The writer Norma Lazo spoke with SinEmbargo about her most recent novel, a police thriller set in Mexico City in 1942 and starring Secret Service agent Ana Terán who is on the hunt for murderers.
Mexico City, October 18 (However). -It is 1942. The Mexico City He lives between scheduled blackouts when the disappearance of a young woman will lead to a terrible discovery: the remains of several unidentified women buried in the garden of the house of an outstanding graduate student. The Mexican secret service agent Ana Terán He will remedy the situation by finding the murderer, only to realize that there is still another monster lurking in the city.
Norma Lazo write this powerful thriller titled The visible darkness (Lumen) and explains in an interview with SinEmbargo how “the novel is inspired by a real case: that of Gregorio Cárdenas, but more than being interested in Gregorio Cárdenas, who is already a character that is too much, too much, resorted to, too visited, what interested me was that one of the agents who arrested him was a woman.”
Lazo talked about how in that sense Ana Terán is openly inspired by a Mexican secret service agent named Ana María Dorantes, “from whom I could not obtain any type of information because there is no record of the women’s passage through the Mexican secret service.” Throughout this story, Terán will have other allies such as the veteran reporter Haghenbeck and the new photographer Manuel “el Pollo” Artigas, also inspired by the legendary police source photojournalist Enrique Metinides.
“I found it very peculiar, interesting and exciting to see a woman doing this work at that time. We are facing the persecution of a feminicide in a time where that conception of feminicide did not exist and also in a time where women had two destinies, apparently according to Mexican cinema: Either they were the lost rumberas or they were the holy mothers and in the middle of that there was absolutely nothing and for me it was very attractive to imagine this woman and everything that must have happened in an environment managed and performed particularly by men. That is where the need to tell this story arises,” said Norma Lazo.
In addition to Ana Terán, there is another agent in the story called Leticia Ordoñez who is completely fictitious. However, the author clarified that more than seeking to make the women of the Mexican secret service visible, “what was exciting to me was imagining what it could have been like for her to be doing this, to be entering Gregorio Cárdenas’s garden and find women’s bodies completely violated, from a hatred and a chilling perversity and how she could have faced that, how she could have perceived it.”
“It is something shocking to this day, we are never going to get used to that, I want to think, it is terrible. But imagine at that time, where the human body was something completely hidden, repressed… well, they wanted to put underwear on Diana the huntress, with that. So, it was an exercise of imagining what the life of this woman was like who must have had very different characteristics from what was expected of a woman at that time.”
Precisely about that time, the first half of the Mexican 20th century, when the President was Manuel Ávila Camacho, the last of the generals of the Revolution to govern, with a mandate far removed from the leftist policies of Lázaro Cárdenas, Norma Lazo agreed that it was “a very rich time.”
“Many things are happening, the Mexican Revolution has just happened, it is a very recent event; there is the Second World War, there are the blackouts that were scheduled in the city for fear that the Axis powers would bomb us, we found that it is the golden age of cinema, they are like so many ingredients that were so rich at that time that for me it was sweet to be able to get into this to imagine, and not just imagine because I had to watch movies, I was reviewing some books, somewhere a historian friend who has much better management of the historiographic archive than me helped me with the search for these women, which was where I gave up and said, ‘well, there is nothing about them, I’m going to invent them.'”