The Sonoros, we learn early in Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s violent meditation on the sins of the father The Bullet Swallower, have a long track record of rapaciousness, cruelty, and remorselessness. The opening section shows us how one member of the family killed scores in an effort to snatch every last bit of gold from the Sonoro family’s mine on the US-Mexico border in the mid-1800s. Unlike a lot of aristocratic monsters, however, the members of the family suffer disaster and poverty as often as they enjoy wealth and privilege. This split time narrative shows us how two scions of the Sonoro family face the long overdue repercussions of their fathers’ sins.
In 1895, Antonio Sonoro lives a life of a latter-day Robin Hood—much to the frustration of his wife who is left to scratch a living at the drought-striken family farm. Antonio hatches a scheme that could restore the family fortunes after he hears a rumor of a train heading into Texas laden with Mexican treasures and luxury goods. Even if he can only get away with what he can carry, Antonio will be a wealthy man. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Antonio is a terrible planner. The theft goes wrong almost immediately and Antonio and his adopted brother find themselves pursued by a murder-minded posse of Texas Rangers. What follows is the stuff of Western legends.
Roughly seventy years later, Jaime Sonoro lives a busy life as a successful singer and actor. He knows next to nothing about his family’s ignoble past; his father refused to tell him much of anything. Jaime’s movies have bought his family a mansion in Mexico City, raising them up from the poverty Jaime’s father knew as a child. The only flies in the ointment arrive in the form of a book purporting to document the vicious history of the Sonoro family and the appearance of a sinister (possibly immortal) stranger named Remedio. A quick Google Translation tells me that Remedio can mean remedy in the sense of redress or compensation. Remedio himself (itself?) tells us that he is here to claim on the Sonoro family’s moral debt.
Antonio Sonoro—who comes to be known as El Tragabalas, the Bullet Swallower, after a near-fatal gunshot to the face—absolutely runs away with this book. I was curious about why there was so much ink about Jaime until Remedio’s plot becomes clear. The scales tipped by Antonio and his ancestors must be balanced; someone has to pay for all those centuries of crimes. The tension in the plot builds as Jaime searches to find out what might have happened to Antonio. Did Antonio ever atone for his misdeeds? Or are Jaime and his children going to have to foot the impossible bill?
When we talk about complicated family histories, we’re usually talking about mental illness, abuse, or similar generational trauma. The Bullet Swallower is unique in my experience for looking at how individuals might have to wrestle with a history of ancestors who committed unpunished crimes against others. Looking at Antonio Sonoro and his predecessors, one might wonder if one’s own family tree contains murderers, slavers, and others whose actions might have been excusable at the time but that also tarnish the family’s reputation. This book also raises the question of whether or not it’s fair to expect the children of these parents to offer some kind of reparations for past crimes. I would’ve liked to see The Bullet Swallower wrestle a bit more with this latter question but, as it is, what this book does include lingers. I’ll be mulling this book for a while.