Se?orita Etcetera

Arqueles Vela's short story collection Señorita Etcetera, a landmark of Mexico's Stridentist movement, is considered to be the first work of avant-garde prose from Latin America. The title story was written the same year as Ulysses, albeit "a microbe to the monster of Joyce's novel," as Vela would put it in an interview with Roberto Bolaño shortly before his death. Expressing the alienation of the new urban environment and the breakdown of traditional values in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, it follows a series of increasingly abstracted encounters between the narrator and an elusive woman with a plural, contradictory character, whose memory haunts him. "If you reread Señorita Etcetera, you'll see that it's the 'I' that creates everything," said Vela decades later. "The conflicts, the realizations: the reality that exists doesn't exist except through the 'I.'" This theme of fragmented identity and reality resurfaces in A Provisional Crime, a parody of murder mysteries in which the riddle is not who the killer is, but which of his many selves is the killer, as well as Nobody's Café, which mythologized the café that served as the gathering place for the Stridentists, in real life known as Café Europa, but given its famous nickname due to its desolation. "Nobody cares for it or administers it," Vela wrote. "No waiters bother the customers, nor does anybody serve them anything... We are the café's only customers, the only ones who don't pervert its spirit." According to the poet Germán List Arzubide, movement leader Manuel Maples Arce simply entered the café one day, found no one and nothing but a pot of coffee, served himself a cup, drank it, and left a tip for the waitress he never once saw. Originally a chronicle of life at the Cabaret Voltaire of Anahuac, the story centers on two men, fictionalized versions of Maples Arce and Vela himself, who haunt the back tables. "In this angle of the café, our intellectual and sentimental laboratory, Maples Arce erected the scaffolding of his poems," Vela would write. "Señorita Etcetera rebuilt the forms and languidities of women compiled in a certain chair."