The Trees that Outlast and Tending One's Own Garden in Elizabeth Gonzalez James's The Bullet Swallower
The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Reviewed by Brody Eldridge
Antonio Sonoro is temperamental, a cutthroat, and "The Bullet Swallower." Elizabeth Gonzalez James's new novel, named after the notorious moniker that Antonio earns during his bandito adventures, explores how ancestral sins follow future kin. Inspired by her own family history, James considers whether atonement and redemption are possible for a bloodline corrupted by power and clouded by ruthless acts of greed, selfishness, and enmity.
The year is 1895, and 30-year-old Antonio, the protagonist of James's novel, is just another man in the long line of the Sonoros, trying to make a living on his farm. He neglects his family, mistreating his wife, Jesusa, and their children. Hugo, Antonio's adopted brother and a churchly man of letters, who lacks calluses and family blood, is helpless on Antonio's farm in north Mexico and mostly an irritant at this point in Antonio's life. Spurred on by a drought and a need for money, Antonio decides to leave his family to rob a train in Houston. The devout Hugo tags along out of a sense of familial piety, to watch Antonio's back. But when the train heist goes wrong and Antonio burns down the carriages, Texas Rangers hunt them both down. The Rangers kill Hugo, and Antonio "swallows" a bullet, which leaves him disfigured and, initially, seemingly dead.
In conjunction with Antonio’s story is Jaime Sonoro's narrative, set in 1964 in Mexico City. Jaime is a famous singer and actor. He has a happy family and his father, Juan Antonio, lives with them. However, Jaime's peace is disrupted when a mysterious figure delivers to him The Ignominious History of the Sonoro Family from Antiquity to Present Day, a book published in 1783 which details the awful deeds of the Sonoro family. Juan Antonio warns Jaime about the book and says, "People obsess about history because they’re not happy with the present. Why do you want to disturb your peace?” (49).
Jaime is troubled by what he reads. Most of his ancestors' misconduct leads back to greed or selfishness. One "poisoned the well water of an entire village and then had it razed, just so he could get them out of his view of a mountain" (52). Another, Alferez Antonio, who is Antonio's grandfather, enslaved the Carrizo people, the local indigenous peoples in the fictional town Dorado, and forced them to work the mines, despite the poor air quality and dangerous conditions of the caves. In retaliation to a planned strike by the Carrizo men, Alferez Antonio blew out a cave entrance, effectively trapping and killing the Carrizo men and their families in the caves.
Jaime reflects on his ancestors, "If half the things in the book were true, he was the son of monsters. But he was a good husband and a good father, a loyal friend and, he hoped, a credit to his country. It wasn’t fair, is what it came down to. Why was this his problem?" (52). Later, Jaime asks, "Could there be a mysterious biology to it, his blood somehow carrying a memory of this base history? Could crimes be so wicked, and the screams of the innocent so loud that their echoes rang still in the air, audible to anyone who cared to listen?" (54). Here is the prime tension in James's novel: the struggle between an inherited legacy of immorality and the resulting acts of atonement. Does either cancel the other out?
While Jaime discovers his inheritance, Antonio runs around South Texas attempting to avenge Hugo's death by killing the Rangers. He makes friends with Peter Ainsley during a shootout with a Texas mob. Peter is a British dandy who loves alcohol and prostitutes. He was running Daddy's cotton farm until the cotton ran out. With no money left, Peter has rejected bourgeois society for a fun time in Texas. Peter's employment and family ties epitomize the novel's exploration of colonialism and how it can drive someone like Antonio to his actions. At the beginning of the novel, Antonio is playing the card game monte with a drunken "Idiot" who says, "Let me tell you . . . the Americans want everything in Mexico except the Mexicans" (15). This is especially true of the Texas Rangers, who ruthlessly watch over South Texas and rule with racism. Antonio wonders if the Rangers will eventually use him "as example of a failed people, contemptible savages who needed benevolent Protestant discipline" (142). The preaching of Protestant Texans is thinly veiled because "when these promises of salvation went ignored the men always threw down their Bibles and picked up their rifles, for that was what they’d wanted to do all along, and shouted that such an indolent race didn’t deserve the soil under their feet" (143). Cyrus Fish, the captain of the Rangers, acts just this way. He and his men kill a small town of people, leaving numerous bodies of men, women, and children to rot, then frame Antonio for it. Antonio eventually succeeds in securing vengeance by killing the three Rangers responsible for Hugo's death, but he loses most of his family, executed on Fish's orders. He loses all those closest to him, except one.
