Juan Gómez Bárcena Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

You go to the window to watch the Neighbor leave. He’s accompanied by two men. They’re wearing hats pulled down tight over their ears and a sort of kerchief or scarf that leaves only their eyes exposed. But you recognize them anyway: you’ve seen them many times under this very window, carrying their portfolios and their leather briefcases. They look like they’re in a hurry, and the Neighbor is practically dragging his leg as he limps along. You watch them head down the street toward the river.

They disappear.

From the other side of the wall, the voice of the Girl again. She switches from world capitals to multiplication tables, where she seems more self-assured and more mechanical, and from there to the right and left tributaries of the Danube, and finally to a long ... Read More »]]>

Juan Gómez Bárcena
Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

You go to the window to watch the Neighbor leave. He’s accompanied by two men. They’re wearing hats pulled down tight over their ears and a sort of kerchief or scarf that leaves only their eyes exposed. But you recognize them anyway: you’ve seen them many times under this very window, carrying their portfolios and their leather briefcases. They look like they’re in a hurry, and the Neighbor is practically dragging his leg as he limps along. You watch them head down the street toward the river.

They disappear.

From the other side of the wall, the voice of the Girl again. She switches from world capitals to multiplication tables, where she seems more self-assured and more mechanical, and from there to the right and left tributaries of the Danube, and finally to a long recitation of Great Moments in the Labor Struggle. She rattles off the publication date of the Communist Manifesto. The martyrs of Chicago. The Odessa uprising. The Winter Palace. A pause, and in that pause, the sound of the door. Guadalajara. Stalingrad. Berlin. The Korean War. Another sound, this time in the hall. It’s the Wife. You’d recognize the tapping of her heels anywhere. She stops on the other side of the door, as if she were about to come in. But why would she, when you’ve still got water, and food, and cigarettes, and the bucket almost untouched—there’s still a while to go before another of those endless days finally comes to an end. That’s when you hear the Girl stop reciting. Or, rather, you stop hearing her, because the sound of water has filled everything. The water, again, lapping at the cold, white surface. The Wife’s sigh. Her clothing coming loose, garment by garment, almost reluctantly, in pauses pervaded by steam and tile. Her bare feet padding toward the water. You hear it all with a new, almost terrifying precision that soars above the sounds issuing from the other side of the window. You realize that the bathroom door must be open. And why wouldn’t it be, since yours is, as usual, closed? You press your ear to the wood to confirm that the Wife has started her bath—her heels ring on the ceramic for a moment, her hands gripping the edges of the tub with a noise like a cephalopod sucker or an amphibian. And then, just as you’re about to hear the rest, all the damp and heat of her body, the voices start. A rising chant. Fevered cheering that seems to come from across the river, with whistles, clapping, and shouts of approval. You attempt to unplait the voices that arrive woven into a uniform murmur, waves that surge and ebb. Voices calling for resignations, voices calling for calm, voices calling for international assistance, voices calling for weapons. They all want the same thing: a country free of Russians and a Russia free of Soviets. That’s what they repeat in a frenzied ovation, and there are so many mouths, and they are shouting so loudly in all directions, that you have no doubt they’ll achieve their aim. Underneath the repeated words, you hear many others that do not repeat. You hear a little boy whose molars are aching. You hear a taxi driver who is honking his horn and the crowd that isn’t moving aside. You hear a dozen radio broadcasts reporting live in different languages and one that is stubbornly repeating the same military fanfare. You hear the ripping sound of a pair of hands tearing up a Party membership card and the swish of scissors slicing through a flag’s hammer and sickle. You hear a soldier loading his weapon. You hear the rustle of a man taking advantage of the crush of the crowd to brush his lover’s waist. You hear seventeen lighters lighting seventeen cigarettes in different spots around Bem Square. You hear one voice that’s cursing God and nine others praying to Him. You hear the poems that a student is reading from a rooftop or a dais. You hear an agent of the secret police who’s asking if it’s time to intervene yet and his sergeant who doesn’t answer or answers with a gesture. You can hear everything. Everything but the Wife’s body. And so you’ve reached out your hand to grasp the door handle, the door handle that seemed all this time like it would burn you but doesn’t.

You open the door.

And then there she is. First her hand, resting on the edge of the tub. A hand that from time to time moves, seems to vibrate, maybe trembles.

A hand shaken by the touch of a thought or a nightmare. The hair loose, tumbling softly. The motionless profile of her face. The closed eyes. You look at those eyes and realize she’s crying. Crying soundlessly. And it’s strange, maybe even impossible, because though you seem to hear the fragile breeze of her respiration, even hear her pulse, muffled through the water, you cannot make out her weeping. Maybe she’s not crying. How could you even discern her tears from here? You see her crying because you think she should be crying. Maybe she’s simply taking a bath, while out on the street everybody is shouting and demanding things you don’t understand.

Slowly she rises from the water, suddenly presenting you with the sight of her naked body. She offers herself to you as if glimpsed through the fog of a dream. A heat spreading through the steam and the hallway: the warmth of her body. And then, when you see her, you suddenly realize that the Wife is no longer the Wife. She’s not that girl who once opened the door to you. She is a woman. A woman who’s gotten her first wrinkles and maybe even her first gray hairs. A woman who is afraid. A woman who cries or who perhaps does not cry. Who has needed all those trays, all those newspapers, that endless ferrying of buckets, to become what she is now. Because you never looked at her—at least not till this moment. You accepted her mugs, her bowls, her basins of water, but you didn’t look at her. You saw her fossilized smile, a smile made of fatigue and time. And now yes, you look at her, now you see her as the woman she’s become, and you even seem to see the man you’ve become. A succession of images and thoughts that flit past in the time it takes for her to reach out her hand and grab the towel. The instant between that movement and the insignificant movement of lifting her face to look at you. Suddenly, her gaze.

And with that gaze, no movement at all. The Wife bears up under the weight of your eyes, her face utterly motionless. As if all her focus were on the other movements: wrapping the towel around herself, drying her hair, shaking first one foot and then the other. She looks at you for a period that seems neither long nor short but simply incomprehensible, almost mineral, like the passing of geological eras. And her gaze, too, seems to be made of stone, looking at you without seeing, without expression, without judgment, and even so it still doesn’t shift away, it remains fixed on you while she dresses slowly, while she adjusts her bra unhurriedly, untrembling, while she pulls up her skirt and almost blindly her hands gather up the garments scattered across the floor. She looks at you as if you were the one made of stone. Perhaps with a hint of curiosity, of the sort aroused by a mute’s first spoken word, even if it is an unforgivable curse or insult that is forgiven all the same. That is how she looks at you during this instant that doesn’t last, this during in which time runs aground, and which nevertheless comes to an end—she slips on her other shoe, turns out the light, and moves off down the hallway without looking back, as if you didn’t exist or as if it were only now that you had begun to exist.

She disappears. And yet she is still there before you, still standing and still naked in the empty bathroom. She is young again. Five, ten, maybe even fifteen years ago. You see her just as she was when you first arrived at the house—though you feel as if no time had gone by, as if that first day had never ended. She is still naked, but she’s no longer standing in the bathroom door. The door isn’t even there yet. Only the steam from the tub or something akin to the steam from the tub remains, plumes of mist rising from the frozen earth. And she is lying on the snow. She is naked and she is also, most certainly, dead. You picture her like that, eternalized in the act of opening her mouth, fossilized by the frost. She’s not alone. All around her are other bodies, women who are naked and dead like her, heaped up on the snow. Suddenly, a sound. A cart approaches, rocking back and forth: two men in prison uniforms are laboriously pushing it. They stop, glance at each other, and walk over to the first body, leaning on their walking sticks. Rising from their mouths is the heat of their breathing, in quick puffs that dissipate in the air. They bend over and start lifting the corpses. Except they’re not corpses—that’s what they’ve been taught. You have to call them shit, dolls, garbage, scarecrows. If anyone messes up and says the word deceased, the word victim, the soldiers flog him with their whips. So that’s what they’re doing now: picking up scarecrows. Later they’ll drink a dish of mud and call it water; they’ll chew a patty of black clay and call it bread. Because they’ve learned that surviving means, above all, knowing the right name for things. They know, for example, that organizing a shirt means stealing it; that you should avoid the prisoners with a green triangle sewn on their uniform but that the ones with a pink triangle or a yellow star are easy to take advantage of; that being chosen in the selections means becoming a scarecrow yourself; that you have to sleep on top of your bowl and spoon to keep others from organizing them in the night; that working in the Kanada section extends your life and shoveling coal shortens it. What they’re doing now has a name too. It’s called cleaning the field, and you have to do it quickly, before the kapo comes over. They’ve also been around long enough to learn the word kapo.

The prisoners—because wearing a striped uniform means being a prisoner, in this language and in every language on earth—start dragging the garbage toward the cart. Each of them takes his own load, just as the soldiers have taught them: all they have to do is place the handle of their walking stick under the chin—the chin of a scarecrow—and pull, pull hard. The heels cut shallow furrows in the snow, which sometimes becomes tinged pink. The dolls seem faintly blue when they’re still lying on the snow, and white when they load them one by one onto the cart. They do it carefully, with something that is akin to consideration or respect, or that maybe is just exhaustion. Five, ten, twelve, twenty scarecrows arranged the way you pile up railroad ties: one going one direction and the next going the other way. Making the most of the space. Those men know what they’re doing, and the cargo seems infinitely light in their hands—forty, maybe thirty-five kilos each. As if they really were stuffed with straw. It’s not a lovely sight: the dolls are broken and dirty, and the men try not to look at them. There’s one that looks like an old woman—with coarse, wrinkled skin—and another that looks like a little girl and a third that’s pregnant like a Russian matryoshka, and also a doll that seems to be missing pieces or to have extras: blotches like dried blood gleam against her white skin. They’re all ugly. They’re all smeared with crusts of mire and ice and have shaved heads. The men lift them as quickly as they can, and when they hoist them into the air, the emaciated arms dangle heavily, slack as a disjointed marionette.

Only the Wife’s body seems unblemished. Only hers seems, in fact, like a body, and one of the prisoners stops short just as it’s her turn. She has her head shaved too and is glowing like plaster, but she doesn’t look like a doll. She is a woman. A beautiful woman, in that contradictory and unbearable way that a corpse can be beautiful. She looks like an actress, a model, a ballerina, with long, sculpted legs hanging in the air: a young bride delivered into her groom’s arms, and the groom hesitating to step over the threshold. Her body is fleshy, inviting, with no cuts on the feet or splatters of mud. Against her white skin, only her nipples stand out, quite red and quite hard, like berries shining in the frost. Seeing her up close, it turns out she’s not the Wife. She can’t be, of course, but even so it’s easy to confuse them. You could say she is the Wife if time were able to run backward. The Wife if, rather than taking a bath, she’d instead expired in the snow. She doesn’t seem to have worn wooden clogs either, or wielded a shovel, or endured a single lash on her back. She’s simply dead, and the prisoner, still hesitant, lifts her into the air. Maybe he thinks she’s too pretty to be a doll, a piece of garbage, a scarecrow. Maybe he’s calculating whether he can load her on top of the others or if doing so will cause the pile to collapse. His uncertainty is almost touching. And she is practically a girl still, with unmarred hands made for embroidering tablecloths or grasping fountain pens. She was young and beautiful in some very distant place, in Greece or Norway, in Spain or Yugoslavia, in France or Russia or Italy, and now there she is, nestled in a stranger’s arms, as if waiting to continue her journey. She must have been a virgin still. And it’s inevitable to imagine the immense effort it required to care for and feed that body for so many years, all her life covering it in dresses and blankets, nightgowns, skirts, stockings, shawls, garters, bracelets, underskirts; warm baths in the tub and Sundays with rouge and perfume. Her mother wrapping her daughter day after day like a gift so that one day she’d find a good husband who’d unhook the clasp of her bra, like a boy tugging on a piñata’s rope. And later discovering that the only thing men wanted was to take her from her village—and maybe that was her very first journey—and pile her into a too-small cart the way you pile logs. Hers is a story that cannot be told, that must not be told, because it ceases to make sense. How could they understand it, those anonymous boys who became men while dreaming of undressing her with their hands, who hid one night below her window to peer in at her in the darkness and catch a glimpse of a breast, a thigh, an ankle, any minuscule portion of her flesh laid bare. Now she’s there, held indifferently aloft, with the secret of her beauty revealed at last and ultimately useless. That nakedness preserved for so long for nobody, now transformed into garbage that everyone avoids looking at or touching. A useless thing that only perplexes the prisoner, who’s wondering whether to pack the cart a little tighter or make a second trip. He, too, is very young. Sixteen, at most seventeen years old, weighing forty-five or a maximum of fifty kilos. Perhaps he, too, is a virgin. This could be the first time he’s touched a naked woman. Maybe he feels disgust or maybe he’s aroused—who knows. Because it’s the first time he’s touched a naked woman, and maybe it’s also the first time he’s touched a dead body. Or maybe he isn’t thinking, isn’t feeling anything. A moment of hesitation, and then a sudden decision: they’ve got to fit in the cart, all twenty-three of them. Let’s cram them in as best we can, or the kapo will punish us for the delay.

Image: “Bricks, Budapest” by Marina Salles

Carlos Gamerro 

They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same clothes and cloak etc. between them.

—John Aubrey, Brief Lives

ONE 

October to November 1612

Letter from John Fletcher to Francis Beaumont, 31st October 1612.

My dear Damon,

I began work on our Cardenio yesterday with Will, or rather on Will with Cardenio, for I was forced to play the peddler and urge its many virtues and beauties, all but begging him to help me write it: to this state your desertion has brought me. The going was not easy, and he is far from won over yet. The story we so often read to one another with such delight and so dreamed of bringing on the ... Read More »]]>

Carlos Gamerro 

They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same clothes and cloak etc. between them.

—John Aubrey, Brief Lives

ONE 

October to November 1612

Letter from John Fletcher to Francis Beaumont, 31st October 1612.

My dear Damon,

I began work on our Cardenio yesterday with Will, or rather on Will with Cardenio, for I was forced to play the peddler and urge its many virtues and beauties, all but begging him to help me write it: to this state your desertion has brought me. The going was not easy, and he is far from won over yet. The story we so often read to one another with such delight and so dreamed of bringing on the stage, he took as a wary patient will a bitter pill: not to swallow, but to keep in the corner of his mouth, and spit out as soon as the doctor’s back is turned.

