What's like a reasonable bribe amount?
400 pesos, apparently
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who used to live in Los Angeles but is currently traveling around. If you love the notes, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
A couple days ago I was taking a walk on Avenida Amsterdam when I ran into a friend of mine. It was a beautiful, cool evening — light breeze, setting sun — yet my friend, who happened to be visiting from L.A. for a long weekend, looked visibly depressed, head hung low, arms limp at his sides —
“What’s wrong?” I asked — and indeed there’d been an incident. He, his husband, and some friends had gone out, ordered way too much mezcal by accident, poured some into a water bottle to take back to the hotel to drink later — and gotten stopped by the cops.
The cops wanted a bribe. My friend and his group paid it, then were free to go! Apparently the cops had been nice about it all, exchanging fist bumps with them by the end. Still, the event had been traumatizing. Now my friend felt like a target, he was afraid even about jaywalking, which everyone does in Mexico City —
We hugged goodbye. I went to the neighborhood gourmet snack shop called The Corn-er and bought a gigantic bag of caramel corn for 85 pesos. Later that night I ate these while texting with a friend from salsa class: “so they paid the cops 7k pesos,” I told him.
“That was too much lol they can't even take you to jail,” he wrote back.
“What's like a reasonable bribe amount?”
“400 pesos”
“That's like not even twenty bucks tho but ok this is good to know”
He sent me a link to a Whatsapp group for expats called “Know Your Rights.” I joined it, and though I haven’t yet learned what exactly my rights are here, I feel like I have a random group of 80 or so strangers I can text should I ever get in trouble —
This story has nothing to do with the books I’ve been reading this month, which are not about cops, or bribes, or mezcal. They are, however, intense emotional experiences you’re likely not to forget.
Happy Women in Translation Month —
Love,
Siel
Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (Seven Stories, 2003)
This memoir of obsession gripped me so tightly with its very first sentence that I read it in a single frenzied sitting, wide-eyed and rapt. The book entranced me despite the fact that the slim novella is mostly about waiting — Annie waiting, endlessly waiting, for her lover to call her, to come see her, to fuck her. It’s what her entire life revolves around for a year, even as Annie continues to live her life as an intellectual, a respected and revered writer, a mother of two grown kids.
Annie is close to 50 years old. Her lover is 37, a handsome Eastern European man temporarily in Paris for work-related reasons. He is married, she is long divorced. The two see each other only when he chooses to call, which is why Annie is waiting so much of the time, lost in her fantasies about him.
“I do not wish to explain my passion — that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify — I just want to describe it,” Annie writes. Read it if you’ve ever indulged an unexplainable obsession — or would secretly like to.
Thanks to reader Bonnie for introducing me to Annie Ernaux, of whose writing I’m now an obsessed fan.
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor (New Directions, 2022)
What do you do when your every day is a nightmare of the soul-killing variety: waking up on the floor of your mom’s shitty little house, working all day at a gated community where your job is to clean up after people richer than yourself, doing overtime without pay just to preserve what little you’ve got? How desperate do you become when there’s no hope of change or escape? This is the place where Polo, a young college dropout-cum-disgruntled gardener, finds himself at the start of Paradais. To escape his reality for a few hours a night, Polo starts drinking rotgut with Franco, one of the rich kids who’s got his own issues: binge eating, porn addiction, and increasingly unhinged obsession with the pretty Senora Marian next door.
Soon, Franco hatches an unhinged plan to cure himself of his virginity once and for all — and brain-drunk Polo finds himself passively strung along. Is Polo a poor hapless victim here? Not exactly — he’s fucked up the lives of plenty of people around him himself. This is a propulsive story that shines a lurid light on the hot-topic issues in Mexico today: The gap between the haves and have nots, the elision of victimhood and victimization, the changing role of women and the still-strong male sense of entitlement. Read it if you like novels that seem to have been written in one long, spine-chilling, blood-curdling breath.
Thanks to Jim Ruland for gifting me this book!
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (Hogarth, 2022)
Be careful what you wish for might be scarily apt advice for the characters in this book. Ever had a crush end up with another lover — and wished them both dead? Dreamed up an admittedly feckless fantasy — and hoped it would come true anyway? Had a loved one die — and wanted them back alive? The heroes in these stories are full of wishes with terrifying consequences. Love gets requited, justice served, missing children returned — except in strange, eerie ways that scare and destroy.
These surreal stories are the brainchild of Mariana, who hails from Buenos Aires and weaves into her tales ghosts, myths, and witchcraft. Often, the protagonists are women — women who are in turn helpless and vicious, powerless and shocked by the limitlessness of their own power. Much has been written about the social consciousness of these stories, and certainly they can serve as allegories for events in Latin American history or present culture. But what I truly liked about these stories is that they’re just creepy as fuck. Whether you feel vengeful or remorseful, proud or ashamed, you’ll find moments in this book that feel cathartic, fascinating, and chilling. Read it if you loved that trashy 90s film The Craft, and want a literary version capable of giving you nightmares.
Once a month, I share book recommendations. Shape it by recommending a read!
Three links you might love:
Do what you love and very little money will follow and also you’ll no longer love what you used to love. “Seduced by the idea of turning my hobby into a paycheck, I led bike tours across the U.S. throughout my twenties. As I learned, some passion pursuits are best left pro bono.”
It’s not pro-life, it’s pro-criminalization. “At issue here is not a principled attachment to “life” or to “choice” but the practical question of whether terminating a pregnancy should be considered a crime.”
How pro-criminalizationists justify their own abortions. “So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women — abortion.”
We're reading all the same books this summer -- now I'm reading Cristina Rivera Garza!
I am really loving it!