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Life on the border is by turns grotesque and carnivalesque in Fernando A. Flores’ new story collection “Valleyesque.”
Life on the border is by turns grotesque and carnivalesque in Fernando A. Flores’ new story collection “Valleyesque.”
“Valleyesque” by Fernando A. Flores
Life on the border is by turns grotesque and carnivalesque in Fernando A. Flores’ new story collection “Valleyesque.”
When you’re from the border, you perceive the world from that insular vantage point with a covetous gaze out at the wider world. Yet that ineffable pang of wanderlust is wrapped around the idea that you already exist in a space that holds the entirety of our absurd and curious world.
The forcefield limned by lines, rivers and bridges feeds and fortifies the mythic stories of our lives. We are hemmed in as if stalled on a ferry boat. Access to the outer spaces, to the rest of the United States or, indeed, to Mexico come to us in a careful curation of consumption of music, television, film, art, and books.
Fernando A. Flores seems to understand these transactions, and they inform his collection of stories, “Valleyesque.” The book is dedicated to “the RGV exiles, and exiles living in the RGV,” the Rio Grande Valley. It’s an enigmatic line but one so knowable to those of us from these spaces, ever on the fringes that become the center of all things.
This is a book that defies easy, canned superlatives. Each story is loaded with observations by turns hilarious, troublesome, insightful, exasperating and all too true. That’s the thing about stories layered with surrealism, when that layering is done well. It seems organic, essential.
You get the feeling that these are precisely the ways that Flores experiences life on the Texas-Mexico border, where each side is a funhouse mirror for the other, with distortions that reveal the true colors and edges and reflect what might be hard to look at.
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“Valleyesque” pulls readers into coffee-shops, murals, stash houses, churches, and a massive warehouse of mountains of used clothing.
Chopin is in Ciudad Juárez trying to get his papers in order, recover his confiscated Pleyel piano and mourn his mother’s death. Emiliano Zapata emerges in the flesh from a decal on a T-shirt.
Flores first came on the literary scene in 2018 with his debut collection, “Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas.” His 2019 novel “Tears of the Trufflepig” followed. It’s a Border noir tale that marked the author as an artist and visionary without equal for his capacious knowledge of literature, film, and music, not to mention his incomparable prose.
Flores is not after anything except telling stories his way.
Glimmers of this insight can be seen in the story “Nostradamus Baby.” Yes, a man and his wife are fashioning a “baby” out of the earwax, which they unceremoniously collect and mold. But what stands out in the story is the main character, a writer who must ghost-write to pay the bills. About his own writing he says, “I feel I can reveal more by writing stories in the tradition of hard-core, maybe weird literature, rooted in something old and unknown, and infusing it with my life and where I come from, as unintentionally as possible.”
The story “Queso” evokes Adorno and Heidegger and their philosophical wrestling with the idea of authenticity. Is queso real? Not usually. Not even on the border. To be palatable, it must be altered, its essence destroyed, its orange plasticity pre-shredded and sprinkled on tacos of pre-made tortillas and eggs from a container.
Marcos, the story’s protagonist, watches TV news and rages over the fake features of the anchors. He goes to a job interview where the boss instructs him to say “kay-so” and co-opt the culture.
“Hijack it,” he says, “and sell them a back a cheaper version. An authentic experience that’s better, faster than the real thing.”
“The 29th of April” stands out for being the more conventional of the tales in this collection, and yet it’s far from the conventions of story topics we are used to. A woman begins telling the story of what happened on that late spring day. It is a dramatic monologue of depth and breadth, spanning generations in the colonia known as El Charco outside of the imagined border town of Doctores. The story is epic, biblical, replete with a prodigal son (or two).
The woman who is speaking shares anecdotes about the ways that violence becomes the DNA of an entire town. But she doesn’t boil down the stories of the border to violence, corruption, and drugs — as too often happens. She provides the names of streets and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. She describes their fears and idiosyncrasies. She breathes life into them by telling the story fully with a pang of melancholy.
Doesn’t everyone deserve to be remembered that way? It is a genealogy of reality that only a work of fiction can manage and only a master storyteller can offer as the truth.
“Valleyesque” is picturesque. It is carnivalesque. It is grotesque. The ethos of the Rio Grande Valley is found in this El Chalan ride of a collection. We roll onto the ferry and see the flora and the fauna, this country and that one. There are flashes of color and explosions against a blur of sameness and familiarity we recognize only from the middle of the greenish murky river. It seems as if we are not moving, and in a moment that comes too soon, we’ve reached the other side feeling grateful for the long, labyrinthine ride.
Yvette Benavides is a professor of English and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University. She is the host of the Texas Public Radio Book Public podcast.