Writing About the Men in My Nightmares
I had the dream two weeks ago.
Sometimes I dream about violence, but it is easy to discern the nightmare from the waking world by the fact that I feel nothing in dreams. There is no pain, no tingling, no sense of touch. I look down on myself from the third person, like a ghost eavesdropping on my own mind, watching my legs convey me from room to room, my body a detached, hungry figure. And all I can remember about this dream was the fact that the man at the center of it scared the hell out of me.
He smiled at me. The teeth on the right half of his mouth were lined with gold caps. He was dressed quite dandy. Before he was to kill me, I asked him to let me have time to finish reading the books left on my shelf. The smile widened. “Of course!” he cheered. For the first time in memory, I felt the sensation of his injecting me with some paralyzing substance, the way it burned going down my right arm, felt the cutting into my flesh. The sensations followed me all through July 21, and I clutched my arm to my chest for the work day.
This man has now appeared in four dreams, each time in his flamboyant purple coat, the most recent of which I was covered in blood as I hid from him. He has grown progressively less charming and, oddly, progressively less frightening, but I’m still doing what writers do: I’m putting him in a book, a quirky horror called Lola to Albuquerque.
That’s right. When the beast is most perplexing and charismatic, he probably belongs in something campy.
Lola to Albuquerque is not a new story — I drafted it several years ago — nor is the villain a fledgling creation. But now my approach to him is reconfigured because I have been thinking these past weeks about what it means for a man to be evil, the stories that I write, and even what it means for the women who follow him.
——
A few years ago, the Albuquerque Museum had an exhibition on La Malinche. There she was, this woman who is reviled in Mexican culture. Images of her at the feet of the conquistadors. Images of her as unsaintly whore. Traitor. Fallen woman. Murderess who bowed to Hernan Cortes. And while La Malinche’s legacy has in the past few decades been taken up by feminists, I was fascinated in that gallery, looking at various depictions of this woman who was responsible for the birth of the New World by slaying the old one, I could not help wondering what it was that women are blamed for by history. I began writing Project Guernica right away, twirling my fountain pen in my fingers as I thought about what it means for evil men whose actions are diffused through the women in their lives.
I will never know what is the reality of La Malinche and what is the whimsical mistruth of history. What is her story? Mother or empire breaker? What I do know is that I put “Sympathy for the Devil” on repeat with my headphones in, and scrawled. Instead of Hernan Cortes, I came up with a character named Lionel, a strange and terrifying figure who comes to call on Salamanca in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. His Malinche is condemned by history as betrayor of women, Cleopatra of war, seductress of violence and blood and chaos and despair. The novel has two perspectives and threads through the story with touches of the speculative. I am calling it magical realism.
I read parts of Project Guernica to my classmates when I was working towards my MA. My professor, in what I could only call a huge win, wrote in my feedback, “Lionel scared me senseless.” It was as though Lionel was a dream himself, one that eschewed feeling in exchange for horror. She included notes on how to sustain the tension, notes that I still cherish as I continue to draft the book.
Project Guernica is not campy like Lola to Albuquerque. What it is instead is an alternative portrait to evil men and the women who orbit them like moons sewn to the land of a ravaged planet. The doctor in Lola to Albuquerque is cruel, deserving of the moniker of charming butcher. “Give ‘em your best Glasgow smiles,” he is fond of saying to his employees. It interests me that the doctor has a wife who is quite content with the despicable life that he has built for them. Fern, in other words, is content to orbit this planet. I don’t think Lionel’s wife is in that same position of comfort, of understanding that she will take the brunt of history’s condemnation.
——
History tells La Malinche, “Empires of the heart are the first to fall.” I think, in some naive way, that women follow men to their violent graves because allure rings louder than love, because to be mesmerized is a potent feeling, like the cutting into of the arm, of the chest, of the lungs. Maybe there is something captivating about Lionel and the doctor that even I, as the creator, cannot fathom outside of my own nightmares. There are places where skulls pile up in the corners of men’s wickedness, gathering dust from widow’s desiccated eyelashes. I want to write about these men. I want to write about these women. Because, really, who are we? Who are we if we stare down evil in its mismatched eyes? If we find a joke in its shine, a terror in its smile?
This is what I know: I feel that I have some responsibilities as a feminist to answer the perennial questions of shame, of scarlet lettering, of heavy branding like a hot poker pressed into tender flesh. History marks women. Whether it intends to or not, the story of history has a particular class of character for the woman. This is not to say that La Malinche deserves a pat on the back (as my colleague said, “She sucks”), to say that Fern is just as depraved as her doctor husband. Rather, it’s to say that people have these deep rafters in them that remain to be explored, how women resist the colonization of men’s perspectives — and what kinds of horrible dreams inspire it all.
