It’s hot, isn’t it?
It’ll be 34°C in London later and that’s all we are allowed to talk about. “It’s hot, isn’t it? Or, yes, very hot; but it’ll be hotter later!” And so on. By lunchtime I’d grown tired of all the small chat, and started to think about writing heat. How can a writer communicate this most sensuous of sensations on the page? I mean, we can always just say “it was hot that day,” but that would be incredibly dull, wouldn’t it? Perhaps, this is one of those rare occasions when “show, don’t tell” actually makes sense.
Heat is at the core of my latest collection, A Foreign Country is the Past.1 I wrote this book while feeling very homesick. Ironically, one of the strongest memories I had about my hometown Rosario (and Argentina in general) was the unpleasant, murderous heat of the summer months — I set out to capture this as accurately as possible. While writing these stories I found myself returning repeatedly to Juan José Saer's Nadie nada nunca (1980), in my opinion one of the best novels ever written about heat.2 This book made me realise that the best writing on heat approaches it at an angle.
Let me give you some examples from Saer, first, and then some of my own, where I dealt with heat in similar ways.
Saer and the sound of the light
Nadie nada nunca is one of Juan José Saer’s major novels. It is set in the landscape around Colastiné, near Santa Fe,3 during a sweltering summer, and it revolves around an unexplained series of horse killings. Saer isn’t so much interested in plot as in the texture of experience: this is a novel of waiting, observation, memory, and the slow accumulation of perception. Regarding the heat — the prevalent sensation — instead of just telling us it’s hot, Saer lets heat infiltrate the text, transforming the behaviour of objects, bodies, and even time.4
Take this passage:
Cat stands up and goes back to his deck chair, collapsing in it. Through the shade on the porch, which does not cool it, there swiftly passes something that effaces it, for a moment, and that, at almost the same time, restores it.
The first thing I notice here is that this is a shade that doesn’t cool — it’s still shade, but it has stopped doing what it is supposed to do. The next thing that captures my attention is the “something” that passes through the shade. Is it a breeze? Is it an insect? Is it the light? I’d go for a breeze. But does it really matter? I’d say that what matters is the sensation it leaves the reader with. That sensation is suffocating heat.
Take this other one:
Then she had begun to describe, in a monotonous, absent voice, the city: in the late afternoon, when it was ordinarily full of people, there was not one soul to be seen in the downtown area. In the morning, around noon, even on a Saturday, the few shops that hadn’t closed were empty, despite the relative coolness coming from their doorways. The dark blue asphalt of the streets melted in the sun. One could even hear the sound of the light.
Instead of tackling heat directly, Saer writes about what it does: emptying the streets and the shops, turning coolness into something “relative,” melting the asphalt. Then he ends with that beautiful synaesthesia: “One could even hear the sound of the light.” He doesn't explain how that happens, but thanks to the perfectly concrete and coherent observations that precede it, by the time you get there you are willing to accept that the heat has something to do with it.
And finally this one, probably my favourite paragraph in the novel:
Everything is in its proper place within the kindly transparency which abruptly ends at the low, black sky, and which turns livid and greenish, for a brief moment, with every flash of lightning. There is a vegetable excitement, discreet but definite, in view of the imminent rain. One senses a general state of alertness in the grass, in the bushes, in the trees, in the rustlings of leaves, the slow straightening out of fibers, the revival of roots and branches.
Here Saer evokes heat through the idea of the relief of an impending storm. He never describes the oppressive weather; rather, he focuses on the anticipation of the whole landscape for the opposite possibility. By the way, “vegetable excitement” is a fantastic oxymoron.
