The Savage Violence of Deindustrialization: Felipe Montes’ El enrabiado
El enrabiado by Felipe Montes takes as its starting point the real event of the closure of an iron and steel foundry in Monterrey that was the economic engine of the city. Although it had received state investment to stay open and was one of the main employers in the area, the foundry was closed in 1986, and there is now a public park where it was located. By that year, Mexico was already under the government of Miguel de la Madrid (his six-year term ran from 1982 to 1988) and had begun slowly to adopt some of the “economic recipes” that would later be termed the “Washington Consensus” by John Williamson (Panizza 2009). This series of policies implied, in general terms, a turn toward economic and fiscal orthodoxy and included privatizations and the liquidation of state assets, so that the closure of the foundry was part of the economic prescriptions imposed by the “modernizing” turn. Montes’ novel takes as its starting point the very day the foundry closes its doors for good and traces two stories that will end up converging: on the one hand, the general impact that the closure had on the citizens of Monterrey and the number of working-class families in the region who had to adapt to suddenly finding themselves in a situation of not having a source of income; and on the other, the story of Gonzalo, one of the workers who becomes unemployed.
The importance that the work at the foundry had for Gonzalo is immediately established in the first pages of the novel: “Prefería ahorcarse antes que fallar; prefería enfermarse antes que faltar al trabajo. Prefería no comer, no dormir, no ir al baño antes que faltar a una junta sindical en la que se hubieran tratado los grandes asuntos que esperó” (Montes 2003: 10). Then, when he “da la espalda al cadáver aún caliente de la planta y camina hacia el río” he is attacked by a pack of rabid dogs, which will trigger his transformation into a werewolf (11). The association between the attack that he suffers and the change in his life is highlighted by the narrator when he notes that, “Los labios del perro se tiñen con sangre de obrero inmóvil en el suelo” (13). For their part, the other workers dismissed from the foundry at first appear confused and hopeless but finally resigned to accepting the severance pay offered to them and continuing with their lives. Gonzalo, on the other hand, will begin to develop a disease transmitted by that bite. It is immediately established that “rage” is presented in the novel in its double connotation of illness and the resentment generated among the workers and their families by the closure of the foundry:
Y ahora dicen que desde hace mucho se decidió el cierre.
Y que los líderes lo sabían.
¿Por qué nos engañaron?
La rabia se impone: se burlaron de nosotros.
El gobierno también sabía. Y nadie nos defendió.
Nos engañaron. (Montes 2003: 23)
After apparently recovering, Gonzalo begins to show signs of his transformation into a wolf, first mentally and then physically. After his father – also fired from the foundry and who had tried, unsuccessfully, to find new business opportunities – is cruelly murdered by a group of violent youths for no reason, Gonzalo attacks a neighbor. This is the character’s first break with society and the beginning of his animalization.
From here on, Gonzalo’s physical transformation is gradual but inevitable, to the point of losing his name and identity. In light of the abrupt changes in his behavior, he is locked up in a police cell from which he soon escapes, beginning an increasingly violent series of attacks and brutal murders. Gonzalo, now turned into a werewolf, represents in his transformed body and in his bestial anger the rage of those who have been left out of the productive system in Monterrey. His actions are now guided by violent and destructive impulses that have no motive other than destruction itself. He is a beast that stands in the way of the economic modernization of his city. As Mabel Moraña argues:
Like the angel of history with whom it shares its supernatural condition, the modern monster is fighting against the “hurricane of progress” and against the conceptions of history as a linear and necessary advance, which questions neither its own course nor the debris produced by the incessant passage of time. The monster ruins the status quo, “the triumphal procession” of modernity, by unveiling something that should have remained hidden, as Freud suggests with his notion of the uncanny (a notion that, together with the meaning of strangeness, also connotes the sense of threatening, ominous, incongruous). (Moraña 2003: 23)
The transformation into this monstrous subject is complete and total when he decides to attack his wife and his little daughter. The narrator’s description of this scene is brutal in the extreme. We read:
De pronto da un tirón definitivo. Ante todos azota el cuerpo de Carolina contra los escombros, contra el suelo, contra sus atacantes. El cuerpo de Carolina es un guiñapo con el que el Enrabiado ataca al grupo armado. Continúa azotándola: su cara se abre contra el suelo y sus dientes se dispersan. La piel se aparta y expone partes del cráneo. La nariz se deshace y los sesos saltan. La garra mantiene apresado el tobillo y golpea aquel cuerpo contra lo que encuentra. Macrina grita y se lanza con un pedazo de viga contra Gonzalo, que finalmente suelta a su hija y atrapa a Macrina. (Montes 2003: 94–5)
Gonzalo, now turned into a beast, mercilessly attacks his own daughter and even uses her as a weapon against his acquaintances and friends who have come to try to stop his path of destruction. In this way, Gonzalo, now turned into a monster, personifies the total rejection of social norms and the breaking of the taboo of violence directed against his own family and his daughter. The violence that Gonzalo as a monster enacts here takes up the widespread (although academically disputed) perception that indicates that, in the face of rising male unemployment rates and recessionary economic situations, there is a corresponding increase in domestic violence.
