Strange Fire

A Violence and Gentleness of Wind

Words by Elifete Paz. Photographs by Alyssa Chandelle and Juan Madrid   |   October 15, 2020 

Alyssa Chandelle is a Xicana artist from El Paso, Texas who is currently based in Queens, New York. She studied Cultural Anthropology and Media Studies at Texas State University. While the primary source of her work is created through photography, she constantly explores mixed-media practices. Her most current projects analyze the ways in which childhood trauma/experiences have the ability to carry (consciously and unconsciously) far beyond the adolescent years.

Juan Madrid is a photographer and book artist based in New York. He has worked for editorial clients including Time, VICE, Bloomberg Businessweek, Society Magazine, Topic, and Planned Parenthood. He was an artist in residence at Eyes On Main Street in Wilson, NC. Publishing is integral to his artistic output, and he has self-published his and other artists' work and teaches workshops based around zine and book making. He is one of the authors of Los Sumergidos, a collaborative photo-text book that was shortlisted at Les Rencontres d'Arles and PHotoESPAÑA 2019.

Elifete Paz is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a former Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Fellow, a Stevan A. Baron Work Scholar at Aperture Foundation, and was an Artist in Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. His writing has been featured by the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, VICE, Remezcla, Aperture. He is one of the authors of Los Sumergidos (published by Alejandro Cartagena y Carlos Loret de Mola, 2019), shortlisted by PHotoESPAÑA 2019.

LOS ANGELES, or THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RAUL, MORE THAN THE SUM OF MY LOVES, TERESA

In the middle of last night, she came back to me. The lights were off, and the doors were closed.

She reappeared after I had finished a couple of Tecate tall boys and polished off a two-finger pour of Monkey Shoulder, then Tanqueray, then Flor de Caña, and then finally Tito’s Vodka.

But reappeared is the wrong word. One, because I’ve never seen her, and two, because she isn’t alive. The only word that does her justice is possession. It had been seven years, and once again, she was able to enter my mind and commandeer what I typed on my computer screen.

I am here, Raul, she typed, there, on the screen, in bold, green letters blinking on an all-black background. I asked why it had been so long, and she replied instantly like an Ouija board.

—Are you doing OK?

Possession, real possession, as in Catholic, grab-the-holy-water possession, is a liberating analogy for what a mental breakdown feels like, although it’s a realization only chanced upon after said possession’s bone-chilling hangover.

You’ll never understand what losing your mind is until you take your own unique plunge. But once in its grip, seeing your loss more as a ride beyond your control and less a personal failure, accommodates a much more relaxing tumble, much like, I’d imagine, boozing it up might do as your airplane takes a final, loopy path from the sky to the land.

Who is she, though?

Lately, I’ve been calling her Teresa. Although, it’s a name I gave her only after writing about her in Los Sumergidos, a photobook I worked on, in 2019, published by Alejandro Cartagena y Carlos Loret de Mola. She has never told me her name, but I suspect she is from either the past or the future, one of my ancestors or a descendant of mine. Or she is someone else entirely.

Teresa first took possession of me in Los Angeles. I was writing about photography when she took over my mind in an Armenian coffee shop.

At first, it felt as though I were talking to my unconscious; then, as the words began to take on their own character, I started to get worried. My hands typed automatically. Whoever was taking over was confident, assured, patient and witty—so unlike me. After an hour, I had a 2000-word essay written without me.

Later that week, I wrote an introduction to the essay, which I modeled after those written in The Paris Review, to muddle fact and fiction. But for the most part I, me, the conscious me, did very little. What had come to me that day in an Armenian coffee shop was left largely intact.

Several months after Teresa possessed me, I quit my job and made peace with Los Angeles. I moved in with my mother back in Texas. And I felt I’d never see Teresa again.

Until now some seven years later.

In that interlude, I’ve moved to New York three times, twice back to Texas, and once more to Los Angeles. Is Teresa a symptom of a psychosis? A ghost who has come to check in after another break up? In New York, I had fallen in love twice—most recently to E, who managed assets for a hotel real-estate investment group, and before to B, who wrote reviews for art magazines.

But what more than the sum of my loves?