Heat in my own work (from A Foreign Country is the Past)
From Light Bugs
Heat is mentioned several times in this story, but for me the strongest image of heat is these light bugs flickering around the lights. They recur throughout the story:
Bugs everywhere, so many of them flickering around the streetlights. They crash into one another, like those dodgem cars they’ve got in the fair downtown.5
From Sunstroke
The title of this story makes it obvious that heat is central to the plot. My favourite heat moment in this one:
[The wax statue’s] eyes are black and dead and his forehead is sweaty; Martín didn’t know wax statues could sweat. The statue winks at him; Martín didn’t know wax statues could wink. He throws up on the pavement orange and strawberry and little pieces of ice cream cone.6
From A Different World
This story takes place against the background of food riots; these are a common occurrence in Argentina during the hottest month of the year, December. But heat in this story is best experienced through the opposite sensation, cold. Muriel, the main character, is watching events unfold on the telly, drinking a glass of iced Coke, sheltered in an air-conditioned room:
She puts the handset down, walks to the fridge, gets a couple of ice cubes from the freezer, fixes herself a large glass of Coca Cola, and comes back to sit in front of the TV… The raiders gathered there just hang out in the heat, talking to one another, while the camera pans over their sweaty faces and the presenter in the studio speculates if the army will finally disperse them or not, if the president will declare a curfew, when the raids will end, when things will ever go back to normal… Muriel takes a sip from her glass — it’s so cold her teeth sting…7
From Cicadas
I could paste the whole story, which is my attempt to capture heat aurally. I’ll go for this section, which focuses on the rhythm of the cicadas, and how you get used to them, just like eventually you get used to the summer:
And the thing with the cicadas is that you never think of them while they are there. You get used to the cicadas and you stop hearing them, just like you get used to everything else. Perhaps you just think a bit about them when the singing starts. Early summer first — here are the cicadas, they hadn’t been around for a while. Then, for some days, you hear them around lunchtime, when they turn up for the afternoon shift. And after a while, you only notice them when they go quiet.8
From Colour Theory
This story takes place in December, during the build-up for one of the typical summer storms we get in Rosario during that time of the year. My favourite heat moment is:
The work shirt sticks to his back, and the jeans stick to his legs. And the dark cigarettes stink worse than usual, and the smoke splashes on the floor, instead of creeping upwards towards the ceiling. Even sounds sound different — louder, sharper, the horns of the passing cars hurt his ears, the engines bounce against the furniture, and he can even hear the walls moan as they struggle to breathe; or at least he can see them sweating and imagines the rattle of the fan is their breath.9
From When Things Were Good
This story mainly takes place in a semi-empty shopping arcade. For most of the story, the main character is in an air-conditioned shop. But there are some moments when she steps out and faces the stifling heat. Below is my favourite section:
Things have a blurry edge around them, almost as if someone had rubbed them with the palm of their hand. The sun still falls like molten lead and there are few people about — only the crazy ones or those who have no choice but to leave their shelter. She’s crossing the street when she steps on the liquefied tar that covers a pothole, and her right heel gets stuck. When she tries to move her foot, the heel snaps.10
Unlike Saer, I tend to be more explicit in my descriptions. But the guiding principle for the fragments above remained the same throughout: write not the heat itself but the world under its influence.
A brief heat manifesto
Saying “it’s hot” isn’t enough.
Focus on the effects of heat on people, animals, things, and time.
Coolness and relief are about heat too.
Heat is felt, seen, smelled, and heard.
Heat changes the behaviour of the world.
I wrote this short essay while writing the book.
Another one: Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo. But here heat is tangential to death, which I’d argue is the main theme of this short novel.
The location is unnamed, but it is recognisably Colastiné, on the eastern outskirts of Santa Fe Province. This is Saer’s usual fictional territory, aka La Zona.
I’m quoting from Helen Lane’s translation, published as Nobody nothing never (Serpent’s Tail in 1993). Until I started this piece, I wasn’t familiar with this English version; it is excellent.
This story also features barflies: “There’s a pile of unwashed plates in the sink, the trash bin in the corner is overflowing, there are a million flies fluttering around the room, and the air stinks of naphthalene, because Ana’s mother stinks of naphthalene.”
The sweating wax, the hallucinatory effect of heat, the heat-induced sickness…
This is a story about class inequality and I wanted the reader to feel that in their teeth.
The siesta cicadas of my childhood — chicharras in the vernacular — still ring in my ears.
Olfactory, aural, and visual heat. I’m particularly fond of the idea that smoke would splash on the floor.
Later in Saer’s novel, the main female character gets a heel stuck in the melted asphalt and ends up on the floor. Sounds familiar? But I’ve seen this happen in real life, so I’m not willing to attribute this one to reading Saer. On the other hand, can you spot the Patricia Highsmith homage here? From Strangers on a Train: “Overhead, the sky was a clear strong blue. The sun poured down moltenly, not yellow but colourless, like something grown white with its own heat.”