Among the Lost Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Note

  Translator’s Note

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  The Book of Epitafio

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  First Interlude

  I

  II

  The Book of Estela

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  Second Interlude

  I

  II

  The Book of the Sons of the Jungle

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  AMONG THE LOST

  Emiliano Monge is a multi-award-winning Mexican novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and reporter. In 2011, the Guadalajara International Book Fair FIL chose him as one of the top 25 best-kept secrets in contemporary Latin American literature, and more recently he was selected for México20, a list of twenty important young Mexican authors chosen by The British Council, FIL, Hay Festival, and Conaculta.

  Frank Wynne is among the English language’s greatest living translators from the Spanish, has won many awards for his work, and is the translator of, amongst others, Javier Cercas,Tómas Eloy Martinez, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published in Spanish as Las tierras arrasadas by Literatura Random House in 2015

  Published by agreement with Casanovas & Lynch Agencia Literaria S.L.

  First published in English by Scribe in 2018

  Text copyright © Emiliano Monge 2015

  Translation copyright © Frank Wynne 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

  9781925322804 (Australian edition)

  9781911344643 (UK edition)

  9781947534797 (US edition)

  9781925548655 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  Author’s Note

  All passages set in italics in this novel are taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy, or are quoted verbatim from the testimonies of Central American migrants making their way through Mexico, hoping to reach the United States. The author would like to express his gratitude for the work done and the information provided by the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, Amnesty International, Hermanos en el Camino, Las Patronas, La Casa del Migrante, Sin Fronteras, and La Casa del Menor Migrante.

  Translator’s Note

  One of the challenges in any translation is preserving a sense of place, affording the reader a glimpse of otherness, of another life, another culture.

  Emiliano Monge’s novel Among the Lost recognisably takes place in the desolate mesas of Mexico and Central America. It is a story — a threnody — of migration, of the desperate and the lost. But the novel also takes place in a mythic landscape, directly inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and often reminiscent of the worlds of Hieronymus Bosch. In Emiliano’s writing, the particular is universal, the allegorical all too brutally real. In trying to recreate the cadences and inflections of the novel, I have drawn on translations of Dante, but also found inspiration in Milton, and the King James translation of the Bible.

  One of the most difficult decisions to make was how to approach names. Almost all of the characters in the novel bear names that reek of death: some are clear to an English language reader — Epitafio (epitaph), Cementeria (cemetery) — others are less so: Estela (gravestone), Sepelio (burial), Hypogeo (a burial chamber). Many of the characters are also referred to by nicknames — often in the form of strings of unspaced words. In the end, I elected not to translate those names by which characters address one another, feeling more would be lost than gained, but to translate the sobriquets which appear in the narrative but not the dialogue. Place names in the novel are at once real and allegorical. The arid plateaus, the impenetrable jungle and the rocky sierra are palpable, but the names given to locations and natural formations sometimes come directly from Dante, others — like La Caída (The Fall) — sound biblical, still others, allegorical — El Ojo de Hierba (The Eye of Grass). For these, I have chosen to preserve the Spanish names, while glossing the first time they are mentioned.

  Throughout the novel, are brief passages set in italics. Some are quotes or rewordings of lines from the Divine Comedy, the others are taken from interviews with migrants who have made, or attempted, the long, brutal, dangerous trek to an imagined paradise.

  The terrains through which Epitafio and Estela traffic migrants are enduring landscapes that have forever existed in visions, dreams and waking nightmares, but they are also the harrowing no-man’s-land many of us glimpse only in news footage, where desperate migrants risk their lives ‘seeking liberty, which is so dear, as he knows who gives his life for it’.

  ‘If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.’

  DANTE, PUGATORIO

  For Alejandro, Iván, and Jose

  ‘Through me the way to the suffering city; Through me the everlasting pain; Through me the way that runs among the Lost’

  DANTE, INFERNO

  ‘You who believe the gods are indifferent to human affairs, what say you to those paintings that show the great number whose prayers saved them from storm and returned them safe to harbour?’

  ‘That may be,’ rejoined Diagoras, ‘but there are no paintings of those who drowned, and they are a multitude.’

  CICERO, ON THE NATURE OF THE GODS

  The Book of Epitafio

  I

  It also happens by day, but now it is night. On the expanse of wasteland that neighbouring villagers call El Ojo de Hierba — The Eye of Grass — a clearing ringed by gnarled trees, primeval liana and roots that snake out of the earth like arteries — there comes an unexpected whistle, the clatter of a petrol engine revving up, and the darkness is suddenly ripped by four huge spotlights.

