The loops that would always lead to the murder of Santiago Nasar

“We’re going to kill Santiago Nasar.”

Their reputation as good people was so well-founded that no one paid any attention to them. “We thought it was drunkards’ baloney,” several butchers declared, just as Victoria Guzman and so many others who saw them later did.

I pick up Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold repeatedly. It is a novel that has become a voice in my head. It is the novel that I imagine I could write if I were at my literary best. Oppressive political events in Egypt and the region lead me to revisit the storyline of a fateful day in a man’s life, where a thread of exchanged chatter and a buildup attached to a chase of sorts frame him as the victim of a murder plot. The plot takes shape over the course of a few hours. The village becomes the site of a crescendo that culminates in cutting Santiago Nasar out with a sluggish scission and a plot that is at moments banal, outrageous, lethargic, quiet and mixed with the stuff of tragedy, all at the same time. A tightening of the plot surrounds me; despite the contemplations of a few lax and well-intended few, Santiago Nasar’s death becomes a fact. The build-up of diverse emotions in a fatalistic pursuit draws me in every time. I have this fantasy that if I figured out one detail differently, I could prevent Santiago Nasar’s murder.

I recently decided to read Marquez’s novella alongside The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster. The book is a philosophical rap on what propels action in response to grave events, revisiting Hamlet as a tragic figure written about by many. Critchley and Webster take their turns breaking down the story of Hamlet in order to address or investigate possible reasons behind his hesitation to act, considering the truth about his father’s fate and the future of his rule were revealed to him at the beginning of the story.

The subtitle both challenged and nurtured my illusive nudge to engage with Chronicle of a Death Foretold as if I were part of the events that, although involved almost the whole of the village folk, failed to prevent Santiago Nasar’s death. I also figured I would have more tricks and questions that enable me to go on one more round of futile hallucination to change Santiago Nasar’s fate and scribble some more on how to deal with my own sense of blockaded political reality, which prevents possible participation in many scenarios I imagine could lead to an aspired outcome.

In a conversation with friends upon receiving my copy of The Hamlet Doctrine, I declared that I would use the text to spell out my sense of cowardice as a member of a collective undergoing grave events of disenfranchisement that have spanned the course of about ten years. With the recent destruction of Gazans and Gaza, all such sentiments cut even deeper. The book’s subtitle states that it’s about knowing too much and doing nothing, which instantly made it eligible for my list of readings that I use to investigate and conceive of “non-action,” a concept that I’m obsessed with these days.

My interest in the category of nonaction grew after discovering Asef Bayat’s proposition of the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” as a form of non-movement that the average person living under oppression employs to create immediate solutions for persisting problems. It is basically a look at ordinary life in society that investigates the ways in which people move things around to rid themselves of persistent obstacles without directly addressing the system as a whole or attempting to topple or replace it. This implication, that something is always going on in the everyday and that it may not fit familiar or historically defined ways of action in dealing with larger events, is a site where a “quiet” decorum of operating is enacted. I am preoccupied with the notions of functioning, surviving, questioning and carrying on while constantly rubbing shoulders with forms of oppression. These forms accumulate through a certain consistency due to both the arbitrariness and deliberation that come with the avoidance and postponement of direct confrontation. Charged by that sense, I ask myself: Do I want to save Santiago Nasar? Do I blame the others for ushering him into a brutal murder?

In the course of a few hours of active and circumstantial mobility in pursuit of other things, Santiago Nasar rubbed shoulders with and carved himself into the grave of his tragedy. The end of his life functioned as a rumor for the most part, one that did not bring everyday life to a halt. It was a day that was host to many occasions — a wedding and the passage of the bishop through the village. Must a certain temporality and order of circumstance be on someone’s side or against it? In being mobile, he was a harder target to subjugate to the murder sooner; this slower motion toward his end and its postponement were the fuel for my feverish and futile re-reading of the narrative that I keep hoping to change. Every single time I reach the part that brings him to a locked door, the one he hoped would be his exit from the scene, I feel the most restless. In the small interval of time before his arrival at the door, he was certain that the Vicario twins were after him. But, instead of successfully fleeing the tension of this grand moment, he found himself stationed in a final face-off with his murderers. With all this in mind, I keep going between two tropes while attempting to manage time: being busy with chatter and constantly contemplating confrontation.

