We’ve all asked or been asked those “where were you when…” questions of specific historical events that shook the world as we knew it in our lifetimes. I remember the moment very clearly when I learned of the 9/11 attacks. I was a sophomore in high school; the whole school stopped what they were doing, turned on the TVs, and watched as the Twin Towers collapsed. From the shocking deaths of politicians, activists and artists to bombings and instances of violence, every generation remembers certain traumatic events that help to form and forever mark their collective memory. In his novel Amuleto (1999), Roberto Bolaño frames his narrative around the trauma of one of those so-called “where were you when…” moments through the first person account of Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico City in the sixties. During the Student Movement in 1968, Auxilio spent twelve days in hiding in a stall in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Department of Philosophy and Literature of the UNAM during the Mexican army’s occupation of the autonomous university from the twelfth to the thirtieth of September. This traumatic experience repeatedly returns to the narrator, following and haunting her existence. Time and space overlap and blur throughout this nonlinear and non-teleological novel whose plot relies on a narrator whose memory is admittedly questionable. She writes, “I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I’ve got no memory for dates anymore, or exactly where my wanderings took me; all I know is that I came to Mexico and never went back” (Bolaño 2).

Time is distorted in this novel, where past, present and future are at times indistinguishable and simultaneous. Auxilio’s recurring traumatic memory in the bathroom of the UNAM in September of 1968 serves as the lens through which she views her own experiences. She describes:

“I don’t know why I remember that afternoon. That afternoon of 1971 or 1972. And the strangest thing is that I remember it prospectively, from 1968. From my watchtower, my bloody subway carriage, from my gigantic rainy day. From the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, the timeship from which I can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are” (Bolaño 56).

Bolaño’s treatment of time and space in Amuleto corresponds to Bhabha’s idea of the present and the “in-between” space. He writes, “Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living” (7). By seamlessly intertwining different layers of time, material, geographical, and imaginary spaces, and seemingly real, imagined, and hallucinatory episodes, Auxilio is trapped in the [traumatic] space of the in-between.

Although unclear to the reader her reason for leaving Montevideo, Auxilio is one of many transnational subjects in Mexico City. When she first arrives, she shows up at the door of two exiled Spanish poets she admires offering free services as a maid in order to spend time with the eccentric writers who share her nomadic existence. Bolaño writes:

“Like me, they were wanderers, although for very different reasons; nobody drove me out of Montevideo; one day I simply decided to leave and go to Buenos Aires, and after a few months or maybe a year in Buenos Aires, I decided to keep traveling, because by then I already knew that Mexico was my destiny and I knew that León Felipe was living in Mexico, and although I wasn’t sure whether Don Pedro Garfías was living here too, deep down I think I could sense it. Maybe it was madness that impelled me to travel. It could have been madness. I used to say it was culture. Of course culture sometimes is, or involves, a kind of madness. Maybe it was a lack of love that impelled me to travel. Or an overwhelming abundance of love. Maybe it was madness” (Bolaño 3).

León Felipe and Don Pedro, Spanish poets in exile during the Franco dictatorship, are not the only fellow wanderers she encounters in the capital. She meets Paolo, an Italian journalist who is waiting in Mexico to go to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro. Bolaño’s alter ego appears as Arturo Belano, a young Chilean poet living in Mexico who travels to Chile to take part in the revolution in 1972, only to return after Allende was overthrown. The encounters between writers center around the “Encrucijada veracruzana,” or Veracruz crossroads, the bar frequented by the members of the community of poets living in Mexico City. However, imaginary encounters as well as encounters with the dead coexist with the living, such as the ghosts of poets León Felipe, Don Pedro, and Remedios Varo. The diverse political contexts of the late sixties/early seventies throughout the Hispanic world intersect at this symbolic bar, where sociopolitical unrest and repressive regimes from Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, and Spain meet and overlap. Through the perspective of the unreliable memory of the narrator, Bolaño’s hallucinatory novel blurs the lines between reality and imagination, complicates national space, and problematizes linear time. Furthermore, these narrative techniques help to divert from the nationalist narrative of 1968 towards a more transnational perspective of the events of the late sixties and early seventies in Mexico.

Lastly, I’d like to touch on the recurring image of the cicada in Bolaño’s work. Early in the novel, Auxilio self-identifies as a cicada when describing her nomadic and bohemian lifestyle. Bolaño writes, “Sometimes I’d go for a whole week without spending a peso. I was happy. The Mexican poets were generous and I was happy. That was when I began to get to know them all and they got to know me. I became a fixture in their group. I spent my days at the faculty, busy as a bee or, to be more precise, a cicada […]” (17). In the context of Amuleto, 1968, and transnationalism, the cicada is a particularly interesting metaphor. Cicadas are found on every continent except Antarctica, since at least Ancient Greece to the present, their existence spanning vast amounts of space and time. They are known for their song, referenced often in literature, mythology, and pop culture. Cicadas are also known for their cyclical emergence, where the insects will surface from hiding places in trees or in the ground in tremendous numbers. This imagery invokes the concept of generations and collective movements. Like 1968 as a symbol for a global protest movement, the cicada can also represent a global phenomenon.

However, the diverse forms that this so-called global movement took on in the sixties in different regions due to the sharp contrasts in socio-political, economic, and cultural environments throughout the world is also reflected in the cicada’s song that varies from region to region. In the famous Latin American song, “La cigarra,” the cicada is romanticized as it sings until its death. This image is replicated in the end of Amuleto. The final image in the novel presents a mass of singing (ghost) children heading toward the abyss to their death. All that is left is their song, “[…] And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet” (Bolaño 184). This song, the song of the cicada, the song of those that were murdered in the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968, the song of those that sacrificed their lives in protest and opposition to repression and violence throughout the history of Latin America and the world, captures in one image both the particularities of 1968 in Mexico and its transnational connections.

Here is a link to some examples of cicada songs around the world.