The Brooklyn Rail

“In general, the world seems like a system of allusions and signs, like Baudelaire’s forest of symbols but with treeless areas,” says Natalia, one of the protagonists of Daniel Saldaña París’s novel The Dance and the Fire, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. The world is, for Natalia, “a Morse code of objects and people that is only partly legible; a book chewed to shreds by a furious dog.” This feeling—that meaning is there to be grasped but somehow just out of reach, a sense of precarious balance between fate and agency, an ambiguity around what is real and what is imagined—stalks the characters in the novel. It is also a description of the paranoid worldview of conspiracy theorists. Natalia herself is not a conspiracy theorist exactly; she’s a choreographer. She traces a web of connections from her beloved bromeliads to Swedish witch hunts, and from there to medieval dancing plagues and German expressionist dance; as she researches, the idea for a new performance, taking place in city streets, employing a cast of non-professional dancers, begins to take shape.

The novel follows Natalia and her high school friends-turned-adult acquaintances, Erre, and Conejo. In the way of high school friends, they were all in love with each other back then, and maybe still are—they are still bound together by that early love and at the same time, they hardly know or understand one another as adults. The three live in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and, in much the same way, the city is both the same one they grew up in and one nearly unrecognizable. Cuernavaca has been changed by climate catastrophe, now ringed with raging wildfires that turn the sky the color of “a rotting orange”; the residents are fevered, the air dense with a strangling, estranging smoke. Weeds are overgrown, chairs are left to rust, garbage is collecting in an evaporated lake, giving the city an apocalyptic aura underscored by the fire-and-brimstone preacher who urges his followers out into the smoke-filled streets. The novel is atmospherically anxious, evoking the “uneasy tension” of a world on the edge of disaster.

The fires provide both a backdrop and a running metaphor. Saldaña París is interested in inflammation and contagion—as in searing pain, easy gossip, sleazy pastors, catching conspiracy, smoldering desire. The central characters, who each narrate one section of the book, are all consumed by something. Natalia’s obsessive research gives way, at the end of her section, to Erre’s strained and unsettled voice. Erre is back in town after the collapse of his marriage, and he is in constant, mysterious pain, “radiating like a sun in all directions, hiding its own point of origin.” In a parallel to Natalia’s sense that the world is not quite legible, Erre, upon hearing someone say that the wildfires “have been burning for almost two weeks, as if the earth itself were alight,” thinks “that’s a vaguely familiar metaphor for something, but I can’t figure out what because I’ve had a bad night.” He dreams of a sign that reads, “This garden is for everyone, but only those with a clear-cut vision can enter.” His view of things is blurred by the physical pain that renders his body “at once familiar and foreign” and by his confusion over how the boy he remembers became the man he is. As his section comes to a close and the date of Natalia’s performance approaches, he begins seeing people moving strangely in the streets, jerking and contorting.

Conejo, who lives at home and cares for his blind, once revolutionary father, takes over the narration for the novel’s last section. He is not quite a believer in the numerous conspiracies he endlessly discusses, but certainly interested in theorizing. “I believe and I don’t believe,” he says, and he is startlingly perceptive about the appeal conspiracy theories hold for someone who is also half-convinced. “There’s something comforting in assuming an order, a meaning, even a guilty party hiding behind the visible that is lying in wait and organizing things,” he explains. The novel, wisely, ultimately offers no such easy comfort. Conejo narrates the events of the days after Erre saw those people moving strangely, as mass hysteria took hold of Cuernavaca. This outbreak of strange dancing is obliquely related to Natalia’s performance and to the fires. But at the novel’s close, the dust has not settled; the fires are still burning, the world still collapsing, the damage still being done.

At times, it seems that Saldaña París doesn’t trust the world he’s created to hold. He is occasionally uneasy with his choice of first-person narration, sometimes justifying it with flimsy gestures towards diary. He also has a tendency to repeat detail—he makes reference, for instance, to “Frau Troffea, who sparked off the 1518 dance epidemic in Strasbourg,” reminding the reader who Troffea is a small handful of pages after dedicating a section to her story; he repeatedly re-describes the “yellow-tube bed” one character sleeps in. This is a book about growing hysteria and the flickering fickleness of shared realities—in this pervasive instability, it is perhaps understandable that the creeping distrust that is the subject of the book seems to have infected the author as well.