The Crossing, by Cormack McCarthy

[Sancho]

Has anybody here read this one? I just finished it and boy-howdy what a good book. I’ve mentioned this before but every couple of years I’ll read a Cormack McCarthy book just so as to leave my comfort zone for a while. The last one I read was Child Of God and that one took me way - way out my comfort zone. This one, not as much.

Anyway there’s a lot going on in this book. And as art tends to do, it will mean different things to different readers. One thing that struck me was how well McCarthy writes animals. In the opening scene the main character, Billy Parham, then a young boy awakens to hear wolves. He dresses and goes out and crouches in a dry creek bed to watch them. The writing is amazing. I couldn’t have gotten a better picture of a pack of wolves in a snowy meadow if I’d watched a National Geographic special. Here’s a small part of it:


There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with a forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didn’t tell him where he’d been nor what he’d seen. He never told anybody.

(Boyd is Billy’s little brother)

So the book starts with a glorious scene of wolves, antelopes, and a young boy on a snowy moonlit New Mexico plain. The book ends with another canid, this one an old decrepit arthritic dog who:


… stood there inside the door with the rain falling in the weeds and gravel behind it and it was wet and wretched and so scarred and broken that it might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists.


Here’s a one sentence paragraph from the middle of the book. The context is Billy and Boyd are on the road in Mexico and on horseback when they come upon a gypsy encampment:


The horse’s ears quartered the compass for the source of the music.

I will say the book can be hard on a reader who is an animal lover. It can also be hard on a reader who is expecting traditional western tropes - Good guy wears a white hat. Bad guy wears a black hat. Black hat does something sh*tty so White hat opens a can of whoop-a$$ on black hat.

Hey, that reminds me of a joke:

Dog walks into a bar.
Dog’s got his foot all bandaged up
Dog says, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw!”

[Danik 2016]

Hi, Sancho,
Good to see you and with a comment on a book.
This Cormack McCarthy seems in fact to be rather tough, makes Faulkner appear a author for small kids.
He is much appreciated though. Hope you find response.

[Sancho]

Thanks, danik. I think you win the award for the most dependable Lit-Net member, also the most polite. I can alway depend on you to pick up a thread, and to be respectful of others opinions and feelings.

Anyway, I’ve found analysis of this book comparing it to Faulkner’s The Bear, Melville’s Moby Dick, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, even Homer’s Odyssey. I suppose whenever you have a hero-takes-a-journey story there will be comparisons to Odysseus. Robert Hass wrote a glowing review of it the New York Times where he compared Billy Parham’s crossing into Mexico with the she-wolf to Cervantes’ Man From La Mancha wandering around the Iberian peninsula with his trusty sidekick, (a man whose name I lifted for my handle on this website). Though comparisons can be expedient, they always seem to somehow fall short for me.

One thing that struck me about this book and made it seem real to me was how it rejected just about every western trope. I had no idea just how invested I am in those kinds of stories. I kept expecting something to happen and it didn’t. I mean in a traditional western tale if somebody stabs your horse you track them down and exact revenge, and more than likely in the process you save a damsel in distress, and all this happens after a long struggle and many adventures. Right? That’s what’s suppose to happen, eh? Well this isn’t a traditional western story. Towards the end of the book Billy sums it up well. He meets up with another traveler and over a campfire they’re sharing some beans and coffee and a little conversation:


You look like you might of been down here a while, the man said.

I don’t know. What does that look like?

Like you need to get back.

Well. You probably right about that. This is my third trip. It’s the only time I was ever down here that I got what I come after. But it sure as hell wasn’t what I wanted.

Ya gotta read the book to figure out what things were that he didn’t get and then did get but didn’t want. I suppose the Don Quixote comparison ain’t bad when you consider the way the book rejects traditional story lines.

[Danik 2016]

"Thanks, danik. I think you win the award for the most dependable Lit-Net member, also the most polite. I can alway depend on you to pick up a thread, and to be respectful of others opinions and feelings."

