Una cita con la lady by Mateo García Elizondo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Una cita con la lady by Mateo García Elizondo Haley Osborn García Elizondo, Mateo. Una cita con la lady. Vintage Español, 2020. Pp. 197. ISBN 978-0-593-08284-3. Told from the point of view of a burned-out, bottomed-out junkie, Una cita con la lady is a psychedelic journey of both good and mostly bad trips. The protagonist is on his way to the last stop on the line of local civilization, the sleepy town of El Zapotal, Mexico, in pursuit of death. Not only has his indomitable addiction to lady (the slang terminology for heroin) sabotaged his own life, it has also impinged on the lives of those who loved him most, driving him to chase the final fix in a place so remote that no one will be there to revive him with naloxone as they had done countless times before. Replete with gothic imagery, hauntings, out of body experiences, and encounters with surreal people and places, the protagonist’s journey is far from normal; it is paranormal, but not a typical ghost story. Divided into brief chapters, Elizondo’s use of first-person narration places the reader in the cadaverous skin of the wandering user. The tone is a drugged-out stream of conscious that traps us in the protagonist’s inferno of obsession and delirium, forcing us to understand his desperate attempts at achieving a high to feel something other than withdrawal, such as when he stabs his veins with the tails of live scorpions to absorb the intoxicating venom. Even this cannot satiate his need. Through his testimony and interactions with some peculiar characters, the reader gains access to his fragmented memories, visions, reflections on life, and existential musings about the afterlife and is thereby tasked with having to decipher between the blur of his time at the pension, opium dreams, nightmares, withdrawals, and even life and death itself. The result of this structure is an empathetic one that familiarizes and humanizes the undertakings of the drug addict living in the margins, a member of society whose illness is frequently diagnosed by many as merely a consequence of multiple bad choices. Some of those for the protagonist include allowing his inherited family home to become a traphouse, getting his own girlfriend hooked on heroin, and neglecting his dog, who waits countless hours during the protagonist’s self-inflicted stupors to be fed and let out. The long-term effects of this behavior are devastating, indeed. During a high at a friend’s house, another user staying at his family home leaves the door open and, in search of his beloved master, the dog escapes and is subsequently hit by a car. The protagonist’s girlfriend, likewise, is killed by an overdose of his own seductive temptress, lady (the drug). More than a postmodern drug culture novel worthy of psychoanalysis and interesting to Latin American generalists, upon closer scrutiny, this fiction has much to offer Mexicanists specializing in indigenous studies. To be sure, it would be difficult to ignore the many ways in which [End Page 327] elements from the plot parallel characteristics from pre-Columbian Mesoamerican mythology. By way of example, although never mentioned in the novel, El Zapotal in Veracruz, México where the story takes place was home to the Totonac and Aztec people for hundreds of years until succumbing to the installation of the Spanish colonial encomienda system. The protagonist’s mission, furthermore, is to commit suicide by overdose there. It is no coincidence, then, that El Zapotal houses the ruins of the shrine of Mictlantecuhtli, the lord of death in Aztec belief often portrayed as a walking corpse. Complementing this imagery, the protagonist frequently mentions his own now emaciated, living-dead appearance from drug abuse. No longer able to stomach most food he ingests or exert himself physically, his own human body seems to be ousting his soul from it, as if he already has one foot in Mictlantecuhtli’s kingdom of the underworld. The living inhabitants of El Zapotal treat the protagonist like he is invisible or an unwelcome spirit; they ignore and avoid him when he approaches them for guidance in...