We sat in the poet’s nook, chilled to the bone, but the fire was out; darkling, yet no candles were lit; parched, and not a drop to drink; truly it had been a miracle if aught in our imaginations had kindled in a habitation so sober, sombre, and chill. Upon my suggestion we removed to our club-room at the Mermaid, where we warmed our bones by a sea-coal fire aided by two beer-glasses of sack, and talked of friends departed (mainly you, and Ben) and friends dead (mainly Will’s). Master Will Johnson sends his best regards and asks when will you be back with your pots of gold. ’Tis not easy, this having to begin anew; like lying down a scholar and waking up a schoolboy. It took me back to our Philaster days, nay, further back: for I find it hard to think there ever was a time when we two were twain.

But O what remedy. The Winter season is nigh, the Globe will soon close his doors, the Blackfriars open his, you have your wooing to do and your own masque to devise, and I have one more play to complete, which I cannot write on my own. I asked Jack about the contract: he said that as long as the play is ready for the Christmas season, he does not mind if I write it with my dog. I wish we owned one, for I believe his naked paw should prove more instrumental to the task than our friend’s empty glove. I fear me Dick is right: he seems to have lost all his fire for writing, as if his last had gone into the engendering of Caliban and his brood.

But this present burden, which I’ll gladly carry for your sake, dear friend, may prove a benefit in the long run. For who do you think will take his place, when he be gone? Dick loves Ben’s plays, but the bear himself he’ll keep at bay—particularly since Ben tried to school him in the speaking of his verse. Occasion must be seized by the forelock. So what do you say? Shall Olympus by Pelion piled on Ossa be overtopped? What would you rather inherit, a few acres in Kent or the roundness of the Globe?

Joanie bids you be wary of chills, draughts, and wetness, whether from downpours or drabs. She has been much given to moping lately. Yesterday she broke another cup, the one we liked to think of as yours. There will be a new one awaiting your much longed-for return.

Your (fleetingly) faithless shepherd,

Pythias

Conversation between John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Blackfriars Theatre, London, 30th October 1612.

JF: They find him in the bowels of the mountain, thick-bearded, bare-headed, and exceedingly toasted by the sun. A wild man, leaping barefoot from rock to rock, as nimble as a goat and in apparel all torn: but his rags are holland and his tatters velvet and lace. By this they imagine him to be the owner of the dead mule and the rotting portmanteau they found in the ravine. They learn from some local mountaineers that he arrived some six months ago, demanded of them which was the most secret and inaccessible part of the mountain, and has dwelt therein ever since, spending his days in the roaming of the forests and the procurement of bread when he has his wits about him; in the tearing of his hair and the cursing of his fate when he does not. His meat he sometimes begs of the mountaineers with humble and courteous speech, and receives with tears of gratitude; but when he is taken with his fit of madness he will snatch it with curses and thank it with blows. When the knight and his squire finally come upon him he is in one of his meeker, yet not untroubled, moods, for he approaches with much biting of his lips and bending of his brows, muttering to himself and fixing his eyes on the ground. After eating of what Sancho and his master offer, he agrees to tell his story. His name, he tells them, is Cardenio; his place of birth, one of the finest cities of Andalusia; his lineage noble, his parents rich, and his misfortunes so great as neither birthplace, cradle, nor wealth . . .

WS: Spare me, Jack.

JF: I’m sorry. To be brief, then, this Cardenio loves a maid called Lucinda, has loved her since early childhood, she loves him back and is willing to marry him, they are both equally noble and rich, they have secured her father’s consent . . .

WS: So? What stands in the way of their perfect happiness then?

JF: A trifle merely. The girl’s father would have the suit directly breathed to him; by the lad’s father, that is. This condition seeming entirely reasonable and appropriate—Cardenio sets off toward his father’s rooms full of courage and resolve—which presently begin to drain from him, and drop apace, as if the very earth were sucking the blood from his legs. He knows not why, but he fears that his father’s consent, freely offered when unsought, will be, upon the asking, promptly withdrawn; that he will object, if not to the match itself, to the manner, or the occasion, or the wording of the request; the which his mind feverishly begins to rehearse, answering objections yet unborn and parrying the thrust of unsheathed swords. He will be made an object of scorn, and mocked out of his suit, thus: Consent? Why certainly, boy. If you have her consent, why would I deny you mine? I can give as freely as she. My only scruple, dear son, is this: having secured her consent, how, pray, shall you sequester it from the rest of the world? For thou must needs consent that whosoever shall consent to thee will consent to any other as well.

WS: Jack . . .

JF: Yes?

WS: You’ve been writing already.

JF: Well, you know, a line here and there. When they come of their own accord . . .

WS: So why not keep going?

JF: Will, dear Will, sweet Will, you know I don’t like working on my own. I tried it but once, and you saw the result.

WS:I didn’t, but I heard about it. How about The Tamer Tamed? I thought Frank had no hand in it.

JF: We rough-hewed it out between the two. But the actual writing fell to me, yes.

WS: No wonder it was any good. And how goes his new venture? Found he his perfect little heiress yet?

JF: He did. Far from perfect, he says, but better than writing for the stage.

WS: I can see his point. The question still remains, why me? I am not one for this twinned writing, as you might know from Tom.

JF: Who, Kyd? I’ve seen his Spanish Tragedy. Was your hand in it?

WS: No. That was Ben. He added some stuff, and probably scanned the whole for faulty lines. Ha! Tom Kyd, that was a one-hit wonder if I ever saw one. Hieronimo, go by, go by! No, I meant Tom Middleton. We worked together on Timon. So to speak. He’s fast, and needs the money.

JF: He needs it too much.

WS: True. Surfeit makes your poet slothful and hunger makes him overhasty. The happy mean is in slender but sufficient means. What about Jack Webster? Or Ben?

JF: Ben. You want me to write with Ben. I’d rather be yoked head to tail with an angry bull. Or lie in bed with the fretful porpentine.

WS: You’ve had stranger bedfellows.

JF: Now don’t you get started. Go to, Will, you know I’ve always wanted to do this with you.

WS: Not when Frank was around.

JF: That’s different.

WS: In what way?

JF: In as many as you can fancy and I not tell.

WS: Very well then, perhaps there is something you can tell.

JF: That being?

WS: Did Dick send you?

JF: To what end?

WS: You know. Good old Will’s lamp is spent. We must pour some fresh oil into his veins. New ink for old.

JF: Will . . .

WS: His pen will not rise to the occasion. We’ve a shotten playwright on our hands.

JF: You do me wrong, Will.

WS: You’re not answering my question.

JF: ’Tis I will reap the fruits of this our joint labour, I well know that. I know you don’t need me, Will. But I need you. Of course I didn’t when I had Francis. I’ll freely grant you that. But I don’t have him now. Help me out this once and I promise I’ll not trouble you again.

WS: So?

JF: So what?

WS: So what did his father say?

JF: Whose father?

WS: The what’s-his-name. The lad’s. Does he have a name?

JF: Cardenio.

WS: I mean the father.

JF: Not in the book. I thought we might call him Camillo. O, but you’ve used that, or do I mistake? Where was it?

WS: The Winter’s Tale.

JF: To be sure. Of course we can change it if you don’t want to repeat yourself.

WS: Let me warn you, Jack. I’m far from won yet.

JF: But you will be, as soon as you hear the rest. It’s an amazing book, Will. You should read it yourself. Ben has a copy in his library.

WS: He gave you a free pass, did he? Lucky you.

JF: It was Francis wrenched it from him. ’Twas not easy.

WS: Thanks for the offer, Jack, but I have not your Spanish.

JF: O no, before sailing for France he purchased the translation, you know, the one by Thomas Shelton, newly published by Blount.

WS: Who is this Shelton, by the way? Irish, is he?

JF: All too Irish. His brother was hanged for a traitor in one of the Tyrone rebellions, I forget which. He fled to Spain, and studied there. Ben claims to have met him in the Low Countries, says he plies both sides. But you know Ben. Shall I fetch you his copy then?

WS: Not for the moment, thank you. I’d rather hear it from your lips. Let’s get back to the lad and his father then. Was it as bad as he anticipated?

JF: Worse. For Cardenio finds him standing, holding a letter, the which he hands to him. This letter is from the Duke of those parts, and bids Cardenio presently repair to his court, that he might be companion to the Duke’s elder son. Dumbstruck and confounded he takes his leave: he well knows that he can as little oppose his father’s will as his father can the Duke’s; and even had he the courage, how would he be granted his suit, after refusing his father’s, and the Duke’s? Sorely troubled with such thoughts, he repairs to his beloved’s. Here I see a pretty parting scene. I was thinking we could place her on the upper stage and have Cardenio climb up to the balcony . . .

WS: I may have seen it done before.

JF: Where?

WS: A forgotten play. Romeo and Juliet, by one William Shakespeare.

JF: Yes, I seem to remember it. Let them meet on the main stage then, where we’ll have us many tears, oaths, and protestations, much kissing and holding of hands through cruel iron grates, and off he goes. Next scene, he is at the Duke’s. But, surprise! It is not the elder but the younger son of the Duke, Don Fernando, who takes to him, and soon they are the closest of friends.

WS: How close?

JF: Close enough to have no secrets: at least on Don Fernando’s side, for by the sacred laws of amity he holds it not lawful to keep anything concealed from his friend. Cardenio agrees, in so far as it comes to lending ear. When it comes to giving tongue, he’s more remiss.

WS: A lad most prudent.

JF: This being his idea of frankness between friends, when one is vassal and the other lord—a narrow street at best, that allows traffic to go but one way. He thus learns that Don Fernando is in love with a very beautiful, discreet, and honest country wench, of parents low in birth but in fortunes wondrous rich.

WS: Always a good combination.

JF: He woos her with all the enticements that wit and lust together can devise, but seeing that none will persuade her to surrender her fortified castle, at last he resolves to ask her hand in marriage. Cardenio does his utmost to dissuade him, but seeing all his entreaties fall on deaf ears, he determines to acquaint the Duke with his son’s purpose.

WS: Some friend.

JF: He’s a lad will stand in awe of authority, ’twould seem. Anyway, Don Fernando prevents this by suggesting they repair to Cardenio’s city, telling his father it is to see and price certain horses, and his friend that he is determined to follow his counsel and forget the wench. In this, at least, he did but speak the truth.

WS: Meaning?

JF: He had already enjoyed her.

WS: I’m beginning to like him. Why not make him the hero of the piece?

JF: Is that an offer?

WS: More like a thought.

JF: It sounded like an offer to me.

WS: When I’m making one, I promise you’ll be the first to know.

JF: Thanks. Vouchsafe me the lighting of this match. Will you have any?

WS: I’m no great lover of tobacco, as you well know.

JF: This is your right Trinidado, it beats your Sancto Domingo and your Nicotian any day of the week.

WS: Very good for choking a man and filling him with soot, I’m sure. Pray proceed.

JF: Cardenio is of course delighted, as this not only offers him a way out of his perplexity but allows him speedy passage back to his beloved. So overjoyed is he, that on the way, and following that very same law of friendship that Don Fernando had previously invoked, he tells him all about his love for Lucinda, dilating on her beauty, wit, and discretion, thereby stirring in Don Fernando a great desire to view a damsel so richly endowed.

WS: I think I begin to see where this is going.

JF: By the light of yond same candle you will.

WS: And what candle might that be?

JF: The same one Cardenio, at his friend’s entreaty, holds to Lucinda’s figure and face, while they converse together at their usual window and Don Fernando, a silent witness to their tryst, hides in her garden and gapes, ravished and beside himself. Henceforward he will let no moment pass without making some mention of Lucinda, begs of Cardenio that he should let him read all missives passing between them, and will not suffer the two lovers to meet unless he be privy to their every word and deed. Perusing one of their letters, Don Fernando learns that Cardenio has not yet secured his father’s consent, and offers to speak for him; to the which offer Cardenio readily consents, near to weeping with joy and relief; so, when Don Fernando asks him to repair to the Duke his father’s to obtain some money for the horses he means to purchase, he is filled with joy at being able to repay with so small a favour his friend’s great boon. Back at the Duke’s, Don Fernando’s elder brother bids Cardenio wait at court until the brother can raise the money for the horses, and still he will obey, and still will not suspect, until, on the fourth or fifth day, a man from his city arrives at the door of his chamber, bearing a letter endorsed in a hand he knows all too well, and it is with badly shaking fingers that he manages to open the letter and discover what the whole playhouse, save himself, has guessed by now: as soon as Cardenio was out of the way, Don Fernando approached Lucinda’s father and demanded the maiden for his wife; and the good man had agreed to his demand, in so good earnest that the wedding was to take place before two days. At this, Cardenio feels entitled to depart without requesting the brother’s permission—

WS: How very daring of him. The mouse has sprouted a lion’s mane.

JF: —and, riding like the wind, he arrives at his own city in time to find Lucinda in her wedding weeds, sitting behind their wonted iron grate. She weeps for joy, for her greatest fear was, she says, to depart this world without ever seeing him again. When he asks her what she means by this, she shows him a poniard she carries about her with which, should all her reasons and persuasions fail, she will, by taking her own life, put an end to Don Fernando’s intent. Then she is called away: the bridegroom awaits. Cardenio manages to steal into the house unseen, and, concealing himself behind a piece of tapestry, he makes ready to be witness to either her treachery or her faith. He watches Don Fernando strut into the hall, in his best array; and then Lucinda walks in, richly decked in carnation and white. Never before had she seemed more beautiful to him than now that he is about to lose her to one of his two rivals, his treacherous friend or death.

WS: And he is actually hoping she will stab herself.

JF: It would seem so.

WS: Interesting. And does she?

JF: He closes his eyes for a second and can actually see, vividly, the swift flash of her blade, her silent collapse into the folds of her crumpled dress. So when he hears her dismayed and languishing “I will,” he at first thinks his ears have deceived him, as well as the eyes that open to see Don Fernando slide onto her willing finger the golden ring. At this she falls, as if struck by a bolt from heaven, and when somebody, let it be her father, or some nurse, unclasps her bosom, out falls a folded paper which Don Fernando seizes on and reads, seemingly indifferent to his wife’s fate. Taking advantage of the uproar, Cardenio adventures to steal away, bearing the resolution, if he were perceived, to do such things as all the world should understand the just indignation of his breast.

WS: Of course he would. Too bad his chance always seems to slip away.

