Horacio Castellanos Moya’s schizo-noir The She-Devil in the Mirror (2009) is a novel of affairs, both private but also (potentially) political. Like all good detective stories, The She-Devil in the Mirror begins with the discovery of a body, that of Olga Maria Trabanino, the wife of a well-connected advertising executive and the owner of a popular boutique store, who has been shot dead in her living room. Despite initial reports, Olga Maria’s murder does not appear to have been the by-product of a burglary gone awry – (the incursion of the poor) – but rather a contract kill, carried out by an ex-serviceman who witnesses describe as resembling ‘RoboCop’ – (the machinations of the rich). Narrated in the first-person by Laura Rivera, the irrepressible best friend of the recently deceased, the novel provides an account of the investigation into Olga Maria’s execution, questioning ‘how could such a tragedy have happened’. Throughout the course of her idiosyncratic and associative monologue, Laura reacts to hypotheses presented by the police, as well as generating her own theories regarding possible motives and potential masterminds. Pursuit of the truth brings Laura into conflict with other social institutions within San Salvador, which each have their own causal explanation for how the ‘honorable’ – if flirtatious – Olga Maria ended up with bullets to the chest and head. What is dramatized in Laura’s quest are the processes through which narrative hegemonization takes place, that is, how particular stories are reproduced as the official version.
In his essay, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, Tzvetan Todorov glosses that the classic kind of ‘whodunit’ novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’. The first story, that of the crime, divulges ‘what really happened’; however, its observations are only accessible through the ‘second story’, that of the investigation, through whose interviews, interrogations, and deductions the detective (and the reader) uncover the past. As intermediaries of anterior experiences, the characters in the second story ‘do not act, they learn’, a process of interpretation which is thematized and made explicit by an associate or friend of the detective, who is often writing a book about the incident.
The She-Devil in the Mirror preserves and intensifies the temporal duality Todorov identifies in the ‘whodunit’. Inflected by the behaviors of someone belonging to high society, Laura’s monologue jumps erratically from stimuli in the present to memories of Olga Maria’s many affairs. Amongst the candidates of known jilted lovers there is her husband’s former business partner Jose Iglesias, the ‘half-communist’ photographer Jose Carlos, and the rising darling of the political right Gaston Berrenechea (affectionately known as Yuca), a childhood crush, who is disappointingly coked-up in bed. Yet the novel also arguably internalizes Todorov’s duality further. As with the classic ‘whodunit’, Laura’s investigation is self-consciously presented as a story; however, rather than a written account compiled by an observer, it is a spoken one, performed by Laura herself and addressed to a floating signifier, a ‘you’ or ‘my dear’. In this sense, the reader is interpellated as Laura’s confidante, as the schizophrenic second-self who occupies her mind and divides her subjectivity. The unadorned and referential language of the ‘whodunit’ is thus re-articulated through the rhythms and grammars of psychosis.
In Todorov’s typological account, detective fiction undergoes a modification as the whodunit transitions into the thriller and the suspense novel. The implacable retrospective narrations that characterize figures like Hercule Poirot, who work with total impunity, are inverted into prospective narratives where it is unclear if the detective will even survive the case, let alone solve it. Mystery is replaced by curiosity, on the one hand, as detectives encounter effects, such as a body, whose cause they need to retrace; and by suspense, on the other, as causes are depicted whose effects have not yet arrived and are unpredictable and uncertain. The second story suppresses but does not completely efface the first story, but attention shifts to the milieus through which the detective moves, the spatial mapping of built environments. Readers, Todorov, notes, are simultaneously animated by a ‘curiosity to learn how past events are to be explained; and there is also the suspense: what will happen’. Crucially, the aura around the detective shifts as they lose their sense of invulnerability and are re-integrated into the universe of actions: detectives can be beaten up, injured, find themselves in jeopardy or even framed.
Laura’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding her best friends death is similarly invested in the feel of the present, in the spaces through which her body moves and with those who she encounters. The story of the crime is not fully eclipsed by the story of the investigation, but a portrait emerges of a class and nation emerging from a sustained period of civil war. Bars are appreciated for the European ‘ambiance’, telenovelas are consumed religiously, Jesuit priests despised for their connections to subversive networks. Not only does Laura find herself a suspect – she is stunned to receive ‘a news flash’ that even her ex-husband, the financier Alberto, had embarked on an affair with Olga Maria – but that she is also in jeopardy. Within the context of El Salvador, The She-Devil in the Mirror suggests that learning is an action, that the process of investigating a crime is an act that can modify the conduct of others and transform the researcher into a target. Jose Carlos warns Laura that if political agents are involved then ‘it’s better that we don’t know and don’t try to find out who it was, because if we do, they’ll kill us, too’. Learning the causality behind a sequence of events has the capacity to volatilize situations. Investigations do not so much resolve the contradictions of the past – such as the non-identity of the killer – but actively re-channel the flows of beliefs and desires in the present.
Another of the variations The She-Devil in the Mirror introduces to detective fiction is that the mystery is less about the killer – who is apprehended quickly – and rather about the mastermind. In this sense, Laura’s account functions as a sort of meta-commentary on the institutions of interpretation and symbolic production. Laura details an almost structuralist account of the various narrative combinations and different lines of investigation. Laura has dealings with both the state, in the form of Police Inspector Handal, and para-state institutions, like the private investigator Pepe Pingdona and muckraking journalist Rita Mena. The further Laura advances in her investigations, the more she realizes that the institutions of order, both political and mediatic, are intent on containing Olga’s death as a crime of passion, a pressure she feels personally as she is institutionalized in a psychiatric clinic. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Handal tried to throw suspicion on me so I’d be force to keep quiet about what I know’, Laura reflects, ‘those bastards are capable of claiming that I hired somebody to kill my best friend because of a man … I swear: they’re capable of saying anything: I was jealous of her, I’m under psychiatric treatment, she was like my alter ego I had to get rid of’. As with Ricardo Piglia’s neo-noir Target in the Night, the investigator finds asylum in an asylum. In the face of political and financial interests, the truth can only be gestured to by the stigmatized epistemology of the paranoid, the schizophrenic, the other of statist reason.
Laura’s efforts to negate the blackmail narrative pushed by state investigators converges with a financial scandal that threatens to engulf El Salvador’s political and economic elites. Finapro, an investment bank owned by the politically ambitious Tonito Rathis, is in the process of dissolution after attracting huge sums of money through the lure of impossibly high rates of interest on savings deposits. Initially Laura questions whether Olga Maria’s murder had been part of an elaborate smear campaign to discredit Yuca, with her killing scripted as resulting from thwarted desire. Rumours are also circulating that Toni owed money to a cartel after a shipment of cocaine was found in a warehouse his shipping company had stocks in. Laura is forced to concede that ‘the same thing will happen with all the crimes committed in this country: the authorities will never find out anything and people will simply forget about it’. Laura’s narrative is perhaps an effort to process an affect that sits ‘between sadness and anger’, a desire to ‘do something’. Whereas the forces of symbolic order strive to inscribe the murder within a familiar pattern, such as jealousy, blackmail, envy, Laura’s monologue reconfigures the standard procedural sequence into something different, pushing it down alternative channels of thought.
Thomas Travers 