This week’s quote parallels my experience reading this week’s section:

“Then the one-eyed man shifted in his chair, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and said: our commander”s name was Korolenko and he died the same day. Then, at supersonic speed, Ansky imagined Verbitsky and Korolenko, he saw Korolenko mocking Verbintsky, heard what Korolenko said behind Vebitnsky’s back, entered into Verbitnsky’s night thoughts, Korolenko’s desires, into each man’s vague and shifting dreams, into their convictions and their rides on hoseback, the forests they left behind and the flooded lands they crossed, the sounds of night in the open and the unintelligible morning conversations before they mounted again. He saw villages and farmland, he saw churches and hazy clouds of smoke rising on the horizon, until he came to the day when they both died, Verbintsky and Korolenko, a perfectly gray day, utterly gray, as if a thousand-mile-long cloud had passed over the land without stopping, endless. At that moment, which hardly lastted a second, Ansky decided that he didn’t want  to be a soldier, but at the very same moment the officer handed him a paper and told him to sign. Now he was a soldier” (709).

The section is written as though dreamed, and it flows by in a second, and I decide I don’t want to engage anymore, but there I am, done with the reading and left in a new state, knowing and bewildered.

Hans Reiter is a child of the water, in a one-eyed, one-legged family. Mmmmkay.  Diving, swimming, drowning, enlisting, befriending, spying, and a woman obsessed with Aztecs. Mmmmmmkay.

This is the sense I’ve missed since Amalfitano, but I just can’t get engaged. Is this the guy who winds up, somehow, in the prison in Santa Teresa? From this?:

“Then his mother stared at him with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise from the depths” (644).

Somehow via the Third Reich?

“It was around this time, as they walked under the sun or the gray clouds, enormous, endless gray clouds that brought tidings of a fall to remember, and his battalion left behind village after village, that Hans imagined that under his Wehrmacht uniform he was wearing the suit or garb of a madman” (670).

Makes me think of Amaranta in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Rosa in House of the Spirits. Not through any clear parallel, but as a cyan negative to their passion and vitality.

Ah, the Crimes. Bye bye, crimes. What I have gleaned from your voluminous horror is that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and that while we devalue women and throw the in the trash in death, we spend not one moment thinking about their lives in the maquiladores. We benefit from the economic system in which they are disposable, and then we are horrified when they are disposed.

Good, good times, international economy.

And while the violence against men is much more frequent, we hole it up in prisons and boxing matches, creating a compartmentalized culture of viciousness that we then shug off and romanticize. Raping and murdering women is somehow both terrible and ignorable, while raping and murdering men is at once terrible and expected.

Good, good times, penal system. Panopticon, indeed. Fetishizing gaze and violence…yeehaw.

Finally, in the congresswoman’s story, we get to the center of at least one of the murders…actual investigation, revelations, seedy underbelly of a culture. But even that ends without resolution, unsatisfactorily.

Frustrating.

“Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you’re shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don’t hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you’re off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?” (511).