logical reasoning. But it was a guaranteed disaster if I took the initiative.

  This photo of the neighbourhood where I grew up shows the Gonzalez kids, a clan of five brothers and sisters. One fewer than our six. I never understood the reason, but we and they hated each other’s guts. At least that was simple. Don’t say hello to them. Don’t address a single word to them. And most of all – this was absolutely clear – never make them a present of a marble.

  Hatred. That’s the way it is. No rhyme, no reason. It’s like grass. It grows without needing attention. It feeds itself. It springs up on its own.

  At last, here was something I understood. I liked the idea of seeing myself aligned with my family in a battle. My brothers and sister used to have fun drawing up maps of how we could bypass the Gonzalez kids. Applause and cheers were in order when one of us returned unscathed from a trip to buy tortillas.

  Then the inevitable occurred. We all bumped into one another in the square. Glances were exchanged. Spit flew out of mouths. Curses followed. The long-expected war cry rang out.

  When the battle began, I found myself without an adversary. I was supernumerary to the engagement. It was then that I took the initiative. The Gonzalez kids had brought a playful puppy with them. This was my opportunity. I delivered kicks to my canine foe. I grabbed it by the tail, whirled it around and thwacked it against a wire-mesh fence. Stunned by my action, both warring bands stopped fighting. Still sweating with hatred, they both turned on me, raining down blows.

  Afterwards, my own siblings – in other words, my own team, the army composed of my closest relatives – refused to speak to me. Finally, I understood that there were rules, even in hatred, that could not be broken. After several hours of being given the cold shoulder I pretended I had seen the point, and I was forgiven.

  3

  While Santiago was circling around my dreams Mina set up house in me with a bang. Together we explored land and terrifying sea. Sounds and tastes. The fireworks of an exploding spirit.

  My mother sent me to buy tortillas. I had to cross a square shaded by almond trees, under which stood an abandoned kiosk. As I returned with a kilo of tortillas a man spoke to me. He was seated on a bench. He showed no sign of possessing a Santiago, and his Mina, like mine nowadays, was concealed behind shattered fragments of memory. He was a typical beggar, dressed in blackened clothes that had once been beige. Chewing-gum was stuck to his long hair. His eyes were small, but, in spite of their opaqueness, they had the sharp look of a rat’s. He called out to me as I passed. I headed towards him quite naturally, for human beings did not figure in my list of phobias.

  He asked me for a tortilla. As I unwrapped the package he slipped his hand under the skirt of my school uniform. I detached the first tortilla and observed the steam that arose from the one beneath it. The beggar took the tortilla with one hand. The other, in the shade of an almond tree, pushed aside my panties and began to stroke me. Before his hand got any further inside Mina and I held a conversation. Why was he touching my pee-pee? That was what we were going to find out. Mina assured me everything was fine. The man had this small need. We stayed where we were. The man took me by the hand and sat me down on the bench beside him. I mentioned that he had no Santiago to guide him, because I don’t recall his being worried somebody was going to see him. Eating tortillas, Mina and I discovered the delights of touch. She took control of the situation. Inside me things turned into a ball of light, then, with the help of the man’s finger and the dilated clitoris, everything exploded into hundreds of tiny suns.

  Santiago now searches for this picture of the plaza, which, according to him, he photographed in minute detail.

  ‘To begin with,’ he says, ‘your mother, because of that inattentiveness of hers that we are so familiar with, forgets how little you are to be crossing the avenue by yourself, on your way to the square. Here you can see this white car that had to brake to avoid killing you. Once we get to the square we have forgotten all about the errand. We settle down to study ants that are pulling pieces off the blood-red shells of fallen almonds. While we are sitting in the sand under the almond trees, the beggar, who is really none other than the lollipop-seller, comes by and asks what you are doing. Tears spring to your eyes, for you suddenly realize you have lost the money and will get a beating, so you make him a despairing answer. He offers to give you a coin. He takes a shining peso out of his pocket. It is blindingly bright in the midday sun. At this point you approach him. Screened by his lollipop cart, he slides his hands under your panties and strokes you with his moistened finger. This other photo here of your internal events shows the explosion of the sun – but look, see how dark it gets afterwards.’

  ‘I lost Mina in that darkness.’

  ‘The lollipop-seller fits your hand to his hardened penis. Of course, you don’t know what to do. When you come back with the kilo of tortillas he intercepts you again. He asks you for a tortilla and says he will expect you the next day. So you lost more than a coin that day. Here are the photos of the days when you are crying and kicking, so as not to be sent to the tortilla shop. You say you are afraid to go because of the Gonzalez kids, although the older ones, the most belligerent, are in school at that hour. Reluctantly, Lilia has to take on the job of fetching the tortillas. She threatens to get her revenge on you.’

  4

  I never ceased to be amazed by my sister Lilia. She was only eleven months my senior, but she understood everything, from bathing in the ocean to the right way to combine her outfits. She had elegant manners and always won top academic honours. She was born charming. She knew how to dance and even had a seductive smile with a slight tilt to it. My mouth practised various sorts of smiles but to no avail: they all looked like scrunched-up spiders.

  In primary school I tried to dance. I asked the teacher, Miss Cuquita, to include me in one of the concerts she put on for Mother’s Day. She had fond memories of my sister’s talent and gave me the starring role. After a few rehearsals she regretted it. She then put me in the chorus line, as a partner in one of the numerous pairs. She regretted that, too. My body couldn’t remember the dance: it ground to a halt at the back of the stage, its eyes fixed on the rest of the swirling chorus. To top things off, I was dribbling. The boy assigned as my partner made the situation worse by refusing to dance with my clumsy body. Miss Cuquita chastized him for his bad manners. To console me she gave me a red caramel lollipop, sat me
down on the stage steps and promised to include me in some other dance.

  That never happened.

  Maybe because of my lack of logic I forgive easily. But Santiago, that intruder in my body, driven by power, pride and desire, does not. I am supposed to recognize that his growing willingness to forgive is an indispensable element in his struggle to maintain my health, but I now see it is a ruse to stay in control of me for years to come. Although I know he feels humiliated by the need to forgive, he did start to learn how to do it after the incident with the lollipop-seller. But he made that concession only to gain my favour. He wanted to persuade me that he had not usurped the places he occupies in my body.

  So why all the bad feeling? Because he cannot overlook my attempts at loving. I was a lover from my earliest years, before he came to dominate me, when Mina and I lived in ecstasies of discovery. Together we loved a body that no Santiago controlled, as we had loved that beggar’s. His name was Cheese-Buns, because he sold bread and cheese outside the school. I was in my third year at the primary school. He and I had something in common: dribbling.