A brief talk with Paco Ignacio Taibo II - happy - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers - Interview

Ilan Stavans

The last few years have witnessed an explosion of detective fiction

in Latin America. From Buenos Aires to Havana, the publication of

native thrillers, often embarrassingly ignored by critics, has been and

remains a favorite pleasure for thousands of readers. The most prolific

practitioner is Paco Ignacio Taibo II (b. 1949), who despite his young

age has more than 30 books to his credit, most of them with his

protagonist Hector Belascoaran Shayne, a prosaic, lame, one-eyed private

eye. Among his titles, PITII, as he likes to call himself, prefers Some

Clouds (Penguin, 1992), Shadow of the Shadow (Penguin, 1993), and

Four Hands (St. Martin's Press, 1994), all translated into English. This

interview took place in Mexico City.

IS: When and how did you begin to write?

PITII: When I first learned how to form my letters, the moment I acquired the use of reason. Since then, writing has been my destiny. At age 11, I was making steps toward printing a magazine, and at 13, I wrote my first short story. I have been a journalist since age 15, an obsessive reader since 5, and I managed to finish my first novel, which fortunately was never published, at 20. I suppose that this obsession is part of a family tradition nurtured by a great uncle who was also a writer, and by my father, Paco Ignacio Taibo, a journalist, novelist, and critic according to whom the best trade of the world wasn't to be a trapeze artist or a fireman--those are no doubt the best secondary trades--but a writer. When I was 5 years old, my father used to come home from the newspaper for which he worked, in the middle of the night, and instead of going to bed, he would put newspapers and a towel on the dining room table and over them his Olivetti typewriter. He would then write a novel trying to make as little noise as possible in order not to wake up the family. He would write until dawn. I would silently escape from bed and crawl beneath the table. It was very clear to me that my father was doing something very important, so important that I had to be a witness...I slept the first years of my life lulled by an Olivetti.

What technique do you follow? What schedule? Do you have any talisman that inspires you warding off evil spirits?

I write all day at all hours. I tend to work with music--the more rhythmic, the better. Richard Wagner and Carlos Santana, for example. My only talisman is a change of work. I am a voracious writer. It could be that right now I have begun three novels, another three are outlined with notes, a historical essay about Mexican anarchists of the twenties, two or three reports, and a comic-strip script. I go from one text to another. When I feel that I am not getting anywhere with one project, I abandon it and begin another. I tend to have a few dry spells and when they arrive I don't fight them, but rather, I travel and dedicate myself to helping here and there in community projects.

What was your first encounter with Hector Belascoaran Shayne? Where does his physical appearance and his intellectual capacity come from?

He was born by elimination and his physical presence developed from a variety of things. He is rootless, a refugee of the middle class, madly curious, stubborn, full of humorous feeling toward his fellow Mexicans, a bit melancholic. Actually, his appearance came from an anthropologist friend, Sergio Perello, who wore the clothing of the fashion 15 years ago. Belascoaran Shayne has become what he is over 15 years of backwardness. I should also add that his appearance was formed from injuries and wounds throughout the novels: the loss of an eye, a slight limp, the horror of humidity which makes his bones grind.

Arthur Conan Doyle, tired of his character Sherlock Holmes, once killed him, only to bring him back later on upon the petitioning of his readers. Belascoaran Shayne seems also to have been resuscitated in your novel Return to the Same City and Under the Rain (Planeta, 1989). Does he control you or vice versa?

We control each other. I didn't kill him, dramatic logic killed him, the progression of facts. Then the readers protested. I decided that the saga wasn't finished and revived it. White magic!

What is the relationship between Belascoaran Shayne and Phillip Marlowe? What are their differences?

The differences are in the structure of the lone hero, the outsider: a vocation for solitude, a fidelity to friends (in Marlowe's case) and to certain obsessions (in Belascoaran Shayne's case). Raymond Chandler's character moves within rational histories whereas mine is surrounded by a chaotic atmosphere, Kafkaesque and corrupt: Mexico City.

To what do you attribute your huge popularity?

