The Hole

Starred review from October 22, 2018
This dark, disturbing, and powerful novel from Revueltas—who wrote it while imprisoned as a political dissident in Mexico’s infamous Lecumberri prison—tells the story of three prisoners trying to smuggle heroin into their prison. Unfolding in a cascading single paragraph that captures the progression of the plan in real time, the story opens with Polonio looking out through a small hole in his cell, awaiting the arrival of three women with his two cellmates, Albino and the Prick. One of the women is the Prick’s mother, who has the drugs hidden in her person. The other two women—Polonio’s girlfriend, La Chata, and Albino’s girlfriend, Meche—are younger and are to distract everyone while the mother hands over the heroin—at least that’s the plan. What happens instead is that everything goes wrong, the dissolution of the doomed plan comprising the book’s nightmarish and unforgettable ending. The book is packed with memorable lines and sensory observations. The Prick’s addiction is described as “a faceless white angel leading him by the hand through rivers of blood”; at one point, Polonio’s jealousy is so overwhelming that he feels “a kind of incapacity for existing in his own space”; Albino has a hypnotizing stomach tattoo of a copulating couple that he can activate with his muscles. Revueltas’s short novel has the force of a tidal wave.

October 15, 2018
Brutal, mercifully short novella of life inside a Mexican prison.Himself a former political prisoner who died in 1976, Revueltas served time in the Palacio de Lecumberri, perhaps the worst of the worst of Mexican jails, where he wrote this roman à clef. His story recounts the struggle of three inmates caught up in an ugly, unwinnable war against their guards, for whom they have a simian name: "They were captive there, the apes, just like the rest of them," Revueltas' story opens. That the apes get to wear uniforms and badges and go home at night is about the only thing that distinguishes them from the prisoners, and everyone involved is a violent sort except for "The Prick," a half-blind junkie whom two other prisoners, bearing the Shakespearean names Polonio and Albino, are angling to implicate in a plot by which "The Prick's mother--amazingly just as ugly as her son,"--would smuggle drugs inside the prison, carrying them deep within her person. What could go wrong? Everything, as it turns out. As the story, told in a single onrushing paragraph for no apparent reason, unfolds, we learn the backstories of the characters, none of them remotely pleasant or honorable except of the honor-among-thieves variety; Albino had been a soldier and a pimp, but his addiction is so strong that he cries "from the lack of drugs, but stopping short of slitting his wrists, something all the addicts did when the anxiety got too tense." He and Polonio share a girlfriend, who "was an honorable woman, a tramp sure, but when she slept with other men it wasn't for the money, no...." Meche is the brains behind the operation, but that's not saying much, and the whole thing ends in a bloodbath. There's no hint of the magical realism that characterized Latin American literature at the time; Revueltas' story is realistic, period, and deeply unpleasant.If hell is other people, then being locked up with these three is its deepest chamber. Of interest to students of Latin American literary history.

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