Season of the Swamp
By Yuri Herrera and Lisa Dillman
()
About this ebook
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the stark trade in human beings.
With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera's fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.
Yuri Herrera
Yuri Herrera’s first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the Best Translated Book Award and was chosen by The Guardian as one of ‘The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century’. His second novel The Transmigration of Bodies was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and his sci-fi inflected collection of stories Ten Planets was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. He teaches at Tulane University, New Orleans.
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Season of the Swamp - Yuri Herrera
First published in English in the UK in 2024 by And Other Stories
Sheffield – London – New York
www.andotherstories.org
La estación del pantano copyright © 2022 by Yuri Herrera
The English edition is published by arrangement with Yuri Herrera c/o Editorial Periférica via MB Agencia Literaria S.L.
Translation copyright © 2024 by Lisa Dillman
All rights reserved. The rights of Yuri Herrera to be identified as the author of this work and of Lisa Dillman to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.
ISBN: 9781916751101
eBook ISBN: 9781916751118
Typesetting and ebook: Tetragon, London
; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Series Cover Design: Elisa von Randow, Alles Blau Studio, Brazil, after a concept by And Other Stories.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
1853. Benito Juárez has served as judge, deputy, and governor of the state of Oaxaca. But he has yet to become the man who will lead his country’s liberal reform, first as minister and then as president, and he is certainly not the hardheaded visionary who will lead the resistance against France’s invasion of Mexico and restore the republic. Nevertheless, he’s managed to make a number of enemies, in particular Santa Anna, who will not forgive Juárez for forbidding his entry into Oaxaca in 1847, when Santa Anna fled the capital after the disastrous war with the gringos. This is why now, back in power, Santa Anna has Juárez arrested and sent into exile.
In his autobiography, Apuntes para mis hijos (Notes for my children), Juárez describes in detail his arrest, the long journey to San Juan de Ulúa prison, and his exile to Europe via Havana, where he decides to stay and plan his return. Here, his account becomes terse. He says only:
In Havana "I remained until 18 December, when I left for New Orleans, where I arrived on the 29th day of that month.
I lived in that city until 20 June 1855, when I headed to Acapulco to lend my services to the campaign …
Juárez says not a word about his nearly eighteen months in New Orleans, not a single one, despite the fact that while living there he met up with other exiles, despite the fact that it is there that he evolved into the liberal leader who would transform the trajectory of his country over the decades to come. Apart from two or three vague anecdotes that appear in the multiple biographies of Juárez, no one knows what happened in New Orleans.
It is this interval, this gap, in which the following story, or history, takes place. All the information about the city, the markets that sold human beings, as well as those that sold food, the crimes committed daily and the fires set weekly, can be corroborated by historical documents. The true account of what happened, this one, cannot.
For Tori
One
The badges dragged the man from the ship, hurled him down the gangplank, and he fell in front of them and then attempted to stand, but the badges conquered him with clubs and he didn’t defend himself from their blows, because his hands were clasping a treasured object to his chest. One of the badges torturing him said Drop it. They didn’t speak the language, but that’s what the badge was saying. Drop it! shouted the one who seemed to be the boss, and then he insulted the man; they didn’t recognize the word but they recognized the language of hate. But the man did not drop it, not until three badges wrenched one arm and three wrenched the other, and the object fell to the ground and popped open, and the boss picked it up, and though he’d no doubt held objects like this one before, he was astonished to see that it was a compass.
In that frozen moment in which the badges looked at the boss and the boss looked at the compass and the man looked at the boss holding the compass and nobody knew what to do, he caught a glimpse of the tattoo on the man’s back, on his shoulder blade, a glyph of a bird walking one way while looking the other.
Then time unfroze, the boss snapped the compass shut, turned, and walked off, and his badges lifted the man up only to drag him off like a beast once more and disappear into the throng.
Then everything kicked into action: the cranes hoisting sailboats, the ships loaded with hay and coal, the cotton—so much cotton, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bales of cotton—the mountains of produce being unloaded, the smell of fresh produce, the smell of rotting produce, the promiscuity of incomprehensible voices, the people bustling here and there, the smell of the people bustling here and there; to the left, dark water specked with lights; ahead, the dim lights of lampposts; to the right, the twinkling lights of the city.
They let themselves lurch between the stevedores and the men who suddenly began to swarm them, offering things and pointing this way and that.
He leaned over to Pepe and shouted into his ear did he have the address. Pepe looked stricken. What was it, what was it. A hotel. Mata had sent word that he’d wait for them at a hotel. A hotel named for a city. Or a state. Or was it a person. Something with a C.
Hotel Chicago?
he shouted into Pepe’s ear.
Pepe made squint eyes.
Hotel Cleveland?
Pepe dubitated, not dissenting, just dubitating.
Hotel Cincinnati?
he asked.
Though the voices around them were a sea of unnavigable sounds, one of the squawkers accosting them beamed and, face aglow, said:
Hotel Cincinnati,
and tapped his own chest. Hotel Cincinnati.
Then gestured for them to follow.
He shrugged and said to Pepe Let’s go, and the city sucked them up like a sponge.
The man walked fast but kept turning back to ensure that he and Pepe were following; after climbing down from the levee and entering the actual city-city—less congested but more mud—their guide began to walk slower and slower, until he stopped entirely, then whistled in no apparent direction, and from the alley emerged a little kid to whom he gave instructions using the universal sign for writing, and the kid took off running. Their guide turned back to them and thumbs-upped in triumph, then walked on once more.
They came to a house with a torch over the door. With a majestic flourish, their guide, spent, offered them the narrow square door as if it were the entrance to a palace. Beside it, a strip of cloth read Hotel Cincinnati.
They entered single file; inside, the boy was still holding a hammer in one hand and a strip of fabric in the other; behind him was a dark hallway, a rocker, a fireplace around which were arranged several armchairs where three sailors sat warming their hands, and an oak table where an austere woman sat, already asking Yeah, what? with her nose.
He pulled out the documents he’d shown at customs, but the woman shook an impatient head and thumbed her fingertips in the universal sign of This is what I’m talking about. So he pulled out some of the money he’d brought, in pesos, which the woman assessed for a moment before she nodded, They’re legit, took them, and gave an order to the kid, who trotted off down the hall.
They followed him to an inner courtyard containing nothing but broken chair parts and stacked-up tables, and a door at the back, which the kid opened for them. Two cots. One whole chair. A hook to hang clothes on. A pewter basin. The kid pointed to another door on another side of the patio, with any luck the toilet. The boy gazed at them in silence for a minute. Then made the universal sign of Welcome to the Hotel Cincinnati and left.
His reception on disembarking from the packet boat had been a foretaste of all that was to come: waiting and waiting and not knowing words and not being seen and learning the secret names of things.
When it was finally his turn he had pulled out his papers, but instead of taking them, the bureaucrat supposedly helping him had asked a question or two: Where are you from? Why have you come? What do you do? What is your name? Not all of them: one or two. He decided to reply to them all, one by one. The official gave him an exasperated look, snatched his papers, and began copying down his details, but when he reached Occupation the bureaucrat stopped and asked him something. Looking at the word the bureaucrat pointed to, he replied Abogado, lawyer. The bureaucrat gazed at him blankly and wrote Merchant, and then paused again on seeing the age listed on the document: 47. Looking up, the man studied him in genuine curiosity, almost amiably, and wrote 21. The bureaucrat also wrote the wrong date of arrival, though perhaps it wasn’t the bureaucrat but he who was wrong: for a long time now he’d had no idea what day it was.
He’d kept his mouth shut when his papers were handed back. And Pepe had been dispatched much quicker.
They had been on their way out when the compass man landed at their feet.
A cockroach traversed the ceiling as if setting out across the desert, illuminated by a band of light coming in from the courtyard. They tracked its progress in silence even though each of them knew the other was awake. They watched it wander back and forth for a while. Then Pepe said:
When can we go back?
The cockroach turned and scuttled off to a corner.
Soon, no doubt.
They had to find the others. The next morning, he inquired as to whether Mata too was lodging there, writing out Mata’s name and mimicking the man’s long mustache. Mata was not lodging there. He asked more for the sake of it than out of any actual optimism. By this point he suspected that if the Hotel Cincinnati even existed, this was not it. But there was no point asking for the real Hotel Cincinnati, as if they might reply, Oh, you wanted the real Hotel Cincinnati.
They drank a hot drink aspiring to tea, which the austere owner logged in her little notebook, then put on their coats and set out. For a few minutes, they stood on the sidewalk in silence.
Though it was a sunny day, the street failed to register this fact. It wasn’t the worst cold he’d ever felt, but it was a slow cold that, rather than strike all at once, took its time finding just the place to let a layer of frost slip in under his coat. They walked to the corner and looked in every direction. No sign of yesterday’s crowds. They headed for the river, and as they neared it, the streets