“Unlike some of the heroes in Attic tragedy, like Oedipus, who act first and then find out the truth later, Hamlet knows the truth from the ghost’s mouth in Act I.” If finding out and confronting the truth is a matter of time anyway, as the ultimate bargain, can it contribute something in the realm of change? to change the truth? And what does the element of time contribute to our life stories when it comes to facing the truth? The truth resides somewhere, but the key to understanding something or another in light of it may not come our way, even if we are continually mobile without confrontation. One cannot invoke confrontation without thinking of James Baldwin’s words on the subject: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Will the truth confront us without us confronting it? Can confrontation take place while we are busy?

What haunts me most about the characters surrounding Santiago Nasar is their slowness and what that temporality provides in an abundance of swinging positions that cloud the drive to save him. By the time his future father-in-law alerts him with a plan to prevent his tragedy, he’s in disbelief. He suffers that surprise and is overwhelmed to the point of confusion. So, instead of slowing down to think of his next move, he hurries to the fateful door. These final moments also witnessed Clotilde Armenta’s sole physical intervention when she “grabbed Pedro Vicario by the shirt and shouted to Santiago Nasar to run because they were going to kill him.” When the chain reaction to alert him was set off among the townsfolk, “Santiago Nasar went backward and forward several times, baffled by hearing so many voices at the same time.” He didn’t even respond to his father’s best friend, Yamil Shaium, when he invited him in that last hurried sequence to seek shelter in his store. The murderers were also part of this enactment of lethargy; it was they who said, “Sooner or later, he would have to come out…”

There’s a strangeness to being the fastest witness as a reader already familiar with the storyline. It is the position of a spectator who finds it hard to succumb to the chosen pace of the events, only to arrive at the same ending. Even upon reading as fast as possible, the lethargy of a tired village after an eventful wedding and a sleepless night, where everyone seemed to be dragging their feet around, never lent itself to being broken by any character who found motivation to shake the speed of the narrative and act differently. Maybe slow motion finds a good home in the folds of the mind, behaving as if outside of time, to ponder a satisfying logic or an emotion to make sense of an end as a goal in and of itself.

We never really get to know Santiago Nasar in any significant way to understand why he wasn’t really properly saved. We know that he had friends who enjoyed his company, with our narrator being one of them. We know that Margot, the narrator’s sister, thought him to be a good catch for any girl and that she declared that she would have saved him had she heard the rumor of his fateful murder like most of the town’s people. We know that he often cornered and sexually harassed Divina Flor, who left “the door unbarred… so that he could get back in case of an emergency.” So, we have room to resent him, which can nurture certain wishes for his death, like Divina’s mother, Victoria Guzman, who “in the depths of her heart, she wanted them to kill him.” She was anxious for her daughter and consistently tried to get her out of his way, but he was no gentleman about it.

Critchley and Webster touch on the issue of “deservingness” through Hegel: “Hegel insists, and we think he is right, that if a similar justice appears in modern tragedy, then it is more like criminal justice, where — as with Macbeth or Lear’s daughters — a wrong has been committed and the victims deserve the nasty demise that’s coming to them.” But the difference between mythological tragedy (mysticism), where karma takes care of things, and modern times in that sense, is that acts for justice require us mortals to take a role in accomplishing what we believe to be justice. But in order to pick a role and know our place in the story, we must intently reflect, among other things, about who deserves whichever fate. Through this idea of doing away with myth and embracing our roles, we are presented with the subtleties of “responsibility” as the way to liberate ourselves from prejudice, and time can slow down for us so that we can fulfill an “investigation.” In order to act in defiance or construct/reconstruct the issue of clarity about one’s context and the knowing of one’s place in the narrative, perhaps even deciding on one’s place in the narrative, Critchley and Webster pick up the idea of the way illusions pave the way to action, a position that Virginia Woolf discussed through illness in her essay On Being Ill.

“He (Hamlet) also seems to us justified in certain other self-accusations; it is merely that he has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weakness of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come very pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.”

