In its landscape, structure, and blurring of life and death, Last Date in El Zapotal is immediately reminiscent of Juan Rulfo’s iconic magical realist novel, Pedro Páramo—but while Rulfo’s protagonist is on a quest to find an estranged father, García Elizondo’s narrator seeks to find his own end. He assures the reader that he is quite familiar with death: his addiction to heroin has led him to its border many times. “I know what it feels like to live in limbo, to start slipping over to the other side,” he says. He means this both literally and figuratively—he’s been brought back to life after an overdose more than once, and believes that heroin gives the user a glimpse of the peace we’ll all feel when we’re finally, truly at rest. Now, after years of living at the edge of death, he’s come to the conclusion that he is ready to cross over for good. He’s rationed out his supply of cash, opium, and heroin to fuel a short trip—a bender just long enough to bid goodbye to the world before he pushes himself across death’s boundary with one last heroin shot. The stakes are high: if all doesn’t go as planned, he’ll have no money for food or shelter and will almost certainly die of exposure, a possibility that terrifies him.
The narrator has also brought along a notebook and the novel is told through his entries. He claims he doesn’t want to leave a legacy, and that he only writes to make sense of his own death as it unfolds. The death that he seeks is a difficult thing to achieve, he reminds the reader again and again—the precision and faith it demands is taxing, and a mistake could leave him stranded, suffering withdrawal’s shakes and pains without any way to increase his supply. He likens his existence to that of a monk—both in his devotion to heroin—which he calls his lady—and the ascetic lifestyle he has embraced. He lives on a diet of yogurt, miraculously shuffling between the town’s corner store and his rented room as each muscle atrophies in his mendicant’s body, all while praising the virtues of his chosen drug. But as he embarks on this quest for death, he continually prolongs the final moment with meditations on his past and sojourns through the town’s dusty streets. He visits the local cantina in search of human voices, he limps to a farm to determine if the visions of the dead seeping into his opium dreams are real hauntings or signals of his mind’s degradation. Each trip out of his room prolongs his last moments into a journey of days, or possibly weeks.
Reading, it’s hard to doubt the narrator’s argument that addiction is a vocation, and a terribly difficult one. But almost immediately, it becomes clear that fear and anxiety lie beneath his pontifications on the courage it takes to renounce one’s membership in society. These sermons quickly begin to feel tired—but happily, in the novel’s first half, the feeling of repetition is broken when the novel dips into magical realist descriptions that transform the narrator’s hazy experience of reality into something that verges on enlightenment. As he wanders El Zapotal, the narrator finds ghosts and death worshipers, dogs who dance at life’s edge and the bouncer to the afterlife. “When your mind is no longer preoccupied with sensation, with seeking pleasure and dodging pain and disgust,” he confides, “there’s a void that opens up, and it starts to fill with shadows, fantastical forms sculpted from the residues of sanity that wash up on the shores of consciousness. Your memory falters, and you fall into a spiral of oblivion that corrodes everything your life once was.” How horribly—and yet how perfectly—this description distills what it feels like to be so unmoored that everything you remember of your life becomes “vague, fragmentary, garbled, and absurd.” In moments such as these, the narrator’s tale captures the experience of dissociating in the face of stress and loss, when uncertainty about how to be in the world wells up. These experiences extend far beyond the realm of addiction. They describe a darkness many of us feel when doubt creeps into our minds as we obsessively examine past choices and consider that—no matter how convinced we were of our rightness at the time—we may have made a move that proved to be terribly, irredeemably, wrong.
In her translator’s note, Robin Myers explains how she worked to preserve the way García Elizondo’s prose renders great beauty amidst the novel’s body horror. The narrator’s recollections of heroin’s toll are unflinching: there are memories of old friends choking on their vomit; of their skin flaking like pork cracklings after getting high on the beach; of friends living in a constant state of open-heart surgery, blood spurting onto the ceiling each time they shoot up as their parents try to save them from their collapsing veins. Her success in capturing that balance especially shines out in the narrator’s dreams, as, “visions hidden in the basements of the mind…unfurl in harmonious permutations, appearing and fusing together with the clarity of an open vista.” The prose’s best moments occur in this unfurling, as the narrator’s mind dances back and forth across the line between the living and the dead, the past and the present. “I’ve been dragging a lot of time behind me,” the narrator writes.
His ravings push the novel into a timeless state where memories of the past and visions of the future rise up, monolithic and bright, while the present moment is always encased in fog—difficult to pinpoint, if it even exists at all. After pages of sweaty exchanges in a bar, the narrator exits “at a pale, tentative hour when the darkness, the silence, and the loneliness in the air feel exactly the way they felt when I’d first gone out, hours before, maybe days.” The novel’s only reference points are mutable, like that bar—which, at one hour, is bustling, as “People flock to these fleapits for the same reason as moths flit around lamps at night: they’re the only reference point, the only place to orient yourself in the physical space of the village.” When the bar appears again—hours or days or weeks later—it’s long-abandoned, a ruin.
