Publication Studio recently released Matthew Stadler’s fifth novel, Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha. With this book Stadler challenges our ideas about authorship. The story is a “cover” of another book (ala rock-and-roll cover songs). In this case, Stadler has shoehorned his own creativity into the tightly defined structure of John LeCarré’s 1962 novel, A Murder of Quality. It is a stunningly original work riding on a classic tale.
Herewith, Numéro Cinq is pleased to bring you chapter one.
LQ
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Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha
By Matthew Stadler
Chapter 1
The city fills a great bowl in the steep Sierra Madre, the meeting place of three river canyons that the Chichimeca Indians called “the place of the frogs.” There were frogs here, and Chichimeca, for centuries before the arrival of Spanish armies. Today the only frogs are on tee-shirts and the shelves of ticky-tack tourist stands. The Chichimeca have been bred away or simply disappeared into the immensity of the surrounding Mexican countryside. The name survived, altered slightly by the conquerors from “Xuana Huato,” to Guanajuato, a word so serenely Spanish sounding that tour guides must remind the visitor of its Chichimeca origins. It is a mestizo name, a halfbreed, hiding its native blood behind the pleasing sonority of a well-fed Castilian lisp.
The basin holds a colorful patchwork of buildings, all of them forever under construction, four centuries of architecture tossed carelessly together, like so many toys in a spoiled child’s treasure chest. The rim of the canyon is bare, an empty mountainous plain of scrub brush and rock, but below it the city presses up from the depths of the basin, surpassing the busy ring road, the panoramica, to reach the upper limits of the delivery men who hand-carry their heavy canisters of gas and agua into the crowded warrens of houses.
It doesn’t matter what day it is; always, as the late afternoon sun burnishes the ridge of the cerro de Serena to the east, a series of cannon blasts echoes up the steep canyon walls, like rocks skipping on water, plonk plonk plonk plonk, further and further, until with a last dim splash they disappear. Puffs of smoke lift from the houses. It is impossible to tell who is firing the cannon or why, the scene is too closely packed and confusing.
The blasts are followed shortly by the machine gun staccato of hundreds of schoolboys pounding on drums. Dressed in white and green, they’re visible in glimpses as they serpentine their way down the hill into traffic. There is some kind of saint or a dead person laid on a bier with ribbons and candles at the front. Templo de San Francisco’s rough stone towers catch the last sunlight, golden against the blue sky. Birds lift from the plaza, disturbing the trash, and men pulling on long ropes ring the bells of the church. By the entrance to the tunnel, scores of trumpets mew like sick calves as the absent minded boys keep pounding on their drums and traffic pools behind them. It could be any day of the year. There is always a parade, always the fugitive cannon blasts, always the haphazard ranks of boys in their school uniforms raising a holy hell as the day tumbles forward.