By Irma Gallo
There is something in the narrative of Clyo Mendoza (Oaxaca, 1993) that makes you want to cry, and not stop reading it.
It is clear that it springs from the entrails, but with a poetic language that comes from the external, rural world, from the earth. In the narrative voice there is the imprint of the desert, of the air, of sex and violence, of desolation, of animal bones rotting in the sun.
Clyo Mendoza builds the plot of Fury (Almadía, 2021) based on the figure of Vicente Barrera, the backbone of a dynasty that he despises, violates or, at the very least, ignores. Although he is a simple yarn seller who goes from town to town offering his merchandise, Barrera is a patriarchal cacique who imposes his law through sex (consensual, through seduction, and if he can't, through violence, of course!), sowing children here and there and leaving only devastation and abandonment in his wake.
The homosexual relationship that one of these abandoned sons, John, will establish with Lazarus is one of the examples of how this violent patriarchy that is exercised in a rural environment results in a profound inability to accept and therefore, to exercise loving relationships with love and empathy: John can not cope with the guilt, to the point that makes him justify himself thinking in
the way sometimes being with him was like being with a woman.
Or to think that if she had the guidance of a father figure in her life she wouldn't love another man.
Salvador, another of Vicente Barrera's abandoned sons, will also set out on a journey in this hostile desert in search of María, a woman who is half illusion, half ghost, whom he has not known how - or been able - to love.
An initiatory journey that takes place at the same time in his feverish, confused brain, blinded by a love that does not know how to be if it is not through domination, through absolute possession.
At Fury there is also something of fantasy, of the absurd. I refuse to call it "magical realism" just because it takes place in an impoverished rural setting, like many in Mexico and Latin America. It is a story in which a woman impregnated by a man who has become a beast has puppies instead of babies, in which the same man-beast fornicates with the trees and the animals, thirsty for Maria, the woman whom we don't know if he dreamed or imagined with that feverish mind.
I don't know if the desert is the main character of Fury, but I am sure that this story could not have been written anywhere else:
What the sea was to the sailors, the desert was to the soldiers: full of unimaginable monsters, hellish creatures, stories about God and the Devil, and hostile plants that burn and make children angry.
And I think of the soldiers that Calderon took to the streets and neither Peña Nieto nor AMLO wanted or were able to return to the barracks and are still out there, spreading misery and devastation.
There is also violence among women: Sara, the mother of Lazaro, a baby she cannot take care of because the pain of Vicente's departure makes her blind, and Castula, the black woman, the wet nurse of Lazaro, her Lazarito, for whom she will be able to walk the dusty roads, the burning sun, the roads abandoned to their fate and the cries of beasts that seem like the wails of ghosts to find her father, and who will also end up pregnant by the cacique, alcoholic, abandoned, dead.
In this journey of characters through almost ghost towns and violent deserts, which we can't help but be reminded of Rulfo, Clyo Mendoza, who won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Poetry Prize, makes himself known as a gritty, profound and original voice that we want to keep reading.
By the way, the cover, designed by Alejandro Magallanes from a photo by Everardo González, is excellent.
Irma Gallo is a Mexican writer and journalist.
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