Not only does Gonzalo/el enrabiado attack his little daughter, he also murders his wife in the same scene. And while this can be read as part of the perception of increased violence in times of mass unemployment and economic recession, there is also in this scene and its violent narrative an absolute suture of the possibility of continuity in his life. For Gonzalo, losing his job, which constituted such an essential part of his life, also implied losing any idea of a future, of family, of life in society. In addition to manifesting in his violent acts the pure monstrosity he has become as a direct consequence of having lost his job, he is also voiding the possibility of continuing his family line. The path chosen by some of his dismissed colleagues is suicide, barely mentioned, and the murder of his father while he was trying to find a way to recover, survive, and reintegrate into society are manifestations of the same place of waste for the progress of history that the modernizing process earmarked for these workers and their families.
El Enrabiado’s path of destruction continues with the same deadly violence until it reaches the now empty building of the foundry, inhabited only by a bureaucrat in charge of liquidations and his secretary. At this point, Gonzalo’s consciousness persists, huddled in that of the monster. Contrary to the conception of the werewolf as the inner beast, in this case what is presented is “the inner human” within a chink in the monster’s consciousness. A citizen mob shows up at the now completely empty foundry to hunt him down. The fusion between the monster that represents the current of history that refuses to be subdued by the new modernizing current is presented in the rebirth of Gonzalo/el Enrabiado in the bowels of that building already turned into a corpse in the firmament of the city: “En el sótano del Edificio de Modelos Gonzalo vuelve a nacer, vuelve a vivir ligado a Fundidora, metido en Fundidora” (Montes 2003: 110). Of course, the fate that awaits him, just like the empty concrete shell that is now the foundry, is that of disappearance. The monster dies melted down in the foundry: “Gonzalo Martínez, el Enrabiado, alza los brazos y la cabeza, lanza un alarido que resuena en la cáscara de Fundidora y su alma se hunde en el fuego del Alto Horno Uno. La chimenea lanza una llamarada azul. Sale una bocanada de humo más negro en una columna que se desbarata entre las nubes” (Montes 2003: 115).
The empty building is transformed into a public park, the empty shell of a place that was once central to the daily life of its workers and, by extension, of the entire society of Monterrey, which now finds itself lost in a landscape of modernization, replaced by shopping malls and amusement parks. The empty foundry building will remain as a farcical version of what it once was, just a part of the furniture of the new public park, a reminder of the importance it had for the city. The incarnation of its laid-off workers in the form of the werewolf is thus melted in its furnaces, but forgotten, like the entire generation of workers who lost their source of income. The monster in this narrative was destined to perish from the beginning, because only with its disappearance could the new triumphant moment in the history of the city finally be born. As Moraña points out, its manifestation represents a nihilistic and destructive but doomed attempt to overcome that passage of history that buries, with its discourses of modernization, the way of life, in this case, of generations of Monterrey residents.