New Directions, blessed with a nose for lesser known and marginalized literature of high value since its founding in 1936, has another very good list this year.  I’ve just had the happy experience of reading Katherine Sliver’s translation of Rafael Bernal’s 1969 Mexican gangster noir classic The Mongolian Conspiracy. More than American or French noir, Bernal adds a steady dose of dark comedy and tender emotions to this story about a hired gun, Filiberto Garcia, brought in to track down rumors of a plot to assassinate both the US and Mexican presidents in one fell swoop.  The rumors have originated in Chinese Mongolia and Garcia is known to play poker in Mexico’s tiny Chinatown and therefore supposed to have an inside track on figuring it all out.  When he gets word that there are enormous amounts of money in play he deduces that all is not as it seems.  A proper assassination only needs a few good men, like himself for instance, who can be hired on the cheap.  No. Lots of money means something else altogether.

When he is assigned to work with an American FBI agent and a Russian KGB — who had bungled a take-down of the FBI man a few years earlier  — the plot thickens.  When a Chinese-Mexican lovely shows interest in him, which he can’t take advantage of because of unexpectedly tender feelings, and not much time to spare, we move with him into unexpected zones of feeling.

Silver’s translation is impeccable, though for some ears the constant adjectival use of ‘fucking’ will seem less humorous than gratuitous.  It’s her choice for the ubiquitous Mexican ‘pinche,’ a versatile curse word of which I have a full dictionary. Pinche has a wider amplitude in Mexico than ‘fucking’ in America and is generally not quite so offensive in everyday use, but in Garcia’s use of, “fucking” is just fine, perfectly suiting his hard-boiled character.  There are a few times when the American usage of splitting an adjective from its noun would have been more punchy, more colloquial,  as in “Fucking tame tiger,” instead of the more slangy “tame fucking tiger.” A few other barely noticeable locutions might have been tightened up.  “Hill of beans” doesn’t have quite the right ring in a novel packed to over flowing with “fucking”, and “bitch”, and “shit” and the attitudes that go along with them.

You need to be good with the gang in charge, and to be full of a whole load of shit. Otherwise your experience isn’t worth a hill of beans.

To “run afoul of” similarly seems too formal for this setting.  On the other hand, her choice of ‘stiffs’ for the corpses Garcia is known for generating, is just right; his referring to himself as a ‘chump,’ and as a ‘faggot,’ when he worries about his more than sexual feelings for Marta fit the flow of texture and image perfectly.

Silver gets to that magical goal of all translation, letting the reader simultaneously understand the language as a native while knowing the people and scenes are not, in this case, American.  There’s just enough strangeness to let you feel you are hanging out with a Mexican gunslinger, with a Chinese girlfriend — I’ve never done it with a Chinese gal, he constantly thinks to himself– with International peace on the line.

The tone of the book and Garcia the man are introduced early in a short, laconic passage.

He examined his perfectly trimmed and polished nails.  The only thing he couldn’t fix was the scar on this cheek, but the gringo who’d made it couldn’t fix being dead either.  Fair is fair.  Fucking gringo!  Seems he knew how to handle a knife, but not lead.  His day had come in Juárez. Or, rather his night.  And let that be a lesson not to wake people in the middle of the night, because the early bird doesn’t always get the worm but the worms got that gringo.

Some very nice idioms are left in place — “People said he was such a tightwad he wouldn’t even give you the time of day.” “This notion is spinning around in [the Colonel’s] head faster than a mouse on his wheel.” or this:

This fucking colonel is really taking it hard.  He’s finding out what it’s like to give birth on Good Friday, as they say:  all by himself….

The narrative point of view excellently fades from third person to first person as we enter Garcia’s thoughts — from gangsters callousness to philosopher’s world view.

“He went all the way back to the booths in the back, where bold and veiled women used to sit in the old days; not, there are only men seeing more solitude than what they carry around with them.” 

Or, after finding Marta dead, he thinks:

Now Marta is alone. She’s alone in the bed, alone with her death.  I had never thought about that. Killing someone is sending them off to be by themselves, to be alone.  They should’ve killed me, that’s what real men do.  … But it was Marta. And now she’s there alone, with her death. And I was sitting next to her, but she was alone.  And I was alone.  The two of us.  Like a wake!

Besides the language itself a few other things about Garcia may be disturbing, not so much the killing, of which he has done much and does more in the book, but his tough guy’s misogyny and the language that goes with it.  Ugly.  Part of the character probably, and mostly ameliorated by the dark humor of his self reflections and mostly diminished in the confusing spiral of investigation that carries us through the book. 

The New Directions edition has a useful introduction to Bernal by a contemporary Mexican writer, Francisco Goldman, and a nice memory of him by his youngest daughter, Cocol Bernal.

If you like your crime hard-boiled, here’s a Mexican novel you will be glad to read.