Three Stories

To many North Americans, Mexico is a land fraught with cartels and criminals poised to stream across the southern border. This is a fiction that raises a wall of ignorance. The following trio of stories by Mónica Lavín, one of Mexico's most prolific and respected modern writers, opens a crack in that wall, revealing a country far more mysterious and variegated.

Born in Mexico City in 1955, Lavín is the author of eleven short story collections, eight novels, two works of young adult fiction, five works of nonfiction and essays, and the recently published Méxicontemporáneo, an anthology of interviews with some of Mexico's greatest contemporary creators. She is a multimedia talent: a journalist; a columnist for El Universal; a tv and radio personality; and a professor of creative writing at the Autonomous University in Mexico City. Among the honors she has received are the Premio Nacional de Literatura Gilberto Owen (1996) for the short story collection Ruby Tuesday no ha muerto, the Premio Bellas Artes de Narrativa Colima para Obra Publicada (2001) for the novel Café cortado; and the Premio Iberoaméricano de la Novela Elena Poniatowska

Mónica Lavín. Photograph by Hans-Paul Brauns.

(2009), one of the country's highest literary honors, for Yo, la peor, a fictionalized history of the life of seventeenth century poet and scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. From her book-lined studio in Coyoacán, Lavín produces material at a furious pace for print and electronic media. She knew and has interviewed Carlos Fuentes for a documentary about his life; she films a regular television show with her friend, the writer Rosa Beltrán; she has translated several works by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, who dedicated a poem to her. When interviewed about her writing, Lavín often declares that she would much prefer to ask questions than answer them. She has been a Yaddo fellow, resident at the Hermitage Retreat and the Banff Centre for the Arts, and is an international speaker. She loves playing basketball and dancing flamenco. She prefers to write in the morning, the earlier the better, a fragrant café cortado by her side.

I found Lavín's work by chance. I give my students a seventy-five-dollar budget to buy books for me whenever they travel abroad, and two years ago one of them brought me a copy of Manual para enamorarse (How to Fall in Love) from a trip to San Miguel de Allende. I read the stories and, as they say, nothing was ever the same again. Here was a modern Latin American woman writing about sex, love, desire, and eroticism with a frankness, honesty, and linguistic virtuosity that seared and wounded me. In September of 2015, I proposed myself as her translator. She graciously gave me that opportunity, and these three stories from her 2010 collection Pasarse de la raya (Crossing Over the Line) are the result.

We begin in the basement apartment of "The Caretaker," where a young office worker finds herself sequestered by a man whose smooth, dark skin and cheap personal accoutrements identify him as working class and of indigenous heritage. We proceed to the ground floor in "What's There to Come Back To," in which a husband rejects desire and intimacy in favor of middle-class order and ferocious routine. Finally, in "Postprandial," we take the elevator to the glittering penthouse, where a parade of delicacies provides the appetizer to exuberant feasts in which lovers' bodies are the main dish and sex is power. In Lavín's stories, food reveals character and social class: in the basement, we are overwhelmed by the pungent odor of beans, the staple of the poor; on the first floor, fried eggs and supermarket cold cuts communicate a disdain of sensuality; and in the penthouse, exotic cuisine ushers in the consensual cannibalism of unrestrained Eros.

Lavín's characters are at once molecularly Mexican and universally human. Lavín is also a trained...