Sophie Hughes: Leonard Cohen wrote, ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’ What are you more concerned to depict as a writer, the cracks or the light?
Fernanda Melchor: I love that song! I’m definitely more concerned with depicting the cracks inside myself through these experimental egos we call characters.
I was glad to see Hughes bring attention to this aspect of Melchor’s writing. Because if you read anything about her new novel Hurricane Season, from blurbs to reviews, the focus will almost always be violence, whether it’s how visceral the book is or how much pain its main characters have to endure throughout. But the cracks, and the vulnerability and tenderness they imbue the narrative with, are just as essential: they ensure that what could have been a gratuitous and voyeuristic tale is, in fact, a contemplation of the contradictory forces that give rise to violence.
Of course, it would be disingenuous to argue that violence is not central to Hurricane Season, or that it is not a book that speaks about violence with very violent language. Melchor doesn’t trick her readers into a false sense of security: the cards are laid on the table from the very first page, where a group of young boys comes across a rotting corpse floating in a canal. From there on, Hurricane Season assaults the reader’s senses: its prose, rendered in Hughes’ magnetic translation, is as putrid as the corpse the boys discover.
The body belongs to the local Witch of the fictional Mexican town of La Matosa. And while Hurricane Season does revolve around the murder of the Witch, Melchor’s novel is not a whodunnit, at least not in any traditional sense. Early on we learn, in broad strokes, what has transpired, and that the narrators are unreliable only insofar as they interpret other characters’ actions based on their own warped view of the world. As a result, Hurricane Season is, in some sense, a meticulous study of not only intra-community violence but also how limited our understanding of other people’s motivations can be—without necessarily being wrong.
The Witch herself is less a character than a construction. We learn that she was the daughter of the town’s original Witch, who had died during the hurricane and landslide of 1978, ending a life spent providing the women of the town with her concoctions and spells after accumulating some wealth in a dubious manner. But every chapter offers us a narrative about the Witch without ever sharing her perspective. She is everything from a scapegoat to a savior, playing a number of different roles in the five narratives that make up Hurricane Season. The collective voice of the town at the beginning of the novel, as well as the stories of the four characters tied (some more directly than others) to the murder, speak of the Witch even though she never speaks herself.
Yet the Witch does have a strong symbolic presence. Although her powers are nonexistent, like those of so many other superstitions, she is used to explain the source of all the evil that has besieged La Matosa and the surrounding region. Rather than directly explain it, Melchor only ever alludes to this context, mentioning the oil fields outside the town and the company that was supposed to bring work but instead just brought misery. There are also drug lords, and prostitution, which occurs not only in public houses but also along the highway, another infrastructure project that promised wealth yet delivered destitution. But the people of La Matosa do not understand their poverty as the result of these very real potential sources of misery: instead they cast blame on the hurricane season that affects people’s moods, the Witch summoning the devil in the women she assembles in her home, or the evil she conjures at the parties she holds every night at her house with local young men.
After the opening chapter’s collective narrative about the Witch’s origin story, the following ones take up different points of view. And with each character not only do we get a divergent perspective on the Witch, but also on the town of La Matosa, and the abject misery of its inhabitants. We start off with Yesenia, a young woman who spends her days raising a litter of first and second cousins and taking care of her abusive grandmother. She is also the cousin of Luismi, the Witch’s potential killer. From Yesenia, we move on to Munra, Luismi’s step-father, a retired truck driver left disabled by a road accident and now confined to a couch, who tries to make a living through canvassing while also worrying that his wife, a supposedly successful madam, will leave him. But in this novel filled with stories of gruesome cruelty, Norma’s is by far the most harrowing, for it is both heartbreakingly anger-inducing and, at certain points, physically painful to read. When we are introduced to her, Norma is only thirteen, seemingly pregnant, and tied to a hospital bed. Much of what has happened with respect to the murder then becomes clear by the penultimate section, where we meet Brando, Luismi’s accomplice and perhaps the hardest character to sympathize with. He is moody, selfish, and unrepentant, with a penchant for bestiality.
In a lesser writer’s hands, this ensemble might have turned from a realistic portrayal of wretchedness to an excessive catalogue of tragedy and devastation, but Melchor never crosses that line. This is perhaps because she writes from her character’s perspective rather than about them. As I read, I found myself constantly noticing the cracks Hughes and Melchor had discussed, which is to say the moments where not only the goodness shone through, but the real reasons behind each character’s brutal behavior emerged. In Hurricane Season, it is not simply that violence breeds violence in a cycle that repeats, expanding to encompass more and more people across villages, towns, and countries. Rather, the argument that Melchor seems to be making is that the characters’ violent demeanor, whether turned to others, or (often enough) towards themselves, is simply a reaction to a lack of love and affection.