Thanks, Sancho, this award really made my day :), though I don´t feel so deserving of it.
I enjoyed your review of The Crossing, without having read the book though. If you remember, the Don Quixote is probably the first novel that laughs at these proceedings that you name, "I mean in a traditional western tale if somebody stabs your horse you track them down and exact revenge, and more than likely in the process you save a damsel in distress, and all this happens after a long struggle and many adventures" only what Cervantes had in mind where the medieval knight tales. Maybe Billi Parham is the antihero of a post western world where those adventures aren´t possible any more.

[Sancho]

Exactly, Danik. And I think that’s one aspect of Don Quixote that the reviewer for The NY Times must have been thinking of. The other was simply the Quixotic nature of Billy’s first crossing. Robert Hass in his review put it this way:


Billy Parham, the protagonist, who has dreamed of wolves, finally stumbles on a method and traps the wolf and, also unexpectedly, hogties it, muzzles it, leashes it with a catch-rope -- all of this heart-stopping to read -- and sets off south across the unfenced land to return it to the mountains of Mexico from which it came. And at once we are in the world of romance. If an old man in antique armor on a bone-thin horse, followed by a fat would-be squire on a mule, was once a strange apparition on the highways of Cervantes's Spain, then a young man on a cow pony dragging behind him a wild and recalcitrant she-wolf through ranches, American and Mexican, where wolves are a remembered tale of ravenous ferocity and terror, may well seem to replay that story, with the same mix of comedy, cruelty and philosophical wonder.

What he leaves out is the backstory. This pack of wolves has come up from Mexico and has been reeking havoc on their hard scramble ranch. The she-wolf lost her mate to a steel leg-hold trap south of the border and consequently is wise to the method. Also she is pregnant with her first litter of cubs. Billy, in his attempt to run a trap line, has come to respect the wolves.

Anyway where Cervantes set out to parody the noble knight genre, I don’t think it was McCarthy’s aim to poke fun at cowboy stories. I think he was more interested in exploring something real and deeply human in the psyche of a young man of that time and place and in those circumstances.

[Danik 2016]

No, there doesn´t seem to be any fun in Mc Carthy! Hes stories are cruel but, so it seems, deeply representative of the world of today.

[Sancho]

Ah there’s plenty of funny stuff, most of it in the dialogue, a fair amount of it fairly course. So I broke my rule and I’m now reading McCarthy’s last book of the Border Trilogy, Cities Of The Plain. This one occurs a few years later and the protagonist from the first book, John Grady Cole, and the second book, Billy Parham, are working as ranch hands on a spread near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

I’ll use an example from this book since it’s close at hand. As the book opens a few of the cowboys are patronizing a house of ill repute in Juarez, the border town in Mexico across from El Paso. They get to discussing the merits of the whores, particularly the big ones - La Grandes:


You remember the time we brought Clyde Stapp down here? I do and he was a man of judgment. Picked him out a gal with some genuine heft to her.

JC and them slipped the old woman a couple of dollars to let em go back there and peek. They was goin to take his picture but they got to laughin and blew the deal.

We told Clyde he looked like a monkey f**kin a football.

…

JC told everbody that Clyde fell in love with the old gal and wanted to take her back with him but all they had was the pickup and they’d of had to send for the flatbed. By then Clyde had done sobered up and fell out of love and JC said he wasnt takin him to no more whore houses. Said he hadnt acted in a manly and responsible fashion.

[Danik 2016]

Well, I prefer Cervante's sense of humor, dear Sancho.

[Sancho]

^ Whoops. Haha. Coarse humor. I meant coarse not course. You sea, homophones have always bedeviled me.

Yes, well, so anyway, I’ll make another post about this book and then I’ll shut up.

