“A cemetery in the year 2666”

“A cemetery in the year 2666” is an image from Amulet that helps illuminate the title and structure of 2666. It turns an ordinary city avenue into a forgotten burial ground, linking an imagined future date to the novel’s present-tense landscape of disappearances, unidentified victims, and violence that resists complete accounting.

The image in Amulet

In the passage from Amulet, Auxilio Lacouture follows Arturo Belano and Ernesto San Epifanio through Mexico City at night. As they walk along Avenida Guerrero, the avenue seems to become a cemetery not belonging to any familiar historical year, but to 2666. The image expands from a neglected urban place into a burial ground beneath the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, a vision of forgetting so complete that even the thing once meant to be forgotten is lost.

The date does not function as a precise forecast in this passage. It alters the reader’s sense of time and place: a contemporary street is apprehended as if it already belonged to a remote, unremembered future. The cemetery is both physical and figurative, an image of a world where death has become part of the city’s hidden landscape and memory itself has failed.

From the image to 2666

The novel’s framing discussion identifies 2666 as an enigmatic date and a vanishing point around which its different parts fall into place. It also distinguishes the physical center, understood as Santa Teresa, from a concealed “hidden center.” The cemetery image in Amulet offers an earlier, strikingly direct way to imagine the date’s effect: not as a destination explained by the plot, but as a temporal horizon through which the present appears already buried and difficult to recover.

This connection is grounded in the recurrence of the desert city’s crimes, not in a single explanatory key. The image makes the future feel like an extension of present loss, while the novel’s title gathers its parts around a point that remains distant and unresolved. The cemetery therefore helps orient the reader toward the book’s convergence on Santa Teresa without reducing the title to a simple date or the city’s violence to a solved mystery.

The crimes and the work of remembering

The opening record of the killings in 1993 presents their accounting as incomplete from the start. Esperanza Gomez Saldana, thirteen, is treated as the first victim on the list, but the narration allows that other girls and women may have died earlier, gone unrecorded, or never been found. Some, it suggests, may have been buried anonymously in the desert. The list is thus not a complete boundary around the violence; it is a record with absences built into it.

That gap between a body and an identifiable life returns in later cases. A woman found in a school field is never identified; the medical examiner can only estimate her age and describe uncertainty about the precise cause of death. In another case, a skeleton discovered in a farming cooperative’s field is identified as a woman’s, but the circumstances of her death and the date remain uncertain. The police publicly deflect responsibility rather than resolving those uncertainties. These episodes make the cemetery image concrete: bodies enter the landscape, but the records that might restore names and histories remain partial.

A later account of a girl found near railroad tracks likewise records the limits of identification. She carries no identification, and the physical details that might have helped identify her do not match anyone reported missing in Santa Teresa. The investigating officers’ disagreement over whether the crime scene has been deliberately wiped clean or merely left without usable traces sharpens the distinction between seeing evidence and being able to reconstruct what happened. In this recurring pattern, the dead are discovered, examined, and described, yet a full account remains out of reach.

An image of erasure

The cemetery image gathers these different failures of knowledge without claiming that every death has the same history or cause. Its force comes from the contrast between the precision of individual observations and the larger uncertainty surrounding the victims: a place can be named, a body examined, and an estimated age recorded, while identity, chronology, and responsibility remain unsettled. The result is not simply a metaphor for death but an image of how people can disappear from public memory even after their bodies are found.

The forgotten cemetery beneath a corpse’s or unborn child’s eyelid also gives forgetting an unsettling scale. It suggests both the dead who cannot be recovered and a future in which the past itself has become inaccessible. Read alongside the incomplete victim lists and unresolved identifications in 2666, the image frames the novel’s return to violence as an act of attention to what official records and ordinary remembrance fail to contain.