Woolf contemplated the truths revealed in illness, where intimidation toward the world falls apart as we experiment with the perspective of being almost outside the activity that previously defined our everyday lives. There’s an image that her essay conjures in my mind of being almost beside the world, where “we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.” From that subject position, we find clarity in illness, a state that compels many to tie loose ends and look at the world differently. So, in that place or perspective of weakness and desertion (nonaction?), there’s a stirring. When we are distant from the world in that sense, we approach experience and entertain another perspective where we no longer have to behave in order to participate in the world. We then attain the gift of “rashness.” Woolf believed that such a proposition, or rather “illusion,” if it qualifies as such, because we are never really outside of the world, “is still so helpful an illusion, so prodigious a pleasure, so keen a stimulus…” However, in this stimulating illusion, which I believe can be a newfound state of mind, courage and “rashness” may not be the guaranteed outcomes.

Critchley and Webster ponder that “maybe action requires veils of illusion, and once those veils are lifted, we feel a sense of resignation.” The rashness of action for the authors in this instance is about not knowing the full extent of what we’re dealing with. That’s not the case in Borreguita’s tale, though. Borreguita and the Coyote by Verna Aardema became a part of this essay much later on, when my kids and I realized that the reason we love that little lamb is the fact that she never hid from the coyote. She maneuvered her exits, yes, but never went into hiding. Borreguita knew the fate the coyote wanted for her, much like Hamlet knew the truth of his ordeal, but they acted out different projections. Maybe part of Borreguita’s strength lies in the fact that her thoughts are not part of the story; they are simply hidden from the reader. But it seemed in Santiago Nasar’s case that so long as he “didn’t know” about the intent behind his murder, he was floating like a social butterfly without much deliberation or contemplation of what awaited him, and with that, opportunely so, fulfilled the theory of veiled illusions as per Critchley and Webster in the unbeknownst motion that enabled him to dodge death for almost a whole day. But then again, his disbelief exceeded the information he received about the plot for his murder at the critical moment of approaching his end. Does knowledge count in that instance? Perhaps there is a lucky streak regarding ignorance and that’s why there are many who advocate for its importance, mainly because the general perception is that it’s a currency to buy us time from being trumped over by the forces that oppose us. But might not such “illusions” shove us elsewhere?

Whether we consider the “veils of illusion” a form of liberation because we find a different relationship with the world due to being ill, for example, as per Woolf’s notion of being “deserters” of/in the world, or as ignorant of the magnitude and dimensions of where we are and what we are opposing and is opposing us in Critchley and Webster, they seem to both present us with pathways to finding our courage and rashness, necessarily because of certain discrepancies. It seems to me that almost all knowledge of experience will be missing something or another, or discrepant in some way, so to speak. The assembly of what informs us and that which stays beyond the reach of our knowledge may, in some cases, help us feel the guts to comment on the state of the world and engage with it, diminishing hesitation. And when time seems to slow things down for us in that way, postpone circumstance, we trust the cycles of trial and error and our ability to remedy outcomes or keep them steady without minding too much whether we make things worse or bring ourselves closer to vanishing. This relationality with the world that makes the “veils of illusion” a critique of our ignorance of the world around us is a given, but such “shadows” may show us a different side, where we recycle fear which neither Woolf nor Critchley and Webster tap into. Our discrepant knowledge can offer us a territory beyond hesitation, and it can also feed our construction of recyclable threats.

I imagine another scenario, via Virginia Woolf, on a bed, feeling ill, looking at the world through the lens of clarity offered by being a “deserter” and feeling things other than a “keen stimulus.” A neurosis perhaps or a looming fear; there’s a spectrum of positionalities on that bed. Perhaps one of them is “disgust” with the world or oneself. Critchley and Webster invoke Hegel’s idea that disgust “induces not action but acedia, a slothful lethargy.” Being overwhelmed upon contemplating “the state of the world” can be a pandora’s box; if it invokes fear or disgust in us, we curl away from the world. But it is the breaking down of such notions, transcending their arrest as nonaction, that makes Life as Politics by Asef Bayat an important reference to return to in order to entertain a closer look at nonaction via non-movement. It is instructive to conjure the notion of the-spoon-that-creates-the-tunnel to approach Bayat’s “quiet encroachment of the ordinary.” The drive for problem-solving that is ongoing everywhere in the world has a quietness about it that deprives it of noise, but not of deliberation. This is what compels me to revisit Bayat’s work and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and move away from the view that everyday life is small and irrelevant, centered around one big battle and one grand reveal; to look at the settings surrounding us and the agents populating them as sites of motion no matter how discouraged we may feel toward them, because that ordinary everyday “no longer appear(s) as merely the obscure background of social activity.” And although I’m reminded through my work in anthropology to keep my eyes open to what people “do” as I converse with them, there’s no way around chatter and its significance.