To exoticism ... I suppose Mexican readers find in my novels a broken mirror, a proposition that invites them not to surrender to an immoral reality.

Why is detective fiction so attractive?

Because of the allure of adventure, the virtues of enigma, an incredible capacity for discovering cities and ancient mysteries, a set of characters in limited situations. A good novel is a good novel, but if it has a detective plot, all the better.

Before you, the Mexican detective novel didn't subscribe to the dirty realism of Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ernest Hemingway. How come? Why this new affiliation?

In reality, I subscribe to the Ugly-Dirty-Fucking Realism of Chester Himes and Jim Thomson, in the worst sense of the word--that of storytellers. I have added to this black humor and a Kafka-style twist in morality. I feel identified with a generation of narrators who wrote in the same years as I and see literature as subversive subversion: Manuel Vasquez Montalban, Jerome Charyn, J.P. Manchette, Jean Francois Vilar, Juan Carlos Martelli, Alberto Sperati, Per Wahloo, Robert Littell, Martin Cruz-Smith; likewise, with a current trend of writers of nonfiction testimonies: Rodolfo Walsh, Miguel Bonasso, Joseph Wambaugh, and Guillermo Thorndyke.

Do you consider Maria Elvira Bermudez, Antonio Helu, Pepe Martinez de la Vega, and Rafael Solana your Mexican precursors, all writers who wrote detective stories from the thirties to the fifties south of the Rio Grande, although in a very different way? What do you think of Rafael Bernal's The Mongol Plot (Joaquin Mortiz, 1982)?

I don't think of them as precursors. I don't owe them anything, nor do I want to maintain relations with a generation of parodists and imitators. Their books interest me little and their approximation of style is spineless. The only work that attracts me is Bernal, which has been unfairly forgotten and which my generation has somehow revived.

What do you think of Jorge Ibarguengoitia's The Dead and Vicente Lenero's 1967 novel Los albaniles, the works of two writers who reinvigorated detective fiction without ever considering themselves practitioners?

They interest me as precursors to the nouveau detectives in Mexico and the Southern hemisphere in general. You're right: what is curious is that both authors never consider themselves part of this style.

Talk to me about Carlos Fuentes's The Hydra Head. Also, more than your detective, talk to me about Mexico City, which was also Fuentes's protagonist in Where the Air is Clear.

I feel an affinity toward Fuentes, although not to The Hydra Head. I like his novels dealing with this monstrous metropolis, a city that manages to obsess me. The city produces more stories in one day than Balzac would have been able to tell in numerous lifetimes. There is in this a perverse condensation of schizophrenia and horror, adorned in a mountain of myths, an incredible fountain of inspiration. Frankly, this place is shaky and full of bad vibrations and aloneness. It is surrounded by catastrophe, and people protest every day the miserable way of life they are forced to live in. But they don't leave. This place makes me sick: I can't manage to grasp its essence.

What is there in you of Julio Cortazar? What influence if any did the Latin-American literary boom writers have on your work--Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jose Donoso?

I like Cortazar but I don't know ... Something in him bothers me and keeps me away. About the rest, nothing. The first five novels of Vargas Llosa attracted me, but the rest are a bore. In fact, I feel very influenced by Antonio Skarmeta, Oswaldo Soriano, Eduardo Galeano, Jesus Diaz, writers of another generation in whose novels the need to locate a story in a historical context is essential.

Mexico is a country where there is so much corruption that justice is obliterated. Is that the main theme of your national detective literature?

Yes, that's the point. Criminality forms part of the system and is incorporated into it in a logical and coherent manner. Hence, the solution is also part of the crime. I live in a city where the police produce more deaths than all of the underworld organizations, the Mafia, and any number of marginal lunatics. Luis Gonzalez de Alba, a student leader of the Tlatelolco movement of 1968, was absurdly imprisoned for four years for setting fire to a streetcar in the intersection of two streets, a place where there had never been rails, and at a time during which he was giving a lecture before thousands of witnesses on the other side of the city. To him, of course, we owe the famous phrase: "The police is always to be blamed."

COPYRIGHT 1994 Fairleigh Dickinson University
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