The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 29: Fly Toward the Abyss

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If there’s one arena of horror literature I most regret not making more time for, it’s the vast world of non-English horror. I did write a post on Edogawa Rampo back in 2008, and another that dealt with a story by Jorge Luis Borges last year, but in each case those posts were only meant to be one, or two, among many. If I was a better planner, or any kind of planner, they might have been, but I’m not, so they weren’t. Translated fiction is pretty much a giant blind spot with me in any case – an occasional Georges Simenon novel or Kafka story will help me convince myself that I’m not completely missing the boat, and then I’ll read nothing but American or English or Irish writers for the rest of the year. This pattern is abundantly reflected in my October horror posts.
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But there’s always a token, isn’t there? This year, it’s a novella by Carlos Fuentes called Aura. While I was familiar at least with the existence of Carlos Fuentes, I’d never heard of Aura until it was recommended to me by Crake (presumably of Oryx &… fame) one of my fellow Palimpsesters over at the Palimpsest. Who, by the way, also pointed me towards the Borges story, which I really enjoyed, thereby setting a precedent of profitable recommendations. So Aura went on the list, I happened to snag a copy just about a week ago (before discovering I actually already had a copy, but that’s another story), and got it read between last night and, well, now.

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Aura begins in a manner that is most appealing to me: the protagonist, Felipe Montero, sees an ad in the newspaper placed by a private citizen, who requires the services of a historian. That kind of subtly Gothic, antiquarian-based set-up is absolute catnip for me, promising, as it often does, a series of grotesque family secrets soon to be unearthed by said historian. However, in Aura – which really is very brief, even for a novella, its story plowing heedlessly by any possible diversions – the historian aspect of Felipe’s job is place in the background, and his skill with French (the ad also specified this) become of primary importance. His job is this: he is to read and fill out the manuscript for the unfinished memoirs of General Llorente, long dead husband of Felipe’s new employer, the quite elderly Consuela Llorente. The home in which Consuela lives is steeped in perpetual darkness, or at least dimness, and initially Felipe needs spoken instructions just to navigate his way from the front door to Consuela’s room. Though he gets used to this, Consuela’s home – where Felipe is to lived for the duration of his job -- and hospitality is beset by small oddities: Consuela keeps a pet rabbit named Saga, and scatters the animal’s food across her bed; lunch and dinner are always, and only, liver; judging by the general’s memoirs, it is difficult to get Conseula pegged to a reasonable age, as the evidence found therein suggests something unlikely; and strangest of all is Aura, Consuela’s beautiful niece. Not that Aura herself is so very odd, but during meals Felipe begins to notice that the young woman eats when her aunt eats, meaning if Consuela brings the fork to her mouth, Aura does the same thing, with the same motions, at the same time. And it’s not just during meals – at one point, Felipe sees Aura butchering a lamb (for its liver, presumably), and when he walks upstairs to see Consuela, he finds her miming the same motions, alone and lambless, in her bedroom.

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Where this is all leading is described in terms that are both entirely clear, and fairly vague, which is to say that what the reader is meant to intuit about Aura and its characters is easy to grasp, but why and how any of this happened is left as curious scraps of the General's memoirs. As intended, this causes Aura to be forever above ground, never firmly planted, however clear we may feel about its final moments. However, doing most of the work to make Aura the trance-like, otherworldly book it is is Fuentes's decision to write not only in the present tense, but in the second person. Observe:

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You force yourself to go on workin on the papers. When you're bored with them you undress slowl, get into bed, and fall asleep at once, and for the first time in years you dream, dream of only one thing, of a fleshless hand that comes toward you with a bell, screaming that you should go away, everyone should go away; and when that face with its empty eye-sockets comes close to yours, you wake up with a muffled cry, sweating, and feel those gentle hands caressing your face, those lips murmuring in a low voice, consoling you and asking you for affection.

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This is the sort of thing that I would normally be inclined to write off as a needless affectation, or, perhaps, as tedious dicking around, but not here. Though I'm in no position to say for sure, being merely monolingual as I am, the translation by Lysander Kemp seems exceptional to me, utterly seamless, so that Fuentes's case-and-narrative mode choices don't come off as gimmickry, but rather as essential to Aura's chilly mood. In an odd way, the second person helps to personalize Felipe in a way he wouldn't be in, say, third person -- we learn next to nothing about the man, outside of how he reacts to the situation he's currently in, but every "you" Fuentes throws at us works to keep him from becoming only a cipher. He's just mostly a cipher, and I'm not sure there's anything those "you"s do that first person "I"s wouldn't, and, in any case, you could accuse Fuentes of taking a short cut, but if something works, it works, and I'm inclined to give credit on that basis.

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And anyway, the primary function of the second person, at least here, is throw the reader off balance. That's the intention of nearly every aspect of Aura, and Fuentes never steps wrong there. I suppose it's easy to accomplish this when you throw in bits of untranslated French right at the moment where you'd really like to be reading your native language (provided it's not French), or force the audience to read lines like "You want to touch her breasts" (that's a paraphrase), but the truth is I felt as though I was walking through those shadowy rooms, smoking cigarettes in bed as cats fought outside, and sat down to another dinner of liver. And I felt the great unease, too.