This theme becomes clear early on. After spending the first few pages presenting readers with a vision of the Witch as someone who was a source of evil and malice (at least in the eyes of the local population) and who spread corruption of all sorts across La Matosa, the tone shifts. A chorus of women the Witch has helped—part of the unforgiving narrative voice of this first chapter of the novel—suddenly gives a half-hearted positive assessment of her character:
[A]nd, when all’s said and done, a shame, goddammit, because deep down she was a good egg, always helping them out, and she never charged them or asked for more than a bit of company; and that’s why they – the girls from the highway and the odd stray from cantinas in Villa – decided to do a little collection, raise enough to give the putrid body of the Witch a worthy burial.
Much of what follows this chapter is a portrayal of violence at every level: domestic, sexual, political, psychological. No details are spared, no impure thought shielded from the reader. But this unexpected act of generosity is the first of several fractures in the dark domain violence has established in La Matosa, and it speaks to a desire to be loved and cared for, to be acknowledged as someone worthy of love.
Yesenia is the perfect example of a character turning to hatred and violence when she is denied the love she knows she deserves. She becomes a main witness in the search for the Witch’s murderer as she had seen her cousin Luismi allegedly drag the unconscious body out of the Witch’s house. She takes a perverse pleasure in bringing her cousin down, hoping that her grandmother will finally understand what kind of monster (according to Yesenia) Luismi actually is. One could call Yesenia an unreliable narrator, but Melchor does not intend Yesenia to consciously mislead readers. In fact, most of her hatred for her cousin is a displaced frustration with her grandmother, who terrorizes her many daughters and nieces and shows love and affection only to her good-for-nothing son and nephew. And that is all Yesenia wants: that misplaced affection, the one Luismi receives but never repays. She wants the love, the caresses, and the sacrifices, but all she gets is contempt and beatings.
The same is true of Luismi’s child-bride Norma, who is only thirteen and has run away from home. Her tale is harrowing, but it is also a testament to Melchor’s power to embody her characters—to her ability to narrate complicated emotions and states of mind by accessing what she refers to as her “experimental egos” in the interview with Hughes. Norma is the oldest member of her household, for her perpetually single mother keeps getting knocked up by strangers and leaves Norma to take care of new siblings. And the more her family increases in number, the more distant Norma’s mother grows, in stark contrast to the attention she gave her daughter when it was just the two of them.
Just as Yesenia redirects the anger she feels toward her grandmother at her cousin, Norma seeks a substitute for maternal affection from someone else. She gets close to Pepe, her mother’s boyfriend, who takes advantage of Norma’s need for love to rape her, even though neither Norma nor Pepe see it that way. Norma blames herself for being so weak; Pepe argues that she was the one to approach him, to kiss him first, as if that mattered. But for Norma, it is not love that she feels for Pepe, or even lust. She instead longs for the attention she feels she has been robbed of since the arrival of her siblings, for a false sense of physical intimacy, for a fleeting form of affection:
That was the moment Norma always waited for: when she could close her eyes and feel her naked body pressed tight against Pepe’s, and forget for a minute that it never lasted long enough, that there was something evil and terrible inside her for wanting that contact, that crude embrace, and for wanting it to last forever[.]
When Norma discovers she is pregnant, rather than let her mother find out and risk her eternal hatred, she sets out in search of a cliffside village that she and her mother had visited in their earlier years. She now plans to end her life there, but during the journey she meets Luismi. She goes to live with him, and his mother introduces her to the Witch, who then helps Norma with her pregnancy.
Through the Witch, Yesenia, and Norma, Hurricane Season delves deeply into the gendered nature that violence can take. It examines how this violence manifests, as well as how it harms women, especially when poverty, machismo, and even the hurricane season become excuses for rape and “crimes of passion.” The gritty portrayal of these women’s lives reflects what Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza has dubbed a “war on women.” The latest statistics from Mexico show that ten women are murdered every day, while 4,320 are raped. What happens to the women of La Matosa is a piece of that larger canvas.
But the strength of Hurricane Season is that it doesn’t treat any subsection of violence as happening in a vacuum. Various forms of gendered and domestic violence intersect, and women like Yesenia’s grandmother and Norma’s mother can be both victims and perpetrators. Violence here is ultimately systemic, afflicting everyone even as it affects them differently. The Witch and Luismi, the two explicitly queer characters of the book, and arguably its protagonists, never tell their own stories. Their perspective is completely erased, making it clear how silence is also a form of violence.
In Hurricane Season the absence of love and affection feed violence. And they are exacerbated by precarious financial conditions, by misogynistic and homophobic traditions, and by an inability to accept vulnerability, which can get you killed. It is a novel about violence, to be sure, but also about survival. It asks us to recognize that when there are no Witches around, when there is no gold to be found, and when there are no spells or hurricane seasons to drive people mad, the real curse is what we do to each other.