All in all, things were far better and far, far worse. It was during my third time back in New York, while I was cat-sitting in a janky, roach-infested apartment in Chinatown, amidst the worst pandemic in a hundred years, when Teresa reappeared.

THE MARS VOLTA, EXOTICISM, COVID-19, A WASP NEST

Teresa asked if I wanted to be another Elvis. I typed, “Fuck, no.” I’m the next Omar Rodríguez-López.

She had just reminded me how E, my most recent ex, was now dating another brown man. E, a woman who worked with Trump-supporting men, in hotel real estate, and who suffered from severe anxiety as well as issues with codependency and drinking, invited me to stay with her in Los Angeles last year. But there was a catch. Nothing in her home would be mine—except my clothes on the floor and my luggage in a closet.

E and I met two months after my second stint on antidepressants. It was Halloween night. E drank in the back of a bar by the DJ. I was with a friend, a month of sobriety now over. She had on a pink unicorn onesie. A friend was with her, also wearing a onesie. They had zipped down the polyester, revealing thin satin spaghetti straps, lace bras underneath.

After introductions, we danced to Selena, and E and I fucked the morning after.

I wanted Teresa to spill the beans. Tell me whether E had only been with me because she fetishized brown men.

TERESA: Who gets mad about a water stain left by an AirBnB guest?

RAUL: She didn’t like me because I didn’t care about a water stain?

TERESA: It’s a sign, isn’t it?

RAUL: Was she forgetting about me as soon as I got there?

TERESA: You saw hints of it.

RAUL: I’m starting to think she left me because I was poor. But was she fetishizing me too?

TERESA: Did she have a history of dating brown men?

RAUL: Yes, and I think she’s dating another brown dude, an older one who probably has more money.

TERESA: Why do you trust white women? Why do you defend them?

RAUL: I don’t know. I feel I’m not brown enough.

TERESA: What do you mean by brown enough?

After that Halloween night, we hooked up frequently, staying over at each other’s apartments, and we became serious shortly after I was fired from an “elevated” stationary store in Greenwich Village.

In Palm Springs, where she owned a vacation home, we played fantasies of a married couple. I nailed book cases to a wall in her living room, assembled most of the outdoor furniture. “I look like a divorcée,” she preened, sashaying in lace gown that flung from her hips.

“What’s that,” I asked.

“You don’t know what a divorcée is?”

“No, I know, but I don’t know what you mean.”

She sighed and marked the air with her hands, a show of frustration.

I had already aroused her temper more than once that day. Earlier, I took too much time to mark a wall for anchor holes. E’s temper was tectonic in how it surfaced. I remember times she banged her fists against the wheel in traffic, yelled at people she hired to manage her properties, and scoffed at restaurant servers and Uber drivers for hesitating or disagreeing with her.

“I look middle-aged, and I’m drinking rosé for god’s sake,” she said. It was a balmy desert night, the sun setting. Her thermo-controlled swimming pool was heating, but too slowly.

“Can you not just sit there,” she asked me, hinting for me to help her. In her fridge were bánh tráng wraps to make spring rolls, taken from a recipe she learned from a recent trip to Thailand. I had never before futzed with a pool’s heating control unit.

“Why the fuck is this not working,” E yelled across the pool, “When I pay somebody to fix something, I expect it to be fixed, goddamnit.”

To some, E seemed nothing more than another basic white woman, and some of my friends even accused me of dating a “Karen.” But to me, E was cloistered. I related to her anger. I related to her stubbornness. She was disgruntled, but also subject to the whims of sexism and harsh anxiety.

In the final months of speaking to her, as the world hunkered in from the COVID-19 pandemic, I admitted my love for her on FaceTime. It was months after our break up. She was already dating another man, and I was jealous. She told me in a text message, much later, she could not “stomach” me saying one thing and meaning another. In our last phone call, she said she “had to go.”

As we hung up, I heard a ding from Microsoft Outlook— she had an email to answer. She always worked from home, but for some reason I thought we had time alone.

Let me tell you one of the greatest disappointments in my life.

Yesterday morning, while watering my pomegranate trees, I hired a man to kill a wasp nest for me. I found it underneath a swamp cooler installed in a window for the living room. The nest, which looked nothing more than a wad of chewing gum, hung from the cooler’s bottom-side.