JF: Away he goes, unseen and unheard, recovers his mule, rides out of the city, and travels all night. By dawn he reaches the mountains, through which he travels at random for three days, until his mule falls dead under him, to rid itself, he believes, of so vile and unprofitable a burden as he. And in such solitudes he has dwelt ever since. The shepherds that feed their flocks in the mountains, moved by charity, provide his sustenance and musical accompaniment to his sonnets and songs, which he either sings in a plaintive voice or engraves on the rinds of trees—

WS: Tarry a little. Did I hear rightly? Flocks? Shepherds? Sonnets? You are not thinking of writing another pastoral, are you, Jack?

JF: I would not call it a pastoral, not exactly—

WS: I’m out.

JF: Will, listen, it’s just a couple of scenes—one.

WS: No, you listen to me. And look at me. In the eye. No more sonneteering shepherds, or shepherdesses, faithful or otherwise. No more sheep. Not even a strand of wool.

JF: This by the man who wrote that wonderful scene with Perdita, Autolycus, and—

WS: That’s just it. That was a pastoral scene to end all pastoral scenes. Well, at least it was longer than most—except, of course, whole pastoral plays like yours. When I managed to put an end to it I swore, on my mother’s grave, and on my father’s, and on my brothers’—

JF: I’ll tell you what. I’ll do them.

WS: Jack, why do this to yourself?

JF: I know not what you mean.

WS: Who’s going to write the commendatory verses this time? Ben is away, and Frank appears to have other concerns, and it would not look good if I did, being second father to the piece—that, if you manage to talk me into it, your prospects not appearing to be the best since the bleating began.

Ed Thompson: Master Shakespeare . . .

WS: What now?

Ed Thompson: The players are ready, sir.

WS: What is it to me? It was Dick’s turn today. Is he not here?

Ed Thompson. No, sir.

WS: Why, a pox on him! Where is he?

Ed Thompson: I don’t know, sir.

WS: Jack, let me sort this out, and as soon as I do, let us away from here, somewhere far where I can least be found when I am needed most.

* *

Cardenio, which centers on Shakespeare’s mythical lost work, was written originally in English and then translated into Spanish by the author. The novel was published in 2016 by Editorial Edhasa.

* *

Image: Jorge Macchi, “The Speakers Corner”

Gabriela Poma

The sleeping pills had finally worn off.

Her left eye opened, a slit, and she remembered to breathe.

Yo no entiendo nada de esto.

The world seemed on its side, wrong, as she viewed it then.  Everything around her was new and nothing really belonged to her and, yet, she had to make it all familiar.

She scanned the room—

a recliner next to the window, the television still on, the armoire, two lamps, the ordinary bedding, the awful green carpet, the silver-streaked wallpaper with silhouettes of sleek bamboo shafts.

She had taken an inventory of all the things in the bedroom and repeated the order back to herself over and over again.  Then, she noticed her rings scattered like rolled dice on one of the bedside tables.  It was all there they way she’d left it the night before.

Her eyes ... Read More »]]>  

Gabriela Poma

The sleeping pills had finally worn off.

Her left eye opened, a slit, and she remembered to breathe.

Yo no entiendo nada de esto.

The world seemed on its side, wrong, as she viewed it then.  Everything around her was new and nothing really belonged to her and, yet, she had to make it all familiar.

She scanned the room—

a recliner next to the window, the television still on, the armoire, two lamps, the ordinary bedding, the awful green carpet, the silver-streaked wallpaper with silhouettes of sleek bamboo shafts.

She had taken an inventory of all the things in the bedroom and repeated the order back to herself over and over again.  Then, she noticed her rings scattered like rolled dice on one of the bedside tables.  It was all there they way she’d left it the night before.

Her eyes finally settled on particles of dust slowly descending from the curtain rails, glistening in the sunlight.

How to face the day, this first day of a new life.

She kept the weekend bag next to the bed, just as she’d kept it next to their bed back home.  It was packed with a change of clothes, a shawl, a bottle of Fidji, some toiletries, the essentials.  It reminded her of the place she’d just left, where she’d waited for news of his release, ready with that bag to leave in an instant, to get him to safety, to nurse him back to health, so that life could continue to be as it was meant to be.

But this was the first day of a new life, and she was alone in a strange place, Florida, with two small children.

She thought of the last note her father-in-law had received from him, and which she had memorized, dated January 25.

Querido papá,

La letra me sale bastante mal porque tengo la mano dormida. Como deseo
que esta nota te llegue hoy la haré breve.  He recibido muy buen trato aunque ya
deseo estar en casa.  Espero que todas las negociaciones vayan viento en popa.
Abrazos cariñosos para todos y para Lucía y mis hijos mil besos.

Roberto

She remembered to breathe again and lifted herself up from the crisp, foreign bedding that held her. She decided to begin.

They kept saying that he had left a wife and two children, a boy and a girl, and oh, what a pity! So young and full of promise.
What would become of them now? 


They would spend their lives looking for a reference.

There was that photograph taken by the press, of the young wife leading her children down the front steps of their house to an idling car. She was pony-tailed and wearing that navy blouse with the pointed collar, a long denim skirt, tall wedges on her manicured feet, no sleep, no make-up, so young, still beautiful, looking down.

The children, too, were looking down, their heads heavy with their honeyed hair, straw- like, just like their mother, in a stupor, eyes creased because of the sun.

Everything in that photograph is pointing down: the eyes, the hair, the mouths, their shoulders, their silence, their hearts closing up slowly, and then tight. Tightly shut and as if recoiled, sealed.

Leave them alone.

Leave them alone forever, the image seems to say.

Their mother smoked long cigarettes.

She’d stare out through the wall of the kitchen into the den, into the dining room, into her bedroom, between the hallway bookshelves, into the bathroom next to the children’s bedrooms, through the window and out into the yard, through the hibiscus bushes, the fence, the neighbor’s pool, around the chimney on the neighbor’s roof and into the vast, open sky.

She’d stare into her thoughts with her large wintry eyes, in silence, one leg crossing the other, kicking out, moving the stale air in the kitchen of their new home, far from the initial apartment where they’d first landed, this constant ticking of impatience and fear, with her feet marking time.

She still waited for something to change, for a phone call, for an end to all of this, for some repose, for permission to go home to the way things were, for a reservation to be made, for a winning number, for the magic wand.

For someone to take care of it!

Y quién soy ahora?

 Was she a widow, a wife? In her mind, she was still married.

The three of them sat around the wooden dining table, eating slowly and in morsels, speaking fragments of sentences, the girl usually silent, the boy nurturing a nascent violence.

Steam would rise up from the teakettle, like the fog in Panchimalco, where they had played and looked for each other as part of a game, pretending to be lost.

To distract themselves, while they waited for news of their father, they would leave San Salvador and go to La Libertad.

At night, the garden by the sea would be full of fireflies.

The children would chase and catch the fireflies with gentle claps and place them in old glass jars with holes on their tin tops. They would try to read by the light of the makeshift lamps, then tell each other made-up stories as the light of dying insects began to fade.

The ocean air was thick with salt and stung their eyes, the salt crusting on their cheeks and arms. The children would make their way to the pool, peeling the paper-like bark of the jiote trees, carefully stepping over any dormant ant hills.

There they stood, together, having reached the best-lit section of the grounds, and they’d let themselves glow beneath the moon and splashes of stars.

The toads suddenly croaked and, fittingly, the children feared their milky poison.

The ocean was strange, what it provoked.

They were easily confused by so much mystery, and they longed for morning, when they thought they had seen him again there, appearing in the thorny patches of grass and amidst the plague of butterflies, or there!

diving

into the stillness of the pool,

or

lying in a hammock,

reading thick books.

They were always going away, the mother and the children, to wait for him somewhere else.

Or so it seemed.

To visit her relatives in Managua.

To a farm for a couple of days.

To a friend’s house in Panchimalco for the weekend, the children playing in the thick fog that rolled from the sides of the volcano, in slow,

deep

breaths.

And then, one day, they went away for good.

Their mother got help to pack everything in the house they had rented while their father was still alive.

They gave their dog away and sent their cuyo to the local zoo. Doors shut, the pool was drained, the curtains drawn, key chains rattled and locks bolted, books were taken down from shelves and put in labeled boxes, their father’s clothing was distributed among various charities.

Certain things were kept and stored in a room: the sports jerseys and the polo mallets, old love letters to their mother carefully separated into tidy bundles tied with ribbons and folded neatly into plastic bags, photographs and trophies, school notebooks with his early penmanship, his shoes, the architectural renderings of the house they had planned to build, a California ranch-style house with bedrooms for more children and a great clearing.

The house would have been next to his brother’s, on a quiet, dimly-lit hill that, at night, rolls towards the bright lights of the sprawling city.

When she wasn’t being quiet, the girl wrote poetry. Innocent haikus about birds in flight and hot-air balloons over faraway prairies.

Always about leaving.

She wrote a short story about time travel that won first prize at the local fair.

Did anyone notice?

How could it be that this child felt so young and so old at once?

And how was it that, when she stood still, she felt the totality of her small life envelop her. The weight of it would wear out her tiny bones, her side would ache with longing, even her ribcage felt the inadequacy of her breathing,

as if it were detached from the rest of her body,

as if it had a life of its own.

While their father was still alive, they escaped the city every weekend and drove west on a narrow, trafficked road that emptied as it widened out and approached the coast.

The road would be level, then suddenly point up, wrapping itself around orange-colored hills that had been carved out of mountains to create these paths- dangerously slim corridors running through a fusion of bare trees and lifeless shrub.

Eventually, their car sped by the Cristo Negro shrine where piles of rocks lay roadside, accumulating from continual landslides during the rainy seasons, and the children eased into their seats as if finishing a rollercoaster ride.

Their father whistled while the radio station went in and out of frequency and he would steer with his knees, no hands, as he popped a piece of gum into his mouth, or rustled his hair with his fingertips, or caressed her kneecap.  He drove through the port town of La Libertad and stopped at a cooperative where their mother bought fresh oysters, a bag of peeled green mango in salted lime juice, lottery tickets, water wings, honey-flavored candy and a homemade kite.

As they traveled over cement bridges, the same river flowed below, dotted with women washing clothes.  Their long, shiny, black hair appeared like mirrors within mirrors, as they turned their heads against the reflecting water. The women’s arms pushed and pulled in swift strokes on the peaked surface of rocks, the scent of musk and moss and earth collecting under pavement, revealing a beguiling other world scooped out for the children to witness, always the same, reliable, beneath the bridges.

First, they lived in a building in the downtown section of Miami. The building was one of four, building B. The others were known as A, C and D- each letter corresponding to the name of an island. Building B, Barbados, became their temporary home, so they thought- a transitional respite meant to soothe them and tend their grief while they waited for a signal to return home.

In the meantime, the children organized parties in a room in the building’s lobby, adult-like parties with bags of ice and extra-large paper cups, strobe lights and slow dancing in the dark. They stole lollipops or guava paste from the downstairs grocer and raced bicycles on a dusty track near the Lutheran church. They wrote foul words on the dirty windows of parked cars with their soft fingertips and pushed the emergency button in elevators to keep them from running. They made crank calls and thought about the many ways they could exit the building in case of a flood or hurricane.

They made friends.

Some days, they would go to the hairdresser’s with their mother to watch over her – a fort, no trespassing, a ring of fire around her and legions of angels. The hairdresser wore roller-skates and had a longhaired dog. Their mother laughed out loud at his whispered jokes, her legs crossing and ticking with anticipation, then coming apart as her mouth opened wide and her head tilted back. Then, her legs would entwine with a sigh, finishing up the laugh a significantly long time after the punch line had been muttered. Their mother surprised the children with her gestures and her laughter, so abrupt and unusual. Her jumping eyes looked here and there in quick spurts, agitated, becoming wet when they settled and emptying as they closed.

Water rushed and drained. The on and off of blowers reminded the children of flickering Christmas tree lights or of Stop! and Go!, Yes! and No!. The drone of the vacuum cleaner echoed through the smell of cigarette ash, coffee creamer, old magazines, dye and cut hair. The children liked all the activity, the buzzing around them: fast, busy, numbing.

Women there marveled at the color of their hair—that threaded gold of childhood. The women asked for coloring like theirs, coveting that glow, the deceptive youthfulness around their faces that, depending on the angle, began to show a fading and give away hints of another time.

The children would leave the hairdresser’s wiping down the fronts of their overalls, pleased at having fulfilled their obligation to keep watch over their mother while trying to erase the trail of strange desires that the place had elicited in them and that had left its imprint on their play clothes.

At night, in the apartment, the children prayed together, looking out the sliding glass door at the brightest star, which they pretended was their father. It was not only the brightest, but also the closest.

They shared a room and the sliding glass door led to a balcony overlooking Biscayne Bay, where they watched planes coming into the city or leaving it. At night, the airplanes looked like gliding stars slowly tracing an invisible line in the sky. During the day, the planes seemed to spray dissolving, white cotton in their wake, against the construction paper blue of midmorning, or the dull gray of some afternoons.

There was a certain hour of the day that the children didn’t care for because it reminded them of having boarded an airplane with their mother, in a rush.

Usually, the children were at school when that hour came, and if they weren’t, they would try to make themselves fall asleep then, unable to withstand the swaying inside that made them shudder. The girl’s fingers would curl into themselves while she rotated her hands together, as if washing them.

The late afternoon would come, then dusk, then night. And the children would be glad for it.

They prayed together before falling asleep. They got ready for bed, taking comfort in each other, in the verses they would swap, in the collective -Amen! – then the reverential nod forward. They would untuck the bedding from beneath the mattresses, peer inside their shared closet, under their beds. Before they turned the lights out, they made sure all the doors were locked, the one leading into their bedroom and the one leading out to the balcony, framing a swollen sky replete with stars and airplanes.

The boy usually woke up in the middle of the night, unable to fall asleep again unless the girl held him, rocked him, even if she didn’t sleep enough, even if, the following morning, she had trouble waking up.

Their mother was readying for a get-together at the apartment.

She stood in front of the marble-topped vanity in the master bath and placed her makeup bag out in front of her; the plastic covered one with tiny bouquets of purple flowers against a white backdrop. The vanity had a mirror that covered the entire wall above it, and the mirror had a straight line of large, round opaque light bulbs on its upper border, like a showgirl’s dressing room. Beneath the light bulbs and the mirror were two sinks; one was never used and at times collected a thin film of translucent dust.

