The Empathy Exams (11 page)

So the conversation continues. Drug lords write messages on corpses, and these messages say
fuck you
to the border control and its 370 criminal arrests. Poets get ideas and they get visas and they get on flights to Los Angeles. They tell Americans about Mexicans in a little barrio called Comales. They get home and the cartels are exploding grenades that tell them:
Stay home and shut up.
Everyone is trying to talk loudest. Everyone is simply hungry for the chance to speak.

As we drive away from dawn, toward San Diego, Marco tells me about another piece he made just after the August massacre. It was designed to resemble his local yellow pages. It listed all the stores and services named for the Gulf: Siderúrgica del Golfo, El Restaurán del Golfo, Transportes Línea del Golfo. In the spot where El Cártel del Golfo would have fallen, the line read:
Puede Anunciarse Aquí.
Addressed to the cartel, to its rivals, to its victims: You Can Advertise Here.

MORPHOLOGY OF THE HIT

We begin with the first function.

I.
One of the Members Absents Himself from Home.

I didn’t exactly leave home for Nicaragua. I’d been leaving home for years. Nicaragua was just the farthest I’d gone.

Near a city called Granada I taught Spanish to kids who knew their language better than I ever would. I worked in a school with two concrete classrooms sometimes invaded by goats or stray dogs. The dogs were skinny. Some of the kids were too, though they were always buying treats from an old woman who sold old bags of old potato chips and bright pink cookies from huge straw baskets. She sat in the shadows beside their rusty swings.

I liked the kids. They touched me—literally, my arms, legs, my whole body—more than anyone else I’d known. I knew their families by sight and sometimes by name. Many of their mothers sold chewing gum and cashews in the
parque central
next to the bus station. Their fathers and brothers called out “
¡Guapa chica!
” every time I passed. I should have been offended. I wasn’t.

I turned twenty-four in a bar called
Café Bohemia.
I made sangria with local fruits and wrote notes from the Internet café that said:
I made sangria with local fruits!
I told everyone I was enjoying the easy commonality of being a foreigner among foreigners:
None of us are where we usually are!
I said.
We are lost together!
The keyboard was strangely arranged under my fingers. I still hadn’t gotten used to it. It made me confuse certain punctuation marks.
Fruits from the market?
my notes said.
We are lost together?

I never know how to start this story. I just don’t. That’s why I need functions. That’s why maybe we need to go back further. Vladimir Propp was a man who lived in Russia through the Revolution and two wars. He wrote a book called
Morphology of the Folktale
that no one talks about much these days, except to disagree with it. It’s basically a map for storytelling, a catalog of plot pieces arranged into thirty-one functions: commencements, betrayals, resolutions.

Propp’s elaborate system of classifications—letters, numerals, headings, subheadings—pegs these plot points like taxidermy specimens:
trickery, guidance, rescue.
They mark moments where the action takes a different direction. Propp claims that you can break any story into an accumulation of these parts shuffled into constant rearrangements. Essentially, he is making a claim about disruptions. He says everything proceeds from losing our place.

III.
The Interdiction Is Violated.

Now we’re out of order and we’ve hardly begun. Propp maps imperfectly onto the story. I keep coming back to his functions anyway. This is the third one. This interdiction was an old one: Girls should never be alone in the dark. This is wisdom from the fairy tales.

Afterward they said I shouldn’t have been walking at night. In that neighborhood. On an empty street, alone. Here’s what “alone” really means: without a man.

It was mainly men, saying this last one.

Some said it kindly. Others sounded annoyed. The point is nobody had really said it before. Which means we’ll have to rearrange the functions. We return to the second after the violation of the third.

II.
An Interdiction Is Addressed to the Hero.

I hadn’t been instructed not to walk alone. I’d been instructed not to be afraid. Granada was safe. Nicaragua wasn’t just violence. That was an idea that belonged to Americans, the ones who didn’t know any better.

This is the function that baptizes the hero. Its pair of points—the rule and its transgression—is what makes him a hero in the first place.

My prohibition was fear. I was told to keep my fear within bounds. Or at least keep it to myself. My friend Omar said: “All of you are so afraid here.”