I had a unique experience reading it. I was getting towards the last few pages, sort of coasting in, thinking things were winding down and I had it all figured out. It was getting late and I had an early get-up. Then I got to the last scene. It had to do with the old dog who “might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists.” (one of the quotes I used in my original post)

That scene was so vivid that despite the late hour and the early get-up, when I put the book down I couldn’t get to sleep. Then when I finally did, I dreamt about about it. It bothered me. And that was the unique experience. I’d never read a book that made me sleepless and then gave me bad dreams. I won’t tell you what the scene was about. It’d be a spoiler. And you can’t really pick up the book and skip to the end and read it because it wouldn’t make any sense without reading what led up to it. Anyway with everything else that happened in the story (and there’s a lot that happened) I wouldn’t think this short vignette would have such a impact, but it did. Donno. Maybe it’s because I’ve got an old arthritic dog hobbling around my house that I love dearly. Maybe it’s because the Billy character had developed into such a good guy. Or maybe it’s because Cormack McCarthy really knows what he’s doing when he sits down to write a novel.

[Danik 2016]

Don´t mind me please, Sancho. I´m enjoying the discussion. And I bet the silent readers (there is still a considerable amount left, if they aren´t all robots) probably too.
I´ll risk to say that the book also is about America today, or at the time when it was written. Maybe that´s what left your sleepless. Our continent isn´t living the best of times.

[Sancho]

I suppose I should’ve named this thread The Border Trilogy. All three of the books in the trilogy were written in the 1990’s.

The first of the series, All The Pretty Horses, was set in the 1940’s just after the WWII. I read it a few years ago and although I remember parts of it vividly, a lot of the finer points are lost to me now - it had something to do with Matt Damon going to Mexico and breaking some horses - Joking, Joking. (They made a movie of it with Damon playing the main character, John Grady Cole) Cole is a teenager when the ranch he grew up on is sold from under him due to death of the owner, his grandfather.

The Crossing is set just before WWII. In fact, after one of his crossings, Billy learns that country is at war and he tries mightily to enlist. He goes so far as to lie about his age to qualify. But he is rejected for military service by the army doctor due to a heart murmur. He goes to several other enlistment centers to try to join up, but each time is rejected by the medical screening and labeled 4F - unfit for military service. In one particularly galling scene he is accused by a drunken soldier and a bartender of cowardice and shirking because he’s not in uniform. He doesn’t defend himself. He just leaves the bar.

Cities Of The Plain is set in the early 50’s with Billy and John Grady working on a ranch in New Mexico. It looks like the ranch is about to taken as an eminent domain project by the army (probably for what is now White Sands Missile Range) I’m not really sure. I’m just getting started.

At any rate, each book involves huge changes to the status quo, which of course is a catalyst to move the story ahead. And as you say, Danik, not the best of times - then or now. Come to think of it, when are the best of times? When has it ever been the best of times? Maybe a 150 years earlier than the events of these books and in a different war and on a another continent:


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

[Danik 2016]

The citation above is one of my favorite book openings!
The Crossing - just before WWII
All The Pretty Horses - the 1940’s just after the WWII
Cities Of The Plain - the early 50’s

Looking at the chronology of the trilogy you presented I was wondering if there was a story behind it, concerning life and work on the small ranches. I googled a bit and found this article which might interest you. I didn´t read it all, I just looked at the introduction and at the enormously decreasing number of ranch workers.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/pub...66_eib3_1_.pdf
The fact is, those Johns and Billys that owned the small ranches of the plain or worked on them were displaced as these small ranches were substituted by larger and more modern farms. So the Johns and Billys first had to cover quite a strech of country to find a new employment. Later even that became difficult. This might account for Billy´s quixoting around. As the knight has lost his function In Cervantes time, Mc Carthy´s saga deals with the end of the agicultural period in the region that was sustained by the small ranchers. They become vagrant´s. And in Billy´s case the second option, the army fails also. I guess WWII plays it´s part in the process too. And Mc Carthy doesn´t want to tell the a success story, but the story of a vanishing mood of life and the consequent decay of that part of the country.

That´s of course all guesswork as I haven´t read any of the books, but your comments seem to point at that.

"What would you call a cowboy who has just retired? You say that he has been de-ranged!"
https://kidadl.com/articles/cowboy-jokes-that-will-spur-on-laughter

[Sancho]

No doubt about, Danik, that’s gotta one of the best opening sentences of all time. We could do a whole thread on best first sentences, or probably we already have here on this most illustrious of World Wide Web communities.

