'You don't understand anything,' the narrator is told at the beginning of Neige Sinno's La Realidad. The narrator, Netcha, and her friend, Magda, try to reach La Realidad, the village in Chiapas, Mexico, where they hope to join an 'encuentro,' one of the legendary meetings often involving hundreds or thousands of people involved in the Zapatista movement, and perhaps even to meet the Zapatista leader, Subcomandante Marcos. On a later trip to Mexico, the two friends set up tables in each village square to collect the locals' stories of their dead and of their dreams, offering their homemade lentils in exchange. Netcha returns to Chiapas again to attend a Zapatista Escualita, or little school. In search of la realidad, Netcha instead finds ghosts. 'I hear the whispers of ghosts wandering like sleepwalkers through my head,' she says, among them Antonin Artaud, who in 1936 made an enigmatic journey to Mexico, and a character in J. M. G. Le Clezio's The Book of Flights who wanted 'to be a traveler without being an oppressor.' Ultimately La Realidad is a story about desire, both intimate and collective, for another possible world.
