Truman Capote, New Orleans 1947
There’s something undeniably sexy about Capote’s expression in this photo, but it holds a pervasive, disturbing undertone. This is the same photo, taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that is on the back of the edition of In Cold Blood I read the summer I lived in Mexico City.
On Avenida Mazatlan, between my apartment and the Chapultapec metro stop, there was a small used book store. It was ramshackle, cramped, and filled with the crisp smell of aging paper—as a good used bookstore should be. I first stepped in during a Quixotic attempt to find an English-language copy of Infinite Jest for Infinite Summer. Naturally, while living abroad, I sought to broaden my horizons by staying indoors reading a massive novel set in the city I’d just left.
Though I never found IJ, I did find a small cache of carefully-curated English-language books that were all darkly related to living in Mexico or Central America: Bel Canto, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Old Man and the Sea, In Cold Blood.
The experience of reading Capote’s account of the unprompted slaughter of a Kansas family, and the trial of their remorseless killers was haunting. More than that, it was confusing and unsettling to someone who generally believes that all people are compassionate. It demonstrated, in a way I hadn’t before understood, the human capacity for pure violence, which was, I guess, a fitting lesson for that time and place.
