Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

Polo never told fatboy anything during their drinking sessions; he never shared what he really thought of him or his ridiculous fantasies about Señora Marian, at least not in the beginning, during their first meetings down by the dock, when fatboy would get hammered and spend hours telling Polo whatever filthy shit went through his head, sparing no details and without a hint of embarrassment: about the porn he watched and how many times a day he masturbated, or the things he'd do to Señora Marian when he finally got his hands on her, by whatever means necessary, while Polo just nodded and chuckled along and shiftily downed three quarters of the bottle of rum that fatboy had paid for, humoring the fat prick but never opening his mouth unless it was to drink from his plastic cup or exhale his cigarette smoke up into the sky to chase away the mosquitoes that swarmed in vertiginous clouds above their heads, occasionally nodding to give fatboy the impression that he was listening to him, that he "got" him, and that he wasn't just there for the handouts, right?

Polo works as a groundskeeper for a luxury condominium in Progreso, a seaside town on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. He lives across the lagoon--supposedly haunted by the ghost of a sinister doña--with his mother and cousin Zorayda, who tortures him with sexual aggressions. The only friend he's ever had, his cousin Milton, has recently left, recruited against his will into the schemes of the cartel. In a long reported story, Milton tells Polo the gruesome ordeal of his own kidnapping, and of being forced to murder at the cartel's bidding, and yet Polo can only see the story as offering a kind of escape from the dreariness and poverty of his own life. At Paradais, he befriends Franco, the filthy-minded son of a wealthier family, though secretly Polo despises him and thinks of him as "fatboy." Franco/Fatboy is obsessed with Señora Marian, an elegant neighbor, and is constantly describing his own lurid fantasies of kidnapping and rape. Between the two of them--the desperate Polo and the sinister Franco--the fantasies inch closer and closer to becoming a real plan.

Paradais is the story of how a terrible crime comes about. Polo and Franco are quite different, both in temperament and status, and yet they both become invested in realizing Franco's bloody, predatory fantasies. Franco could never be a point-of-view character; he's poisoned by his relative affluence to the point of desensitization. We get the sense that life is not much different to him than a video game, or a video on the pornography websites he spends most of his time on. It's harder to understand, on the other hand, why Polo participates. He hates Franco, and despises his fantasies, and yet they come to represent for him a lashing out against the forces that have conspired to place in in poverty and immobility: his cruel mother, his lascivious cousin, his abandonment by Milton, his tyrannical boss, and especially the moneyed residents of Paradais, whose freedom over their own lives Polo recognizes as something he can never have. Polo is a teenager, and we can see easily that his desperation and resentment are stronger than the reasoning centers of his brain. Yet, beyond the misfortune of his station, Melchor does very little to make him an appealing or sympathetic character. There's no heart of gold here, just nastiness and despair.

Paradais is a dispiriting read. It's bleak, it's seedy, it's sordid. It makes you feel like taking a shower. You pray that something will happen to derail the horrible denouement, but it never does--that would be too literary, too easy. It's effective in its portrayal of the anger and resentment produced in those who think they have no escape from their own poverty, or the simple tedium of a life without the benefits of wealth. And yet I felt at the end of it that it hadn't quite justified, or found something revelatory, in its own sheer ugliness. I finished reading it in the emergency room, and boy, that felt bad. But you can't say it doesn't do exactly what it wants to do, as unremittingly awful as that might be.