Raúl

The mountain where Raúl’s and Julia’s ranches are located is ever-changing. The climate is chilly rather than mild, and it’s perpetually damp. Throughout the day, periods of rain, fog, and sun follow one after the other. Julia bought hers a long time ago, drawn by the area’s lush vegetation, she said, and by the beauty of those rains and suns. He bought his just four years back, drawn by her. They got married in a picturesque colonial town three hours from Bogotá, and after two and a half years Julia left him, married another man in that same town some time later, and, seven months ago now, disappeared without a trace.

The vegetation is lush there because water abounds. Those who warn of a desertifying world have never visited those parts. There, the world will end in water. It falls everywhere, wells up everywhere, floats. Washed-out roads and mudslides are the biggest concern. Raúl’s third of a hectare contains three springs; a stream known as El Raizal, which rushes noisily past about ten meters from the house; and, some thousand meters away, tumbling over large boulders down the mountainside, the Lapas River, which has been torrential of late. Winter—the rainy season—is hard going everywhere, but especially in this region, which is already so wet. Over the past three months, there’s been as much rain here as usually falls in an entire year.

Sun, not so much.

Sitting out on the porch, Raúl is listening to the stream and the downpour and the river all in a chorus. His chair is made of cowhide with a very straight back. To avoid the tedious labor of building the wrap-around porch out of bamboo, he instead has installed a railing made of macana palm wood and a ceiling paneled with interlaced bamboo, each stem two centimeters in diameter. Raúl likes what he does. He never studied architecture; he learned from foremen and books and by keeping his eyes open. He graduated with an engineering degree a million years ago, worked in the field for two years, and got bored. He learned to work with bamboo and knows how to use it in his constructions without ruining the view. Bambusa guadua. Books about his work are published in sumptuous coffee-table editions, with spectacular photos and drab texts that nobody reads. Julia wrote four poems for one of them, and Raúl found them just as drab as the texts but told her he liked them. And since she was fairly renowned herself, the editors agreed to include them in the volume—or maybe they actually liked them.

Plenty of people admired her poems. The intellectuals who awarded her the occasional prize deemed them good, of course. Sometimes Raúl goes back and rereads them, trying to understand what everybody saw in them, but García Lorca’s gypsy ballads are more his speed, and César Vallejo’s poems, especially the two or three you can actually make any sense of. He hasn’t read much poetry beyond that and doesn’t consider himself qualified to pass judgments on the subject. When he told Julia how he felt about García Lorca, she’d said, “Only a shit-for-brains could find Poet in New York dull,” and Raúl went ballistic. Afterward, Julia was always talking about his rages this and his rages that. She came to see him as an angry man.

As far as money goes, Raúl has neither too much nor too little, and he isn’t stingy when it comes to investing in his property, which he keeps meticulously maintained. The pickup he uses to haul supplies isn’t new, but it runs well. He doesn’t regret selling the ranch he used to own near Cucununá, which was lovely but very dry, to buy this one. He’s rented out the Bogotá apartment where he lived and worked for so long, and that serves as another source of income. He’d stopped using it after a while, preferring to stay “holed up on his ranch,” as his friends say and as Julia used to say, accusing him of being a recluse. If Raúl ever went to Bogotá, it was for her and her alone. Recluses spend their lives within the hundred-square-meter confines of an apartment, Raúl thinks, or the fifty square centimeters of a car seat, yet it’s him, the one who spends much of his day with no roof but clouds above his head, who’s supposedly the shut-in. His business has one full-time employee, him, and a manager, him. He designed the logo—bamboo sprouting out of the soil like a huge asparagus—and painted it himself.

People invite him to come more than he wants to go, ringing him from all over the country. He also gives lectures on bamboo, and he’s even traveled to Japan. He prefers designing whole houses rather than specific elements, though that has its charms too—ceilings, for example, almost always with a combination of Guadua bamboo and reeds, which look great together if you know what you’re doing. He charges a bundle to ensure that people don’t bother him much. He prefers blue-leafed reeds, which have thicker, shinier stems than regular reeds, which are slender with a strawlike texture that works well in folding screens and room dividers. He also uses papyrus, rushes, and palm fronds. When he gets to thinking about rushes and bamboos and reeds, the hours fly by as he contemplates possible combinations of textures and colors. Colombia is a paradise in terms of materials. Right by the turnoff to Bogotá, there’s a group of artisans who weave dried banana bark to make wicker furniture. The pieces are a little rustic, but the texture has its appeal. Raúl is planning to go by the workshop this week to speak with them.

