Hurricane Season
A woman's murder narrated as folklore, exposing the contempt that made her killable long before anyone raised a knife.
Novel · 224 pages · Paperback · Published 2020 by New Directions
Who Gets to Be a Person?
Five boys find the Witch's decomposing body in an irrigation canal outside La Matosa. Fernanda Melchor opens on the corpse. The murder is settled. Hurricane Season spends its remaining seven chapters on a different question. Who gets to be a person in this village, and who only gets talked about?
The Witch has no name. She has a title, inherited from her mother and built on rumour. Healer to some, whore to others. She lends money and rents land to people locked out of formal credit, and the men resent needing her. Being needed is what makes her hated. They will not accept that a woman owns land. So they invent a buried fortune. The invention licenses them to search her house.
Contempt runs through the women too. Yesenia, Luismi's cousin, inherited her grandmother's habit of blaming women before men, and she uses it on her own mother first. Yesenia did not invent the language. She has no reason to test it. Her chapter still does what the men's chapters will not. The book knows who did it long before it finishes explaining why. Yesenia watches Brando and Luismi carry something out of the Witch's house, and she says so when the police and district attorney take her testimony.
Eight chapters. Four hand one character the floor for pages at a time, and a village voice holds the short chapters at either end. The Witch gets neither. She is the subject of the second chapter, not its speaker. The village narrates her from outside, as gossip. Norma is thirteen and pregnant by her stepfather when Luismi takes her in, and her chapter corrects what the village has decided about her. The second chapter does nothing comparable for the Witch. Even Munra narrates her as a man in women's clothing rather than a woman. Melchor builds a full interior for Brando, one of the killers, and none for the woman herself. The form does to her what the village did.
Brando wants Luismi and will not say it aloud, least of all to himself. His friends treat paying a man for sex as ordinary. What ruins you is wanting it. Brando acts on that desire once, taking Luismi while he sleeps, and shame turns into homicidal intent. The police later rename him Faggotkiller. Melchor gives him access the Witch never receives.
That absence holds across the book. A chapter from the Witch's point of view would settle who she was. Instead there is hearsay. The convention in this kind of novel is to recover the victim's inner life as recompense. Nobody finishes Hurricane Season having understood her. Yet Melchor has imagined her absence with precision. The second chapter is there. The narration simply stays outside a consciousness it enters almost everywhere else.
Melchor's technique carries the same pressure. Her clauses chain by association, with little hierarchy between one perception and the next. Yesenia's chapter gives the method at full force.
“...all the insults that, for three long years, Yesenia had been storing up for her stupid son-of-a-bitch cousin... That was the first time she’d bumped into that pussy around town because he usually steered clear of her, and he only went out at night, after dark, like some sort of fucking vampire, to meet up with those wasters who spent their lives getting shitfaced on booze and drugs... useless, spineless shirkers, every single one of them, a bunch of pathetic, sponging, fucked-up junkies. They should be locked up and ass-fucked and then disappeared.”
The sentence keeps moving. Insult runs into memory, then accusation. Information about Luismi, his friends and La Matosa travels inside Yesenia's contempt. The obscenity moves at the same speed as everything else.
The opening works the same way. The boys recognise "the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze." A dead woman and roadside litter sit in the same series. The narration slides into a witness's voice without marking the switch. Contempt and testimony can occupy the same sentence with no pause in which a speaker might reconsider what has just been said.
Institutions repeat the village logic under an official name. Rigorito, the officer leading the investigation, is corrupt, and what he wants to know is where the Witch's money went. No one misses a dead fag, he says in front of the people whose testimony he is taking.
The robbery is thin machinery. A fortune nobody confirms is doing work that shame and contempt have already done more convincingly. The vocabulary that made the Witch grotesque explains the conditions of the killing without excusing the men who carried it out. Melchor did not need the treasure.
The impersonal voice that opened the book returns for the last chapter. An ambulance comes in from Villa with anonymous bodies, stripped of the distinctions that decided who could be blamed or killed while alive. Nobody has an interior there. Anonymity is the one thing the novel distributes evenly.
The five boys at the canal only know a body is there. Munra drove the van the whole time and still says he saw nothing.