I called the town, and they sent the man I hired.

The man was named Henry. Henry worked with my ex-husband on Highway 54. Back then, when Sandy’s was still around, they, the two of them, repaved asphalt, while also repairing guardrails, and, occasionally, set up warning signs on the side of the road about possible flooding. Henry looked the same as ever, and I asked if he wanted anything to drink.

“A glass of water would be good,” he said.

“Anything else,” I told him, “You want ice?”

“No, no ice.”

“You sure? It’s hot out here.”

“It’s ok, Teresa, it’s no problem.”

I looked at him, cupping my hands over my eyes as though I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“It’s my teeth,” he said, pointing to his jaw, “My daughter made me go and see a dentist. They said I have problems with them.”

In the kitchen, I figured I was in no hurry to have Henry leave. But I was also particular to how much time we spent together. Like clockwork, the sound of the swamp cooler, the one still working, buzzed in the dining room. It smelled like wet rock, and it made me sad for no reason.

“One time I sprayed them, and nothing happened,” Henry said, handing me his empty glass, “but most times they’ll get mad and attack everything. But if you’re inside you’ll be ok. I’m just gonna sit in my truck until they’re gone.”

“How much time till they’re gone?”

“No telling, maybe an hour,” he shrugged, “Until I don’t see them anymore.”

“You don’t have to wait in the truck that long.”

I asked Henry if he wanted to wait inside with me.

“C’mon, come,” I said to him, “I’ll make some coffee.”

Henry’s cousin was the woman my ex-husband left me for. She looked like a white woman. Her name was C. C died last year. Her right arm and left leg were amputated after a failed attempt to remove some blood clots.

Now Henry was in my kitchen. He was still tall, around six feet two inches in his boots. His hands were wide and stretched out, dry, scarred, and rough.

“Do you ever think about the diner,” he asked me, “the one you worked at.”

“Uh ah, I never do. I hated it there. Why?”

“I was thinking about the breakfast.”

“The American one —

“The Mexican.”

“What about it?”

“The American food was not that good, but I did have some good Mexican once. They didn’t make it, like, white-people Mexican.”

The diner was outside the town, owned by a family that won the state lottery one year.

“Teresa, can I ask you something,” he said.

I looked down, nodded.

“Did you hear about C?”

“How could I not?”

“F was really upset.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“Uh huh, but did you hear the shit they were saying about you?”

I got up to lower the fan speed of the swamp cooler. I felt Henry’s stare. Of course, I did hear, I wanted to say.

“And I’m guessing you believe them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“Do you think I would do it?”

“No,” he said, “You ain’t nasty like they say.”

“What am I, then?”

He stared at me.


Me and Henry had sex later that afternoon, after the wasps had died. He didn’t last more than ten minutes, told me he was tired after collapsing to his side of the bed.

“It’s been too long,” he said.

“Umm.”

“Would you think about doing it again,” he asked.

I smiled at him, it was kind. “I don’t think so.”

He got up and put on his pants, a leg at a time.

“Am I a no-good friend?”

“No, I won’t say a word about you.”

There are worse problems to have. With E, I suffered abundance. Life hummed along. There were steak dinners on a Tuesday night — take-out more than once a week. Her friends planned destination weddings, and birthdays had tumblers of small-batch bourbon, plates of mussels, and poolside gossip. I gained weight, and I carried it well.

But I was unfit. I’d be sussed out eventually. I had no word to contribute when E’s friends mentioned retirement plans or mortgages — entirely appropriate for 30-something professionals but also entirely unlike my life with B.

With B, I was brown and self-loathing. With E, I had a taste of what a life could be, and I had convinced myself that I earned it.

SIRENS & MERMAIDS, BROWN BLUES, I SING OF BLOOD

Which I of me was in love with B?

When I was a kid I built a roof for myself. It was ramshackle, girded with passages of out-of-date encyclopedias and fantasies of playing god, hoisted with imagination instead of pressurized wood, but it was a ceiling nevertheless, one blocking me from spells of bad weather, both sunlight and moonlight, and I laid it between outside and in. Under my roof, I could be me in private, play pretend blissfully unaware that, to some adults, I was no child.

Yet one monsoon could un-turn screws.