But, as the narrator’s condition degrades, bringing him closer to death, his repeated insistence on his own courage and on the purity of his devotion to heroin becomes exhausted and grating. At the same time, his unreliability turns into an obvious literary conceit. The notebook that he writes in sets up one of the novel’s central contradictions: while the narrator claims to be ready to leave life behind, he clings to his efforts to understand it. Regardless of the fact that he says he doesn’t want a reader, the act of writing entreats an imagined other to follow him through each opium dream’s velvet transformations. And even as he speaks confidently about understanding death—detailing how he’s nearly met it time and again—he is clearly haunted by his own solitude. His addiction has left him alone with his memories of friends and loved ones who followed him and, one by one, succumbed to overdoses. As he sifts through the circumstances of each death, the prose alternates between images of him walking through El Zapotal’s dereliction and descriptions of him prowling city streets and syringe-filled trap houses with old friends, looking for an angle to supply their habit. In these flashbacks, the prose evokes Sarah Minter’s 1986 film Nobody Is Innocent, whose protagonist boards a train to nowhere. The camera contrasts shots of him staring out on a blurry, empty landscape with past scenes of his friends debating the meaning of nihilism and punk atop melting mattresses in Ciudad Neza. Like Minter’s protagonist, García Elizondo’s narrator declares that life holds no meaning for him, so he has decided to journey to the end of the earth without any means to return—but the narrator is still shackled to an obsession with his life, his memories, and continuously attempts to articulate his place within it all. “I want people to say I renounced everything, like a saint,” the narrator writes. “That I abandoned all earthly ties and matters of the flesh and travelled alone into the jungle to face my death head-on. I want them to think of me and say ‘How brave’ and ‘Not just anyone can pull that off ’.” It’s this desire for recognition—this hope to be seen as someone who is blazing a trail—that makes the novel’s descent into regret and perdition feel overly predictable, and at times dull. As a result, there are many moments in the novel’s second half that drag on, repeating perhaps one too many times the narrator’s insistence that he is a noble vessel on an enlightened path. His internal crisis becomes obvious long before he acknowledges its source, so the revelation that the ghosts may be warnings and that death might bring regret rather than peace, falls flat.
Yet, in literary historical terms, there’s more to Last Date in El Zapotal than meets the eye. As a debut novelist, it is understandable that García Elizondo considers it “boring” when discussions of his work are dominated by questions about his family, but it’s impossible not to mention that his paternal grandfather is Gabriel García Marquez and his maternal grandfather is Salvador Elizondo. Given the rich familial connection to magical realism on his father’s side, Last Date in El Zapotal’s references to the genre’s founding text, Pedro Páramo, seem almost inevitable. After all, Juan Rulfo’s book was so influential on García Marquez, that he once said he’d memorized it cover to cover and could recite the entire work by heart. García Elizondo is in conversation with his grandfather at least in this way—through the osmotic exchange of remembered verses, the preoccupation with a text reread and recited to the point that it becomes attached to the beating of one’s blood, the pattern of one’s synapses as they fire off, connecting one idea to the next. In its best moments, however, the novel earns its connection to Pedro Páramo not through familial legacy, but through the fluency with which it plays with the borders of consciousness, proving the permeability of membranes—us, our surroundings, life, and death—we often want to see as inviolable. This is no small feat—and an achievement that makes the novel more pleasurable than not as it draws magical realism and the nihilism of addiction into an organic embrace.
Through its twists and turns, Last Date in El Zapotal traverses the liminal—the in-between of consciousness and unconsciousness, past and present, death and life. This in-betweenness is not a cloak the narrator can shrug on or off; it’s the very material of his skin, the only lens through which he views the world and himself. Which is to say, his inability to choose a side isn’t a question of ambivalence. He deeply wants to exist, to reconcile with his pain and loneliness through a final act of devotion to the addiction that has characterized his life. And while I find myself tempted to skip through his sermonizing, I also want to follow the narrator’s twisting visions when he leaves his speeches behind and looks death in the face. As he pries that loose brick free and opens a gap in the room he’s been haunting, climbs down into the place “beyond the walls, beyond every closed door,” down into the muck, into the labyrinth that smells of childhood, I’m right there with him, hoping the dogs will guide him home—hoping that there is, in fact, a place to which we have all always been headed, and where, no matter the uncertainty that floods our chest now, we will always belong.
