Bookworm, Issue 13

The Book: The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

Following a vengeful “bandido,” his movie-star grandson, and a mysterious character from the afterlife, Elizabeth Gonzalez James combines Western fiction and magical realism in this tale of lives teetering between good and evil. Taking cues from her own family history, the author reimagines an Old West anti-hero in The Bullet Swallower and breathes vibrant life into the desert landscape along the border between Mexico and Texas.

In 1895, the out-of-luck, Mexican bandit Antonio Sonoro has one purpose – to avenge his brother’s death at the hands of the Texas Rangers. While in 1964, Jaime Sonoro, his grandson and one of Mexico’s most successful and beloved actors, finds his perfect life upended by an ancient book that describes his family’s shameful history. A shadowy figure from the afterlife appears before both men and requires payment for their ancestors’ multitude of sins.

In the Sonoro ancestral homeland, Spain, we find our perfect wine pairing. Its intense, rich flavors are best savored slowly, allowing the wine to reveal more as it opens up in the glass. In this way, the drinking experience mirrors the story’s development as a seemingly straightforward quest for revenge becomes a more complex meditation on the human capacity to change.

Outwardly, Antonio and Jaime have little in common, but they both feel uncertain about where they belong. Antonio is “afraid of being just like everyone else,” a humble Mexican farmer and a family man struggling for a better life in the face of poverty and drought in the borderlands. Not until he’s physically broken and alone, after a months-long manhunt in Texas, does he recognize value in what he’s left behind.

His grandson Jaime, on the other hand, lives contentedly with his wife, two children and his father in Mexico City. He’s only missing a sense of “rootedness” that his father refuses to provide. His father says, “People obsess about history because they’re not happy with the present. Why do you want to disturb your peace?” So Jaime looks for answers in an old book about his family’s “ignominious” history, and its contents begin to erode his sense of self.

Slipping like magic into their daily lives comes a shadowy figure from the afterlife, Remedio, here to collect a soul in return for the sins of the Sonoro family’s ancestors. He observes Antonio “take some of the gold he’d won at knifepoint and give it to a friend whose stillborn crops baked lifeless under the unforgiving soil,” and he wonders if Antonio is, somehow, attempting to balance the scales. While the bandido is deeply flawed, he demonstrates potential to be a better man, and readers can’t help but to root for him.

The story includes raging gunfights and a grueling manhunt through the hostile desert wilderness (all great fun to read!), but at times, the author exchanges adventure for poetry. Remedio’s reflections on human activity are particularly evocative. One day he visits a post office in Mexico City where he sees “as many words as stars and almost all asking for love in some form or another…out of the swirling chaos of their hungry souls men had managed to build a system for delivering sympathy, joy, remorse, anger, felicitations, admonishments, and cheap sentimentality.” Remedio compares himself to a postman “because, like a letter, every person has a terminus.”

At one point, Antonio declares himself at war “even with time itself…He was just past thirty – he should not know already what his life would look like at sixty.” There’s a sense of despair in his observation that’s compounded by the perception that time “circles, spirals, pivots and repeats.” The past comes back to bite, just like the scorpions that Antonio and Jaime frequently encounter. Both men must learn that while one’s history cannot be rewritten, it does not necessarily dictate the future – that’s up to them. It’s a choice to live in the present, break the cycle of violence, fight against hopelessness and choose, instead, “a daily dedication to the light.”

The Wine: Black Slate, Porrera VI de Vila, Priorat, 2019 $27.99

This deep ruby wine has medium (+) intensity on the nose. Aromas include ripe black plum, prune, violet, smoke, cedar, spearmint, blackberry, raspberry, cooked strawberry, milk chocolate and leather.

Flavors on the palate mirror the nose, but also include dried cranberry, blueberry and baking spices such as anise and cinnamon. The wine is dry with medium (+) acidity, full body, high alcohol at 15% ABV and medium (+) tannin. It has medium (+) flavor intensity and a spicy, medium (+) finish.

The wine is a blend of Garnacha (Grenache) and Cariñena (Carignan), with a splash of Cabernet Sauvignon. The grapes come from 20-30 year-old vines planted on very steep slopes in the rugged Priorat region of northeast Spain, where the Sangenís family practices sustainable farming in the village of Porrera.

This wine was fermented with indigenous yeast and aged for 12 months in neutral French and Hungarian oak barrels. It is robust and complex, but with enough freshness to maintain balance. Despite its initial intensity, the wine will evolve over time in the glass to reveal more subtle aromas and flavors.

Why the pairing works:

In The Bullet Swallower, Antonio Sonoro and his grandson Jaime, are both haunted by their family’s past, and so I turned to their ancestral home of Spain for this wine pairing. Priorat is a rugged growing region in Catalunya where old vine Garnacha and Cariñena thrive in the warm, Mediterranean climate. Here, these two grapes are blended to make bold and powerful red wines – a perfect match for our brazen protagonist Antonio.

Antonio is a complicated character; he’s greedy, cruel, prone to drunkenness and indifferent toward his wife and two children, but turn the page and he displays surprising tenderness and generosity. He survives countless shootouts and unspeakable hardship as he blazes a trail of death and destruction across the borderlands in pursuit of revenge. But this is a wine that can withstand Antonio’s bravado, while also delivering unexpected freshness and finesse.

The climate and geography in Priorat are unforgiving, like Antonio in his quest for revenge. Hot days, cold nights and very little rainfall define the growing season. Vine roots must deeply penetrate the stony slate soil, called llicorella, in search of water and nutrients. The slate reflects and absorbs heat, so only late-ripening varieties like Garnacha and Cariñena truly thrive here. Old bush vines grow on steep, terraced slopes where the arduous vineyard work is done by hand. Yields are low, but the resulting wines, full of depth, concentration, and power, are worth the effort.