While Yuri Herrera already has two novels rendered in English, his third to be translated, Kingdom Cons (2008, tr. Lisa Dillman, 2017) was actually his debut. A slim volume, like his others previously translated, it focuses on crime in an interesting way (via a musician called Lobo) and is less concerned with the machinations of crime than it is the images such endeavours build around it and project outward.
When he was young, Lobo’s father popped an accordion in his hand, showed him some chords, saying, “This is your bread”, and then vanished in search of a better life. His mother followed soon after. This early abandonment has seen Lobo grow up on the streets, with only the gift of song to aid his survival:
The street was hostile territory, a muffled struggle whose rules made no sense; he managed to endure it by repeating sweet refrains in his head and inhabiting the world through its public words: posters, papers sold on street corners, signs. These were his antidote to chaos.
This sort of life is a drudge, with only the occasional event punctuating its monotony:
He never took notice of the calendar. It seemed absurd because days were all alike: do the rounds of tables, offer songs, hold out your hand, fill your pockets with change. Dates earned a name only when someone took pity on themselves or another by pulling out steel and shortening the wait.
It’s just another day doing those rounds that opens the novel, as Lobo spies a man taking his seat in a cantina with “no urgency and an all-knowing air, as though made of finer threads” and his entourage fanning out around him. Soon, an altercation with a drunk leads to the crossing of Lobo and the man’s lives and it becomes one such date that earns a name as this man is the King and Lobo is absorbed into his court, and that dreary perspective that knew only the streets is instantly widened.
It was exactly as he’d always envisioned palaces to be. Supported by columns, paintings and statues in every room, animal skins draped over sofas, gold doorknockers, a ceiling too high to touch. And more than that, it was people. So many people, striding down corridors. This way and that, attending to affairs or looking to shine. People from far and wide, from every corner of the earth, people from beyond the desert. Word of God there were even some who had seen the sea.
In this new setting, Lobo becomes the Artist. His role is to write songs – corridos – that amplify the King’s successes. He moves silently through the palace, listening, using others’ stories “to weave the fabric of his songs”, and in celebrating their feats, give their glory also to the King “who made it all possible”. Such songs feature the novel’s wider cast, the “good guys” all with archetypal names – the Heir, the Manager, the Doctor, the Jeweller – indicative of their specific roles within the court.
He was a King, and around him everything became meaningful. Men gave their lives for him, women gave birth for him; he protected and bestowed, and in the kingdom, through his grace, each and every subject had a precise place.
This vague naming convention for characters, coupled with an equally vague setting (the City) makes Kingdom Cons seem quite mythic and timeless; universal, as if it could be picked up and placed elsewhere without damage to its core story. While the book never really makes mention of drugs (it’s poison, product, or heaven) where we are actually is in Herrera’s native Mexico, near the US border, and, if a passing reference to a doomed busload of girls is any sort of clue (“a job’s a job”), then it’s a city not unlike Ciudad Juarez, and the court of the King is, in reality, merely the base of a local drug lord. The Artist’s songs therefore sing the kingpin’s glories, building up his legend so that others fear him and dare not challenge his supremacy.
As we know with kings, their reign is always temporary; they die or are deposed, and the throne passes on. So it is for each nameless archetype within the story, always at risk of being easily replaced; no names needed, just a role. And as the translated title cleverly alludes, until Kingdom Come; the King replaces God at the centre of this criminal universe, and the story grinds on forever.
In telling the story, Herrera maintains a certain distance. We rarely enter the characters’ heads so their actions tend to speak more to their motivations than any level of thought. As a story within the narco world, it’s less interested in the drugs operation day job – the smuggling, double crossing, and ruthless killing – but in taking reality and sifting it until something more honest remains, echoing the influence, perhaps, of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 classic, Pedro Páramo. One can well imagine that it’s sparse prose, light but packed with meaning, is more poetic and, like the Artist’s songs, musical in the original Spanish.
The book throughout uses abbreviated forms of though and although (tho and altho), though (tho?) it’s not quite clear why the stylistic choice has been used, but they were slightly jarring to read. Is it to recreate some level of informality that exists in the original Spanish? The translator’s preferred shorthand, perhaps? A minor quibble, as it doesn’t appear to enhance the story’s delivery.
That delivery is less as an engaging all-guns-blazing storytelling narrative, and more like distilled wisdom, a tale told many times by a narrator looking beyond the glamorisation of violence and acknowledging a greater truth about propaganda.
They’d rather hear just the pretty part, but the songs we sing don’t ask their say-so, a corrido ain’t a painting that hangs on the wall to look pretty. It’s a name and it’s a weapon.
Kingdom Cons isn’t a painting either. But it’s a stylised portrait of Mexican narco life, a crime fable that acts as a weapon for criticising the harm done in its wake, touching on how it affects others’ lives, and perhaps asking why it has to be like this, ad infinitum. The King is found to be “a single drop in the sea of men with stories”, but these stories will just keep coming as there’s always someone willing to assume an archetypal role, thus it seems a problem without a solution will always have its prose and cons.