Foreword
by Mariana Enríquez
Sometimes Bernardo Esquinca’s obsessions lie hidden in his direct and powerful stories, but most often they’re right there in the open: brooding ideas that buzz in the night before slumbering in the corners of sleep. Magical thinking, insane asylums, secondhand bookstores and their peculiar treasures, ancient gods, lovers’ breakups, ruins. The influence of his guiding lights seeps between the lines of his stories as well: Amparo Dávila, Thomas Ligotti, E. A. Poe, Lovecraft. Esquinca is a very smart writer and well aware of his tradition; he has taken an area and haunted it: Mexico City, and especially its historic center, whose intensity, inequality, and mixture of cultures serve as his tapestry and background, landscape and essence. Occasionally he goes further afield, spreading dread through other provinces, like Guanajuato, or even other countries, but not often. Calle Donceles, the ruins of the Templo Mayor, the Colonia Doctores and Roma neighborhoods: you start to look at them differently after reading these stories, because Esquinca scatters his broken, insomniac characters in these familiar places.
Another thing about Bernardo Esquinca’s stories is their decisive opening lines, surely a nod to his other passion: true crime. It’s all there, at the beginning. He grabs like a furious tentacle: ‘Two things: (1) Today I’m going to talk to my wife for the first time in two years. (2) My wife is dead. She passed away two years ago under strange circumstances.’ Thus begins ‘The Secret Life of Insects’, a short and powerful tale featuring a forensic entomologist, a classic Esquinca detective character, somewhere between investigatorial and ghoulish.
The ‘other’ literature
Popular culture has many forms of expression, some looked down upon: the horror story, though fortunately less and less so, is still one of them. It’s what Esquinca calls ‘the other literature’. Interesting tidbits, anecdotes, popular science magazines, conspiracy theories, ufology, the compilation of mythical information crossed with superstition. Bernardo Esquinca uses those voices that surround us and takes them seriously. The influence of Poe is clear, but also that of those voices that enter madness not through the door of the great lords, but through the commoners’ entrance.
The protagonists of Esquinca’s stories are often books, not princely tomes or mysterious occult treatises, but the ones you can buy from any street vendor for a peso. The implication is even more disturbing: it’s not volumes bound in human skin or illuminated medieval manuscripts that contain revelations and open portals – not The King in Yellow or the Necronomicon – but those ordinary paperbacks with silly illustrations whose throwaway theories we scoff at.
The protagonist of ‘Manuscript Found in an Empty Apartment’ finds clues about his brother’s death in a book that leads him to Guanajuato: ‘It had been a long time since I’d been to that city, and as I passed through the tunnels underneath it I remembered that it was mysterious by nature; that despite its touristy side, it gave the impression of containing a secret.’ Architecture, old books, passageways, neighbors: Esquinca’s mad, mystical, everyday horror, the poisonous urban landscape, the towers and buildings like new fortresses, far from the castles now, but very close to the slums.
The ruins of the returning past
Romantic relationships in Esquinca’s stories are sometimes as threatening as ruins; what’s left of them is mysterious and trembles. ‘Come to Me’ feeds off everyday trash: in this case, the flyers for love potions and other magical operations we see in the streets stuck to lampposts, and to which we seemingly pay no attention. But no doubt there are many people who use them. Maybe even we ourselves – myself – have a secret to hide: visits to the witch who receives clients over a plastic tablecloth in a room smelling of fried food and jasmine. The story is almost a rewrite of W.W. Jacobs’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, but is unbelievably more macabre; it might be the most horrifying story collected here. Desire and despair as triggers of horror: love as a circle of hell. ‘Distress and blind faith in a magical solution,’ says Laurinda, the protagonist, a woman living in an almost unimaginable nightmare.
The past, ruins, and love form a dangerous triangle in the most political story here, ‘Tlatelolco Confidential’: ‘That day marked their six-month anniversary; they decided to celebrate by attending the rally at Plaza de las Tres Culturas to hand out flyers in support of the students’ movement. And in a single second the world disintegrated in a hail of bullets.’ I won’t say what happens, but I will add another quote, which tells how that piece of land, that square, demands blood. And gets it. ‘Tlatelolco was the final stronghold of the Aztecs during the Spanish conquest, and it makes perfect sense for their return to begin from this epicenter. Every tomb excavated, every fragment of pyramid that comes to light, only confirms that they never left, they’ve just been waiting for the right moment to take back what’s theirs. And for that an enormous sacrifice was needed.’
What ground are we walking over, what is it we’re stepping on, what secrets lie hidden beneath the surface, not only of the streets we stroll down so calmly, but under our skin, behind our eyes?
The sick and the mad
The great writer on madness was E. A. Poe, of whom Esquinca is an avowed fan, and about whom he has written quite a lot. Like Poe, he is interested in insanity. ‘Sea of Tranquility, Ocean of Storms’ is about hereditary madness and has one of those terrific and irresistible opening lines: ‘In my family there were always secrets, but madness cannot be hidden.’ Cousin Rodolfo’s delusions and conspiracy theories are dangerously similar to paranoid theories on internet forums (in fact, Rodolfo spends a lot of time there). And then there’s ‘Dream of Me’, one of my favorites, about a collector of haunted dolls who mixes his own chilling story with the horrible – and wonderful – biographies of the dolls in his collection, somewhere between Freudian uncanny and urban legend.