Their mother brought out her brushes and did her eyes.  She was wearing denim tailored pants, a stiff-collared safari style shirt and high-heeled shoes with tortoiseshell buckles at the tips.  She slowly twirled the clasp of a necklace until it was secure, dabbed Fidji on her neck and arms, slid a small brush through her wavy, golden bob, ran her index finger along one thick eyebrow, then the other, took two steps back from the mirror for one last look, puckered her lips to enhance her cheekbones and walked into the living room, with its lacquered block tables, their father’s sculpture of a horse next to a lush fern and silver bowl filled with walnuts.  At the opposite corner of the room, an étagère displayed a figurine of a golden hen and a cigar box, creating balance, drawing in the eye.

She methodically set out bottles and glasses on a bar cart alongside pale blue linen napkins embroidered with elephants, miniature ashtrays, a bucket of ice, wedges of lime. Her fingers then trailed across the records that she kept in an acrylic record holder, choosing one, putting it on, moving to the music, one wrist against the other, ready to clap, her eyes closed, her lips mouthing the words, “I love the night life, I’ve got to boogie…”

* *

Image: Gabriela Poma

Edgardo Cozarinsky translated by Cayley Taylor

It starts, always, in the temples, an almost imperceptible throbbing at first, and in the precise moment he acknowledges it, that pulsing starts to grow until he feels as if his head is going to explode and his vision gets cloudy and the distance between him and the objects surrounding him wavers and the arm that he stretches out for the phone is slow in reaching it and the emergency medical service number doesn’t show up in the list though he knows that he’s added it to the phone’s memory. But it’s not just the head. The chest replicates the throbbing of the temples, the thorax narrows and the ribs press down on something that he can only think to call heart, he can’t breathe and the air doesn’t enter his open mouth. He ... Read More »]]>

Edgardo Cozarinsky
translated by Cayley Taylor

It starts, always, in the temples, an almost imperceptible throbbing at first, and in the precise moment he acknowledges it, that pulsing starts to grow until he feels as if his head is going to explode and his vision gets cloudy and the distance between him and the objects surrounding him wavers and the arm that he stretches out for the phone is slow in reaching it and the emergency medical service number doesn’t show up in the list though he knows that he’s added it to the phone’s memory. But it’s not just the head. The chest replicates the throbbing of the temples, the thorax narrows and the ribs press down on something that he can only think to call heart, he can’t breathe and the air doesn’t enter his open mouth. He goes out the front door, an impulse that will seem ridiculous to him the next morning, he didn’t want them to find him dead when they battered down the door after not seeing him for days, and he is sitting on the doorstep by the sidewalk when the doctor arrives, meaning that he finally managed to get a hold of the phone number that seemed impossible to find and he was able to speak to ask for help, and in that instant he remembers that on other occasions the electrocardiogram never detected any trace of a heart attack, not even a pre-heart attack, and it’s only months later, when he resigns himself to following his doctor’s order not to call the emergency service again, which only gives him a sleeping pill so strong that it leaves him stupid for part of the following day, only then will he hear about panic attack when he agrees to put himself in the hands of another doctor whose specialization always inspired mistrust, psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, how to trust his soul to someone who hasn’t read Dostoevsky or Saint Augustine, but he accepts anyway, agrees to abide by his verdict and submit himself to a psychoactive drug that he will soon abandon to seek and find remedy in words, or rather, in writing them as soon as there’s a sign of crisis, in putting them in a certain order. He resorts to the notebook or the screen and writes something that one or two days later might seem useless to him or, on the contrary, surprise him by revealing that he has descended into a relegated darkness, and he realizes, not without shame, that he had chosen to suppress that darkness, that he never would’ve dared to summon it outside of those nights of terror, in that state that others call normality and which he already understands is the sly censorship to which he has relinquished his daily life.

* *

From Dark (Tusquets 2016). Image: Luna Paiva, “wheel and gun” (2012).

Carol Bensimon translated by Adam Morris

They so happened to be born in a rather small town between two more or less larger ones, something they couldn’t get used to because it meant they had the whole highway to stare at. And they stared. And it so happened that on the shoulder of the highway was a store run from out of a house built in nineteen thirty-something, its front steps a set of bleachers for the girls. They’d sit there, all afternoon. Some cars went by, another stopped. Titi let her thin legs stick out onto the sidewalk, her mosquito bites scabbed into little cones of blood from so much scratching. Her t-shirt went down to her thighs, if you could call them thighs. The traveler begged her pardon and went inside. Titi hid her laughter. Lina, three years ... Read More »]]>

Carol Bensimon
translated by Adam Morris

They so happened to be born in a rather small town between two more or less larger ones, something they couldn’t get used to because it meant they had the whole highway to stare at. And they stared. And it so happened that on the shoulder of the highway was a store run from out of a house built in nineteen thirty-something, its front steps a set of bleachers for the girls. They’d sit there, all afternoon. Some cars went by, another stopped. Titi let her thin legs stick out onto the sidewalk, her mosquito bites scabbed into little cones of blood from so much scratching. Her t-shirt went down to her thighs, if you could call them thighs. The traveler begged her pardon and went inside. Titi hid her laughter. Lina, three years older, was more melancholy. She didn’t show her legs or anything else, and she was starting to have something else to show. She was scratching her name out with a stone, only a blue beaded bracelet ruptured her all-black attire. The traveler left with a coke. If families came in, so much the better, the store would creak like an old woman. Dona Celestina was doing the accounting with a pencil, in the slow hand of a grade school girl. The traveler hurried to get back to his travels. And inside the store the old men were playing dominoes without so much as speaking to each other.

Titi said early one March: it’s hot, we could go swimming, and smiled at Lina. Because by forcing their way down a path through the underbrush, they could get to where the river appeared, running like the road, its shores stretching into the distance, up to the sawmills, the abandoned factory, and dismal fish-fry-with-lemon on a plastic plate for anyone who couldn’t afford a more scenic vacation. But the girls hadn’t seen any of this. Lina didn’t think the river was so great anymore. Her feet stuck to the bottom, toes scraping the rough and sinking into the sand, and what kinds of places and people that water had been through was anybody’s guess. She didn’t respond. Titi rolled her gum into a ball, stuck her tongue through the middle. Some river, Lina went on thinking. It was even worse because now the boys went there to smoke, hidden behind the fig tree and laughing at any stupid thing, their feet sticking into the water, talking loud, laughing about whatever.

*

Titi got a running start into the river, beating the water with her open palms. Droplets went flying in scoops, a sound that drowned out the cars on the highway. She always seemed to be having fun, in spite of the endless repetition, and this made Lina feel pangs of rage that she smothered to keep from feeling wicked. Then she’d soothe herself and presto, she was breathing normally again. But who knew what would happen in two or three years if Titi kept up this eager pleasure for every little thing.

Lina started into the water slowly, feeling the chill, adjusting her bikini, looking at the shore, the forest. There wasn’t a single bicycle leaned against the trunk of the fig tree, and in the tree’s shade, nobody sprawled out, face up. There were only birds and fish nearby, the weariness of nothing happening at all. Stupid town. A square, a church, no stoplights, repeated conversations. Anyone who made it out became a hero, end of story. On Sunday, families went out walking from one end of the street to the other, very slowly, so they wouldn’t get to the end of town too quickly. They walked through the church. They walked along the square. When a hero came back from afar, the family went out to parade him around. And the others, on the corners, the few corners, cupped hands to their ears so they could go and tell what they’d heard him say.

Lina waded halfway into the river. As she submerged, she heard Titi start to say something, then the water muffled the rest. She opened her eyes underwater. Her sister’s legs were kicking in sync, like a wind-up toy in a tub. Lina took advantage of the silence for as long as she could. It was sort of nice. It gave her a moment to imagine or remember João. João was one of the boys, or the only one. The rest were just the boys who followed him around. They all laughed the same way (at João’s jokes). They all sat the same way (around João). They all played João’s video games. From the window some nights came the blue glow of the living room, the smell of popcorn, the sound of fingers tapping buttons, and the shouts of destroyed zombies, pow pow pow, but João was really good and they beat the game so quickly they were already asking for another one, because in João’s home there weren’t any special days for presents, no need to show good behavior. So it was this João that Lina wanted to imagine perched on a branch of the fig tree, with a cigarette behind his ear, smiling and offering—want one, Lina? Nothing happened.

She came up from the water. Just then the little one was flailing toward her with her big eyes sparkling from some happy fear, anxious to tell her something. You hear that? Yeah, uh, it’s a noise, what is it. Spit it out. Titi was breathing heavily. And even though there was virtually no one in sight, Titi cupped a hand around her mouth, and spoke from behind it.

*

They raced to gather their clothes and ended up with things on backwards. But you saw what? How big? How many? Lina was carrying her slip-ons in her hand because she was in too much of a hurry to put on her socks. They went quickly, their shirts dampened in spots, Titi out ahead pushing through stinging foliage with her legs, Lina with her jeans dragging in the grass. João must have been killing zombies when, near the river, the city shook with an uncovered secret. Lina’s foot slipped in the mud and they kept running. They got up close, huddled in the bushes. There were three bulldozers pushing everything under. They uprooted the trees, which fell one against the other. They backed up and then started forward again. Then came the sound of branches snapping and the exaggerated rustling of leaves, as in a big squall that sends children huddling beneath the covers on their beds. And from the split trunks, the sweet smell of sap filled the March air.

An empty space had already been opened in the middle of the mountain of green. It was where a man was giving orders and indicating directions to the bulldozers, and his fat, soft belly appeared every time he raised his arm. Six out of every seven days, this is what he had to do, demolish. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead and looked around. The girls crouched further down, and pulled each other into a thicker patch of underbrush. The man cleared his throat, the sound of a savage animal preparing to attack.

He spat on the ground. The earth had never seemed as red as it did now. The man shouted, pointed, spat. A bulldozer was wrestling with a huge tree that wouldn’t budge. The machine got louder and went full force. It cracked the trunk, and went at it again. A pleasant smell. From the sap. The earth stirred up. Again. They heard something give way, failing, a rip, a dry sound, like a fire being lit, like a princess carried off by her hair.

* *

Read this in Portuguese

* *

Image: Lucía Vassallo

from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: ... Read More »]]>

from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin
translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: a 5% sodium chloride hypertonicity ointment, to help with the shedding of the wastes, and Flurbiprofen, an eye drop administered every other day, to slow the progress of the tiny pump’s malfunction. Josué’s mother, two-time Inland Empire regional show champion Okie Doke, retired at an early age because of the C-section required for Josué’s birth—at 2.2 pounds, she was too small to deliver him. The operation had left two scars: the one along her lower abdomen, which somehow also resulted in the disappearance of one of her left-row nipples, leaving her just seven, her breeder’s favorite number—and God’s—but an unacceptable disproportion for a show dog, and the psychological scar, which faded more slowly, fleshy and keloided and suspicious. It was that scar, more than the eyes, that disqualified her from showing. Still, she remained her breeder’s favorite, his most needy beast, living most of her adult life atop some piece of furniture: his sofa, his favorite Milo Baughman recliner, his bed. She was too small to jump up onto them herself, so he would grip her body like a tiny American football, fingers laced between her uneven nipples.

The breeder’s favorite Chihuahua, Okie Doke, c. 7.5 years old, displays early signs of uveitis in her left eye.

 *

Dik Dik Tracy, named after the miniature African gazelles the breeder had seen as a child in his pictographic encyclopedia, impregnated Okie Doke with Josué one afternoon while the breeder catnapped on the couch, some procedural police show droning on as soundtrack to the dog’s impulsive act. The breeder awoke as the beast’s lipstick penis pumped its penultimate squirt of semen into his innocent Okie Doke. Horrified, he began to scream, then swatted Dik Dik with a rolled newspaper until he cowered beneath the coffee table. The breeder spent the evening floundering in guilt and Malbec, first for having fallen asleep with the two sexually peaking animals unsupervised, then for having punished Dik Dik so severly.

Dik Dik was too large to be a proper show dog, weighing in at just under five pounds. Still, as a young dog he had participated in several shows, more for the experience than the possibility of winning. Plus, the breeder reasoned, perhaps he could get work as a stud, with his strong frame and good lineage. (His grandmother, Queen Isabel, and great-uncle, Columbus Casanova, had both been champions.) In some way, the breeder also considered it a sort of punishment for having impregnated Okie Doke: the meticulous grooming and fuss—gland cleaning, nail polishing, ear flushing—violated Dik Dik’s sense of dignity, as he had Okie Doke’s.

Whether in revenge or by nature, Dik Dik soon embarrassed the breeder publicly, first by humping a judge’s leg, a frowned-upon but not entirely uncommon occurrence for a young show dog, which though not technically disqualifying the animal was perhaps worse for their future on the show circuit, as such behavior was not quickly forgotten and the judge pool, especially in culturally deprived areas like the Inland Empire, was not large. The breeder kept Dik Dik in the competition, despite the humiliation, to practice his new handler, a psoriatic thirty-something vet tech who outweighed Dik Dik by at least 50 times. According to the handler, now one of the breeder’s few true enemies, a leash malfunction had led to Dik Dik’s escape from the grooming area after his humiliating performance. Returned to the floor during the Pomeranian showing, Dik Dik mounted R.S. Poofball, a four-time American Kennel Association champion and fixture on the European circuit—perhaps more unfortunate than his pedigree was his male sex, since, owing to the quick wit of one show commentator, the act was widely referred to thereafter as the Dick-Dick Incident.

It took the breeder several months to consider Dik Dik Tracy a dog again. He read several articles about homosexuality in non-human animals: a natural behavior in giraffes and some birds, apparently. He consulted several dog trainers about the possibility of training it out of him, which they generally advised against. Finally he decided to neuter Dik Dik, a difficult decision considering his previous plans to hire the beast as stud, but an easier and much faster solution, he thought, to curb the dog’s homosexuality—one he would come to regret in old age as an act of unwarranted cruelty, a return to the Middle Ages even, and a failure to accept the personality, however deviant, of one of his beloved dogs.

Clay figurine of R.S. Poofball, sculpted by a deafblind student as part of a history display at the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf.

*

Before I tell much more of this story, I must admit to the strange nature of its telling, which deserves some basic explanation. First, the unusual coindence of my brother’s deafblindness. As best I can understand it, I contracted congenital rubella syndrome in the womb, six weeks into my mother’s first pregnancy, when she came down with a particularly purplish case of rubella in Colton, California. The salt-and-pepper retinopathy of my condition allows me to make out vague figures in well-lighted environments; my sensorineural deafness is severe, but the surgical implantation of an experimental clucking device allows me to identify vocalic, nasal, bilabial, and velar phonemes, and years of practice at contextualization and a system of lexical elimination allow me to identify alveolar sounds with 75% accuracy. My brother, with whom I share a mother but whose father is unknown—at least to me, is far less lucky, having been born with Usher Syndrome I. Though his early doctors hoped he would retain foveal vision, he was completely blind at six, having already learned to read. As I am almost five years his elder, our mother had already endured two bankruptcies in financing my own healthcare costs, and financial limitations prohibited the possibility of discovering whether a clucking device like my own would have also worked for my brother. Perhaps his reading before the complete onset of blindness facilitated his adeptness as Braille, which he quickly mastered—even composing occasional poems in the language, and which we use to communicate to this day, using both his 1970s Brailler, his first—which he prefers for its nostalgia, and my computer, which allows me far greater speed in storytelling.