Here’s a few more that come to mind:


Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

— Moby Dick, by Herman Melville


I’m pretty much f**ked.

— The Martian, by Andy Weir


The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

— Neuromancer, by William Gibson


In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

— Torah, by you know who

Anyway I finished the third book of the border trilogy, Cities Of The Plain. It’s a bit more conventional, as western stories go. The cowboy dialogue is still mesmerizing and the descriptions of animals, southwestern terrain, and handiwork is poetic. I also think that McCarthy can get at the nature of someone deftly and with very few words. I’ll give an example. At the end of the story there’s an epilogue in which he fast-forwards to year 2002. Billy is 78 years old and still drifting around the southwest, where he’d stop “to talk to children or to horses.” He drifts back to New Mexico and a family near the town of Portales takes him in and lets him sleep in a shed room off the kitchen. The woman seems to know about him.


The family had a girl twelve and a boy fourteen and their father had bought them a colt they kept stabled in a shed behind the house. It wasn’t much of a colt but he went out in the afternoon when they came in off the schoolbus and showed them how to work the colt with rope and halter. The boy liked the colt but the girl was in love with it and she’d go out at night after supper in the cold and sit in the straw floor of the shed and talk to it.

My wife was such a girl, and whoever said Cormack McCarthy couldn’t write women must of missed this part.

[Danik 2016]

Sure! Let me add:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Metamorphosis, Kafka


As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossman – who had been shipped off to America by his poor parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child with him – introduced himself to New York’s harbor on a slowly advancing ship, he caught sight of the Statue of Liberty in a sudden, strong advance of sunlight. Her arm with the sword rose upwards now, and over her figure the free air blew.
Amerika, Kafka


Nonought. Shots you heard weren’t a shootout, God be. I was training sights on trees in the backyard, at the bottom of the creek. Keeps my aim good. Do it every day, I enjoy it; have since the tendrest age.

Grande Sertão: Veredas, Guimarães Rosa

[Danik 2016]

Grand beginnings! Let me add some more:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Metamorphosis, Kafka


As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossman – who had been shipped off to America by his poor parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child with him – introduced himself to New York’s harbor on a slowly advancing ship, he caught sight of the Statue of Liberty in a sudden, strong advance of sunlight. Her arm with the sword rose upwards now, and over her figure the free air blew.
Amerika, Kafka


Nonought. Shots you heard weren’t a shootout, God be. I was training sights on trees in the backyard, at the bottom of the creek. Keeps my aim good. Do it every day, I enjoy it; have since the tendrest age.

Grande Sertão: Veredas, Guimarães Rosa

...and a memoble dedication:


To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas , Machado de Assis


That last book of the trilogy looks McCarthy very softened down. Who would think Cormack McCarthy able to write the paragraph you cited?

And I think Mrs. Sancho would enjoy the comparison, whether she likes Cormack McCarthy or not.

[Sancho]

Good ones


Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

Or


Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Cien Años De Soledad
or
One Hundred Years Of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

I read the English translation of the García Márquez book. My Spanish is only good enough to get what I want in a Mexican restaurant about 3 out of 4 times — Hey, what the heck is that stuff in my burrito?

The Border Trilogy uses a lot of untranslated Spanish in the dialogue. Both John Grady Cole and Billy Parham grew up speaking both languages. And while it helps to have a little Spanish, it’s not necessary. You can usually suss it out through context. Or if he uses an less common word you usually get it in English in the next paragraph.

