"We Keep Them Anyway" is about a soothsayer who comes from La Chacarita, a poor neighborhood of cardboard houses in Asunción, Paraguay. The fortune teller, Ña Meli, seems to be the real deal, not just some huckster using cheap parlor tricks to fool the gullible. "She had a second-grade education and terrible handwriting, but when she wrote the letters, her handwriting changed. Sometimes she used words she didn't even understand. Once I saw her write an entire letter in Portuguese. It was creepy, before we got used to her."
By the end of the story, Ña Meli is something of a holy woman, suffering terrible ordeals in her own body like a martyr in order to traffic messages to the living from the dead. But the unnamed narrator (How many times have I written "the unnamed narrator in the O.Henry anthology this year? Seems like about half the stories) remembers when Ña Meli was in it for the money. She wouldn't give anyone, not even the poor people of La Chacarita she lived with, a discount on the 500 guaranies she charged. And even then, she sometimes didn't deliver on her promises.
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| Ña Meli splits the difference between huckster and spiritual guide. |
Although she was always in it for the money, at least at first, she was authentic. But over time, Ña Meli becomes more commercial, more cynical in her approach. She scrounges together a crystal ball and a turban, puts on an act. She works the San Juan Festival circuit, doing two to three fairs a day. Her audience at the fairs is no longer the poor, but "...adolescent girls. They came in pairs and bought letters for laughs, for the thrill of dabbling in the occult. Those kids had money to burn." She charges these kids four times what she had charged in La Chacarita.
While working for rich people, Ña Meli seems to have less concern for whether her letters she writes from the dead are authentic. Whereas before, if the dead did not communicate with her, she would write nothing, when working for the rich, she "always produced something that either delighted or horrified them. Either way, it kept them coming back."
However, at some point after selling out, Ña Meli seems to make a turn toward not just real medium again, but toward a kind of sainted and martyred medium. She is hearing more and more from those who were "disappeared" and tortured, raped, and murdered under the regime of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. The narrator worries for Ña Meli's safety in relaying these messages from "bad visitors," not just because the painful contents they relay are ruinous for Ña Meli to pass on, but because the same people who perpetrated all those crimes are still around. They might be a little less forceful and a little more careful about getting caught, but they're still there, and Ña Meli is risking catching their attention.
Ña Meli's increasing communications from the victims of Stroessner coincide with a real-world discovery of the notes, meticulously kept, of the tens of thousands of victims of the regime. Improbably, someone kept careful logs of who did what to whom, and then even more improbably, those notes were left in an office somewhere for years before someone figured out what they were. The narrator thinks that perhaps Ña Meli has helped to bring about this discovery: "Maybe all that rattling about of their names in documents (from Ña Meli) had lured the poor souls back. The 'Archives of Terror' had been all over the news, recently discovered in a pile in the back of a minor police station."
Ña Meli ultimately dies, and while the popular explanation is that she was at last overwhelmed by a painful communication with a "bad visitor," the poor from La Chacarita, who do not have "the luxury of being innocent," know that "there are more evil demons on this side," and figure she was done in by the government.
Who is the audience of this "letter"?
The author of this story about the long terror of a dictator in Paraguay is in much the same position as Ña Meli. She is carrying the testimony of the victims to the living. At first, I was a little turned off by the story, because I saw it as kind of cynical.
When a writer who is deeply knowledgeable of another culture or part of the world from what Western audiences and editors are used to writes a story, there are two ways that writer can game the system to gain acceptance. One is to use something that is well known in the other culture and pass it off as though the writer came up with it herself. This is sort of what it seemed to me that Yoon Choi did in "The Art of Losing" when she used the image of a student eating pages of a textbook in order to memorize them--which is a very familiar cliche in South Korea--in a way that made it seem she had come up with a fresh and original image in her story. The editor who picked the story for The New England Review even specifically called this out as one of the best parts of the story, even though it's so common in South Korea, you're likely to hear it thrown out as a chestnut on the evening news during testing season. (I don't think Choi did this entirely on purpose, by the way, but that's the way it worked out.)
The second way to play a Western audience is to give the audience what they are already expecting. You can put on a show, like 50 hotel workers in Hawaii shaking in grass skirts to Elvis songs while playing a ukulele. That's what I thought this story did, and I so I was resistant to it. It was allowing Western audiences to "dabble in the occult" by giving them an exotic version of the poor in a Latin American country, one that reinforces romantic notions of the poor. I was ready to bash the story, because it seemed inauthentic. It was not a real Paraguayan reaction to years of horrible oppression, because if it had been, there'd have been no need to explain about Paraguayan customs like the Festival of San Juan or about the discovery of the Stroessner documents. I was ready to call foul.
But as I thought about it, I realized that using Western expectations in a cynical way is a brilliant approach. It's what Ña Meli would have done. Yes, invoking the exotic plays on Western (is "Western" the right alternative to "poor Paraguayan" here? Paraguay is, after all, part of The West. But I digress...) biases. It's flash and lights without substance. But in the end, the story gets told and people hear it, which was sort of what Ña Meli accomplished as well.
I intend to have a lot more to say after I'm done with O.Henry on how fraught it can be when a Western editor tries to select a story that is deeply enmeshed in a culture the editor does not know about, how easily that editor can be fooled. But for now, I note only my approval with how Vega used that weakness in the system to get a story told to an audience that needed to hear it.
Is there a closed circle for the narrator?
To return briefly to the story, although the main point seems to be nothing more than to remind Western audiences that this was a thing that happened and it matters, there is still a character within the story to attend to. Does the narrator learn anything and change from her contact with Ña Meli? It seems so. Although Ña Meli warned the people who received the politically risky letters she wrote not to keep them, most did, because, as the narrator points out, "Everyone wants souvenirs, even of the worst things." But the narrator does not keep hers at the end, unlike most people in a story called "We Keep Them Anyway." She knows what she needs to know without referring to the letters.
This is a an act of humility on the part of the author, whom the narrator is temporarily "channeling." This story isn't what matters. It may have been published and won an award, but don't focus on the story. What matters, what must not be forgotten, are the voices of the victims within the story.
Help me pick:
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El segundo.
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