This document, and its account of the unusual founding of the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf, is primarily for him, typed originally into my computer Brailler over the course of several months, following years of investigation. I have traveled across the country seeking relevant sources, no matter their seeming inconsequentialness, and have interviewed persons from R.S. Poofball’s handler on the morning of the fateful Dick-Dick Incident, who still lives quite nearby in Downey, California, to the surviving heir of the breeder’s poetess companion, who now resides on the East Coast. I have chosen to output this document in its current form in the hopes that it might be of interest to the greater public, both as historical document and as inspiring case study on the fulfillment of improbable dreams by even more unlikely actors. The Braille version of this account is available free of charge from the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf, as well as from several mail-order Braille resource services.

*

One afternoon, sitting in the waiting room at the canine chiropractor while Okie Doke endured her weekly adjustment, the breeder read a magazine article about a blind chemist. He was fascinated. MRIs had shown that Okie Doke’s brain, though just larger than a walnut in its shell, placed her in the upper 20th percentile for her diminutive body weight, and the article made him wonder if, like the blind chemist, her worsening sight had sharpened her other senses. The blind chemist had learned to identify within three to five degrees the temperature of a Bunsen burner’s flame, by the sound of the combusting butane it emitted. The breeder excused himself to the office restroom, where he discretely ripped open the magazine’s seams to remove the three-page article, before disposing of the magazine in the wall-mounted trashcan and covering its remains in several crumpled paper towels. His mind was already whirring.

* *

Ten emails about the translation of the still-unwritten Writing Lessons for the Blind and Deaf, with all characters mentioned explained by the translator

Mario Bellatin and David Shook
translated by Heather Cleary

Mario Bellatin translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. ... Read More »]]>

Mario Bellatin
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. I’d had countless sessions with her a few years back. I remember I paid for the therapy not with money but with pieces of writing. Indeed, my lack of money was the very symptom that had brought me to her in the first place. My complete inability to pay for goods or services. Perhaps because of who my correspondent was, I started thinking about pigeons after that. Wasn’t it actually possible instead that they’d annoyed Hrabal so much that he was eventually driven to suicide? Couldn’t it have been because of their constant cooing that he’d come up with that phrase too loud a solitude, which appeared so often in his writing? Today my dogs killed a pigeon. In the park two blocks from my house, a wide pool had formed after last night’s heavy rains. People were lingering beside the water, next to a woman who sells breakfast from a cart in the mornings. A few pigeons were eating scraps that the people were tossing them. I’d left the house with my dogs just a few moments before. When I got to that area, Isaías and Manga caught one of the birds and fatally injured it, then left it floating in the pool. The people breakfasting protested loudly. I fled. When I saw what was happening, after a few meters I turned back. The dogs followed me. As we walked, they kept looking toward their fallen prey. They probably wanted to keep tearing at it. Or maybe bring it to me like an offering, a trophy. I heard someone yelling behind me, ordering me to pick up the dead bird and put it on a tree branch. It seemed like an odd request. Maybe the person believed it was more dignified for a pigeon to die on a tree branch than in a murky pool. I thought about the increasingly complicated relationship between men and animals. About current modes of thought. About the obligations we face these days. About norms that just a few years ago would have struck us as ludicrous. For example, adopting animals instead of buying them. Neutering males and females alike. Abandoning the custom of pointlessly mutilating them or giving them haircuts to meet obsolete standards of animal beauty. I also thought about the insects all around us. About how damaging they generally are, except for the ones we eat. I just now traded the books I’m currently working on for a bunch of giant ants. I also thought about the rats I sometimes hear under the floor of my study. I received another call today, too. In it, they informed me that the dog I’d given to my editor eight years earlier had just died from biting a poisonous toad. My editor is heartbroken. She’d taken the dog out to her country house, where the accident occurred. There’s no antidote for that kind of poison. When my editor calls, she’s in the waiting room of a pet crematorium. I haven’t yet gone out to walk the dogs. After the incident in the park, I return home. The dogs are all worked up. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the pigeon or because they haven’t gotten a full walk. Perezvón and Manga and Isaías and Abelardo keep circling endlessly around me. I ignore them, thinking I’ll take them out again at midmorning, and then settle in my study and open the book Black Ball, a project the artist Liniers has been working on. I admire its green cover. The ball—yes, black—in the center. The green that fills most of the space looks synthetic. I don’t think of nature at all when I look at it. Somehow it seems like the right green for the kind of trance experienced when diving into a book like Black Ball. The ideal green for, among other things, describing the artificiality of a half-wild pigeon hunt in a pool formed after a nighttime rain. The leaves of the tree where the breakfasters asked me to place the bird’s battered body must be that color. And it is, no doubt, the hue of that poisonous toad. From what she told me, my editor’s dog was carrying the toad’s corpse in its jaws. The black ball reminds me of a bowling ball. Of an iron ball chained to prisoners on death row in the United States. It could also represent the interior of the universe. I’m one of the few people who knows it’s a sort of food bolus. The same kind that both the insect discovered in the jungles of Africa and described in the text and the entomologist who found it turned into. For the moment, though, I try to pretend I don’t know what it’s from. When I turn the page, I realize it’s actually the ball from which my most terrible nightmares emerge. There I am, standing behind a lectern on a stage. One of my arms is missing. There seems to be a sizable audience in the auditorium-like space. I become aware once more that I’m missing an arm. I’m surprised by it. In the first scene of the book Black Ball by Liniers, we see the writer Mario Bellatin without his right arm. The void where it would have been is rigid and empty. It’s very strange to see him that way. Without his right arm. Could he have left it backstage? Is it some sort of joke he’s playing on his audience? His head is bald as usual, setting off perfectly the cut of the clergy shirt he wears when he’s not in a black tunic. I’m nervous. It is becoming reality, the worst thing that could befall that kind of writer. I don’t think he can stand up there and face an auditorium without his arm. But the awful scene is already set down in Black Ball. Mario Bellatin remembers how in the book Flowers there’s a similar character. Though unlike the one in Black Ball, the character in Flowers finds himself in front of a packed theater, naked and missing a leg. I think in that book, Flowers, it’s a writer who’s having a similar nightmare. A bad dream that began when he suddenly felt as if he were living inside a violet that his mother was growing in a flowerpot. As the dream continues, he is forced to dance naked on his single leg. It’s the opening number, the one that introduces the heroes of the evening. The Kuhn Twins. Two brothers who were found in a basket at the bottom of a ravine. And who were immediately handed over to the city orphanage. A line of women formed, eager to play their mother, and indicated both the type of child with which they hoped to perform their role and the schedule that suited them best. As soon as the little boys arrived, the women fought for temporary custody. One of the twins didn’t have any arms. The other had no legs. Many years later they choreographed a dance that fascinated and frightened everyone who saw it. The twins’ fame spread rapidly. They were so successful that they were even incorporated into the chapter in Flowers that Mario Bellatin was remembering at that moment. I look at the book Black Ball more closely, and then I see my teeth. They appear right at the point in the story when I wind up in front of a microphone and start to read Black Ball out loud. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything that other people might consider sustenance . . .

2- The teeth don’t look like that anymore. Here they are spaced apart, prominent, demonic. Now they’re worse. They were filed down two days ago and are now jagged and yellow. They’ve become the teeth of an old man. On Monday the dentist convinced me he could fix the ones I’ve had since childhood, employing a number of strategies to obtain my consent. Most persuasive was when he suggested how embarrassed I must be to appear in press photos with such gapping, quadrangular teeth, like the ones Liniers drew in the book Black Ball.  I’m not sure how the dentist heard of that book. Nor do I know how he has become familiar with the images it contains. I wonder these things primarily because the book has not yet been published. It disturbs me to think that there are dentists who find about their patients’ teeth that way—even if those teeth are only imagined from hundreds of kilometers away. I have no choice but to accept. The dentist gets to work. He files down the tips. He keeps sharpening them one by one until it seems to me they have become little guts. They become a row of stalactites through which the outside air comes whistling in. An hour later the dentist hands me a little mirror so I can take a look. I’m horrified. I’m gripped by a sensation similar to the one I felt this morning as I watched my dogs killing a pigeon or when I found out that my editor’s dog had just died from a poisonous toad. Maybe it’s the same thing audiences experience at Kuhn Twins performances. Not only have my teeth become sort of individual shards, they have also lost any trace of color. I find myself gazing at utterly lifeless fragments. They are of a shade that is not quite deep black, but dark—dark like the Black Ball on the book’s cover must have been at some point. If the morning’s breakfasters had been present there in the dentist’s office, they would no doubt have urged me to hang the wreckage in my mouth from the branch of some tree. I imagine it hanging there. To be able to appreciate it like that, it would first have to be extracted and made thousands of times larger. Those stalactites I had in place of teeth would have to swell and expand. And become flexible. One of Bellatin’s giant polished teeth would rest upon each branch of the tree, each adapting to the shape of the surface that cradled it. Like those exhausted, drooping clocks we’ve all seen. Holding the little mirror, the dentist looks satisfied with his work. He keeps asking me if it hurts. It’s true. There’s pain. I realize then that the horror I feel comes not just from what I’m seeing reflected in the moon but also from the pain my teeth are causing me. He tells me the effects of the anesthesia are wearing off now. At that moment I realize those sharp pains I felt were the shots he gave me during the process. He adds that I shouldn’t worry. He tells me I can’t go out on the street like that. He claims he’s got everything ready. He’s going to put on some veneers that will function as temporary false teeth and prescribe some painkillers. In the end he does what he’s promised. For a few interminable moments, he leaves me alone. Then he goes to work inside my mouth. Coming and going. Prodding my jaws open and shut. Making molds of my teeth. When he finishes, I look at myself in the mirror again and see other teeth. Not like the lugubrious gappy teeth in Liniers’s Black Ball. Which we see right when I mention the existence of the entomologist Endo Hiroshi. But not like the pointy, blackened teeth I saw a few minutes ago, either. Bellatin has some strange teeth now. They’re not the ones he had with him this morning. The dentist adds that they’re not the ones he’ll be keeping, either. The teeth in Bellatin’s mouth will be his for only three days. This very Friday they’ll be switched out for permanent ones. I’m alarmed to think what might happen after Friday to the initial image of the author’s mouth that appears in Liniers’s book Black Ball. What can I do to show that Bellatin’s teeth are no longer Bellatin’s teeth? It’s not even just a simple matter of having dentures—which are really the same teeth. Thus, Bellatin is denied not just the option of removing his arm and leaving it backstage but also the option of removing his teeth and leaving them to slumber in a glass of water that some distracted houseguest will probably gulp down in the middle of the night. As he leaves, Bellatin discovers he’s spent eight hours sitting in that dentist’s chair. He finds it quite extraordinary to have put himself through such a thing and allowed himself to be manipulated in such a manner just because the dentist has seen his teeth in Liniers’s book Black Ball. For Bellatin, the day is already over. He has no desire to do anything in the hours that remain. He heads out into the street, and in the chill of the wind he feels a sharp pain. He also feels like the temporary teeth he’s got aren’t attached securely. He has to twist his mouth a certain way to keep them from falling out. At that moment he would have liked to belong to the Caravan of Toothless Souls that appears in the book Black Ball. To be one of those unlucky creatures who, when they feel their last tooth fall out, know that they must depart toward death. As a child, Bellatin heard that story over and over again. His grandmother told it to him. For her part, she had heard it from the mother of a Japanese family that moved in next door, fleeing one of the waves of famine that were always engulfing the Orient. His grandmother told Bellatin that the story of her neighbor’s life hadn’t seemed to end that way at all. She wasn’t convinced that her neighbor had been forced to make a decision after discovering that she had lost the last of her teeth. According to his grandmother, the story of the Caravan of Toothless Souls came to a close the night government forces rounded up Japanese immigrants to ship them off to concentration camps in the United States. The neighbor and her husband committed suicide that very night. My grandmother told me that they’d asked her to look after their young children just a few hours before. The little boy was very fat and the little girl very skinny. She also told me that an hour later they heard a gunshot, and then another. The husband first killed his wife and then committed suicide. The neighbor had asked her to hide the children well. The fat one and the skinny one. To care for them as if they were her own. But my grandfather turned the children over to the police shortly after the shots rang out. I think it was partly by way of excusing him that my grandmother sometimes told me how hard times were back then. That I shouldn’t condemn my grandfather’s actions or those of the rest of my family. I think it is because of their actions that I understand all the better Bohumil Hrabal as he clambered out on that ledge, saying he was going to scare off the pigeons. They say that his fall was deafening. That he showed not a trace of the elegance with which a bird executes its final flight. Actually, birds die huddled in some remote corner of nature. I remember seeing some of them dying on the southern beaches. I used to think, when I was a boy, that the seagulls that could no longer fly were staying still because they’d decided to make friends with human beings. As soon as I spotted them, I’d chase after them. I tried to feed them. I didn’t notice that many of them were hobbling. Others stayed still, allowing my hand to stroke them. Hours later I’d find them dead. They’d lie there motionless, staring into nothing. They wouldn’t eat even a crumb of bread. They seemed to be atavistically rejecting anything other people might consider sustenance. Just like Endo Hiroshi, who declared one morning that he was going to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. Then Mario Bellatin put his hand on the sheet of paper resting on the lectern where he was reading Black Ball aloud. An enormous fly appeared in front of the microphone. A fly like the ones that buzz around corpses when they start decomposing. Like those that certainly had circled the corpse of the pigeon placed on a tree branch by the breakfasters who’d watched in horror as my dog Isaías broke its neck in an instant. Or looped above the violets that the mother of the legless writer was growing in a flowerpot. I was even more terrified of the fly than I was of standing armless in front of an audience to read the text of Black Ball. A text in which an entomologist suddenly decides to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance.