There is cosmic horror in Esquinca, in the aforementioned ‘Sea of Tranquility’, for example, but there is also a lot of religious horror: he acknowledges his Jesuit education. Like in the key novella ‘Demoness’, where taking as his point of departure a personal experience, which the author does not fully reveal, he confronts science and faith in the mode of The Exorcist with an expository coldness, almost a commentary, that combines sex, teenage masturbatory acts, anthropology, rituals, theater, ecstasy, a class reunion, and demonology in a stripped-down setting.
Each little revelation, moreover, is almost a trigger for another possible story. Bernardo Esquinca’s tales are usually short, but they contain such a large amount of information that each paragraph could grow into its own branch, until they formed a whole grove of true and false legends, a black forest of horror.
The master of the tale
You can tell that Bernardo Esquinca can’t help himself when it comes to inserting theories about the short story, the horror genre, the whys and wherefores of writing, into his tales. Here are some I’ve found in his work as a whole:
1) ‘I’ve never really understood where a story comes from, if it’s born or if it’s really in some parallel dimension, just waiting for a writer to reach into the darkness and pull a dead rabbit from it.’
2) ‘Usually the best stories are just around the corner; sometimes all you have to do is to open a magazine, and if it’s a tabloid, all the better.’
3) ‘I think fear is an altered state that the brain comes to need, like a drug. That’s why the horror writers I most admire are never short of readers.’
4) ‘Don’t knock liars: they’re great storytellers. In any case, what you believe says a lot more about you than it does about me. That’s the key to every story.’
5) ‘I suppose the best stories are like abandoned houses that nobody wants to stay in, but which you can’t stop thinking about after spending a night in them.’
I could go on, but I’d rather the reader look for themselves and find this decalogue hidden in these stories that are the work of an elegant hand and a somewhat twisted mind.
*
I know Bernardo, I’ve met him several times in real life and on Zoom and at lectures and at the house of our mutual friend Jorge Alderete in Mexico City and at the Oaxaca festival, and we trade emails and messages. He introduced me to Amparo Dávila; we share a passion for Ligotti, Mónica Ojeda, and Liliana Blum’s El monstruo pentápodo. But I want to tell you two little non-literary anecdotes that, for me, are unforgettable.
When I was in Mexico City, I wanted to visit the cemetery (or pantéon, as they call it in Mexico, a term that seems very odd to an Argentinian like me) of San Fernando, in the historic center. It’s one of the oldest and has various legends associated with it, in addition to splendid tombs. He knows about my funerary passion and wanted to show me this gloomy beauty. Unfortunately the Panteón was closed: a sign said it was for reasons of safety, due to the devastating earthquake of 2017, whose epicenter was Puebla but which also affected Mexico City. Bernardo, with his good manners and gentle voice – he’s a delightful person, like almost all horror writers – started yelling for the caretaker to see if he could make an exception for us. Next to the Panteón there was a mutilated dog, possibly run over by a car, its guts hanging out. A few yards away some grim-faced boys were smoking. I tried to hide my fear, and I think I did a good job, but I was scared. I didn’t want to see the ghostly caretaker appear, if he existed. I didn’t want to hear the door of one of the burial niches fall open.
A little while later, Bernardo sent me a message with a photo: it was an altar that had appeared near his house in Colonia Doctores. I can’t tell you what that figure on it was, only that it provoked an authentic superstitious repulsion, an evil and malignant veneration, with details I prefer not to remember. Yet I think, as I write this foreword, that I should describe the image better, because it deserves it. I know I downloaded it from my phone to my computer. But it’s not there now. I can’t find it. It’s not in the recent images, or with the unorganized ones, or in the folders where I keep pictures that inspire or terrify me – which is usually the same thing. I didn’t save the message, and I don’t know why: I usually delete when I have too many unimportant messages, but I wouldn’t have deleted the photo of that thing. I check my inbox, in case my memory is playing tricks on me and the altar to that urban god was sent there instead. Not there either. It’s vanished. I don’t know if I should ask him to resend it, I don’t dare, and I don’t know if it still exists, if it’ll be waiting for me when I visit him, and the figure on the altar and I will look into each other’s eyes at last.
There are true things in this world noticed only by a single pair of eyes.
Carmen María Machado
The Secret Life of Insects
Two things: (1) Today I’m going to talk to my wife for the first time in two years. (2) My wife is dead. She passed away two years ago under strange circumstances.
It’s my day off and our ‘date’ isn’t until tonight, so I’ll take advantage of my free time to go to the beach. Lucia loved the sea. She wouldn’t swim in it; she had too much respect for it. But she would go for long walks along the shore and loved letting the waves lick her bare feet. Oddly enough, she told me once that when she died, the last place she would want her ashes scattered was the sea. ‘One night I dreamt I was dying, and all I could do was swim and swim through the darkness at the bottom of the ocean, like a blind fish.’ I didn’t pay much attention at the time – nobody takes it seriously when a healthy person talks about their death – but it comes to mind now as I put some cans of beer in the cooler and grab a book to lie down and read in the sun.
I’m a forensic entomologist. My job is to study the insects that overrun cadavers and leave clues behind to help catch killers. The bugs like to lay their eggs on the victim’s face, or in their eyes or nose. The trick is to connect the life cycles of the insects with the stages of the body’s decomposition, which allows you to approximate the time of death. In other words, ...
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