Paradais

Novel · 128 pages · Paperback · 2022 · Fitzcarraldo Editions

Somebody stayed to hear it

Rape is the subject of Paradais long before anyone is raped. Fernanda Melchor sits a gardener and a resident's grandson on a dock with a bottle and lets them talk. The talk is the novel.

The talk turns into a plan because somebody stayed to hear it. Franco Andrade lives in the house with his grandparents. He waves Polo, the gardener, over from his bedroom window, buys the rum and describes what he means to do to the woman next door. Polo drinks three-quarters of it. He laughs where laughing is expected. He tells Franco that stealing a pair of her knickers is small-time, and lists the jewels and the watches in the house. He is employed as an audience on the same terms as everything else he does inside the wall, where his contract says gardener. Melchor spends her novel on the arrangement and a few pages on the attack it produces.

Franco's house got the internet when he was eleven. The laptop his grandparents bought him fills with downloads he watches out of habit. Señora Marián moves in across the way. The films go flat on him, the performers plastic and the sex perfunctory. He keeps the material, edits it, cuts in scenes of his own devising and puts her face on the women in the frames. His plans for her follow the choreography of the videos, the men taking turns included. Every act he pictures for her comes from the films.

Polo runs that operation from the other end. Señora Marián slips an envelope of money into his overalls. He smiles. Later he vomits at the memory of having smiled. Within a few pages the envelope turns into proof that she bought the right to humiliate him and that the smile was taken off him rather than offered. Nothing she does in the interval matters to what he decides she has done. Both scripts need her to have moved first, by consenting or by causing offence.

Before Franco, Zorayda. Polo tells his mother that his pregnant cousin has slept with every man in town. His mother slaps him for it, and the claim returns long afterwards. His account concedes eventually that he has been having sex with her. What the sex was comes last. He pinned her arms and forced himself into her, meaning to hurt and humiliate her, and in his telling she begged him for it. The rich boy did not bring this into the house.

As a small boy Polo could not sleep unless his mother was against him. His grandfather made a doctrine of it, that closeness to a woman weakens a man and dulls his mind, and looked at his grandson when he said it. One evening his mother invites him to sit with her and watch television. He perches on the edge of her mattress, out of range of the fan, so his smell will not offend her. He turns in a few minutes later. Her eyes stay on the screen.

The wall is real. Melchor softens none of it. Franco's expulsion cost his grandparents a cancelled trip to Italy. Polo failed all six subjects and his wages reach his mother intact. Seeing Marián at the top of the stairs, bloodied, a knife in her hand, Polo recognises the Bloody Countess of the Progreso story, who hunted boys among the slaves on her land. She is defending herself against being raped in her own house. He reaches for the one story in which a creature like her hunts a boy like him. His servitude is real and it is available to him as an alibi. His cousin Milton was taken from outside his own house, beaten for a day and a half and told what would happen to his family. Milton does what he is told. Nobody threatened Polo, who was waved over from a window.

Marián is on the edge of her bed with the smaller boy in her arms. Polo promises to look after him, and her hands come away empty. Franco shoots her husband in the head. Polo carries the boy down to the elder boy's room, tapes his hands, has him bite down on a knotted sock and wraps his mouth in layer after layer. Then he covers the elder boy's face and leaves no skin exposed. The child is breathing through his nose by then and the tape goes over that too. He drinks half a bottle of tequila from the bar, then goes back up and tapes Marián's wrists. She asks Polo by name to help her and tells him she knows he is a good man. He kneels and tapes her ankles. Franco cuts the ankles free and complains that he cannot rape her tied that way. He shoots her. She chokes to death on the carpet. Franco dies against the steering wheel of the car they had meant to leave in, knife wounds in his back.

Melchor takes the night in one sentence over pages, and it runs past every point where it could have ended. The third person is soaked in Polo's vocabulary, and in English that vocabulary is Sophie Hughes's, coarse enough to carry the voice without ever stepping outside him.

Polo comes out of the river convinced he has been cleaned. He crossed in a storm and lost everything he carried. The narration marks the conviction as his and goes no further. It was Franco's fault and he did what he was told, except that his own recollection has recorded the tape by then. At the entrance to the development, he will raise the barrier for the police cars.