3- The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. He made the decision after a night of insomnia—brought on, perhaps, by the memory of the household’s old cook leaving for the Caravan of Toothless Souls after his parents’ wedding reception.¹ All that night he had felt, as he hovered between sleep and wakefulness, his arms and legs disappearing, consumed by the unrestrained voracity of his own stomach.

That organ was so aggressive, in fact, that in the first light of dawn Endo Hiroshi already felt like one of those people who eats only to destroy it. Who try to turn it into a near-useless appendage. Endo Hiroshi had seen them up close and personal, young people who died stick-thin because they’d suddenly refused to eat even a grain of rice. Some said that many of those vanishing appetites had been wiped out by a romantic disappointment of some sort, and others that they were the result of a slavish adherence to Western fashions. On the other hand, he also knew of men and women who stuffed themselves with food, their fleshy bodies in the grip of their uncurbed desire to represent the whole universe within themselves.² Both situations had occurred at one time or another in his own family. There had even been twin cousins, a girl and a boy, the former of whom had succumbed to anorexia while the latter became a champion sumo wrestler.³ Endo Hiroshi also remembered stories from the war years that he’d heard as a boy, stories of a scarcity so dire that people had killed each other for a scoop of rice or a piece of fish.⁴ He’d also heard tales of elegant sushi made with rodent meat, and of children who caught flies and ate them like millet.⁵ It seems that the effect of these stories was that the entomologist Endo Hiroshi had acquired, from a very young age, a sort of mingled revulsion and reverence toward food. That’s why he never really agreed with that foreign saying that his country’s food seemed to be made more for visual appreciation than for eating.⁶ In his grandparents’ house, where he spent a good portion of his childhood because his parents were not allowed to live together as long as the cook was still alive, they never let anything edible go to waste. Often—based mainly on the teachings of the prophet Magetsu, of whom the whole family were devotees—they had engaged in a peculiar way of preparing food, which involved burying the ingredients for several hours among stones heated with wood or charcoal. The prophet Magetsu, a monk who is said to have died not once but many times, conceived of the creation of the universe as an offering from mother earth to the universe’s constituent elements, which of course include humankind. Once when he was invited on a long trip to Africa by his entomologists association, Endo Hiroshi had to eat all sorts of packaged foods, which he bought in a shop near his house recommended by the organization’s members. He made that trip with his suitcases loaded with plastic jars and boxes containing different types of dehydrated foodstuffs. Endo Hiroshi just had to add boiling water to the containers to achieve a sort of food that at least vaguely resembled that originally consumed in his country. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi himself dubbed that trip “the long journey of boiling water” because teapots and hotplates were so essential en route, allowing him not just to eat but also to drink tea in the traditional manner. Endo Hiroshi could have easily gone without food for several days, but it was practically impossible for him to give up drinking tea for more than four hours at a time. A few entomologists advised him to take advantage of the trip and sample one of the many edible insects incorporated into the diets of the regions they were visiting. Everything from your everyday ants, which were coated in honey and served in a paper cone, to the flesh of a species of blue-legged tarantula that lives only in the crown of certain trees.⁷ As they ate these specimens, the members of the expedition often talked about insects’ nutritional properties. Some years back, led by the scientist Olaf Zumfelde from the University of Heidelberg, a number of experts had drawn up a table showing the quantity of protein from invertebrates that was absorbed immediately by the human body.⁸ And yet Endo Hiroshi ate nothing but the prepackaged food he’d bought back home. He continued his journey with his dehydrated foods, his tea, his teapot, and his little battery-operated hotplate at his side. He was working with his usual diligence, only a few days from the end of the trip, when he found a strange specimen that had been thought extinct. A theretofore unknown subspecies. The only one on record, the Newton camelus eleoptirus, was a different color. He stored it in the best conditions he could and, without mentioning it to the rest of the expedition, carried it back with him on the return home. Once he’d disembarked, he headed straight for the lab he’d set up in the rear of what would later become his parents’ house.⁹ At the time, his parents were still unmarried and lived apart. Nevertheless, the family members came together every night in that house, where Hiroshi had lived since childhood, to recite the prayers of the monk Magetsu. Endo Hiroshi knew that his find would be the making of his career as an entomologist. His name, Hiroshi, would forevermore be used to refer to the species he’d captured. The insect already identified had been blue, not red like the one Hiroshi had found. The new subspecies would bear the name Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus. But to his surprise, when he opened the plastic box he found only a tiny black ball instead of his insect. The ball was so miniscule, it was strange that he could make it out at all. The box had been specially designed to transport specimens of this sort—that is, small and medium-sized insects. They were made exclusively for the members of his entomologists association and were constructed in such a way that the insects could live inside them a long time. The eleopter he’d found last week couldn’t possibly have escaped. Endo Hiroshi had seen it in the Nairobi airport before he’d boarded his return flight. He’d taken another peek on the plane, and just yesterday, as soon as he was home again, he’d gazed at it for a long time through entomology glasses.¹⁰ On that last occasion, he’d been comparing it not just to the Newton camelus eleoptirus that appeared in an illustration in an insect book he always carried with him but also to a number of specialized tomes that filled his library. He was so startled by the absence that he didn’t notice the arrival of his parents, ready to resume prayers in the living room now that their son was home safe and sound. For the weeks he’d been away in Africa, they’d had no choice but to pray in the temple of the Prophet, which perched on the slopes of the highest mountain. It was an exhausting climb to get there, but they had no other option. The parents were not just forbidden to live together before the cook’s death would allow them to marry, they were unable to be in the main house for even a minute without their son’s physical presence. Hiroshi heard them call to him—they wanted to say hello, of course, but more importantly they wanted to begin the religious rites, which they could not perform without him. Just then Shikibu, the old servant, finished preparing a large pot of white rice that would be passed around after the ceremony. Ever since he’d turned fifteen, the bowl of rice served after prayer was the only food that Endo Hiroshi ate all day. Rice and, as mentioned earlier, several liters of tea. Anyone would have predicted that such a diet would make him grow thin and weak. But his vitality proved otherwise. Just as it had been for the old monks, even the prophet Magetsu himself, a bowl of rice a day was enough food for a lifetime. On a related note, it is said that one of the prophet Magetsu’s deaths—to all appearances the definitive one—occurred when the Prophet decided to allow his body to feed off his body.¹¹ To bear witness to the process, during which his flesh gradually disappeared, curiously transformed into the traces of his own flesh, he relied on his disciple, Oshiro, who wrote on a large rice paper scroll, still available to anyone who wishes to consult it, the words dictated to him by his master during the process. Curiously, the final word could be translated as “peace.” It seems strange that a being as spiritually advanced as the prophet Magetsu, having carried out such a complex process of dying, would utter a word whose meaning for many people would seem quite obvious. Before beginning the ritual of devotion to the Prophet, Endo Hiroshi and his parents had to check the teeth of the wizened cook. His parents were always more interested in that inspection than he was, as they would only be able to marry and live together when the woman had lost all of her teeth. The day that she could no longer eat, the cook would starve to death on her lonely journey—an endless road that would start at one of the many roads encircling the highest mountain—which she would be forced to begin the night the man and woman of the house were finally married. The moment a dental inspection revealed the total absence of teeth, the preparations for the wedding would begin. Two days later, it would all be over. Man and woman would now be husband and wife. During those two days, the old woman would not be allowed to eat even a crumb from the wedding banquet, ensuring that on her journey toward death, things would proceed as quickly as possible. A few minutes later, after the usual greetings and paying their respects to the image of the prophet Magetsu, the inspection of the cook’s teeth began. It was not yet time to begin the prayers: in order to achieve the proper intonation, it was important to know whether or not the cook still had teeth. On this occasion, though he carried it out to the letter, Endo Hiroshi paid no attention to the ritual he was leading. He was baffled by the insect’s disappearance. Nevertheless, a loyal devotee, he hid it as well as he could. He’d put on his traditional tunic and, after greeting his parents as any son recently returned from a long journey should, he started sprinkling the water—which he scooped out of a small wooden bowl—over their prone bodies. After the greetings, his parents had stretched out face-down on the floor. Once that part of the ritual was over, they noticed the cook was gone. The parents sensed it immediately, in fact. The raced to the kitchen, where they found the old woman hiding behind the firewood for the stove. As they’d guessed, when they pried open her mouth they discovered that the last molar, which had had them on tenterhooks for the last few years, had vanished. The old servant pleaded, refusing to open her jaws again. Endo Hiroshi, who had followed his parents to the kitchen, suddenly understood what had happened to his insect. He realized that the tiny ball he’d found in place of the exotic specimen was a sort of stomach of the insect. Actually, it looked like the bug had simply swallowed itself. He didn’t find such a theory at all bizarre. It was not for nothing that he’d spent practically his whole life, every free moment his career as an entomologist permitted him, leading the rites of the monk Magetsu. It seemed to have repeated itself, there within his entomologist’s box, that process the monk had undergone before dying for good. That ball must be a formless mass made up of the elements that had composed the little bug. The old woman was emitting heartrending screams.¹² His parents would not bend. At last she fell quiet—a sudden silence that seemed to suggest a full acceptance of her fate. His parents could then discuss the wedding plans in peace. They talked mostly about the banquet. They’d serve traditional foods. No modern touches, except the sea bream served to the couple before the ceremony began. They’d have to find a cook skilled enough to prepare the ghost bream,¹³ the recipe for which consisted of cutting up the fish until it was fleshless but still alive and then placing it in a fish tank in the center of the happy couple’s table. The couple would eat the flesh while the animal kept swimming, dying, its internal organs exposed for all the world to see. As a good omen for the marriage, the meal should last exactly as long as it took the fish to die. That evening, the entomologist Endo Hiroshi confirmed his suspicions. After they’d sentenced Shikibu and performed—with more intensity than usual—the Prophet’s rituals, he went back to his room and with the help of a microscope found that, in fact, the insect appeared to have consumed itself. For no apparent reason, he felt a wave of nausea. He vomited. Meanwhile, downstairs, his parents were still making plans. Not only could his mother now arrange the house as she wished, but she could also paint her teeth black. In addition to starting to give orders around the house, his father now had the right to go to the dentist to have his front teeth removed once and for all. These characteristics—the blackened teeth and the missing front teeth—were symbols of having a full life. Reflecting on the transformation undergone by an insect that might have been called Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus, a name that would have instantly made him famous around the world, he decided that after his parents’ wedding, the end of his own life would consist in reducing as far as possible the normal functioning of his stomach. He would seek to neutralize it in a manner similar to the liver atrophy suffered by those geese that are obsessively overfed by their owners, or by the ducks that in some countries are raised in tiny cages and fed with chemical-soaked corn. When the sun shone in through the window the next day, illuminating the plastic box that still contained the insect’s supposed stomach, Endo Hiroshi decided to eat not only that black ball but also a bunch of weevils and other bugs that he’d collect later that morning. In the armoire in his room, practically brand-new, he still had the outfit he used to wear for the caterpillar hunt that took place every leap year. The last time he’d participated, he’d gone with his cousin, the excessively slender girl who’d died of slenderness, and with his other cousin, the obese sumo wrestler.

*

Notes

1 Archaic custom that must be followed by citizens who have lost all of their teeth.

2 Popular belief, primarily among the Assyrian Chaldeans, that the whole of the celestial spheres is contained within the human body. Thanks to recent psychological studies, it is believed that men retain remnants of this conviction as a symbol of social superiority.

3 Type of martial art that celebrates times of harvest or abundance. It is especially prevalent in regions governed by the solar calendar.

4 The fish that has provoked the greatest number of murders is the sole.

5 Even today newspapers occasionally run stories about merchants who are selling toasted flies instead of edible seeds.

6 See Newsweek magazine, no. 234, p. 56.

7 They were phosphorescent Larpicus tarantulas, found only in eastern Namibia.

8 Consult the Zumfelde Table, available from the Berlin Nutritionists Society.

9 According to the tradition of the prophet Magetsu—which the Western world found incomprehensible—a man and woman were not permitted to marry until the eldest of their female servants had lost the last of her teeth. This prohibition did not impede their right to have children.

10 He used a pair of Stewarson glasses imported by the Tenkei-Maru department store.

11 See the Hiro-Sensei sect’s book of the Holy Catechism.

12 It is said that some of the neighbors were unable to sleep that night.

13 Teachers of this technique tend to be found on the country’s southern coast.

* *

Images: Ben Rodkin, with Mario Bellatin and David Shook, for Barú. Text first published with BAR in November 2013.

Szilvia Molnar 

1. I come home to a burnt-down house in Lund. You’re back in Malmö. I’m watching my parents gather half-scorched photographs in the garden, like raking autumn leaves before winter. Their faces are covered in soot. In despair, I take my dirty luggage from the island of Nagu to Russia, where there’s neither emo nor emotion left to feel. In St. Petersburg I buy a typewriter, one of those Smith Corona’s I’ve always dreamed of and I steal a stool from a hardware store. I choose a busy street and sit down to type. People walk by and ask me for a quote, an affirmation or a recipe for princesstårta. For the recipe I make sure to add There’s no princess without the marzipan. In exchange for my typing people leave me their ... Read More »]]>

Szilvia Molnar 

1. I come home to a burnt-down house in Lund. You’re back in Malmö. I’m watching my parents gather half-scorched photographs in the garden, like raking autumn leaves before winter. Their faces are covered in soot. In despair, I take my dirty luggage from the island of Nagu to Russia, where there’s neither emo nor emotion left to feel. In St. Petersburg I buy a typewriter, one of those Smith Corona’s I’ve always dreamed of and I steal a stool from a hardware store. I choose a busy street and sit down to type. People walk by and ask me for a quote, an affirmation or a recipe for princesstårta. For the recipe I make sure to add There’s no princess without the marzipan. In exchange for my typing people leave me their lunches but I rarely eat them because there’s just too much meat in them. Buns with flakes of bacon or thick parsnip soups with pork bits sinking to the bottom.

One morning I meet a dog with a mission. He doesn’t look like a scoundrel, just like a humble mutt. I try to give him a bacon bun but he politely turns it down, claiming that he’s a vegetarian. Tell me more I say and he begins a story of how he was first a Swedish Portuguese man but turned into a dog when he lost his girl. I walked from a town called Malmö, where falafels were reborn, to St. Petersburg. Emo is banned here. On my way I stopped by Budapest because you see this girl is from the land of paprika and watermelons, I figured she might be craving some, but she was nowhere to be found. When this dog, a mutt with savaged paws, said this to me I wanted to embrace him because I finally recognized him as you. And you had been missing me so much that you had forgotten what you were looking for. But I had to only remind you.