McCarthy broke from that in the encounter between John Grady and a shoe-shine boy in Juarez. Their interaction is too lengthy and nuanced to be written in Spanish for most of us ‘Mercans. At any rate it’s a wonderful little exchange. The two sort of playfully joust with words. Also I’m sure there’s some sort of literary device or another going on there. The boy’s words turn out to be somewhat prophetic. Or perhaps, Danik, in keeping with your idea, it signals the change of an era. When asked, John Grady can’t imagine ever wanting to be anything but a cowboy, a vaquero. The shoe-shine boy decides he’d prefer to be rich or maybe an airplane pilot:


He brushed the boot and put away the brush and got his cloth out and popped it. John Grady watched him. What about you? What if you could be anything you wanted?
I’d be a cowboy
Really?
The boy looked at him with disgust. Sh*t no, he said. What’s wrong with you? I’d be a rico and lay around on my asss all day. What do you think?
What if you had to do something?
I don’t know. Maybe be an airplane pilot.
Yeah?
Sure. I’d fly everywhere.
What would you do when you got there?
Fly somewhere else.

[Danik 2016]

Yes, an impressive beginning!

I read Spanish quite well, though when speaking I'm reduced to a rather awful variant of Portuñol (Many Brazilians believe that they speak Spanish from the cradle, because they understand, what the Spanish speaking folks are saying).
I don´t know so much about US history, but I couldn't help noticing how many cities in some states have Spanish names and how big the group of US Latinos has become. I think there must have been plenty of Spanish settlements in US in the past, namely in some states like California and Texas, for example.

To me that haven´t read the book, this short but otherwise charming dialogue points again to the reality of displacement of the cowboys. The protagonist, who somehow represents the boy of the past, exalts the cowboy as an ideal. The boy of the present reacts with horror. The grand thing now is just to have a lot of money and no occupation. Yes, but if you have to have a job? I´ll fly here and there (because I don´t feel at home any more, anywhere).



Maybe the Latino group is becoming more relevant in, for example, politics these days. So no wonder, there appears that sort of mixed lingo in Cormack´s trilogy.

[Sancho]

Q. What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A bilingual.

Q. What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A trilingual.

Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?
An American.

Yuk-yuk-yuk.

We’re getting better.

And correct-a-mundo, Danik, just about everything in the southwestern U.S. has a Spanish name, probably on account of it used to being part of Mexico, and in fact that area had been a part of Spain only a few years prior to that. The USA got most of it as spoils of the Mexican-American War in the 1840s.

Texas, then as now, went their own way. They’d earlier seceded from Mexico to become The Republic of Texas. Its geographical remoteness from Mexico City made it difficult for Santa Anna to govern it anyway. What made Texas so remote aside from distance was the difficulty of the terrain in Coahuila and Chihuahua, the same terrain Billy and John Grady traveled through in the novels. A few years after the Mexican-American War, Texas threw in with the U.S. of A. and became a state, mostly I for protection I think.

You know, most of the names in the middle of the U.S. up and down the Mississippi River from Marquette to New Orleans are French. President Jefferson bought that area outright from Napoleon in 1801 or there abouts. He got a steal. In a very bloody uprising, sugar-plantation slaves in what is now Haiti had thrown out the French making Port Au Prince unavailable to them as a sea port. And since the shipping of the day couldn’t make it to France from New Orleans without stopping somewhere, all of a sudden the territories in the Mississippi River valley were worthless to the French. Hooray for the people of St. Louis; if not for that event they’d still be wearing stripy shirts and berets, smoking cigarettes, sipping burgundy wine, and smearing stinky cheese on crackers.

Voila!

I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Jefferson had bought Cuba as well. He wanted to badly, and in fact tried to buy it several times from the Spanish, but no dice. Havana was a powerhouse back then and had Cuba become a state of the U.S., it seems to me, everything changes. The power dynamic between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking North America is upended. We might even be a bonafide bilingual country today, people speaking equally fluently with a southern drawl and a rapid-fire, rat-a-tat-tat Caribbean Spanish.

Boggles the mind.

[Danik 2016]

We had a similar case here. Until 1825 when the territory got its independence, Uruguay was called Provincia Cisplatina and part of Brazil. Seemed a good solution after all as their identity was closer to Spanish America. But in the South the lingo still is full of Spanish words.

