Jorge Volpi: “No one cares about counting the dead in Mexico”

Mexican writer Jorge Volpi still regrets not having studied science.

He had bad physics teachers, good humanities teachers, he discovered literature with his friends and then he moved away from that interest.

"That's why I ended up writing

, a novel about physicists," he tells of the book that launched him internationally two decades ago.

But mathematics marked the limit for him and in the last novel of that trilogy,

, he began to explore psychology and neuroscience.

"I thought, a little riskily and a little perhaps vainly, that he could say things from neuroscience linked to literature."

With his new novel,

(Alfaguara, 2022), Volpi returns to these disciplines to investigate the origins of violence and asks himself a question: what happens in the brains of children who become criminals?

In Frontera Corozal, a border city between Mexico and Guatemala, two migrants find the body of a teenager.

Dayana's murder is already solved.

Her cousin and her boyfriend –two adolescents– in the presence of a 10-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl killed her and threw her into the Usumancinta River.

A group of neuroscientists then arrive motivated by the same question that Volpi asks himself.

"I had been with this obsession for a long time," says the author (Mexico City, 53 years old) to EL PAÍS, where he is a collaborator.

"If in 2006 there hadn't been the outbreak of different types of violence in Mexico, perhaps I would have continued writing novels set in other historical moments, in other places and dealing with other topics," he says, "but suddenly it happened to all of us what the artist Teresa Margolles said: and what else were we going to talk about?

War Parties

, he says, "came up like a kind of whirlwind" during the pandemic.

The novel is narrated in the first person by Lucía Spinosi, a young neuroscientist, herself involved in dynamics of violence.

Lucía is the cross between the story of the children who murdered Dayana and the scientists who come to study the case led by Luis Roth, her mentor, a man who is not what she seems.

"I needed to go back to fiction to have more control over the story," she says.

Four years earlier, Volpi had published

, the non-fiction book about an alleged kidnapping case with which he won the Alfaguara Prize.

“I believe that both are valid ways of approaching reality,” he adds from Madrid, where in February he was appointed director of the Center for Mexican Studies of the National Autonomous University and from where he hopes to “stretch dialogue again” interrupted by tensions. politics between the two countries.

Ask.

The links in the book are mostly contentious.

With family, at work, with friends, partners, even with the body through illness.

Do human relationships have to be like this?

Response.

I do not know if

, but there is no doubt that most of the time they are.

Literature only exists – at least the one that interests me – if there is conflict.

If not, the most valuable part of literature is lost.

We are very contradictory beings and therefore we do not know exactly what we do nor do we fully understand what we want.

If we extrapolate that to others, then inevitably we are going to come into conflict.

Q.

The title of the novel,

, refers to that.

R.

The title has this double reading.

On the one hand, the war reports are the reports that any soldier from the front sends to his superiors or the press to report on how a war is going.

This is what the narrator, Lucía, is doing.

But on the other hand, this is also a war in parts, it is a divided war.

All the protagonists of the book –and not only the children of Frontera Corozal– are surrounded by small wars, small power struggles that take place in the academic world, in the family and in couples.

Q.

Between the narrator – a young woman, a neuroscientist – and Luis, who was her teacher, then her colleague and friend.

A.

All the relationships in that group, ultimately all of them, are power relationships.

That is very clear, because Luis is the boss of all.

One thinks that right in the academy, in the pristine world of scientists who are dedicated to studying the brain, is where you would least find these struggles for power.

However, even being friends, on many occasions still loving each other, they do not stop fighting for power.

Q.

Were you in Frontera Corozal?

R.

I traveled after writing the novel.

He had originally wanted to do the trip first and then the novel, but the pandemic came.

He allowed me to adjust many things: the geography, the landscape, but also the language and the speech of the protagonists.

It was very important to make this story much more credible.

P.

It could have been told in other areas of Mexico, why on the southern border?

R.

Because of the relevance it has been gaining for us.

Both political and symbolic relevance.

The southern border had been completely forgotten by Mexico for a long time, almost as if it did not exist, as if we did not have those kilometers of border with Guatemala and Belize.

But in recent years the migratory phenomenon has been reversed.

And the migrants in Mexico, both in the [Enrique] Peña Nieto Administration and now, in the Administration of President [Andrés Manuel] López Obrador, are being stopped or expelled as were the Mexicans [who tried to cross into the United States] in another moment.

P.

The book returns to a question: what is the origin of violence?

The characters have different ideas.