While living under oppressive regimes within the confines of an abundance of censorship efforts, many take to whispering or hinting to engage with others in chatter and commentary. Walter Benjamin contended that “we cannot act because our mouths are always full of words, words, words.” I imagine intentions taking shape in words, inside and outside of the mind. The process of interpretation and its motion find clarity in words. So, what about words? Must we not align a sort of logic and deliberation with a particular stirring through words? Must chatter bear no fruit and swallow all action? Can we march without chanting and chattering all the while?

Heba Abu Nada was a young Palestinian writer who was killed in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. On her page on Facebook — a platform designed for chatter, both virtual and grounded in reality, where it depends what kind of chatter you keep — she wrote: Writing, like fasting, is an act propelled by intention. Are we discovering that words are a form of disruption and, therefore, not exactly the opposite of action? Do words draw strength from being written that they don’t otherwise have when uttered, or is it the other way around? Is that chatter that we seem unable to do without really telling of a thing or two when social media platforms are being censored in ways that are only familiar to us via state bodies? If it amounts to nothing, then why do our words fall into a digital black hole when they inconvenience dominant rhetoric?

Among others in the story of Hamlet, enactment as hinting becomes a chance and a lethargic ushering to the (painful) truth: “…Hamlet would seem to be suggesting that the manifest fiction of theater is the only vehicle in which the truth might be presented.” In the tradition of “theatrocracy,” an act unravels as a notion where the ability to re-narrate can lend an emotional awareness to events as commentary that moves things and sensibilities around. Critchley and Webster quote Gorgias, “the highly influential Sicilian rhetorician”: “Tragedy, by means of legends and emotions, creates a deception in which the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver and the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived.” It is a form of gravity to paraphrase in this way, via the passing on of tragedy as a tale that acts as to remind us of particular scenarios and provides us with a form of reflection about our relation to certain events. It presents us with a sensibility that is not bound to connecting elements of a story in the way of the straight line between two points entailed in a compact declaration. Stephen King articulated this idea of taking winding roads to narrate our stories to understand the world. He did it in an interview on how children reason in ways that adults grow an inability to understand because they assume an absence of rationality in the child’s mind, only because they can’t walk the same mental map.

I wonder what it is that I’m trying to relive as I reread Chronicle of a Death Foretold; my helplessness? One must evaluate one’s helplessness to be able to deal with it. The re-living of helplessness abides by one truth: dissatisfaction with a state of operation and being in the world, one that therefore must be eventually changed. As a citizen in a country where within the circles of power there’s no such thing as lessons learned, I ponder the distance between the wretched of the earth and those who rule their fate as a similar distance between my distress at re-reading the advancement of Santiago Nasar’s fate toward the tragedy that engulfs him. It all assembles perspectives of very long and prolonged ways to conjure wisdom. For satisfying a possibility of learning through a resonance of sorts, which mimics being in a “prayer” for which the outcome is unknown, is a site eligible for philosophy after all.

In a short film that features the Muppet Show’s Mahna Mahna song, a man asked at the moment of his assassination for any last words sang the song as his final commentary in/on life. For a few seconds, his final utterance acts like a party-track of an absurd joy that precedes the bullet that ends his life. So, it seems that we are inclined to comment, even at the very end, to summon experience — a ground to stand on with others, namely, in this instance, one’s killer.

In Hamlet, this happens in order for him to “speak daggers to her, but use none.” Like Hamlet, it often feels that the eventfulness/motion of non-action, as he deems theater to be, is “all for nothing.” And yet, a sense of anticipation for a “reflection” never stops nagging. “Is the truth best said or perhaps only said in a fiction; that, in a lie and a falsehood?” and “if theater is good for nothing, then perhaps it will be good for this nothing — the unspoken crime of a ‘king of shreds and patches’ —that must be brought out into the open.” It is worth contemplating: which “open”? Wherever this notion of “out into the open” may lead, there is an implied rupture around which our fidgeting/nonaction takes place and promises some kind of transformation, or at least a metamorphosis, to wake up to.