No structure imagined in my mind, as a brown man, could forever shield me from the relentless assaults to break in. As I got older, dreams of my future were worn away one by one, slowly disintegrating from how people outside my roof viewed me. And when I met B, the center of me was exposed, shrapnel made of my dreams; like suffocating vines, repeated insults and criticisms (what we now call “micro-aggressions”) had begun their way to the floorboards.


—Had B’s ceiling collapsed too?

B told stories that had me in tears. In elementary school, she wrote a short story about a mermaid that couldn’t make friends and eventually haunts her lover. In middle school, she spent lunch inside, reorganizing her locker, afraid of venturing out. Her father was white, and her mother Tejana, but it was B who introduced me to Oscar Zeta Acosta and to Octavia Butler. She dissected short stories of Roberto Bolaño to see which sentence functioned as catalyst, which lingered like whisper. There were mornings in bed, smiles basked in a rouge light, then weekends besotted in drink, fights without crescendo, irresolute and unresolved.

A mea culpa—how could you ever want me?

I am one and a half smaller a man. I can’t speak Spanish, and my skin is unmarked with tattoos. I’ve never been arrested. Until last year, I’ve never worked in restaurants, and I’ve never impressed anybody with how I dance. I’m not hood. My family has been living in Texas since before it was Mexico.

Am I brown enough?

Or better yet, is brownness me enough? Zadie Smith writing about Franz Kafka’s struggle to identify himself within Jewishness: What does it mean to have a people? On no subject are we more sentimental and less able to articulate what we mean. Where does the self and a lineage of [b]lood, culture, history, genes detangle? (I imagine Kafka on Trans Mountain, a state highway on a mountain, in El Paso, Texas, my hometown. Some tens of miles across the border, to his south, in Juaréz, Mexico, he’s overcome by a carousel of lights—some phantom and unblinking, others as ordinary as a fitful streetlight.) And what about brownness? Can the whole of a people’s history fit into a few descriptions, or even one? If I were reduced to the shape of a word, am I not already crushed?

I’m uncomfortable embracing you. Who can say I have any right to speak for you? Does it matter if you’re both real and not? In the past five years I’ve lost three jobs, been fired once, and been homeless since 2018, and in my lifetime I’ve made less with writing than a year’s worth of tips at a bar in Los Angeles.

I’m a brown man and you are a brown woman.

I am you and you are me.

But sometimes it feels as though all these words will disappear. If anything, our brown blues is erasure. It’s silence. It’s being born with a body between white and black, between restriction and revolt, both alive and dead, but mostly, plainly dead, as alive as those phantoms in cages, banished to history, or never even registering, ahistorical, bodies drowning in a river that runs between a land with different names.

I am Teresa and Teresa is me.

When I sing of my mother I sing of blood.

My mother was born in Texas, but the mother of my mother was born in the mountains of Chihuahua, a northern state of the Mexican desert. From the darkness my mother emerged, and then as soon as her lungs had expanded and collapsed with air, she was given away, swaddled into the arms of another woman, my adopted grandmother.

When I sing of blood I sing of history.

Who am I — what of the particulars of my flesh, what of the electricity in my mind— which is also my mother’s? Her history embedded in mine. Is it her blood that makes mine milky and clouded, hers that has thickened from life, as if blood itself knows to shed skin to salve against loss? Or is it mine that is yellowing? Who is the I of me that swam canals between narco ranches and white-trash trailers? Is it my blood that would have drown in those skunk-home culverts damned with tumbleweed, plastic bags, dirt; I punched little boys straight in the nose to see what they sneezed up; I killed little mice with unsharpened butter knives. Blood, when seen close up, when held between a child’s finger, is no more than a gooey nothing.

My mother sang lessons at night.

Once she told me to never trust a Mexican man, no matter who this man was, my father included.

My mother sang lessons like I imagined the moon would.

“I’m sorry, mija. But you can’t trust men.”

“I know mommy but do you need anything?”

“No, no. I’m ok.”

My mother sang lessons like her life depended on it.

“Do you want to talk?”

“No, it’s too late, mija. Just promise me you’ll never trust them, ok?”

My mother sang lessons like she knew my blood was hers.

