Black Leather Required

When you see the furniture, you pretty much know where you're headed: The rainswept neon night, the fallen-angel city, the trenchcoats and fedoras, big buglike vintage autos, femmes fatale, the cigarette smoke unreeling toward the ceiling, the half-empty bourbon bottle, the half-closed office of private investigation, the betrayals and the mournful darkside music — all of it iconography we have chosen, for better or worse, to shortform as hardboiled, or noir, or both. And that's it.

If you know in advance you're reading a hardboiled novel, the game holds few surprises for you. If you know you're watching a classic film noir, not only are the house odds against the anti-hero, but it's foregone that the Main Girl will die in the end, or dump him. And he'll have a conscience that's battered but clear. And most of his friends and allies will be dead. And on top of that, it'll be pissing down rain.

Same with superheros. As soon as the social misfit with the oddball powers or goofy Spandex costume shows up, it all becomes as predictable as a Godzilla sequel — a lot of stuff gets destroyed, whole crowds die en masse, the threat is allayed until the next sequel, and nothing ever really changes.

Sonambulo doesn't live in these worlds; he challenges them.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid," wrote Raymond Chandler, in "The Simple Art of Murder," speaking of detectives more than half a century ago. Chandler did not know he was writing the playbook for all the present-day pretenders to his throne, from the overrated best-selling xeroxes to the worthy descendants and inheritors, like Crumley, like Goodis, like Willeford. "He must be complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man." That's Sonambulo, which brings us to the topic of enmascarados.

The essence of the wrestling mask in the cultura de lucha libre is that the man beneath it could be anyone from a migrant worker to deposed royalty. (In fact, the distinctive oval shape of the eye-holes in El Santo's mask design was inspired by Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask, and the legend that the interior of the mask had been rusted out by decades of the tears from its captive king.) The masked man could, in short, be any member of the audience in walking street-life, which is why luchadors — heros and villains both — have a social status that transcends the mere playing of parts. As Chandler notes of his ideal detective, "He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

Outside of lucha libre, most of the time, references to guys in wrestling masks are played strictly for laughs, summoning this potent cultural image only to mock it. Not so, in Sonambulo's world. Attackers frequently deride him as "fat" or "old man," usually before getting their heads shoved up their asses. That's the price you pay for no respect. Per Chandler, "He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge."

Ah, but what about sex? Chandler had that covered, too: "He is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things." The women do not call Sonambulo "fat" or "old man." They look at him the way that siren on the splash page of "Mala Noche" regards him.

We know that, like Santo, Sonambulo had a glorious past, from hardcore Greco-Roman grappling to film shoots staffed with a bevy of bodacious bloodsucking beauties straight out of Las Vampiras. As enmascarado, he's central to the narrative, and solitary — that is, he doesn't have any masked buddies or allies that we know of. He walks the mean streets (or drives in one of a variety of luxurious rides) alone, and is accorded the automatic respect of bad guys and good guys alike, and nobody ever mentions that mask, just as they wouldn't if they were dealing with enforcers like Santo or Blue Demon or Mil Mascaras, whose vintage Sonambulo shares.

It's worth pointing out here that the Sonambulo saga plays out in modern-day real time, despite the post-World-War trappings. You have to look closely, but you'll see that seductive aspects of past decades have interleaved — Forties suits, Fifties car culture and science fiction, Seventies cult looniness; all side-by-side with drive-thru taco stands and ponytailed malefactors. Sonambulo's world is itself dreamlike, a fantasy potpourri in which dial phones and 500-channel cable can comfortably co-exist.

Sonambulo takes a bullet. It's the first thing we see happen to him, before we even get our first glorious, full-page look at his countenance. He packs an automatic (in a world otherwise armed with revolvers) but never shoots anybody. In combat, to Sonambulo, "old reliable" is a folding chair, the weapon of choice in the bloodiest ring battles. We do glimpse a brief flashback to a lucha match past, but Sonambulo, who has the arcane power to read the dreams of others, cannot dream himself, because ... well, that's getting ahead of the story, into the spoiler zone.

Maybe someday we'll get an idea of the circumstances that drove him away from the squared circle.

In a nice nod to Mike Hammer, creator Rafael Navarro has blessed Sonambulo with the ever-tolerant and always-available Xochti. She is his Velda, and if you don't know what that means, you really should be reading something else — about more guys in Spandex, maybe.

Okay, one Navarro story: It's the middle of the night and Raf is painting a velvet banner in a corner of my living room. He mentions a longterm jones for Linda Darnell (born Manetta Eloisa Darnell), especially her performance in a movie titled Fallen Angel (1945). I said, "I've got that right here; you want a copy?" And his whole face lit up.

And if yours just did, too, you're ready for what Sonambulo has to offer in these pages.

— DJS / May 2001

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