Did Angela Vicario tell the truth? Wasn’t her chatter with Bayardo San Roman essentially the reason for Santiago Nasar’s tragic end? We never find out, but we do discover that our narrator doubts the credibility of her claim. Was her claim that Santiago Nasar marked the end of her virginity a fabrication whose only truth was her hesitation to marry Bayardo San Roman from the start, the man who became her life’s obsession just after the tragedy? But then, what about the plots and chatter that bend the truth? What about that eternal match between what is real and what is a lie? And why is truth so intimately bound to oppression? To a manipulation through which to be told? Must truth be a courageous act that requires an expulsion of cowardice/fear? Does it necessarily make us nervous, propel us into behaving slowly where the world is subject to the rhythm of a drip? Does it carry the same weight to say the truth in favor of someone as much as to incriminate that someone and send them off to suffer a punishment, a banishment or an annihilation? Does truth act in the way that vengeance does, with its sharp and uncompromising deliberation?

The play between one’s own sensibility and going beyond oneself to engage with the world through a collective or in chatter within a community is a dynamic that doesn’t succumb to a particular order, nor can it be coerced to any such order. But maybe Hamlet reckoned that a desired reconciliation would best take place in his head, to have a justified change of heart in light of the truth.

Salah Jaheen conceded in his Ruba’eyat that, in thought, reconciliation may be reached:

في يوم صحيت شاعر براحة وصفا

الهم زال والحزن راح واختفى

خدني العجب وسألت روحي أنا مت؟ وللا وصلت للفلسفة؟

I woke up one day comforted and tranquil

My worries gone and my sadness absent

I was taken by my sense of awe and wondered whether I had already died?

Or whether I had arrived at Philosophy?

Unlike Jaheen, Critchley and Webster wonder about “the infinite self-reflexivity of which Hamlet is capable (to be the) incapacity of action,” and not as a way to dismantle the drive to act, to reason yourself out of a particular course of action. And whether in “extraordinary insight into ourselves… companions are melancholy, (there’s) alienation, and a massive obstruction at the level of action.” It seems that is where we find ourselves, more so than not, without accomplices. Or perhaps also outside of one’s head lies the mundane, the flow of the ordinary, where tragedy and its derivatives are almost always met with a sense of surprise as an unfathomable and unlikely disruption, even if the detail and unraveling of the events themselves are not surprising. It seems that even “indecision” takes time, as it is a process, not like “beautiful disinterest,” which in a way is a process as well, haunted by something that lies a good distance away from concern. If it is effortless, then it has achieved neutrality, where neutrality turns the world into stone. But stones are not outside of tragedy in any case, even if they appear as such. That’s what the “Medusan glance” does — it petrifies like a fossil. In My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig called it a snapshot of a point in time: “like the face of the dying, the fossil grants authority to the storyteller, in this case the world telling us the story of itself.”

Faustino Santos was one of the butchers who were present when the Vicario twins went to sharpen their sacrificial knives. He probed them at announcing their intention to kill Santiago Nasar. Santos thought it odd, “since there were so many other rich people who deserved dying first.” In his doubt and unease at this incident, Santos reported the exchange to a policeman who came into his shop later to buy liver. Colonel Lazaro Aponte was informed by three townspeople other than Santos. But when the colonel laid eyes on the twins at Clotilde Armenta’s store, he figured them for “bluffers,” but opted to take away their knives just in case. Armenta watched the colonel take what she thought was a small measure. She later said that, if it were her, she would have detained the twins until further investigation of the matter. I imagine her in a different plot, doing sooner what she did later, physically obstructing Pedro Vicario’s advancement toward Santiago Nasar. I imagine her offering the twins another bottle of cane liquor to knock them out, but she thought they were drunk enough, for she told our narrator that at that point…” they couldn’t have got their blood pressure up, even with lamp oil.” For the record, Clothilde Armenta was not keen on stopping the murder because of any sympathy for Santiago Nasar; she instead pitied the Vicario twins for their burden to avenge their sister’s lost virginity. The colonel declared as he left the store that the sensible thing to do was to warn the potential victim, as if that would be the only significant form of nonaction, one that makes the world smaller when the victim is abandoned as the only party upon which action befalls in a squid game of some kind, where any sense of community/collective is made irrelevant beyond a particular point. Clothilde Armenta did send word to Father Amador with a messenger who came in for milk, and she’s the one who tipped off the beggar and sent her to Victoria Guzman with the news. In both cases, the receivers of the warning failed to obstruct the flow of events for lack of drive and deliberation, content in their own thoughts at a critical moment that required more obvious intervention.