I helped my mother up that night. She weighed nothing in my arms when she died years later. But when she began her shower, I went to my room, and I lied in bed.

It was ordinary devotion.

All that’s left from that day, or of that week, is what happened to my mother. It’s as though one event, this moment of blood, ate up every space in my mind, as if my will to remember was finite. Only a few rooms to be decorated, as if memories themselves were here only in appearance.

I fell asleep after vowing to never be like you.


Now that I’ve lived past the period of my life that repeated like yours, I remember how your eyes would redden when you cried on the floor, those blood vessels like banks of a river. When I find myself in a room crying just like you, I sometimes wonder if I am nothing but your ghost.

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, FEMICIDE, A VIOLENCE AND GENTLENESS OF WIND

—I am frightened by you.

Between 1993 and 2003, over 370 women were murdered in Ciudad Juárez, home to over a million people just across the river from El Paso. In those ten years, most of the women murdered were young, between the ages of 13 and 22, poor, but also trying to make something of themselves as students or workers.

Nearly every case went unsolved or was ignored.

Teresa is a record of these women:

O. Carrillo, a 20-year-old woman whose body was found in a wasteland outside the city, evidence of bite marks, possibly made by a human being, on her left breast and nipple.

V. Castro, a 16-year-old woman found in the desert, stabbed to death, hands bound by a shoelace.

L. Rosales, a 35-year-old woman found dead in a ravine, whose body showed signs of torture and rape.

These women are only three.

In Los Sumergidos, a book for which this essay is an accompaniment, Teresa is both herself and them. Alive and dead. In our story, she crosses the U.S.-Mexico border to find better work. She takes a job as a waitress in Presidio, Texas, a small town near the border. Teresa would say, in letters to her family back in Mexico, that she preferred her walks when the sun was about to set, enjoyed a cup of stale coffee over one just off the pot, and liked it best of all to wake up to clouds. Teresa also said to me privately that she imagined foghorns sounded like trucks on a highway, and during those cloudy mornings, she would imagine waves lapping against sand.

She took as a priority her time to herself.

One summer her life took a turn. She met Ginevra Archiboldi, a photographer and poet who took portraits of families near the U.S.-Mexico border, selling these images to a gallery in Marfa, Texas. They fell in love after a few months.

In one life, Teresa lived with Ginevra for a year or two before moving to France with another lover—there would be evenings preparing garlic confit, a table set with braised burgundy snails, halibut poached in velouté.

But in another life, Teresa was murdered—gruesomely, I must tell you, either near the border or after crossing it. It’s no secret. Her body was buried in the desert, and her bones, if ever unearthed, would take the look of ivory. It would be all that’s left of a life, these songs and dreams nothing but a violence and gentleness of wind.

In the end, they had names. The pomegranate trees. A few of them, those in the back by the shed had even become partial to gossip. Teresa whispered the latest news as she flooded their dug-out trenches, circling the base of each tree like a rug.

The dark soil was fickle and dry, littered with rocks and pebbles, a crumbled portion of asphalt, carried by storms. There was a family of ground worms, mulch, and crickets. She swatted down cobwebs and punctured the home of fire-ants with a shovel.

Insect and tree, flower and song.

Teresa sang to her trees. She sang in orgasm. The dirt quivered; the sound was a yawn of a cave, a twisting, writhing, crunch, tempting some deeper dark.

She sang to her trees as though they were her children.

“They are much better this week,” she would say to her visitors.

“Who,” they would say.

Teresa would say their names. “Juanita, Delia, and Louisa.”


Teresa had no children, and she would die in a hospital bed, in El Paso, beside a nurse who held her hand as she died. Teresa was not alone, though. There would be others that followed her to the U.S. She’d have told them to beware of the traps. Much too many were invisible.

Teresa never once mentioned how the rumors of police impunity, serial killers, white rapists, and drug traffickers were faced firsthand.

“I never told you about my mother.”

The nurse held Teresa’s hand, duty-bound.

“She was born one day after my birthday. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“What,” the nurse asked, “her birthday almost like yours?”

“It all repeats but just a little bit. Just a little bit.”


The pomegranate trees dried away after few weeks without Teresa’s care. There was a drought. “A record,” somebody who lived nearby said,“even the crickets are leaving.”