If there aren´t more old Spanish settlements, this is because of a curious treaty Portugal celebrated with Spain in 1494 called Tordesillas which divided the then known world like it was a birthday cake:
"The Treaty of Tordesillas,[note 1] signed in Tordesillas, Spain on 7 June 1494, and authenticated in Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly-discovered lands outside Europe between the Portuguese Empire and the Spanish Empire (Crown of Castile), along a meridian 370 leagues[note 2] west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. That line of demarcation was about halfway between the Cape Verde islands (already Portuguese) and the islands entered by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage (claimed for Castile and León), named in the treaty as Cipangu and Antilia (Cuba and Hispaniola).

The lands to the east would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Castile. The treaty was signed by Spain, 2 July 1494, and by Portugal, 5 September 1494.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas"

The treaty was largely respected, but they forgot the Bandeirantes about it, groups of armed men that where sent to the interior in quest of Indians and precious stones. These groups didn´t set limits to their expeditions and ended up by enlarging Brazil´s borders thus giving the country the form it has today.

Maybe another dominating country would have been better for Brazil. Portugal was to interested in her riches to care for her development.

[Sancho]

It does seem that foremost on the minds of the early explorers was riches, getting the goods from the new world back to the old world. The Spanish in particular were always looking for El Dorado - the City of Gold. The native peoples were attuned to this fixation of the Conquistadors and kept telling them - Oh yes, City of Gold, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, it’s over there, on the other side of those mountains, just keep going, that way, long ways away, happy travels. Coronado chased all over the terrain of the Border Trilogy novels looking for El Dorado.

But it wasn’t just the Spanish. As you mentioned, Danik, it was the Portuguese as well…and the English, and the French, and the Dutch. So when the Europeans built infrastructure in the Americas it was all pointed towards the ports, aimed at exporting stuff, not at staying and building a society. There were exceptions, the pilgrims in Massachusetts for instance. They planned to stay. They couldn’t go back on account of they’d been run out of Europe because of their odd religious beliefs. So they stayed to enjoy religious freedom, and of course to enjoy imposing their religious beliefs on anybody else who wanted to live there, but that’s another story. The point is they built their cities and roads to interconnect and self sustain on the North American continent.

I think a lot of the newly independent countries in the Americas struggled to build a stand alone society in part because the infrastructure wasn’t built with that purpose in mind. Anyway it’s a theory. I didn’t think it up on my own. I read it somewhere.

[Danik 2016]

You are quite right, Sancho, specially in regards to Latin America. I think, US was more lucky in that aspect, because the Pilgrims that arrived there, were badly in need of a new home. For the Indians that was bad as what happened anywhere else, because they lost their domains anyway. But the forefathers built a solid beginning to what became US.

Our beginnings are more problematic. It is said the Portuguese landed here by accident. They wanted India, in fact, because of its spices. There is a classic picture of the celebration of a first Mass, with the Indians assisting in the background(and probably thinking what the heck these people are doing there). Pero Vaz de Caminha, a sort of ship secretary wrote home and told the king that "in that soil everything you plant will grow" to justify the landing and, of course, to ask a private favor of the king. So there we were. Portugal became interested in the riches promised by Caminha´s letter and began to send people to populate the new found domains. Some of these peoples had to chose between prison and Brazil, or maybe even the gallows and Brazil. So there we were. Other countries became also interested in Brazilian riches, France and much later Holland, but the Portuguese managed to throw them all out again with the help of the Indians.

And, it´s not an accident that, for a long time the only educators in the new country were the Jesuits. So there we were again.

[Sancho]

Well we’re all where are now, eh Danik? Might as well make the best of it. As they say - wherever you go … there you are.

Speaking of going places, I haven’t been to Brazil in about 10 years, but I used to go there regularly in the 00’s. And while in Brazil I was always treated well. In your town, Danik, we used to stay in a Crowne Plaza a block or two off Paulista in the financial district. It was by a women’s hospital, I think the hotel has been converted into apartments now. Anyway that area seemed to have an open-air cafe on just about every corner, a luncheonette. I liked to sit at the counter and order an empanada and smoothie and just sort of hang out. Inevitably somebody would sit on a stool next to me and strike up a conversation. My Portuguese stinks worse that my Spanish, but we’d always manage. That sort of thing rarely happens in the U.S. of A.