  Fearful, those who have come from afar stop, cower and try to look at each other: but are blinded by the powerful spotlights. Then, drawing nearer, mothers to children, children to men, those who have been walking now for many days begin to sing their fears.

  Someone whistles and spotlights

  suddenly blaze … We cannot see …

  We huddle against each other …

  sheer fearful bodies.

  The words of these creatures whose bodies strive to merge into a single being cross the space, the man who whistled does so again and advances two paces. Confronted by his body, the thrumming of the jungle, like the shadows a moment earlier, falls away and for a few seconds all that can be heard are the whisperings of the men and women crossing the borders.

  Some say we are already fucked

 
that we are not worth shit … Others

  talk but say nothing … as though

  praying or swallowing their words.

  Listening to these whisperings, paying them no heed, the man in command removes his cap, wipes a hand across his brow, turns his body and reveals his face. As yet, it is impossible to discern anything particular about this man who now raises both arms and, whistling once more, sets in motion the boys operating the powerful spotlights.

  Having advanced several metres, the four pushing the powerful spotlights hear another whistle from their boss and halt their advance across the grassy clearing. Yawning contentedly, the man in command turns his head, looks up towards an old truck and smiles at the woman dozing there.

  For their part, when the cage of light in which they find themselves ceases to close in, the men and women who left their lands some days, some weeks ago, feel something drain from the entrails and huddle ever closer to each other, their tremblings merging into one, their hollow voices fusing into a single voice. The shock is passing and the terror is charged with questions.

  We did not know what had happened … or knew what had but not what would … They began:

  Who sees something … those who are

  on the other side … who?

  The glare of the spotlights that fashions the intangible bars makes it impossible for those who have come from afar to see anything; not the mountains they crossed some time since, nor the jungle where they were so recently, nor the thick wall of vegetation they breached in order to enter this wasteland and stumble on their waiting captors, whose boss is still looking at the woman sleeping in the truck.

  Removing and replacing his cap, revealing his large nose, the man tears his eyes from the woman he first met in El Paraíso, turns his head and reflexively makes another inventory of his things and his people: all his men are here, his huge trucks, his large trailer, two ramshackle vans, three motorcycles, the blazing spotlights and the petrol generator that has just begun to sputter.

  The sudden belching of the machine signals that it is about to stall, and the commander, the man with the big nose and bushy eyebrows whose name is Epitafio, says: ‘I told you that thing was on its last legs!’ Shaking his head, the man with the nose and the eyebrows, who also has two disproportionate lips, takes off his cap again and waves away the smoke enveloping him as he approaches the generator, lights a lamp, hunkers on the ground and begins to tinker with various levers. Seconds later the machine’s hiccupping stops and Epitafio gets to his feet and extinguishes the lamp, and listens doubtfully to the clanking gears as a doctor might listen to a patient’s chest.

  It won’t hold out much longer … We don’t have much time today, thinks Epitafio and, turning on his heel, he walks towards the old truck: his ears, intent on nothing, take in the sounds that emanate from the dark jungle: the screeching of the howler monkeys, the singing of the frogs on the riverbed, the shriek of bats in the air, the drone of cicadas in the grass.

  An hour at most … There’ll be no time to do the selection today, thinks Epitafio, as he reaches the old truck and scowls to see his reflection in the window. Then he turns away and stares at the cage of light and sees the creatures that now form one single being whose voice chants the fears that suddenly teem inside its multiple heads.

  I knew it back in Medias

  Aguas … we aren’t worth shit … I saved

  myself by sheer luck … They will beat us … They

  will drag us away and beat us again.

  Bad enough, there’ve never been so many before, thinks Epitafio still staring at the floodlit mass in the centre of the night, then, taking off his cap, a red cap emblazoned with an albino lion pouncing, he walks away from the old truck: Still, at least I get that big guy there.

  In the centre of the cage, between the bodies of a stooped old man and a big-headed girl he can make out a young giant.

  Imagining all the things this giant can do for him and for his boys, Epitafio is excited and is about to whistle when from somewhere in the jungle there comes the roar of the panther of these latitudes. When the jaguar is silent again, Epitafio finally whistles and the four men operating the powerful spotlights begin to move once more.

  When each has counted to fifteen, the four men stop, turn towards their boss and for the first time whistle in return. This startling chorus causes two children to collapse and heightens the terrors of the men and women whose bodies are illuminated by the approaching spotlights.

  Be careful not to fall … They shoot at

  anything on the ground … That is how

  it was in Medias Aguas … Then they wrapped

  them in nylon … Do not buckle!

