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The Ghost of San Salvador
SS: Both Dance With Snakes and The She-Devil in the Mirror have action that comes from the relationship between the rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods of San Salvador — two very different worlds that exist in almost the exact same space. Talk a little about this.
HCM: El Salvador is a tiny country — 20 thousand square kilometers. And it’s supposed to be the most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere. You cannot go far away where nobody is. And even though there are neighborhoods that are very clearly defined “poor neighborhoods,” the most privileged and luxurious neighborhoods have poor neighborhoods right next door. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in San Salvador, and just across the street was supposed to be the park. We moved into this neighborhood when it was just being built and suddenly there was a big poor community there. There was no green area anymore, no park. What there was were poor people coming from the countryside to look for opportunities in the city. This is a pattern in Latin America, I guess.
SS: In She-Devil, Laura and her wealthy friends try to create this sort of isolated, encapsulated world, and feel ripped off because they live in San Salvador, where even if you’re rich you have to deal with things like poverty and crime.
HCM: Yeah, that’s a kind of colonial mentality — white people in the middle of native people. I think it’s a little bit more complicated, but Laura belongs to a circle of people that despise reality that is not their own. The rich classes in El Salvador are very, very enclosed.
SS: In Laura’s dealings with the police, it almost becomes self-defeating because the police are trying to help her by solving the case of her friend’s murder, but she won’t answer their questions because she feels like she’s above them.
HCM: The point here is not just the police. The point is that she thinks that [her class is] above the law. The law is not for them. The law is for the poor people, for the other people. That’s a mentality that is still around in Latin America, and that is one of the biggest problems in Latin American societies — that rich people believe they are above the law. They do not pay taxes, they do not approve of the fiscal reform that society needs, and they think police are kind of a private guard for them — like the justice system belongs to them, not to the State. That’s a terrible aspect of not only Salvadorian society — you can see that from Mexico to Argentina.
SS: How does San Salvador look to you when you’re writing? Does it appear differently in your mind since you’ve been away from it for so long?
HCM: Yes, in a way. For instance, you think that Dance With Snakes happens in San Salvador, but other kinds of readers who deeply know the area say that that’s not San Salvador — it’s half Mexico City and half San Salvador. And it could be.
SS: The epigraph in Dance With Snakes is a selection from a story by Paul Bowles, another writer who lived in self-imposed exile. I was wondering what your opinion is of Bowles, and if you felt like he was some sort of a kindred spirit.
HCM: I don’t feel that I have too much in common with Paul Bowles’ writing. He’s a kind of an — if I can call it — exotic writer. He places his stories in different regions of the planet, and different areas where he has lived, and I am a little bit the opposite. Even though I am moving around, I’m writing on the same stuff, from the same place. I spent two years in Germany and I don’t have a German short story. I spent three years in Pittsburgh and I don’t have a Pittsburgh novel or short story. And that’s my way of being. So I don’t think that I feel that kind of empathy with Bowles in the sense of writing stories placed in all these cities or places.
SS: Why do you think that is? Why do you think your gaze returns to Central America?
HCM: I think it has to do with the fact of being wounded by reality, you know? I grew up in a very polarized and radicalized and violent society. And that kind of reality hurts you a lot. You have a kind of wound in your psyche, in your memory about what happened when you were there. And so that follows me in a sense. I am not that free. I think that Paul Bowles was very free. He was not followed by this kind of ghost, this kind of demon from his own place. He was not writing of New York City when he was in Morocco, when he was in Southeast Asia — he was writing what was happening there. And in my case, I’m still followed by this kind of ghost, this kind of wounded memory. And I hope I will get rid of it, but it’s not that easy.