In fact all through South America I found the people very cordial. Los Portaños could be a little snooty, but hey, that’s their reputation so I’d be disappointed if they didn’t look down their noses at me a little bit. Just like I’d be disappointed if I went to Manhattan and the New Yorkers treated me with patience and deference and nobody was hurrying anywhere and was instead just moseying around town. It makes me laugh to think about people moseying around Midtown Manhattan. It can’t be done. At least it’s never been tried.

So I’ve been thinking about the border trilogy, which is a good thing because I’m couple of books down road from these books and still thinking about them. It’s the sign of a good book. (I’ve read Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and Dave Egger’s The Circle since I finished McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain.)

There’s a scene in Cities of the Plain where the cowboys are trying to eradicate a pack of wild dogs that have been taking down a few of the herd’s calfs. It’s the kind of scene that McCarthy writes well, brutal and vivid. It’s worth the price of the book. And not just for the fast-paced action of the hunt, but the whole process of figuring out that it’s dogs killing the calfs, not wolves or a mountain lion or a bear. At one point Billy and John Grady come upon a dead calf. Mama cow is standing there looking at it. One of the cowboys makes a comment about her parenting skills - doesn’t have a scratch on her - cows are only good for two things, to eat and sh*tting.

So I get it. Cows are domestic animals and it’s a well known fact of animal husbandry that the best way to get a real tasty critter that’s docile is to only let the fattest and stupidest ones breed. After a couple of generations you’ve got a dim witted, but well marbled animal. By contrast the pack of wild dogs has figured out how to survive and thrive on the their own in an inhospitable environment, much like the pack of wolves in the previous book. They’ve de-domesticated themselves. I suppose the cowboys are facing domestication as well. It goes hand-in-hand with your idea about the loss of the way of life on a small ranch, but has subtle differences. Billy of course is undomesticable. He just drifts around until he’s an old man. <<spoiler alert>> John Grady tries to domesticate himself. He falls in love with young Mexican woman, and goes so far as to fix up an adobe house for both of them, but then buys it in a knife fight.

I’ve gotta say though, McCarthy took a cheap shot at mama cows. As fat and stupid as they are, they’re still good mamas. My neighbor back in Georgia had Black Angus cows. Mama Black Angus always protect their babies. And here’s a weird thing, also a gross thing. One year there was a young calf, and for some strange reason all the other cows in the herd liked to poop on this particular little cow. I don’t know why. Additionally my neighbor had planted the wrong kind of forage grass for Black Angus because that season they all had runny poops. Anyway I’d look out in the pasture and there’d be all these black cows and single little brown one. And mama cow would be dutifully standing there licking the poops off her baby cow, making him black again. And that takes a helluva lot more courage that chasing off a pack of wild dogs, in my opinion.

[Danik 2016]

I don´t live far of the area in São Paulo you describe. Yea that was quite it, long before pandemics. One went to a luncheonette for a coffee and soon talking animatedly to a prefect stranger (sometimes the stranger turned up being a neighbor). Brazilians often don´t speak other languages, but they are very empathic. And as you seem to be too, I don´t doubt you had very interesting conversations, where neither speaker spoke the language of the other. I don´t know if it´s still that friendly.

I went two times in my life to New York. The second time I stayed around the streets that were named 50 something and there were several emigrant groups. What astonished me: they didn´t mingle, each foreigner kept to his own square, as one would say today. I went to a small self service shop, kept by someone of one of the Arab countries. A group of tourists arrived and asked for a drink. The store owner pointed in the direction of the drinks. He was the only one in the shop. The tourists who obviously expected to be served, said something rude and left. I went to the counter with my yogurt where the shop owner went his anger in his native language. I made a casual remark about the rudeness of the tourists, as I would have done here, and suddenly there came a big hand across the counter to shake mine. This happened about 30 years ago.

