Writing about the missing is an exercise in filling silences. The kidnapped Mexican patriarch at the center of Antonio Ruiz-Camacho’s debut collection “Barefoot Dogs” doesn’t make his appearance until the last story; by then, he’s already in pieces. It’s a disturbing moment of violence after the fact, as well as an elegant metaphor for the family left behind. “Barefoot Dogs” is the story, not of poor doomed José Victoriano Arteaga, but of his family and domestic servants fleeing Mexico and struggling to survive as lonely fragments in Madrid, New York, Austin, Texas, and Palo Alto, Calif.
In the Arteagas’ new lives, unspeakable trauma is displaced onto countless everyday sadnesses: getting teased on the playground, losing a beloved pet, ending an illicit affair started in a laundromat. Some smack unmistakably of privilege — pleasure trips canceled, or the petulant passing thought, “In Mexico, we’d never have to brew coffee ourselves.” Ruiz-Camacho, who was born in Toluca, Mexico, gives each minor tragedy its due, exploring the quiet cacophony of grief with the hyper-articulated rawness of someone who has been writing in English for less than a decade.
The sense of newness in the language can be illuminating. “I Clench My Hands Into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else’s,” a story in which teenage siblings await their parents’ instructions in a temporary New York squat, is written entirely in disembodied dialogue, as if to underscore the dissociative effects of trauma. Another story, “Deers,” explores displacement in one long, breathless sentence punctuated only by semi-colons that seem barely able to separate trauma from its metaphors. Susy, an Arteaga housekeeper who left her own family behind in Mexico only to be fired when her employers ran out of money, is kept from her new job at McDonald’s one day by a rogue bear loose in the restaurant: “I imagined the bear alone, forced to live in a strange place surrounded only by humans; I wondered if this was a young or an old bear, if he missed the company of other bears or if bears didn’t have those feelings, if they were lucky in that way.”
Though Ruiz-Camacho doesn’t offer an explicit critique of the inequalities of Mexican life, the Arteaga diaspora is haunted by the fragility of a social order deeply rooted in patriarchal machismo. The opening story, “It Will Be Awesome Before Spring,” introduces the reader to the horror of kidnapping via an anecdote about a kidnapped woman who is raped and humiliated; the implicit feminization of a wealthy, powerful patriarch in the same situation seems almost as unbearable to the Arteaga clan as the violence itself. When the teenagers Homero and Ximena litter their conversation with homophobic barbs, every use of the word “faggot” underscores the urgency of reinstating patriarchal order in a world with no patriarch. In the title story, Martín Arteaga can barely even look at his newborn son, “(p)urple and swollen, but already a mirror,” for fear that he will see his own weaknesses reflected back at him; later, an apparition of his father tells him, “You’ll see for yourself that we, fathers, are full of sh—.”
One of the most crushing stories, “Better Latitude,” directly addresses such paternal failings. When José Victoriano disappears, his mistress Silvia initially assumes she and their 6-year-old son Laureano have been abandoned at long last. As she struggles to find out the truth, certain phrases and sentences are randomly set off from the story in all-caps, like road signs she is now, for the first time, forced to read: “WE WERE HIS PETS,” or, when she finally meets a legitimate Arteaga son, his all-important question to her, “DOES HE CARRY OUR NAME.” He — little Laureano — doesn’t, despite the testimony of what Silvia calls “THE FAKEST WEDDING PICTURE EVER,” a gendered farce with rented bridal costumes. The nagging worry is that maybe all families are fake, and the fancier the name, the faker the family.
Still, “Barefoot Dogs” ends by speculating that caring for our own may keep us from ruin in the wake of death. Writing is another means of coping, aptly metaphorized by one character’s wild ride inside an industrial clothes dryer: “The air was itchy and had an artificial, eerie taste to it. It felt leaden in my lungs as if I were breathing from an air tank filled with morning breath. But then the space flattened out and the air cleared, the sense of flying in circles vanished, and I broke free. My body felt light as if only made from cartilage, the direction of my flight determined by subtle movements of my limbs and nose and brows.” The stories in this collection similarly alternate between bruising and soaring.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate degree in English and writes a weekly style column called The Good Eye.
“Barefoot Dogs”
By Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Scribner, 146 pages, $23