Samanta Schweblin on Rupturing Our Reality

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Your story “A Visit from the Chief” is structured like a horror narrative: what seems to be an innocuous situation—a middle-aged woman, Lidia, helping an older woman who has dementia—turns into an astonishingly sinister and violent one. Did you plan to write a horror story, or did the narrative itself carry you in that direction?

I knew that the writing had to lead us—both Lidia and me—toward a state that would reconnect us with desire and appetite, with the feeling of being alive. So I intuited from the start that the story would push us to hit bottom, and that we would go through that darkness together and find a way to get back on our feet. But I wasn’t sure exactly how it would happen. It’s almost always like that when I write: I connect with a character who I intuit will move in a direction that I need to go in. Maybe it’s something like an invocation, a spell. I set the emotional experience I’m looking for in motion, and, once I’ve gone through that experience in the world of fiction, I return to real life with new, vital information. I write searching for the kind of relief you would feel upon returning from a successful journey, one in which, though it took time and a lot of work, you found what you went searching for.

Some of the time, the old woman seems to behave like any person with severe dementia—confused about her whereabouts, trying to get to a home that may have ceased to exist decades earlier. At other times, one suspects that she is complicit with her son, Joel, that she has tricked Lidia into taking her to Lidia’s own apartment, and that the entire situation has been purposefully manufactured. Did you want the story to be ambiguous in this way, or do you lean toward one of these explanations more than the other?

I wanted both possibilities to resonate intermittently in the reader’s mind. In real life, we often judge people with hatred or fear if we think they may be threatening to us, and then, when they show fragility, we lower our guard and decide to trust them. It works the same way in the other direction: we decide to trust someone who shows tenderness or weakness, and then, at the slightest sign of independence or contradiction, we feel alarmed, and we’re on our guard again. I was interested in exploring how, from opposite ends of this constant oscillation, we make very different decisions.

At one point in the story, Joel holds a gun to Lidia’s temple. She hears a click and a bang, and doesn’t know for some time whether or not a bullet has passed through her head. What does that uncertainty do for the story?

When the unthinkable finally happens, we feel paralyzed. We ask ourselves, “But . . . how is this possible?” I’m fascinated by the moment of tension when we as readers suspend all our prejudices and give ourselves over to a story, desperate to understand. I never pay as much attention to what’s happening or to what I’m thinking as I do when something threatens my idea of what is possible, and, therefore, threatens my own reality. I don’t know if that state of uncertainty is something that this story in particular needed. But, as a reader and a writer, I’m interested in narratives that go straight to the heart of that rupture, and whenever I write I do it precisely to reach that place. I often paraphrase what I believe are David Lynch’s words, “A work of art should say just one thing all the time: it’s a strange world.” When I look for that quotation now I can’t find any record of Lynch actually saying it, but I can’t help thinking that he would appreciate the sentiment, especially this month when we’re missing him so much.

The encounter with Joel is intensely frightening and uncomfortable for Lidia. Do you think it is also, on some level, helpful—or cathartic—for her to have been forced to confess her true feelings about her daughter?

I would like to think that there are safer and healthier ways to reach that state of tension in which one needs the truth so badly that it finally reveals itself. But, yes, given the circumstances, I think that Joel’s viciousness—his apparent evil—forces Lidia to find what she needed to get back on her feet in her own life. Before his arrival, her life was something of an “early retirement.” She’s an older woman, but not so old that she should start thinking about death, and yet she spends all that time at her mother’s nursing home—just to be there. She doesn’t even stay in the room with her mother; she’s just waiting outside the door, waiting endlessly for who knows what. She no longer expects her daughter to come back or anything new to happen to her. At the same time, the idea of death scares her so much that she buys a more expensive apartment than she can afford, just to insure that she’ll have no choice but to work until the last day of her life in order to pay off the mortgage, “because, without something like this, how do people cling to their lives and keep going?” Joel comes and gives her a jolt, a big scare that startles her awake and makes her appreciate the life she still has before her.

How did the character of Joel—who is not a straightforward psychopath, if there is such a thing—come to you?

In early drafts, I knew what kind of intensity I wanted to achieve. I knew Lidia, and I intuited the kind of dark character who could set the plot in motion, but it was hard for me to really see him. I couldn’t figure out how he moved, how he thought, how he spoke, what kind of ideas he had about himself. At the time, I was teaching a creative-writing seminar at the University of Barcelona, so for a couple of winter months I was stuck in the city, and, in order to get my body moving a little, I signed up for exercise classes at the nearest gym. When I went to the first session I understood that the gym was mainly for people involved in martial arts and military training. In that first class, when the teacher saw how uncoördinated I was, he bullied me several times, probably regretting not having judged me better ahead of time and kept me out of his class. But, as I was leaving, he stopped me and said, “Do you want to improve, Schweblin? We can improve together.” He seemed convinced, as though he had made a decision for me, and I felt at that point that I didn’t have much of a say. And I kept thinking about an encounter like this, in which one person decides to force his “help” on another, with an absolute belief that he can offer something that the other person needs. And although I came close to dying of a heart attack several times in that gym, I kept going twice a week for almost three months, so that I could study him, until I finished this story. I gave Joel that man’s hair and body; Joel speaks like him, probably thinks a lot like him.

The story is called “A Visit from the Chief.” Joel repeatedly refers to God as “the Chief himself.” Do you want to imply that, in some way, this “visit” from Joel is also linked to a divine power?

It’s tempting to think so, isn’t it? To believe that when something bad happens there’s a reason for it. In Argentina, we say, “no hay mal que por bien no venga,” which is in the spirit of “every cloud has a silver lining.” How upsetting it is to imagine that sometimes there are just clouds, no lining, and that maybe we live in a meaningless world. And I think that’s how the story’s title works for Lidia. Joel perhaps thinks that he is the one who gives meaning to other people’s lives, as he, in fact, does to Lidia’s, and as he feels he does with his clients at the gym. The title could also be related to Joel’s father, who, at one point, when Joel was a child, and another time, as an apparition in Joel’s adulthood, seems to have tried to offer Joel a kind of meaning. But if you consider yourself to be a sufficiently “superior” being that you can go around constructing meaning for others, who will take care of constructing yours?

The story is included in your collection “Good and Evil and Other Stories,” which will be published in English later this year. Are the stories thematically linked to one another?

They all navigate an open dialogue between “good” and “evil” and the stories we tell ourselves about these concepts. The stories in the book inhabit the world of the real and the possible, but before long they open up the kind of ruptures that we were talking about before. As I wrote these stories, I was wondering—I still wonder—what forces command the predictability of our lives, and what forces threaten that predictability. Many of us live immersed in such immediacy and simplification, in a kind of half-awake state, while terrible things happen all around us. What, then, is the thing that will suddenly wake us up? What will oblige us to pay real attention again, to stop, to analyze, to think? The narratives in “Good and Evil and Other Stories” go right to the heart of this question. What activates the alarm? And, once it’s activated, can it ever be turned off? ♦

(Schweblin’s responses were translated, from the Spanish, by Megan McDowell.)