OR:

2. I live on the other end of Sweden from you. Years have gone since we last saw each other. Since those ten days in Nagu. You read an ad in the paper. An old lady feels that she will die in a day or two but she has no relatives to inherit her cottage. You decide to call her because the cottage is called Bolond (‘crazy’ in Hungarian). It’s a word you’re familiar with. She takes a liking to you because of your honest face. When she gives you her keys, they feel heavy in your hand but the weight is a comfort. Good things assured to come.

You dust off the sign on the house, stack up chairs to leave more room on the floor, clean the windows inside and out. You’re expecting company even though no one knows where you are. There’s a festival about to happen, or is it New Year’s in a couple of days? It’s something for you. Something makes you get up earlier one day. Makes you shower and shave. Floss your teeth. Cut your toenails. Prepare a meal. Light a candle. You’re practiced at waiting.

After the second knock you open the door.

OR:

3. I’m a cyborg. You’re my charger.

OR:

4. There is a lighthouse not many people know about. Actually, only two people in the world know about it. One of them (me) lives in this lighthouse, the other one (you) comes to visit. You sail in on your boat and find your way only through the light of the lighthouse. I know which days you come by the calendar I keep. My days with you are marked with an H, like a ladder with just one step, H. I climb my stairs and hit the switch. I can’t see your boat but you can see the light. We haven’t talked for years. Solitude at sea and loneliness on the lighthouse have made us mute. Instead we let the diaries speak for us. We exchange them when we meet. They catch us up on the things we missed. They are the loudest words we’ve ever read. Whose voices are we hearing?

OR:

5. Years from now I jump on the bus and sit down next to a man with a tablecloth for a shirt. I wonder for a couple of minutes if it’s you but you get off the bus before I dare to ask.

OR:

6. You’re past being middle aged but people still find you handsome. You live with your wife and 17-year-old son in the outskirts of London. Your wife was diagnosed with MS years ago and her pain has slowly dragged itself into you. You teach Hungarian and Linguistics at a prestigious university but with weariness since the students don’t seem to care. Occasionally, you spice things up during class to make them wake up. You tell them about nivkh, a language that isn’t truly related to any other language but nonetheless is included in the Paleosiberian language group. You show them on the map how they spoke it here, in Outer Manchuria, but all we have left are tapes, and then you point at the five black tapes on your shelf. The students look at you with their heads tilted to one side. No one is getting through to anyone. Then you see my face. From your small crowd of students (because who wants to study Hungarian these days?) you see me looking at you like I’m brooding on a question. But I won’t ask it in class today.

Then, over the course of a couple of weeks, contact occurs. You teach, I listen, I ask, you explain some more. You pass out handouts with my interests in mind and I’m not afraid of questioning your theories. From handouts we move on to books. You give me Frost, Didion, Brautigan, and Edna St. Vincent Millay…I pass you Boye, Tranströmer, and Södergren. We try to meet as often as possible without it looking suspicious to anyone else in the department, but it never really feels enough. Some weekends we go to the British Library as soon as it opens and sit at a booth with our work until the last lines can be read before closure. You bring me Chinese pears that look like apples but taste like sweetened water. I bring us dark bitter chocolate.

Suddenly, the months have moved past us. It’s time for me to graduate and it’s time for you to plan another academic year. We agree to keep on meeting, but we don’t even get to a third lunch because your wife calls me. She found my name in your journal and cries out that I’ve ruined her marriage, her life, a family I shouldn’t have tinkered with. I realize my selfishness and end all contact with you. Unwillingly, you stop writing to me too.

Five years on and we’re still not talking.

OR:

7. You have settled into your apartment in Värnhem, Malmö. Some days you drive a postal truck and most nights you make music. I have moved into a room in Södermalm, Stockholm. Most of my days and nights are spent reading and writing. But my place is completely empty so I’m forced to start over from scratch and do the most adult thing in the world: Buy a bed. Due to my financial situation, I turn to IKEA for a solution. I walk through the entire floor, stop at the bedroom department and test-sleep each mattress. The firmest one has convinced me; I decide to buy it. I walk down to the pick-up aisles and find my 50 kg mattress. I schlep it all the way to the cashier and there, I’ve done it. I’ve bought my first adult bed.  It’s bigger than a single bed, but smaller than I’d like. It’s the size that would give us enough room, should you ever come to visit.

I stand in line for the transport service and look at an ugly baby in the arms of a stressed-out mother. She is worried that her pastel sheets won’t match the wallpaper in the bedroom and can’t seem to find a closer shade. I count to ten because I’ve heard that helps if you’re angry, but it doesn’t work. Instead I try to stop looking at the ugly baby. That helps somewhat. I put in an order to have the mattress shipped to my new place. The big-bellied man behind the booth says that the bed will arrive the next day. I prepare myself for the arrival of the bed. I dust my shelves, I water my plants, and I line up my books in a row. Then, the bell rings from downstairs. A familiar* voice tells me my bed has arrived. I run downstairs to see you sitting satisfied in the IKEA truck. Turns out you are a driver of all kinds of trucks.

OR

8. I make up stories.

Ramiro Sanchiz Translated by Audrey Hall

On the outskirts of Punta de Piedra, there is a bar a good distance beyond the last line of houses. From the untidy plain arises what is essentially a cube of gray concrete with small windows and a parking lot. Actually, to simulate the impression it always made on me when I looked at it—with the houses of Punta de Piedra in the distance and the plain stripped down to what the universe must have looked like hundreds of millions of years ago—I would have to resort to a simple, coarse, improbable image: an art nouveau building on some remote, uninhabited planet.

My grandfather used to go round there on Friday nights, but I wasn’t allowed to go with him. So one day in February 1990, my friend Marcos and I hopped on our bikes ... Read More »]]>

Ramiro Sanchiz
Translated by Audrey Hall

On the outskirts of Punta de Piedra, there is a bar a good distance beyond the last line of houses. From the untidy plain arises what is essentially a cube of gray concrete with small windows and a parking lot. Actually, to simulate the impression it always made on me when I looked at it—with the houses of Punta de Piedra in the distance and the plain stripped down to what the universe must have looked like hundreds of millions of years ago—I would have to resort to a simple, coarse, improbable image: an art nouveau building on some remote, uninhabited planet.

My grandfather used to go round there on Friday nights, but I wasn’t allowed to go with him. So one day in February 1990, my friend Marcos and I hopped on our bikes and headed north toward the bar. At about five in the afternoon we arrived to find it closed; I remember it was a bit cold and overcast, and the wind had picked up. We pulled up in front of the door, disappointed. It was covered with posters for World Cup tournaments I hadn’t paid any attention to. Marcos, on the other hand, studied them with a bemused expression on his face; besides, there were so many of them that it was almost impossible to see inside. In any case, the interior of the bar was dark. There wasn’t much else to do.
Right then we realized that if we kept following the dirt path that had taken us to the bar, we would end up at the highway, and if we crossed it (something that had previously been unthinkable), we would be free to explore a vast region that we called the Salt Marshes on our fantasy map because we had always seen it out the window of my parents’ or Marcos’s parents’ car on some trip to Castillos or El Chuy. To us, it looked like the landscape around the Nile Delta. After realizing the bar was closed, we couldn’t resist the temptation to take that faintly imaginary trip, full of towering reeds, swampy evenings, and trees with multiple trunks that, more so than trees, looked like the bodies of giant antediluvian beasts disfigured by time. It would be the first time we’d seen that landscape without a window separating us from it: just the two of us, in the early autumn chill of that February afternoon.

We pedaled out to the highway and beyond, where there were no roads or electrical wires, and soon we found ourselves in front of a kind of copse. It would have been impossible to turn back then (since it was already almost six o’clock and if we were a little late coming back home, we’d be in trouble), so we dropped our bikes and went in on foot. After a while we arrived at rather a small lake, more like a pond full of green, stagnant water.

Surrounding the lake and separating it from the woods was a belt of sand that was cool and damp to the touch, squirming with insects and tiny worms. On the sand, a few meters from where we stood, we saw something that must have been the remains of some animal in an advanced state of decay; Marcos headed straight for it. I tore a branch from a tree and followed him.

It wasn’t easy to tell what animal those shapes belonged to. For example, there were parts comparable to segments of a spinal column, curved and spiked, but we saw no trace of legs, ribs, or skull. Marcos said it must be a giant and slightly deformed capybara, and the few bones missing must have been carried off by scavengers. Maybe, but I was still amazed by the shape of the creature. For starters—looking closer now—the texture of the carcass didn’t exactly suggest decay and we couldn’t smell anything dead; I poked it with the branch, and it seemed to me that the skin (or whatever it was) was as stiff and hard as crystal. It’s a tree trunk, I said. It was probably in the water for a while and turned out like this. Marcos had found another stick, and between the two of us we tried to flip it over. It didn’t budge an inch: it seemed to weigh tons, or else it was nailed to the planet’s surface, like a rocky outcrop . . . which it might have been, of course, but we couldn’t help seeing something organic in it, some texture, some organized pattern that, up close, seemed to imitate veins, capillaries, or nerves. Marcos took a few steps back and called my name: he’d seen something different from his new perspective, which he pointed out to me. It was shaped like an arm, ending in what looked like a bird’s talon or a dinosaur’s claw, with fingers and nails. At least, that was what I saw, but Marcos said it must be the creature’s skull. I walked around the body and searched for what I had originally taken to be the spinal column; I couldn’t find it. Now it looked like an animal with radial symmetry, the kind that I—having read my Uncle Hilario’s old encyclopedia of natural history—understood to be an essentially primitive life form, one that was far removed from any path that evolution had taken on Earth.

Remembering that feeling of disgust now brings with it the same blend of shock and terror that trees at night have always inspired in me. Of course, at any time I can look at them without really seeing, registering only a superficial level of perception: the colors, the distribution of their branches, the shape of their leaves, the ridges of their bark, or the presence or absence of flowers, pinecones, or nuts; but if I focus my efforts in one direction, I can reach a state in which the tree—so unlike any morphological paradigm repeated throughout the animal kingdom—reveals itself as an otherworldly creature, an alien. And I can very easily access that sensation at night, when the trees look as if they’ve been ripped from their natural habitat, which is light, and stuck in city spaces (a vacant lot, more specifically, or one of the big mansions in the Prado district, or even a park or a densely wooded block) as intruders, ghosts, or shadows of another reality. On those occasions, faced with that strangeness and with the apparently chaotic branching and multiplying of leaves that seem to follow the fissures and ridges of space, which are invisible to animals, I feel as if I’m standing in front of a fundamentally incomprehensible creature that is blessed with a sort of consciousness that I will never be able to grasp. They are obviously solar-powered devices—artifacts of an earlier, forgotten technology—yet they are no less obviously alive. As such, they make up a whole that is stranger than any animal (whose movements, joints, and dynamic life in pursuit of sustenance seem much more familiar and comprehensible to us). For example, I remember pausing before the massive, flattened tree shapes (like ferns trapped inside a big, heavy book) cast by various green light reflectors in some party room, probably back in 1993; I also remember one night when I gathered my courage and climbed a tall fig tree behind a friend’s house, when I melted into the tree and its branches and trunk became extensions of my body.

But the dead creature by the lake wasn’t a tree trunk. Soon it became clear that its shape mutated depending on our vantage point and that even the insight we had gleaned from a particular point of view would alter dramatically if we moved to a different perspective and then left that point after a while to return to our original position. Thus what had initially appeared to be a spinal column quickly became one of those fossilized axes of conceivable radial symmetry; but then it turned into an appendage, a tentacle, a kind of pointed arch, like that of a gothic cathedral or the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle. So I don’t remember whether it was Marcos or I—though I do remember it was already getting dark—who suggested that it must be an extraterrestrial.

The idea that it was an alien had probably occurred to us because of some movie. Although most aliens in movies were essentially anthropomorphic—and not just in the most obvious sense of how their bodies were configured—one exception was Alien, where the eyeless creature behaved in a way that made it difficult to conclude whether or not it was intelligent; and another was Solaris, which we’d seen without understanding most of it, except the part where the whole ocean, like a gigantic amoeba, was an extraterrestrial being. It’s true that now I can’t exactly pinpoint when I saw either of those movies. I do remember Alien—it was in the horror movie marathon cycle that Montevideo’s Channel 4 aired every Friday starting at 10 pm—but I’m less certain about Solaris, since my first solid memories of movies and books date back to ’94 or ’95, when I joined a group of science fiction writers led by Emilio Scarone, though I do feel that when I commented on the movie at the time, I affirmed that I had seen it before. In any case, Marcos and I had definitely seen Cosmos, where Carl Sagan maintained in one of the episodes that extraterrestrials, if they exist, must be thoroughly different from the animal or plant forms we see here on Earth. That concept must have led us to conclude it was an alien. What else could it be? It wasn’t a carcass—the lack of evidence of decay made that clear—but it wasn’t a tree trunk either. Maybe it was something artificial, a sculpture for example; but adopting that hypothesis would have made it very difficult to justify the dramatic changes in shape (or even structure) depending on the angle.

If I had to try and explain it today, I would say that since we were dealing with an alien life form, its structure was probably so foreign to the concepts and perceptions possible for the human mind (shaped as it was by centuries and centuries of culture) that the creature wasn’t entirely visible somehow, as the only way we had of perceiving it was to give rein to our imagination, which lavishly and instantly reconstructed those impossible forms to spare us from having to contemplate the void, or what would otherwise be an intolerable breach in reality.

In any case, Marcos and I didn’t arrive at that conclusion at the time. Instead, we convinced ourselves that we had a dead extraterrestrial on our hands. Maybe its ship had crashed a few days back and the creature had managed to crawl into the woods and reach the lake or pond, only to die from consuming the water, the microorganisms in it, or who knows what other deadly biochemical quirk. It could also have been lying there under the water for centuries, and in the slow process of drying up or shrinking, the lake might have finally left it exposed on the sand. For us to find.

First we decided that we couldn’t tell anybody, believing that any outside intrusion would separate us irredeemably from the creature; we figured that teams of scientists would descend in the blink of an eye, fence off the area, and make it impossible for us to come near it again. Secrecy, then, was crucial: in front of Marcos’s parents and my grandparents, we had to act as if nothing had happened, as if all we’d done was go for a long bike ride within the Punta de Piedra city limits.