About the animals in Mc Carthy. One motive I avoid his books is the cruelty to and of animals they probably all describe. But as the animals are part of ranch life (even the wild animals in a sense) they are probably all very much affected with the changes, in fact they are part of it.

And that cow is really admirable. Maybe this calf was weaker than the other ones or had some illness. Animals can be very cruel too, sometimes. This cow mother was really valiant!

PS: Speaking from a strictly cowy point of view, though, I think for cows poo isn´t as disgusting as it is for humans. It probably rather something that doesn´t belong to ones calf´s fur and therefore has to be cleaned.

[WolfLarsen]

I miss Latin America so much. Tenho saudades. Me extrano mucho. I currently live in the American Midwest. The people here are so cold, so conservative, so close-minded that it makes New Yorkers seem open. Not to get into a political discussion, but the people here in the Midwest make a big to do about their liberal politics, but I’ll tell you they are as conservative as hell. I swear these Midwesterners have personalities of ice. I never lived in São Paulo. But, I’ve lived in the north of Brazil. I miss it so much. I miss most of Latin America. The only place in Latin America I didn’t like was Panama. The gringos sure stomped their personality into Panama. In Panama, you might as well be in the USA. But I miss the rest of Latin America so much. I miss the people. I miss the culture. I miss the openness.

[Sancho]

Wolf! Good to hear from you.

I thought you were up in Alaska, but now I find out you’re in the middle west. Well, as they say - wherever you go … there you are. You know, I’ve had Great Fun in the Great Lakes States. I went to a Polka festival in Milwaukee once and the parts of it I remember (it was also a beer festival) were a hoot. Here’s something Midwesterners share with the Latino culture, Mexicans anyway - love of the accordion.

So never to miss a chance at sexual innuendo:


Mama’s got a squeeze box she wears on her chest
And when daddy gets home he never gets no rest

— The Who

[Sancho]

I gotta agree, Danik, violence towards animals is difficult to read, particularly when it’s well written as in a McCarthy novel. There are scenes in these books that will stick with me until the day I die. The dog at the end of The Crossing. Billy’s horse, Bird, as he rides (is chased) away from him. The wild dog John Grady and Billy rope. The she-wolf in the pit.

Speaking of wolves, and since Wolf Larsen checked in on the thread, and since I associate him with the great state of Alaska, and since his name is, well, Wolf, there’s another scene I read a while back that is stuck in my mind for good. T.C. Boyle’s Drop City is a novel about an enclave of hippies who run off to Alaska and try to make a go of it in the harsh interior of Alaska. Boyle wrote a scene in that book where a wolf has his foot stuck in a leg-hold trap and although I don’t remember the exact words, I can still “see” it. The wolf is stuck and hurt and is going to have to chew his leg off to get get free, and he can’t quite understand why the world has turned against him.

Now I’m going to have to dig that book out of cardboard box in basement and reread that passage to see what I remembered right and what I remembered wrong.

Anyway I found Paulista to be a nice area. I was there once when all my coworkers took off somewhere so I had some time to kill by myself. I wound up buying a Multipass on the subway and riding it around for most of the day to see how much of the city I could see. Turns out the subway system in São Paulo, like the city, is expansive. Lotsa cool places to see. I walked out of the station at Liberdade and for some strange reason found myself in Tokyo.

[Danik 2016]

Yea, I think that was McCarthy's aim: make these scenes unforgettable. A book that doesn´t leave impressions isn´t good at all.

Yes, Paulista is the avenue where so many things happen. It is closed for cars for the most part on Sundays now, so that people can move freely around. They bring their kids and even their dogs from all parts of the city and just walk around enjoying the street music shows.
And yes, Liberdade is our Tokyo. People speak Japanese, cook Japanese, eat Japanese. One feels somewhat as a foreigner there. Years ago they didn´t like the presence of the non Japanese so much. This is their quarter. But I think this has changed now because so many people from other parts of the cities come to their festivities. And that brings money and visibility to Liberdade.