In the "modern day" timeline, Remedio enters the story with a full introduction. He is a mysterious and cosmic character and the literal grim reaper who seemingly transcends time (allowing him to be fully present in both timelines). Throughout the novel, there are glimpses of Remedio in the background, following Antonio in the past and spying on Jaime in the “modern day.” To balance the scales of cosmic justice, Remedio was supposed to take Antonio's life when Antonio was only a baby, but he refused his duty and deviated from his assignment. Throughout Antonio's reckless endeavors, Remedio follows, always wondering if he made a mistake. Whenever Remedio decides to take Antonio's life, Antonio performs an act of kindness to balance out his misdeeds: "It was as though [Antonio] were aware of the precariousness of his own existence, that he wished to perform some balancing of accounts within himself, committing murder and then saving a family from starvation on the same day, net equal" (75). Remedio refuses to take Antonio so that he might "prove his repentance" (230). Years later, however, he introduces himself to Jaime after helping Mito, one of Jaime's sons who gets hurt at a park. Jaime warmly invites Remedio into his home to stay, but Remedio's presence only seems to cast a shadow over the whole family. Frustrated at Jaime for welcoming Remedio ignorantly into the home, Juan Antonio reveals the truth: Remedio has come to take Jaime and his family to hell.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James frequently pulls comparisons to Cormac McCarthy from literary critics, and rightfully so. McCarthy's unflinching portrayal of violence and his southern, borderland settings carry over into James's novel. But with Remedio, James dabbles in magical realism and to powerful effect. Remedio cannot make sense of humanity. Sometimes he settles on a humanist view, considering humans to be good creatures capable of acts of kindness. Sometimes he witnesses atrocities and feels differently. Remedio struggles to comprehend humanity's fickleness. But this human tendency for fickleness reveals the beauty of Antonio's ultimate steadfastness to atonement and moral correction.
When Antonio finds his family dead, he finds one last living son, Juan Antonio. Jesusa gave birth to Juan Antonio while Antonio was away, and she hid the boy before her execution. Similar to Voltaire's Candide, Antonio has witnessed many awful acts (and committed some, too). Now Antonio must "tend to his garden," so to speak. Remedio has promised to return for Antonio on his one-hundredth birthday, but until then Antonio must "earn [forgiveness] with his every breath" because "true contrition had to be more than words" (230-231). Juan Antonio, who grows up with Jesusa's younger sister because Antonio proves to be a poor father, understands this also. Hiding his past from Jaime, Juan Antonio lives in fear that Remedio might bring cosmic retribution to the Sonoros. In the end, Remedio leaves Jaime’s home and does not take Jaime or his family to hell. Instead, Remedio has shown up at Jaime's doorstep out of a desire to "nudge [Jaime] in the venal direction" (88) and avoid any further deviations from cosmic "fate" (as when Remedio refused to take Antonio as a child).
After discovering the truth about his family, Jaime decides to write a movie about El Tragabalas, much against his father's wishes. His father does not want to talk about the family's past, but Juan Antonio does not close himself off to the film’s implications. He makes up with Jaime, who soldiers on with developing the film. Jaime considers that his father, "Juan Antonio, for all of his faults, woke up every morning and tried to be better. And maybe that was all there was and all there ever would be: a daily dedication to the light" (233). Tending to one's garden, a daily dedication to the light, is what Antonio, Juan Antonio, and Jaime choose.
After killing the Rangers and finding his son, Antonio lives out the rest of his days as a good man, and he is left with a choice when Remedio finally comes for his life. Either pass on his cosmic debt further down his lineage or be taken to "hell" and clear the debt from the Sonoro line. Choosing to clear the debt, Antonio goes with Remedio, which surprises even Remedio. Before leaving his home, Antonio surveys what is left, "taking one last look at the fruit trees, the shack, the cornfield, and everything beyond sinking into purple night" (242). "Everyone he’d ever known was dead," Antonio thinks, "but he’d always drawn comfort from the fact that the trees would outlast him." And like the fruit trees rooted in his homeland, his family tree will continue to stretch out. Antonio finds it strange that he will never see his trees, shack, or cornfield again, "but perhaps Juan Antonio would, and [Antonio's] grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In the morning their eyes would open and would continue to open every day in the bright certainty that they lived beyond any shadow, that this particular darkness was no longer at their heels. (242).
Elizabeth Gonzalez James takes a classic dialectic between good and evil, within oneself and one's family blood, and tells a masterful story, weaving bits of her own family history into a rich landscape. Antonio makes some bad decisions, that cannot be changed. But he does learn eventually to tend to his garden, to make reparations where possible, to be better. Dark acts permeate the Sonoros’ past, and these acts ring out over history, staining the pages of their heritage. Yet despite this history, Antonio, Juan Antonio, and Jaime all choose the light over the dark. Jaime's movie ends with a quote from the Ignominious History book: “It is a hard thing to be a good man” (248). What Jaime knows is that his father has been a good man, "and he himself tried to be good" (248). Creating his movie provokes a profound revelation about this "goodness:" transcendence from evil to good, dark to light, isn't "a plot device; it [is] real" (248).
Brody Eldridge graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a BA in English. He is a 2024-2025 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award winner for the country of Georgia.