It was this infatuation with his work—“infatuation” was his sister Raquel’s term—that saved him when Julia left him. Raquel hated her so much by the end! Raúl is still her baby brother, even though he’s in his fifties and she’s only got two years on him. If it hadn’t been for his work, Raúl would have wasted away, or gone mad. He looked a fright.

Julia

I married five times, and every time I came out of it free and independent and unburdened by a husband complicating my life. No, six. I was never anybody’s shadow. The locals used to say that when I got tired of my husbands, I threw them in the lake with rocks tied to their feet—how ironic—or buried them in the coffee grove, or went out and sold them. Well, that’s what they said about the first four, who, unlike Raúl, went away and never came back. Jorge, the father of my two girls, died of leukemia, and Marcelo bled out in the hands of negligent paramedics after a car accident. I used to talk to the other two on the phone from time to time, or meet up for coffee in Bogotá if I happened to run into them. If a while went by without hearing from them, I’d call to find out how they were doing. But they couldn’t claim I’d buried Raúl in the coffee grove because they used to see him on his ranch, which became increasingly overgrown—I obviously hadn’t sold him off yet, ha. He put all his energy into his bamboo and his other obsessions, and grew more retiring and antisocial than ever.

Since I got a late start in my writing career—after I split up with my first husband—I had to give it my all, and I had no patience for people like Raúl, who demand too much attention with their quirks and obsessions. I love the beauty of simplicity. People probably say I was intolerant, but nothing could be further from the truth. I was more tolerant with him than with any of the others, because Raúl is an extraordinary person—I’m the first to acknowledge it—an artist in his own way, and I was actually really worried when I broke things off with him because I knew how much he loved me and I wasn’t sure he could bear it. When I told him we needed to end it, that my love for him had died, I wrote a poem on my blog where I said that a person isn’t in command of their own heart and that emotions should flow like rainwater, never standing stagnant. I wept as I had few times before. The poem was included in an anthology of Latin American women poets published in Buenos Aires at the end of that year. People appreciated it for the depth of its sensitivity and for my boldness in expressing what I was experiencing, without pussyfooting or hypocrisy. My poems touched my readers’ souls. I was uncensored. People who read or heard them were moved; they felt something of themselves or of the world through my words, and something magical happened. Something unpredictable and powerful.

Rain is so beautiful! It was incredible the way it hammered down on everything. I wrote a poem about precisely that, and there was this metaphor about it drumming on the banana leaves on Raúl’s ranch and about the water flowing to join the larger current of the Lapas River, which never ever stopped noisily rushing. “Hey, where’s the off switch for that thing so we can get some sleep?” Humberto Fajardo asked me the first time he visited. The guy was a real jokester—who would have guessed he’d turn out to be so violent? And a total city slicker. He was astonished to see so much water everywhere, like in that poem I wrote about trees, how they look like jellyfish. How from my terrace, the mountains looked like the sea. They were the sea. Humberto liked my poems a lot, even if he didn’t really understand them, because the waters I plied were deep and elemental. Above all, I am a lyrical person, a poet. He’s into marketing—business, in other words—and extreme sports. This place where I am now is like a hammock. So much peace. Lovely.

Raúl

Raúl’s bamboo plants are for looking at—he never cuts them. At a lumberyard in Bogotá he buys bamboo from Quindío, already treated for termites, the Castilla biotype, larger in diameter than the varieties that grow in this region. He built columns using the fattest ones, which are nearly thirty centimeters in diameter and strong enough to hold up the Chrysler Building. He also buys reeds and rushes so he doesn’t have to harvest his own. He created a grove of bamboo with a clearing in the middle where he placed two large, lichen-covered boulders that had to be brought in with a backhoe; they later became overgrown with ferns, some of them tiny and absolutely perfect. When it comes to ferns, they’re either perfect or absolutely perfect. Regular bamboo forests are kind of pansy compared to the local ones, Raúl thinks. Though he does like the carpet of leaves they form. “More coals for Newcastle, eh, Don Raúl?” the truck drivers tease when they show up to deliver supplies.

It’s stopped raining. When that happens the fog creeps in, as it’s doing now, and, without asking permission, slips into the house and leaves the furniture dripping. Or the sun comes out. Or there’s fog and rain on one part of the mountain and sunshine and rain on another.