All of you:
women, Americans, visitors. I was all of these, but I would learn not to be. I’d learn how to be different, try harder, walk through the streets without watching for some stranger in the shadows. I’d arrived somewhere I’d never been invited.

For starters, there was the question of history. Which wasn’t my fault, exactly, but did make me involved. The history was studded with absurdities: the Contra War, the arms scandal. Reagan everything. Bush everything. Omar recited the best bits of Bush’s debates with Hugo Chavez—Chavez, still something of a hero in that country—and I laughed louder than anyone. I hated Bush too. I needed them to know that.

Maybe I didn’t have the right to need anything from that place. Maybe that didn’t make it right that I got punched in the face. But maybe I wasn’t entirely innocent, either.

So now I’ve given away the ending. I got punched.

I’m still looking for the proper function for this part. What is morphology anyway? I looked it up and found this: “The study of the shape or form of things.”

Which is how we keep something trapped in its place: we give it a form.

Maybe VI.
The Villain Attempts to Deceive His Victim in Order to Take Possession of Him or of His Belongings.

There was no trickery. Only a man coming at me from behind, turning me around, hitting me hard. No deception. One of the most honest gestures I’d ever seen.

Maybe V.
The Villain Receives Information about His Victim.

Propp cites examples. The many species of reconnaissance: Spies are sent. Hiding places are found. A villainous bear uses a talking chisel to find some missing children.

On that street in Nicaragua it was simpler. A man was sitting on the curb beside a vacant
lavandería.
He saw me and he sized me up, just like that:
Gringa. Chica.
Tourist.

Guapa chica
, they said—other men, on the streets. But he said nothing.

Who knows what he thought? I just know this: whatever he saw—whatever he thought he saw—it was enough.

So here it is.

Function VIII.
The Villain Causes Harm or Injury.

I was punched. I bled all over my arms, my legs, my skirt, my shoes. I wasn’t crying. I was speaking. What was I saying?

I was saying: “I’m okay I’m okay I’m okay.”

I was saying: “There is so much blood.”

Propp says: “This function is exceptionally important.” He says: “The forms of villainy are exceedingly varied.”

Here are some of them:
The villain pillages or spoils the crops, the villain causes a sudden disappearance, the villain casts a spell, the villain threatens forced matrimony, the villain makes a threat of cannibalism.

Here are two more:
The villain seizes the daylight. The villain torments at night.

“The city is different at night,” Omar had said. “Everything is possible.”

Some functions describe villains stealing body parts. You break something and you steal the way it used to look. That never comes back.

“He took your wallet?” someone asked me. “And your camera?”

I nodded. I wanted to say:
he took my face.

Here are some functions missing from my story:
The Seeker Agrees to or Decides upon Counteraction, The Hero Reacts to the Actions, The Hero and Villain Join in Direct Combat.

These don’t apply to me.

This one does: XVII.
The Hero Is Branded.

My nose was broken. The bones of the bridge got shifted. The flesh swelled like it was trying to hide the fracture beneath. This is how speech swells around memory. How intellect swells around hurt.

XIV.
The Hero Acquires the Use of a Magical Agent.

Meaning what? The Nicaraguan police? The liquor I drank—shots and then more of them—to make myself feel all right again, to make myself stop shaking?

After the hit, I went to a bar on Calle Calzada. I knew the guys who worked there. They saw me right off and knew what I needed. They’d been in fights. This kind of injury wasn’t anything new. They gave me wet rags, ice, a beer. I kept putting all three against my face, very gently. I wasn’t sure if my nose was loose enough to push out of place. I couldn’t even look them in the eye. I was ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to explain this properly to anyone. It had something to do with being seen. Everything was visible to them—swollen face, bloody arms, bloody legs, bloody clothes. These were the only things I was composed of, and everyone saw them—everyone understood them—as well as I could. It was a kind of nakedness, a feeling of nerve endings in the wind.

The police showed up in a pickup truck with a large cage strapped to the back. There was a man inside the cage. I was sitting on the curb with my rags and my beer. The cop was smoking a cigarette. He pointed to the man in the cage: “
¿Es el hombre?
”

This wasn’t the man. This was just
a
man. I hadn’t even given them a description.