What is the origin of violence for you?

R.

The research undertaken by this group of neuroscientists was also basically mine.

Since I became interested in the topic of children who kill or abuse other children, the question was where the violence comes from.

Already applying it directly to the Mexican case, the book tries to give the multiple answers.

Neuroscientists try to find it in neuroscience itself;

there are those who try to observe how violence operates, for example, among primates and compare the societies of chimpanzees, which tend to be quite violent and patriarchal, against the societies of bonobos, which are based on the alliance between females and are much more peaceful;

there is another researcher who rather tries to see what is the origin of violence historically, at what moment, already existing

, traces of serious intentional violence begin to be found and it seems that it is above all after the adoption of agriculture.

What they are going to try to understand, and that is why I am not going to answer it, is where is the origin of this violence that seems to have suddenly infected these children.

P.

The crime is already solved.

The group of scientists tries to understand what led some children to kill and also wonders if we are bad or good by nature.

R.

That is again the great question of the book and not only of the book, but one of the great questions in societies that have become as violent as the Mexican one.

Mexico probably always was, but especially after 2006 it became explicitly violent, with figures typical of a civil war, after the war against drug dealers broke out during [Felipe] Calderón's six-year term.

Are we intrinsically violent and that is why violence is also in children?

Or is that violence learned?

That is a bit what the novel tries to discuss at all times.

There is no clear answer, there are clues.

P.

How much does it influence that these children are in Mexico?

R.

It has a lot to do with it in many ways.

In one of the real cases on which the novel is inspired, some of the children or some of the parents said that they had committed the crimes because they liked to play that they were drug traffickers and imitate drug traffickers, or at least the idea of the drug trafficker, which is a cultural construction, a political construction.

If to that we add the part that has to do with the security forces, with the Army, with the National Guard, with the constant violations of human rights, with watching all the time on television an increasingly normalized violence. .. We are not at the time of the beginning of the drug war, with Calderón, where practically every day the newscasts were counting the dead.

Now nobody cares and to count them, the news just breaks and seems as irrelevant as the weather.

In reality, it does not cease to be impregnating these children as well.

And if we add to that other conditions that are so typical of Mexico, but not only, that have to do with domestic violence, with gender violence, with alcoholism, there is obviously a breeding ground for violence.

P.

The narrator debates all the time between whether human beings are moved by the brain or the heart.

What do you think?

R.

It is part of the inner learning that one always has when making a novel.

From the point of view of the narrator, it is a novel that struggles precisely between the metaphors of reason and emotions to try to understand it.

I had also always identified myself with reason and I always believed that any problem could be solved with reason, including problems, for example, of violence, but we are becoming more and more certain, especially from neuroscience, that we are essentially emotional beings .

It is very possible that consciousness, which until very recently we linked above all to reason, to the cerebral cortex and to the ability to compute data, is actually much more closely linked to our emotions.

That is, we are probably conscious beings thanks to emotions.

P.

The book shows the violence against women that occurs across the board: in all social classes, at all educational levels, in all states... Has writing it allowed you to understand something differently?

A.

As with others, gender-based violence has also become much more visible in recent years in Mexico, but we have not yet been able to resolve it.

That links this novel with my previous novel, which dealt with the case of Florence Cassez and Israel Vallarta [a couple accused of kidnapping in Mexico whose case caused a diplomatic incident between the governments of Felipe Calderón and Nicolas Sarkozy].

It was a novel about how the justice system in Mexico does not work in any sense.

The same thing that he said about the case of Florence Cassez could now be said about this case, even if it is imaginary: that in Mexico no crime is solved.

In Mexico, justice does not exist to any extent for any crime.

P.

After

, what elements does fiction give you again to narrate violence?

R.

I wanted to return to fiction.

Writing

was something very strange for me because I don't come from the world of journalism.

To be writing a book where I had to be trying to check every sentence, looking for the sources and not being able to say what came to my mind.

I could never know what the characters were thinking and I was missing many elements.

I needed to go back to fiction to have more control over the story.

I believe that both are valid ways of approaching reality.

Both ultimately are interpretations of reality with different tools.

Q.

Does either of the two allow you to better portray the reality of Mexico?

R.

For me it has been an almost complementary experience.

As if this,

, were from fiction the answer that I gave myself to

, or vice versa.

Both respond to similar realities, both are for me my Mexican novels, the novels in which I try to understand Mexico a little from non-fiction and from fiction.

subscribe here

to the

of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of this country

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber