Season of the Swamp

The most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the drumming; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the dances; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the concerts; no, in a way it was kind of the hippodrome, which was fun and also pivotal though in another way; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the inner courtyard, yes, that might be it; or maybe the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was that he met the canaille and learned what funk was; or that he more or less figured out what Thisbee might or might not have done. What happened in the weeks that followed was that they stopped feeling like weeks and instead sometimes felt like minutes, and the minutes sometimes felt like days, because the city—first gradually, then vertiginously—stopped being a city of cons and wheeling and dealing and became a living creature, an animal that initially began to wriggle and writhe as if shaking off sleep or fleas and then as if nothing in the world mattered more than dancing.

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Even sailors had their own music, and not just inner music, not just the singsong bitch and moan all down the street by the levee, singsong bitch and moan about making no money—money was one word he did know, a key word if ever there was—and about other things he didn’t understand; at the front, a fiddler and a man with a military drum that he beat with military talent, bom-bom, bom-buh-bom, rhythmic and energetic, while the fiddler played dance tunes, quick and peppy, that nobody danced to, since they were all walking, everyone but him, who accompanied the fiddle by nodding in time to the melody as if there were dancing couples doing little leaps and turns inside it.

On and on they walked, and saw the Théâtre d’Orléans, which was staging a production of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, a very old opera, as well as Le prophète (Le prophète!), which had premiered in Paris only four years ago, so basically yesterday. What a place, forever renewing itself as though the swamp made no matter.

The streets were perpetually under construction. Now that he and Pepe were staying at the boat-house in the third ward, he could walk to work, traversing the old quadrant to get to the printshop. He’d learn to sidestep the holes on one street and then find the next day that workers were patching it, only for it to begin crumbling again, then be patched again, over and over. The streets were under slapdash repair more often than they were traversable. Occasionally the workers would rush around, portraits of exemplarity; more often they’d sit on the sidewalk to smoke, drink, and sing. There was a lot of singing. Cabañas wouldn’t let him touch the movable type. His job was to stack the ads or notices or pamphlets or invitations and deliver them. On rare occasion he was tipped a coin for his trouble, but basically he had to make do with what Cabañas paid him; in exchange, between trips through the quadrant (most deliveries went either there or to the anglo ward, on the other side of Canal) and reading the paper at the printshop, he started to see that despite the cold, the city was hotting up. “Carnival,” Cabañas said. “It’s like everybody gets an itch and it can only be scratched by going nuts.”

He saw a man steal a dog—steal a dog, when there were already so many on the street—and watched the owner catch and beat the thief with the metal handle of his cane while the dog did its part by ripping the man’s leg to shreds. He read of a woman arrested for stealing two corsets. Corsets. A city where there were battles over corsets. He saw two men challenge each other to a duel and a third befriend them both with a bottle of rum. He read of a man called to court to explain what a captured man who didn’t belong to him was doing at his house. He saw a lost child and did not approach.

One day, returning to the house-boat, he heard drums. This wasn’t the little military drummedy-drum drumming of the singsong sailor, the bom-bom, bom-buh-bom, but more of a baaam-bam-bam-bam, baaam-bam-bam-bam, like that; he didn’t know this language either, but it was clear that somebody was making the most of those drums, playing them like keyboards, a hypnotic baaam-bam-bam-bam, but a baaam that was also changing its attitude, like when you truly communicate something instead of just say it.

He stood awhile at a vague crossroads (street demarcations in this part of the city were still more suggestion than law), trying to locate the source of this percussion. Baaam-bam-bam-bam. It sounded close but also like it was in many places, all around.

He entered Thisbee’s house, distracted by the rhythm in his head, without thinking, without knocking. Thisbee was in her room, sitting on a bed, holding hands with another woman. She turned, on hearing him come in. For one second her eyes flickered in apprehension, the next second they narrowed in anger, and the second after that she stood and closed the door.

They lost both their money and each other, on account of following parades: some small, others that started small but were teeming a few blocks later; one led them to the place they saw their first fire—a shop on the edge of the old quadrant—which took no time to engulf the two, three, four, seven houses around it; in Spanish, someone said, Folks want to burn their own damn house, fine, everybody’s got to get their gravy somehow, but leave the neighbors out of it. The parade hardly paused, the band—fiddles and flutes and a drum—was backlit by the flames and continued to play in the light provided by three captured, holding torches aloft; from time to time something would rain down on them, oil or some other fuel, who knows, liquid fire, but the captured did not complain.

Another parade led them to Saint Louis Cemetery; they accompanied Ocampo and Arriaga to that one. Arriaga told him that someone at the Conti said this was the place for visitors to go but he didn’t see why:

“They look just like the ones in Mexico, though there’s more graves aboveground than beneath, true.”

Later he learned why.

“What you may not have heard,” said Ocampo, “was that the man said this is where visitors come to stay, and then he said Wait till summer.”

The parade after that was the one that led them, all five of them, to the hippodrome. It was an afternoon parade, with a band playing on a float, and several masked men, the first masks they’d seen: birds, reptiles, fantastical animals.

Immediately on entering the hippodrome they separated. The place was like its own sort of river, one where luck was the only deal being done. They saw whites, whitewashed, and creoles of color, of varying degrees of elegance. Those who looked the poorest were also the most hopeful, like at church; the richest bet in an offhand manner, as though fanning themselves. He watched the races for a while, less interested in the results than in the muddy clop-clop of the horses, until he saw Pepe gripping one of the railings that bordered the track, slips of paper in hand. No, no, no, no, no.

He approached him and made the gesture of Say it isn’t so. “Two times, only twice, and I almost won, it was so close, I mean, closer than close,” said Pepe, adding, with great conviction: “but look who’s running in the next one, look who I bet on!” Pepe held out the racing form. He’d already seen them back at the printshop, they looked to him like poems, the horses’ names listed one after the other. He looked where Pepe was pointing triumphantly: La Mejicana. That was the horse’s name, spelled with an imperial jay.

Pepe signaled Eh, eh, eh? How could I not?

It was a single lap. La Mejicana, svelte and sorrel, was number two. The horses shot out of the gates and immediately La Mejicana pulled ahead, as did ten, an enormous graceless beast but one with a gallop full of fury. He heard himself urging on two before becoming conscious of the fact that he was shouting like a fool Go, two, go, two, go, go, goooo, and yet he didn’t care, just as in the days to come none of them much cared about any kind of foolishness. La Mejicana was snorting, and ten, blasted ten, was snorting, and the other horses eyed their competition from afar. Screw you, losers, Pepe screamed, as ten and La Mejicana tore down the final stretch, pushing and pushing, snorting and snorting, and La Mejicana seemed to accelerate in the final yards, but ten, blasted ten, leapt more than galloped, furiously, and won by a hair.

He felt a sequence of sorrows before anger. The sorrow of this defeat, which for a moment was the only defeat in the world, the sorrow of the lonesomeness known only to those who lose, and the sorrow of false hope. Then came anger.

“Tell me you didn’t bet it all.”

Pepe gazed at the horse like it was a boat that had set sail the second before his arrival.

“No, not all of it,” he said. “Well, not all of yours, just mine; mine, yes, all of it.”

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Excerpt from Season of the Swamp. Copyright © 2022 by Yuri Herrera. English translation copyright © 2024 by Lisa Dillman. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org