I shook my head. The cop shrugged. He let the man go. The man seemed angry. Of course he did.

That cop was nice, but he never expected things to go any other way than the way they went. He showed me huge leather volumes of mug shots, sepia-toned portraits of local street thugs with their nicknames written in spidery cursive underneath:
el toro, el caballero, el serpiente.

None of them were him. I said: “No, no, no.”

I went to the police station the next morning. It was a ratty building with brown stains on the walls and a broken toilet you could smell from all the other rooms. Or someone could, at least. I couldn’t smell anything. There were old typewriters on most of the desks and a few broken ones stacked in the corner. The station was in a part of town I’d never seen. It wasn’t a part of town that tourists would have any reason to visit unless they were there to complain. I’d been living in Nicaragua for several months, and I’d never felt more like a tourist than I did right then, part of a story everyone had heard before.

The cops were eager to show off their new face-profiling software. I sat with one guy at a computer—one of the only ones, it seemed, in the whole station. He asked me questions about what the guy looked like and I answered them badly. “He had eyebrows,” I may have said—did I say? I was waiting for adjectives to offer themselves up. But none came. The sketch on the computer screen looked nothing like the man.

XXIX.
The Hero Is Given a New Appearance.

Propp gets more explicit: “A new appearance is directly effected by means of the magical actions of a helper.” I got back to Los Angeles and saw a surgeon. There was something in my face that wasn’t right. Anyone could see that. I wanted it fixed. I felt sick with self-preservation. The surgeon looked at my face and said: “Something happened to you.”

“I know,” I said. “Can you fix it?”

He said: “I can’t tell from outside.”

So he went in. I went under.

I still get stuck on this one, a few functions back: XIX.
The Initial Misfortune or Lack Is Liquidated.

Propp says: “The narrative reaches its peak in this function.”

What does this function feel like? I’m still waiting for it.

The surgery got rid of the break. Or else it got rid of the evidence. But I can still find the slant if I look for it, the diagonal remains of fist hitting bone.

You can find a program on the Internet called “Digital Propp.” I guess you’d call it a game. You click on the site and it says: “You have reached the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator, an experiment in electronic (re)writing and an exploration of the retranslation of modernist theory within the electronic environment.”

Here’s what you do. You check off the functions you want and it gives you a story. I check:
absentation, interdiction, violation, villainy, branding, exposure.
I pause, go back, check off:
lack.

I don’t check:
counteraction, recognition, wedding.

I click the little button called “generate.” The site spits back a story: something about a forbidden pear, and then some fight with a bird, some victory having to do with flying. I’m seeing signs of all kinds of functions I didn’t ask for: struggle, challenge, victory. There is some fighting and finally some winning: “The soil on my skin turned into sprinkles of gold dust. The people proclaimed me some kind of god.”

The materials of my life, as memory recalls and deforms them, will always involve him: the stranger. Maybe our union replaces my final neglected function: XXXI.
The Hero Is Married and Ascends the Throne.
I wanted a man to fall in love with me so he could get angry about how I’d gotten hit. I wasn’t supposed to want this. I wanted it anyway.

Months later I saw an ex-boyfriend in Williamsburg and he offered me a line of coke on someone’s steamer trunk. I imagined my nose dissolving right off my face.

I shook my head.

He said: “Why not?”

I told him why not. He stopped smiling. He got very upset. It felt like he wanted something from me. What did he want? I didn’t know what I could give him.

When I got back from Nicaragua and tried to explain what had happened to me, I felt like I was constantly shuffling together pieces of an elaborate puzzle I couldn’t see the edges of: violence, randomness, impersonality and swollen face, pure cash and tourist guilt. Guilt always sounded wrong—like I was trying to apologize for what had happened, or say that my status as a tourist somehow justified it—when I wasn’t trying to excuse anything, only to speak a feeling of culpability tangled with the other kinds of residue inside me: anger, fear, an obsessive tendency to check the mirror for signs that my parts were slipping out of place. I began graduate school and started writing papers about the practice of rereading. I read Propp. I looked back at my own life like text.