The twins replaced the knives that were confiscated by the mayor. The estrangement that happens with repetition, when one is aware of it, can be confusing. I understand Faustino Santos’ confusion when the twins returned to sharpen another pair of knives: “so I believed they were kidding around,” thought the good butcher amid his strange sense of bafflement. Even Clothilde Armenta, upon seeing them again with the new pair of knives, decided that they had lost a good amount of their “determination.” This part of the story reminds me of all those chances given to power, to government, where they must pick themselves up and drop the absurdity of a destructive repetition, because otherwise they must be “kidding around,” right? It’s not possible that Gazans being massacred for this long can escape the absurd.

“…(W)hen the captive Titan is asked what he gave human beings apart from fire and technology, Prometheus adds that he gave human beings the capacity for blind hope as a way of forestalling doom.” But then, while we are still here, what do we do until doomsday? Perhaps it is of great value to approach our context(s) as if dystopia is already here, as per Mohamad Naeem’s article Don’t Fear the Worst that Might Come, It’s Already Here  (لا تخش الأسوأ القادم...قد أتي). In other words, “we are living in the ‘dystopian now,’” as Molly Swain of the podcast Métis in Space coined the term.

Critchley and Webster frame the missing action that lays dormant in Hamlet as a “revenge” that never comes. To set it right by succumbing to something other than a loud act of revenge may be what was stopping Hamlet. Maybe it is the disbelief in the ghostly blood that is automatically emblematic to be already flowing, that pulsing nag that “it’s too late” instead of “it’s here.” Waiting for the “right time” is a postponement, and may or may not have something to do with fantasizing about revenge. And yet it seems that revenge is the only animated and persistent fuel in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, in a loop that for a day knows no action outside of its determination, where the only right time is coming “sooner or later” as the Vicario twins conceived. Maybe it is more about determination than it is about anything else.

Santiago Nasar’s last day on earth is presented to us as a series of delays in the form of interruptions, but not disruptions. His fate unravels slowly but without significant hesitation. This tapestry of a lethargy presents us with a certain pessimism. Isn’t pessimism an insight into a certain truth, a cry for rehabilitation, one that we must face if we hope for life to be an incubator of a different future? Isn’t it a state to declare and recognize our frustration and to critique it when we find ourselves exhausted and behaving alongside the banality of oppression? “Truth does not come from the past but from the future, meaning that what matters is not proof or any supposed veracity but what is said and how in an act that cuts through the past. Interpretation is revelation.” It is also the marking of something’s end, where wisdom must be extracted in order to move on, onto the cusp of something new/different/shifting.

Maybe saving Santiago Nasar is not the point, because to reread a novel knowing that the ending would never change is an exercise in repetition, a repetition that can only take me to the final page. But it seems that the main rationale of a tragedy-come-dystopia and all that it urges is really for you to know your place in it, and most of the characters, along with Santiago Nasar, did not. When Santiago Nasar first heard about the assault that awaited him, he declared “I don’t understand a God-damned thing.”

We are in many ways asked to ignore the immediacy of our surroundings and the weaves by which we are connected to contemporaneity for the sake of a less subjective perspective — an invitation that encourages us to stop ourselves from making sense of our subject positions in relation to what we know and have experienced, to instead adopt a bird-eye view of the world and cultivate our own alienation. The open invitation to alienation has created many estranged sites in the world on many occasions.

It is this return to everyday life that saves us from the mayhem of tragedy, so it seems, that place that we don’t identify as much ground for anything at first glance, although it’s all we’ve got. It’s all Santiago Nasar had to be saved from the myth, prejudice and the stuff of tragedy. It is all Borreguita had and where she almost perished but triumphed every time, or at least that’s how I like to see it. I’ve also come to fathom how a fully-formulated dystopia happens in the everyday, watching Gaza upon the hour in the past months, where survival means an entirely different thing. I find refuge in Borreguita’s conviction that her everyday life was all she had, without postponements. My ten-year-old used to occasionally ask when we read the story together: “what about the Coyote’s hunger? He’ll just take it elsewhere.” By being present, maybe that’s our way to starve the beast while hoping that we are aligned in time so we can change the order of things before we are faced with further losses.