Marco Antonio Guerra

Marco Antonio Guerra, the dean’s son at the University of Santa Teresa, is an audacious, unpredictable presence in Professor Amalfitano’s life. He offers a ride, takes him to a bar beyond the city, and speaks with equal confidence about social collapse, violence, and poetry. His encounters with Amalfitano expose both his dependence on his father’s institutional standing and his insistence that he is acting alone; against the expanding, unequal city of Santa Teresa, Guerra’s swagger becomes a way of voicing anger without offering a credible remedy.

Identity and Introduction

Guerra first approaches Amalfitano while the professor is walking along Avenida Madero. Amalfitano initially takes him for a student, but the young man identifies himself as Dean Guerra’s son and recalls their earlier champagne toast at his father’s office, where Amalfitano had been welcomed to the department. He offers to drive the professor home, presenting himself with a confident smile and a black shirt open at the chest. A pearl-gray designer jacket and a folder of papers lie on the back seat of his car. His casual appearance and ready familiarity with the dean’s world establish him as someone at once socially assured and institutionally connected.

The first encounter is marked by a gesture that unsettles Amalfitano: Guerra says that the professor has nothing to fear from him. He offers no explanation for the reassurance. The remark hangs between them as they set off, making Guerra’s charm difficult to separate from the possibility of threat. Amalfitano declines his invitation for a drink, then declines the alternative of drinking at home; Guerra treats the refusal as settled and turns the car toward a bar instead.

Santa Teresa and Los Zancudos

Their drive passes through new neighborhoods west of Colonia Lindavista, where unfinished streets, open fields, and large warehouses stand beside expanding settlement. The route also crosses a soccer field and passes a canal carrying neighborhood waste northward, the old railroad line that once linked Santa Teresa with Ures and Hermosillo, and a highway leading out of the city. When Amalfitano asks where they are going, Guerra says he knows one of the few places nearby where they can still drink genuine Mexican mezcal. He calls the city’s new districts its supposed future, then dismisses that future as hopeless.

The destination, Los Zancudos, is a large, sparsely occupied venue with a small stage for corrida or ranchera groups, a bar at least 150 feet long, and toilets reached from the patio or through a narrow galvanized-tin passage. Guerra knows the waiters by name, though none comes to serve them. He gets their drinks himself: two glasses and a half-filled bottle of Los Suicidas mezcal. He jokes that the worm at the bottom has probably been eaten, while insisting that the drink is genuine. Amalfitano finds it good, then extraordinary on a second sip. The shared drink briefly creates an easy, companionable interval before Guerra turns the conversation toward the city’s political and economic condition.

Guerra says that politicians do not know how to govern, that the middle class wants to move to the United States, and that more people keep arriving for work in the maquiladoras. He proposes burning some factories and sending the army onto the highways to stop newcomers from coming. Amalfitano challenges the proposal and asks whether there might be another solution. Guerra answers with a complaint about the loss of respect, but offers no further course of action. When Amalfitano notices three waiters whispering and glancing toward their table, he suggests they leave. Guerra makes an obscene gesture at them and laughs; Amalfitano takes him by the arm and leads him out to the parking lot. There, beneath a large illuminated mosquito sign, Guerra says he is armed. The scene turns his political talk into a more immediate display of volatility, while Amalfitano’s decision to get him outside shows his own unease.

Provocation, Fear, and Privilege

Amalfitano encounters Guerra again in a long, deserted university corridor. Dressed like a cowboy, freshly shaved and wearing cologne, Guerra suddenly emerges from a corner. Amalfitano, startled, strikes out automatically and hits him again before Guerra identifies himself. Once they recognize each other, they walk toward a rectangle of light at the far end of the corridor. Guerra connects it to accounts by people who have been near death and describe a dark tunnel ending in brightness, sometimes with deceased loved ones urging them back. Asked whether such experiences are real, Amalfitano says he does not know. Guerra replies that people see what they want to see, which, in his view, has nothing to do with truth; he calls human beings cowards to their last breath and compares humanity broadly to rats.

Despite hoping to part from him, Amalfitano follows Guerra because he is carrying an invitation to dinner at the home of the university rector, Dr. Pablo Negrete. Guerra drives Amalfitano home and waits outside while the professor changes into a jacket and tie. Rosa is invited too. The dinner itself proves unremarkable, but Guerra’s role in bringing the invitation and ushering Amalfitano into the rector’s social setting underscores the access his family position gives him. That access later sharpens the tension in his claim that his actions have never depended on his father.

Confession and Contradiction

In a later conversation, Guerra tells Amalfitano that he understands him: both are unhappy, he says, and both feel stifled by the atmosphere around them. He describes his own method of release as seeking out fights. At night, he sometimes goes to bars and pretends to be a wealthy, disdainful gay man, expecting other men to challenge him. The encounters can end with him or the other men being beaten, and he says that sometimes he has a gun. He describes the risk as something he accepts because he needs the release.

Guerra says that a few friends, now lawyers, have warned him to be careful and called him a time bomb and a masochist. One close friend suggested that Guerra had been able to get away with what he did because his father could bail him out. Guerra denies ever asking his father for anything and calls the explanation pure coincidence. Yet the earlier scenes have already established that he is the dean’s son, moves easily among university officials, and can arrive with an invitation to the rector’s home. The contradiction is not resolved: his asserted independence coexists with the family privilege others believe protects him.

Poetry and Narrative Role

Guerra says he has few friends and does not want Mexican friends, condemning Mexicans as rotten and including both the president and Subcomandante Marcos in his sweeping accusation. He imagines an attack on a city in Chiapas with a strong military garrison, followed by his own departure for Miami. The proposal extends the pattern established at Los Zancudos: political grievances become fantasies of destruction and escape, rather than a considered response to the conditions he denounces.

When Amalfitano changes the subject to music, Guerra names Vivaldi, Cimarosa, and Bach. Asked what he reads, he says he once read everything but now reads only poetry. He presents poetry as the one thing not contaminated by the game and says that only some poetry is good for people. This conviction offers a counterpoint to his cynicism: amid his claims that truth is inaccessible and society irredeemably corrupt, he reserves a narrow space for a form of expression he believes can remain uncorrupted. Guerra’s scenes with Amalfitano do not turn that belief into a solution. Instead, they make him a disturbing interpreter of Santa Teresa’s pressures—its growth, labor migration, institutional access, and violence—whose diagnosis is repeatedly entangled with his own aggression and privilege.