Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Last Call at the Café Blood: Charles Bowden and Ciudad Juárez

2019; University of Arizona Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jsw.2019.0009

2158-1371

Molly Molloy,

Latin American Literature Studies

Last Call at the Café BloodCharles Bowden and Ciudad Juárez Molly Molloy (bio) Once I pass'd through a populous city, imprinting my brain, for future use, with its shows, architecture, customs, and traditions; Yet now, of all that city, I remember only a woman I casually met there, who detain'd me for love of me; Day by day and night by night we were together,—All else has long been forgotten by me; I remember, I say, only that woman who passionately clung to me; Again we wander—we love—we separate again; Again she holds me by the hand—I must not go! I see her close beside me, with silent lips, sad and tremulous. —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass I don't think you can live a full and happy life until you realize it is a tragedy. And then have that glass of wine and smile at the baby in the woman's arms. —Charles Bowden1 Charles Bowden wrote through his skin—always hungry, driven by appetites. He consumed life, breathing in subjects, soaking up joy and pain, turning it into words, pulling stories out into the world, and shining a bright light into a dark edge of town where comfortable people do not go. Bowden wrote with no barriers between himself and his subjects—whether humans or other animals, deserts, mountains, rivers, swamps, or other landscapes. Bowden always leaves himself exposed and skinless—no barriers between the writer and the pain, the bitter cup served in the Café Blood. [End Page 94] He used this working title at least as far back as 2001.2 though to my knowledge, he never published "Café Blood." The editors of a 2007 anthology mention it in their introduction to the award-winning essay "Torch Song," where they mention that Bowden's "next book is Café Blood: Going Over Jordan."3 The reference is to the book that became Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (2009). Bowden called it Café Blood in dozens of drafts and he continued to use the title for drafts of other work until at least 2012. I first read from "Café Blood" in 2003, after Chuck Bowden introduced me to Juárez photojournalist Julián Cardona. Chuck met Julián in 1995, when he went to Juárez for the first time since he had passed through as a teenager on a road trip with his father. "I was writing about a murder in El Paso and I had to go to Juárez to get some evidence, a photograph…," Bowden explained, "and I was stunned by the city—stunned by the poverty in a city of over a million, stunned by the violence.… I never got that photo but met the photographers at El Diario while seeking it."4 Thus began a friendship and collaboration with Julián Cardona that lasted nineteen years, until Bowden's death. In the "Café Blood" that Chuck sent to me in March 2003, he travels with Julián south into the foothills of the sierra of southern Chihuahua. A dark barefoot man with a guitar slung round his neck with a copper wire rides a bicycle near Parral, the town where Pancho Villa was assassinated in 1923. The man says he has never been to school. He plays and sings a song and says it "is about one thing—he wishes he'd never been born."5 I have always wanted to see this photograph, though in the story it is unclear whether Julián got the shot that he wanted that day: …he wants the fingers softly flicking the strings, the guitar spewing forth sounds, the man singing his song, wants it in one frame, but it won't work, the song is too long, too old, a howl coming from God-knows-where.6 I called Julián at this writing in early June 2017. He says that the trip was in 2000 and he did take the photograph. Now stored in an archive in California, it should emerge one day as the musician emerged from the dust of Parral.7 They search but do not...