Ghosts

Ghosts are the novel’s recurring image for how death, guilt, grief, and unresolved conflict remain active among the living. They are not presented simply as supernatural visitors: they return as memories, assumptions, stories, and demands for action. Around Art Keller, they make the human cost of the drug war impossible to exclude; around Adán Barrera, they turn an apparently quiet life into a reckoning with the people he has lost and the people harmed by his rise. The image culminates in a reversal when Nora Hayden, whom Adán believes dead, appears alive on a computer screen.

A crowded room

Art’s reckoning with the War on Drugs is framed as both absurd and bloody: the scale of its deaths makes the conflict seem at once farcical and tragic. The people who haunt him include those killed at El Sauzal and the dead associated with the Río Putumayo. They do not arrive as a neat sequence of memories; they accumulate, making the room feel crowded. The image gives emotional form to a burden that cannot be resolved by treating each killing as an isolated episode.

The scene turns from this crowded interior toward a window, where Art tries to get fresh air. Moonlight catches a rifle barrel. That concrete image places a present instrument of violence beside the unseen dead: the past is not sealed off from the danger of the present. The narrative does not explain the barrel or resolve its threat in this moment. Its appearance instead leaves the haunting unsettled, as if the violence that made the ghosts could still continue.

Adán’s divided haunting

Adán also lives with ghosts, but the first is his brother, Raúl Barrera. In public, the story surrounding Raúl has a protective force: many people believe Raúl carried out the El Sauzal massacre, and that reports of his death are a cover intended to keep him safe from the police. Fear of Raúl helps shield both Barrera brothers from action against them. In that public account, the ghost is almost a weapon, preserving the dead man’s power.

Adán’s private experience is different. He feels Raúl’s death as pain and directs his anger at Art Keller, whom he holds responsible for killing his brother. The belief that Raúl deserves vengeance keeps him from laying his brother’s ghost to rest. Grief therefore becomes an unfinished obligation: Adán’s response to the dead is not to withdraw from violence but to pursue Keller.

Nora becomes another ghost when Adán is told she has died. He initially refuses to believe the news, but is shown an obituary reporting that she died in a car accident while driving home from Ensenada. Her body, he is told, was returned to California for burial in a closed casket. Adán interprets the circumstances as evidence that Americans murdered her and identifies Keller as responsible. The account establishes what Adán believes, not the truth of the reported death. That distinction matters: the ghost is already shaping his anger before he knows what happened.

The life outside the songs

Adán’s daily routine seems orderly. He works at a computer, may have a beer and watch football or boxing, and sometimes sits on the lawn listening to guitars from the village. The songs celebrate exploits: Raúl, Adán’s ability to outwit the federales and the Yanquis, and the claim that he will never be caught. This public musical memory makes the brothers’ story sound heroic and complete.

The private dead expose what that version leaves out. When Adán lies down and closes his eyes, he sees Güero Méndez’s children falling onto rocks and hears their voices in the wind. He recognizes that no songs commemorate their deaths. The dead of El Sauzal also return, although they are absent from the village’s praise. The contrast is not simply between celebration and sadness: the songs preserve the legend of the powerful, while the haunting restores the victims whom that legend excludes.

Father Juan Parada comes to Adán most of all. His presence is described as a gentle chiding, but Adán decides that he cannot do anything about this ghost and must focus on what he can do. The thought turns grief and remorse toward a concrete purpose: killing Keller. In this sequence, the ghost does not deliver a new fact or offer a path to reconciliation. Its force lies in the moral pressure Adán feels and then redirects into revenge.

Estrangement and the screen

The ghost motif also touches Adán’s separation from his family. He communicates with his daughter Gloria only over the internet, which he considers the secure way to stay in contact. Their near-nightly chats and the pictures she sends maintain a connection, but the screen reduces her to electronic dots; he misses seeing and hearing her and blames Keller for the distance. A message from Lucía later reports that Gloria has suffered a stroke and is in Scripps Mercy Hospital. The prognosis is not hopeful, and Lucía may have to make a difficult decision. The passage does not report Gloria’s death, but the news makes the possibility of loss immediate within a life already organized around absence.

The computer that carries news and pictures also overturns Adán’s understanding of Nora. In a later confrontation, Art opens the computer and shows him a live feed: Nora is sitting in a chair, looking at a magazine and checking her watch. Adán looks at the image as if he were seeing a ghost. The scene confirms that Nora is alive, reversing the obituary and closed-casket story on which his belief rested. What had seemed to him a completed death is exposed as a deception or false conclusion, though the evidence here does not establish every circumstance behind it.

The reversal gives the motif a double meaning. Nora haunts Adán because he has accepted her as dead, but the image on the screen is not a spirit: it is a living person whose existence undermines the story he was given. Art uses the live image to confront Adán with the possibility that Nora may testify against him. The screen thus does more than connect separated people; it makes a hidden truth visible and converts Adán’s private haunting into a present challenge. Across the novel, ghosts preserve the claims of the dead and expose the cost of suppressing them, while Nora’s appearance shows how readily the living, too, can be turned into ghosts by an unverified story.