I don’t remember how long we crouched beside that thing, but soon it grew dark and we knew we had to go back. Staring at it had the same effect as hypnosis, as if it blurred the world around us: the trees, the lake, the landscape north of Punta de Piedra, a kind of bleaching of our perception or the annulment of anything our brains could devise.
Only much later did I imagine entire cities arising from those shapes and textures, that blackish color with occasional ripples of blue or green, that intricate and infinite coarseness, those branching, proliferating patterns that forced us to examine them as one does a fractal, each second of the act of perception subdividing (and branching) into countless intervals of time in which we couldn’t help losing ourselves.

At the same time, we understood that it was the most important moment of our lives, that the long search for something new in the world could never result in anything greater than what we had found and that all the rest, from the Temples of Angkor Wat to the underground churches in Ethiopia, from the most advanced war game to the orbiting space stations that we projected for the near future, from the most powerful computer to the fastest particle accelerator, could never be anything truly different, never be anything outside of what was human, outside of what we were made of. Machines, great works of art, architectural marvels, even the wonders of nature—all of that was inside: it was inside us, it was part of what made us human, the furniture or walls of our minds. The extraterrestrial, on the other hand, was a real outsider; underneath the dance of intricate and changeable forms, there was something that put us in contact with the incomprehensible, something that emptied or destroyed our minds only to gradually rebuild them in accordance with other principles. We felt like two immortal travelers who had wandered the world and its epochs thousands of times over and, when everything seemed lost and nothing could tear them from the grip of a most terrible and desolate weariness, found themselves face to face with a marvel that would strip away layers and layers of exhaustion and worldliness on contact and transform them into two eleven-year-old boys, who would be freer, better able to merge with the new, to assimilate it, to make it circulate—inside this time—and change it forever.

So we looked at each other, dazed, as if we were still floating in a slow awakening from a deep dream; without thinking, I knelt in the sand and touched the creature.

When we got home, after the inevitable scolding, I ate dinner with my grandparents in front of the television. I don’t remember anything else about that night, and if I try to describe myself sitting at the table, I can imagine only my lost look, my absorbed expression while my grandparents chatted about the television program or the events of the day. I went to bed early and could barely get through even a few lines of the book I was reading at the time. Within moments I was asleep and dreaming: now I was wandering through a dazzling city that was either the place inhabited by the species we had found or itself a living being. In the dream I wondered whether I was inside the creature or whether the one we had found with Marcos was merely a fragment of an alien life form or of the vehicle that had brought it to our planet. In my memory the dream occupied the whole night and yet lasted only a few minutes, during which I ventured down those strange avenues, contemplating the creature. When I awoke, my grandmother was holding a cold damp cloth to my forehead. I wasn’t in my bed in the garage anymore. Instead I was in my grandparents’ bed, propped up on cushions. I tried to speak, but I could only whisper what I felt as I would a shameful regret. My grandmother asked me to be quiet; I’d never seen her so worried, probably because of what I’d raved about during the night while in the throes of fever. A little while later, a doctor arrived from the outpatient clinic in the old neighborhood. He spoke to my grandparents for a long time, though I couldn’t understand a word. I must have slept again, because my next memory is seeing my grandmother at my bedside once more, this time bathed in twilight. By then I could speak a little more, and I asked her what was happening to me. She answered that I still had a slight fever and needed to rest. And she told me that I’d been unconscious for almost four days and had managed wake up only this morning. I’d been taken out to Castillos, where doctors examined me but couldn’t come to any real conclusions about the supposed virus. The recommendation, if you can imagine, was to bring down the fever and wait.

I don’t know precisely how many days I spent in bed. On what felt to me like the following morning, I thought of the lake and the creature immediately upon waking, but I also felt certain that I had been there a few times, at various times of day, sometimes with Marcos and sometimes alone. I also recalled that I had camped next to the thing for more than one night, which was impossible, since there was no way my grandparents would have allowed such a thing (not that I would’ve wanted to anyway, at least not under normal circumstances). But there it was in my memories: I saw myself seated on the lakeshore, splitting my gaze between the alien and the sky—not the stars, but the sky, pitch-black—and it was as if there were something worth investigating, some detail I was missing that I would now have to track down as if it were a puzzle piece on a vast table and I had a small-scale model of the original image next to me and I had to stare stubbornly at it to detect patterns that had escaped me in the chaos of all the other pieces.

I also remember how the creature had showed obvious signs of deterioration the last few times we visited it. The shapes that had changed depending on the angle didn’t look the same as they had on first glance, and there were structures that seemed to freeze and remain there until the following day, while at the same time huge chunks of the body were disappearing with marks of having been torn or gnawed by animals. Marcos said that if we searched the woods we might find the pieces that were missing, and it occurred to me that a search like that was certain to have consequences, as if the strangeness of the extraterrestrial thing could somehow merge with the trees and the landscape like an ink blot spreading through capillaries on the map, reaching Punta de Piedra and, from there, the entire coast and Montevideo and maybe even the whole world.

That night I felt better. My window had been left ajar and a light breeze was blowing in. My grandmother was asleep in the little bed that I had used when I was little. I got up and wandered through the house. There were things belonging to my parents—clothes and bags, mostly—and in my bed in the garage I found my mother, who was also asleep (in a soft sort of way, it seemed to me, which helped me realize that I was truly well, that the worst was truly behind me). On the dining room table I found my father’s watch: it was one thirty in the morning on February 24, which made me think that it had been weeks, not days, and that I’d been unconscious much longer than I’d guessed. When had my parents come back from Montevideo? And where were my grandfather and father? On top of the refrigerator, there was always a flashlight sitting in a fruit basket; I grabbed it and returned to the garage. I ran its circle of light over the walls and saw that a few fishing poles were missing, along with the buckets, a holding cage, and a lantern. Clearly they’d gone to catch fish, blinding them first with a bright light. I didn’t often accompany my grandfather on these night fishing sessions—they bored me to no end, and I was always afraid of the trees at night—but this time I was dying to move my body in the fresh, salty air, to run down to the beach, look for my father, and let him know that I was better, that I was back, that I was strong enough to stay there with him, fishing with my grandfather and him. The front door was locked; but the back door, the one to the kitchen, was not. I put on some Bermuda shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt and crept noiselessly out the back door. After circling the house and heading up toward the road, I glanced back: the pines looked like animals asleep in a huddle at the bottom of their den. It was a luminous night, brimming with stars. I held the flashlight out in front of me and yelled their names. The wind had picked up a little, so my voice must not have reached them. I walked a little further and yelled again, and that time they heard me.

Image: “Forest” by Caro Maranguello

Nuno Ramos translated by Adam Morris

Geology Lesson

There’s a layer of dust covering things, protecting them from us. Dark sooty powder, fragments of salt and seaweed, tons of grainy matter that goes crossing the ocean and transforms itself into transparent fibers deposited little by little to preserve that which remained underneath. Almost nothing has been thought about this phenomenon. It’s probably all an enormous camouflage operation, of equalizing a remote signal that we’d easily perceive in the absence of this mountain of tiny accretions. Something inside of things is being disguised, hidden at whatever price, and even this extract of stone, earth, and dry lava where we walked, built our cabins and birthed our children seems to be there to wrap something that tends toward the center. The endless aggregation of Gravity, of mass falling upon mass, matter embracing matter ... Read More »]]>

Nuno Ramos
translated by Adam Morris

Geology Lesson

There’s a layer of dust covering things, protecting them from us. Dark sooty powder, fragments of salt and seaweed, tons of grainy matter that goes crossing the ocean and transforms itself into transparent fibers deposited little by little to preserve that which remained underneath. Almost nothing has been thought about this phenomenon. It’s probably all an enormous camouflage operation, of equalizing a remote signal that we’d easily perceive in the absence of this mountain of tiny accretions. Something inside of things is being disguised, hidden at whatever price, and even this extract of stone, earth, and dry lava where we walked, built our cabins and birthed our children seems to be there to wrap something that tends toward the center. The endless aggregation of Gravity, of mass falling upon mass, matter embracing matter with constantly renewed appetite, comprises the most evident expression of this principle. It’s as though a primordial being, in the midst of an ancient howl, perceived a slit in its body or pus in its eyes, a plumage of strange color in its fur or even a malformation in one of its limbs. Before descending into despair, ashamed by what it saw, it still managed to cover itself with what lay nearby, snatching up everything that had escaped it, and so the material with which it was now dressed had until then formed part of its perfect body — the dust and the earth, the foliage and the plumage, the explosive fire of the stars and the frozen darkness. A giant moving spiral, concentric, curling like a fetus, into which this divinity retracts itself, incapable of self-understanding, of wholly including itself, showing to time and space that until then they were inside it, they were it, its basic behavior—collapse, jolt, suspension; sand, matter, enigma. It’s hard to understand how this attitude of reclusion and shame has irradiated throughout things. Matter, in fact, is perhaps nothing more than the first expression of this escape. Inverse to the explosive affirmation deriving from a complete nothingness, all Physics would have for its starting point the negation and occlusion of some perceived thing, the disguise of a defect, a protective spiral around an identity full of aversion. The expansion of the universe, according to this point of view, should proceed only until the coverup is complete, thereafter becoming unnecessary. But if the flux of dust and lava in our planet continues, if the light diverges from its spectrum toward red, indicating the progressive distancing of stars already so distant, it’s because the ashamed body still couldn’t cover itself completely. In fact, the movement by which the heated gases turn, the collisions of polar masses with the lighter and warner tropic air, the condensation of storms over the ocean, all the salt thrown into the atmosphere, the struggle of membranes and gills, the very suffering of human aspirations, dragons spreading their sequins and scales, shorn lives, chunks of shipwrecked wood, eyes veiled by cataracts, basins where the sargasso dwells, everything that turned grey and later flourished in the spring, everything that the autumn equalized with silver and monotony, the soft pink of sunset, air that fills the chest with joy, seem in fact to be part of a wisdom, furtive gestures that we don’t comprehend, resulting from an enormous and defective body that uselessly tries to conceal itself, to flee beneath appearances. The motive of its failure, probably, is due to the fact that the matter with which it covers itself is itself a part of it, sharing in its deception—it also wants to hide itself, reproducing infinitesimally the movement that ought be restricted to the core of its origin. Through mimicry and resemblance it ends up playing the role that was assigned it during the long litany of existence, turning its face inward, neutralizing its factions, parading slowly. Perhaps it’s a curious contradiction that the thing which makes such at attempt to hide itself should require witnesses like us, that contemplate, admire, and moreover, find it beautiful. Such is all the progressive extinguishing, the periodic nebulization from which it could sprout it riotous flowers, the monotony of a language that ought to be flesh, a mathematics which ought to be of trunks and of marble, yes, the whole lagoon of possibilities that the fragile ambition of our organs never truly rises to desire, gains its imprimatur, its documentation in terms of need—we embrace that which flees from us, we invert its very aversion and refusal, we judge this ashamed and defective nature to be perfect, we adhere, in the end, forlorn and forever to that which seems beautiful, because we have gotten used to obeying love.

* *

Ash

If the fire comes from the forest, we’ll have our ditch. If it comes from inside one of the houses, there’s earth all around them to prevent it from spreading. It if blooms in the big hut, then here’s to its destruction. Perhaps it will be a bolt that strikes us. We know that the fire will come because we all have the same dream. A blue flame and light smoke. The sweet smell of burned flesh. The flight of the survivors among coals, all the way to the dry lagoon. Our calcified carcass beside that of two lions. Later the new trees growing, the new houses, the big hut. Later the same dream and dissipation, all over again.

* *

Wasp

They told me that it was the neighbor lady who said it, that they came after me shrouded in hoods. I was submerged. They ransacked the whole room in search of the ticket. The whole room and the ticket. The sofa sinks. The walls are limp. I would have rather they found me later. I’d have rather it all stopped and they let loose the wasp on me. She’s imprisoned in the sugar pot now, gorging herself. They told me, it was the neighbor lady who said it, that this is exactly what they were going to do.

* *

Moonband

The last strong rain tore up the earth above them. They went about in bands. They followed the moon. It’s been proven they don’t transmit our diseases, but we delight in the final howl. We make soap. We make boneflour, hot fur and blood. Afterwards I wash myself with it. This animal thing. Man’s best friend flees from man. It’s there drying on the asphalt with a limp paw, moribund.

* *

I Take Care Of Them

Since the arrival of the highway I take care of them. I only need a spade, a bit of lime, a bucket, and a bicycle. I don’t even need to pedal much. I hang the bucket with the bottom full of lime from the handlebar. Every morning there’s another dog. At least one. I size him up. Sometimes a few pieces of asphalt come along with it, crags of tar hardened in fur. I try to remember what each was like. I take note of the size, the pattern of spots, the place where the car struck him and the date. If anyone comes to ask me I’m ready. Later I cover them with dirt from my yard. I need to exhume the oldest ones to make room for the newest. I’d like to know their names. When I meet the owner, I ask.

* *

Her Only Chance

I doubt it will work. The hatch will close first. They’ll shoot first. I doubt she speaks German. I doubt they’ll ask me anything. Maybe she’ll pull her documents from her purse before they ask her name. I doubt she knows. They’ll shoot first. Before she can move, murmur. I doubt she’ll know how to say naturally why she’s here. Maybe they’ll want to know. It’s their right. I think for me there’s no risk. I speak German well. But I doubt my German will come out. I also doubt they’ll ask me. They’ll want to know about her, specifically. They’ll ask like this: how can you have such alabaster skin if you come from such a faraway country? How can you walk around there, with your light skin under an overcoat? Don’t you see that everyone’s wanting?  And so then one turns to me, but I doubt anyone would do that. One turns to me and asks, in his sly German: where’d you find her? Is she your bitch? He makes a big deal of being rude. Where do you keep her? You guys fuck? You fuck her ass? And so on, but I doubt anyone would speak to me like that. Maybe she’ll be able to run fast, but I doubt she’d do that. She’ll get a cramp, but it would be her only chance. She’ll stand there looking down the barrel of the gun, but it would be her only chance. That hatch is low, I think she’d be able to jump it, but I doubt she’d do it.

* *

Against the Light

Here the earth endures our weight and provides us with crabs. We want to return to the earth, to inside the earth, but above us the sky remains, escaping the tips of the dry trees. Here it is only the wind that stays, balancing the ignoble ball of light, by which we are disgusted. Here we are disgusted by the light.

* *

It Won’t Work

Return the wrinkled skin. Return the toothless mouth. Return the mutilated mixture, inheritance that won’t work. Return to the moon, and take. Spread out your ashes. Now that the light doesn’t watch over this cortege—carnival, silence—close your own eyes. Close them for yourself.

* *

Image: Nuno Ramos, “Untitled” (2005). O pão do corvo was published by Editora 34.