  This is it … We will not have much time today … We have to beat this lot and quickly! thinks Epitafio, watching as those who have come from other lands drop their bundles and fall on the ground. Turning away and putting on his cap, the man whose men secretly call him Thunderhead walks back to the ramshackle truck and the still sleeping figure of the woman who is in command here when he is at rest.

  Perhaps he should wake her, thinks Epitafio staring at the window, and he is about to tap on the glass when the panther of these forests once again roars in the distance. But it is not this roar that numbs the arm of Epitafio: gazing at the woman he loves so much has brought to mind what she said a little while back: ‘Remind me that I have something to tell you … When you wake me, say to me: “You said you had something to tell me.”’

  If I wake her now she will not want to tell me, thinks Epitafio, and turning away he focusses all his energy on his cage: with that one there, we have nine … and those three make eleven … plus the six there, eighteen … There have never been so many … and with those five there … and those ones on the other side … I don’t even know how many there are … there must be about forty … more, maybe fifty.

  Removing and replacing his cap again, Epitafio shakes his head, contents himself with knowing that these creatures he is looking at are fucked, and putting his fingers between his lips and, for the first time, he whistles a sequence.

  These whistles, short and knotted, alert two boys camouflaged within the crowd. Clearing a path with elbows and shoulders, these boys, who were born in the jungle and will drag the men and women here into its depths, surge from the crowd, screaming: ‘Here we are!’

  They tricked us … those two

  little shits who are hardly more than children …

  and they ran off laughing … I heard them

  they were laughing … I never saw them again.

  Without turning their faces, the two sons of the jungle break through the border where the light meets the shadows: we are breaking out! Then, once outside the luminous enclosure, both boys stop, allow their eyes to adjust to the darkness, seek out the silhouette of Epitafio and, having found it, they go to join him.

  But before they can reach the man who commands here, a colossal shadow rises up before the boys who fall on to the ground. Protected from the laughter of Epitafio, by the ear-splitting flapping of wings of the flock of birds that had been sleeping in the grass and is now taking wing, the two boys leap to their feet, set their legs to working, hiding the shame of having been trounced by their kingdom.

  ‘Don’t be scared!’ roars Epitafio, his laugh dying away.

  ‘Scared, us?’

  ‘We didn’t see them.’

  ‘You kept your part of the bargain.’

  ‘I told you,’ says the older of these two sons of the jungle.

  ‘You told me.’

  ‘So when do we do it again?’

  ‘First you have to keep your side of the deal.’

  ‘If you pay us what you promised, whenever you like,’ says the younger of the sons of the jungle.

  After a brief silence, Epitafio brings his left hand to his pocket and, as he takes out a wad of banknote
s to give to the boys, he feels a pressure in his bladder. I’m pissing myself, he thinks, handing over the money, then, unbuckling his belt, he adds: how about we say same place, next Thursday? Fine, we’ll be here, promises the older of the two boys, who, dragging the younger boy by the hand, heads back into the jungle.

  As his body empties, Epitafio watches how the two boys hop over a root and how they pull back the curtain of liana. But he does not see the two disappear beyond the wall that separates the clearing from the jungle, because at that moment the petrol generator belches again and he looks anxiously at the old truck: Fucking hell … I’ll have to wake her up.

  II

  ‘How many times have I told you?’ says the woman who woke up a moment ago, and then adds, ‘I haven’t had a wink of sleep for nights.’

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you …’ Epitafio says again, and before the woman can demand a reckoning, ‘… but the spotlights are about to go out … the generator is seriously fucked.’

  ‘I can’t get to sleep, and when I finally manage to fall asleep you wake me up,’ the woman grumbles again, turning her head. ‘You know how much I need my sleep and you don’t care!’

  ‘Why do you say? … Fuck … You started it,’ Epitafio gets confused and, turning his face to hers, he tries to explain, ‘You know very well that I care … but we don’t have time.’

  ‘Why do you think she did it?’

  ‘What difference does it make why she did it?’

  ‘That way … why that fucking way?’

  ‘That way she didn’t feel anything,’ says Epitafio, ‘or that’s what she must have thought, that she wouldn’t feel anything.’

  ‘You think she thought about it … that she planned it?’

  ‘What I think is that we have to get to work,’ says Epitafio, ‘go make the selection while the lights … the generator is going to give up the ghost any minute now.’

  Looking away from the woman who is now yawning, Epitafio turns around in the seat of his old truck, takes out a coin, holds it between his fingers, flicks it into the air, watches the arc it traces, catches it and slaps it on the dashboard. Heads or tails?