LITMIR.BIZ

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he said, his tongue heavy in his mouth. “He rolls around and around in bed. He just lays there all night.” Twenty years ago he studied French literature at the National Autonomous University and he thought this made him a chevalier des arts et des lettres. “He cannot fall asleep until his mother comes in and kisses him good night.” He grasped his curls with both hands. “My God, he was the greatest. Qué chido, güey.”

      That was the most insightful observation that Gustavo—an editor at one of Mexico’s most prestigious monthlies—could quack about Proust: the Mexican equivalent of “Awesome, dude.”

      Armando shook his graying head. A novelist from Culiacán, up north where men are putatively men, he needed to put things in perspective. Passing the back of a hand across his beard, he said, “I read that book. Kid can’t sleep without his mother’s kiss? What a fag.”

      I looked at the bottom of my cylindrical shot glass, hoping there would be an overlooked last sip of tequila. “I could have done without the first two hundred pages about the hawthorn bushes,” I said. “But the middle section? Where Swann goes after Odette? That is the greatest depiction of obsessive love that I have ever read.”

      Mandarino, whose novels established him as the premier cynic in a city of twenty million of them, said, “I don’t know about your love life, my dear Richard, but that story isn’t like any kind of love I have ever known.” And he’d known a lot, at least to hear him tell it. However, the tales of his exploits were a bit bewildering to reconcile when you considered his pear-shaped body, his jowly face, and his infrequent bathing habits, evident if you sat anywhere near him. He held up two fingers. Lola the waitress—sixty, gold teeth, cuerpo de boiler—saw him and nodded. The signal had nothing to do with a drink order. She would disappear onto the rainy sidewalk for a few moments and bring back Mandarino two grams of cocaine.

      “My dear Gustavo, do you know what Walter Benjamin said about your beloved Proust?” asked Mandarino. He adjusted the brim of his green porkpie hat. “That he died of ignorance, because he didn’t know how to build a fire or open a window.”

      Most of my friends in Mexico City were writers. We usually drank enough for me to drown out their sexism, homophobia, and machismo. I thought they were funny and heroically quixotic—according to a survey, Mexicans on the average read a half a book per year. Still, sometimes their company made me restless. Didn’t they have anything else to talk about besides books?

      We were in Mi Oficina, the tiniest bar in Mexico City. On the ground floor of an abandoned office building whose upper stories were consumed by fire a decade ago, it was a low-lit overheated room with five tables. Behind the bar was an unpolished wooden rack with bottles of cheap rum, tequila, whiskey, and a popular variety of Mexican brandy with which I wouldn’t have disinfected a toilet bowl. The toothless bartender slept on a stool, next to a tiny altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Mi Oficina’s chief attractions were its bargain-basement prices and Lola’s phantom sidewalk connection.

      “Ah,” quacked Gustavo, “but if you read Adorno’s letters to Benjamin about Proust....”

      I considered going somewhere else to get another drink until Lola returned. My friends may have pitied me, but their brand of blather made me relieved rather than regretful about my status as a silenced scribe.

      You may have wondered about my life before mitigation. Maybe you vaguely remembered my name. Could you possibly be among the brave and happy few who read either of my books? I was a writer nearly all my life. While growing up, it never occurred to me to want to be anything else. From early childhood, my parents sent me to the library around the corner to get me out of their hair. I began to fill journals at the age of ten, and wrote stories long before I had any to tell.

      I wasn’t the only one convinced that the world needed another narrator. A piece of paper in the back of a closet attested that I had an MFA in creative writing. It may have come from a liberal arts college in Maryland rather than Stanford or Iowa, but they took care of every cent of my tuition and gave me a stipend to boot. They even funded a semester in Mexico for “research.”

      By my mid-twenties, I was being published in literary magazines, some of them prestigious. My first book managed to make a little noise. Published when I was twenty-nine, it was a collection of short stories about Mexicans who cut lawns and worked in restaurant kitchens, sleeping in shifts in shadowy furnished rooms in Long Island. Before the book came out, the story about Rodrigo, the gardener who has AIDS, won a prize given by Embolalia, one of the best literary magazines in the country, which I hoped would consolidate my destiny. At the end of the year, the New York Times blessed it as a Notable Book of the Year. The reviews were solid, some even splendid. It barely sold two thousand copies and never came out in paperback.

      Although initially dismayed by the sales figures, I took them on the chin and moved on, imagining them to be a peculiarity of the publishing industry rather than a harbinger of the world’s indifference to what I had to say. My illusions were encouraged by Rhoda, my agent, and Lucien, my editor. Wait for the next book, they said in an angelic mini-chorus. You need to write a novel. Everyone loved the story about Rodrigo, and Rhoda and Lucien backed up my decision to supersize him to 335 pages. It took me four years but the novel got written.

      I envisioned a world waiting for it with open arms. After the book was published, life would be a cruise on the Queen Mary. There would be awards, royalties from editions in dozens of languages, speaking engagements, adoring fans. And the jewel in the crown, a cushy teaching job in a small university, where I would shovel the same shit that had been thrown at me in Maryland, while I wrote the next one and the next one and the next one. By that time I was married, to a Mexican named Carla, whose steady salary kept us afloat until my ship came in.

      The book came out on September 12, 2001. The day before, nineteen demolition men named Mohammed toppled a couple of buildings downtown, and there disappeared every clap of thunder that was meant to herald my novel. You want a deadly accurate rendering of how little the world cares about you? Try publishing a book the day after the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Poor Rodrigo sold eight hundred copies.

      Hope springs eternal. I rolled up my sleeves and ground out another one, in a little over a year. By the time I finished, Lucien had quit editing, gone upstate, and opened a B&B with an antiques store attached. No one else at the publishing house was even vaguely interested. Rhoda sent it to thirty-seven editors, one by excruciating one. None of them bit.

      That’s when I decided it was time for a break, an auspicious moment to consider what story I may have had to tell. The greatest writers in the world didn’t write 365 days a year. Even Flaubert lived it up a little, at least while he was young. If I always believed I was a talented writer, I never realized how incredibly good I was at not writing. The world proceeded apace, even though I had ceased to record its progress. The sun kept rising and setting, and if you got far away enough from the city to see them, the stars continued to shine.

      I needed a job. Aside from an occasional magazine assignment or piddling fees from teaching a creative-writing workshop, Carla supported me with her salary. Though she rarely complained, it was a source of tension. A friend named Sharon Bromberg, an activist journalist who straddled the border between Tucson and Nogales, had just begun to do mitigation investigations and got me involved. “They’re desperate for people,” she said. “There are fifty Mexicans on death row and another couple of hundred charged with capital murder. There’s hardly anyone out there qualified to do the Mexico cases.”

      There is no school for mitigation. Although most of its practitioners have backgrounds in social work, law, or psychology, I was as close to a natural as the lawyers were going to find. I had some experience with magazine reporting, which left me unafraid to knock on a stranger’s door looking for a good story. I’d studied Spanish since childhood. I had spent as much time as possible in Mexico since I was seventeen, when as a high school senior I was part of a student group that went to a tiny hamlet in Oaxaca to build latrines and teach dental hygiene. Most of the villagers preferred to use the woods for their toilette, and few had running water with which to rinse out their mouths after flossing and brushing. (Instead, some of them dutifully used Coca-Cola.) But I felt

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