Raúl works because he enjoys it. True wealth, he thinks, is not needing much. Julia always insinuated that was false modesty on his part, a cliché, only a pretense of humility or even saintliness—in other words, hypocrisy. Raúl recalls the emerald dealer who offered him a ton of money to design him a house in the village of Pacho, near the Muzo mines. He was short and stout, very affable, and he had no neck. “Everything, absolutely everything of bamboo,” the emerald dealer effused. Floors, walls, doors, stairs, railings, balconies, downspouts, gutters all made of bamboo. The stove and toilet would be the only things made of another material—though, with some effort, those could be bamboo too. The whole idea was a nightmare, so Raúl resisted any temptation to go after the money and turned down the job. The man was nice about it. He loved bamboo even more than Raúl did.

They offer him what he doesn’t want to build; they tear down what he has built. He’d been so fond of the little chapel he erected in a town in Caldas, the most beautiful thing he’d ever made. Seeking to finally purge his grief over Julia, he’d poured his soul into it. Yes, they’d warned him the chapel would be temporary while the real church was being built, but a person doesn’t build things thinking they’re going to be torn down, so he hadn’t asked what they meant by temporary. Bamboo arches and semiarches, walls made of mud and rush mats, sometimes exposed, sometimes plastered with mud and horse dung and painted ochre and colonial red. Palm thatch roof. The pulpit was made of wattle and daub, also painted colonial red, and above it Raúl placed a simple cross made of macana palm wood, thick and practically black. Great richness in the parts and simplicity in the whole. You might almost think Raúl believed in God. Beautiful. Then the first thing a new parish priest did was tear it down, because we are not ants, he said, and should not build the house of the Lord out of manure and garbage.

Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

Fog at Noon is out now from Archipelago Books.

Forest

We hadn’t noticed, but a kind of water started trickling from the trees, from the branches to the leaves and onto us, our heads, our shoulders. It’s rain, and it may be powerful and thunderous up there, with bolts that light the crown of the boundless woods, but it reaches us as mere drops of mist. That’s how down below we are.

Soon it’s dampened everything. Contrary to what we believed, mud can get slicker, and the torn things disintegrating under our feet can rot even more. The smell climbs denser, heavier, into our nostrils. The air is made of water that envelops us.

Drops of something like sweat rise from my neck, which is a single mass packed with dirt and all kinds of waste and bits of fruit or bark, how can I be sure, spilling down from up above. The droplets seep from my head, mark furrows in my face. Maybe it isn’t sweat, maybe it’s water or some other exhalation of the plants, of unknown animals up above, watching us, regarding us patiently, following our progress, unnoticed by us.

My clothes are completely drenched, stuck to my skin. I’m constantly aware of my own stench and that of my fellows, and when I stop to think about it, about smells and what causes them, I feel even more lost, me in the middle of the woods, clumsy, useless. We’re warped, dirty beasts advancing into forbidden densities. We’ll never get out of here.

When had it crossed our minds to go in? After all, our place was a different one, a place where we could control things and calculate time. Here, by contrast, time is a ghost whose presence you feel when it moves, cold and invisible, but you can’t use it, or measure it, or name it. We have hands, but they’re ungainly around all these trees. What our hands can do out there is futile here; what we need them to do, our hands can’t do it. We have feet and they keep going, but we don’t know the route or where we’re bound. What’s the use of glancing around to prevent some tiger from attacking, why bother peering through the leaves. Do we even know how to look in this quivering world?

The holes in my boots are wider since yesterday, and now a knotty clump of dead leaves or a chunk of earth can slip in and scrape my socks, which are already chafing the soles of my feet, which are already rubbing against all the roughness until they bleed. The earth insists its way through the tatters of my clothes, forceful as claws, boring into the folds of my skin, piercing hour after hour into the red of my flesh. All you can do is not think about the pain. There’s a place in the mind that can silence harm, but the cost is sorrow seeping everywhere.

We make arduous headway and I’m on the verge of tears. I don’t care about the salty current trickling earthily down my face, I just wipe my eyes once I can’t see. Because maybe I don’t want to see. There’s no point. In any case, I won’t have time to figure out if that length of branch is a slithering snake, curling around my mud-caked ankles, climbing the legs of my foul-smelling pants. By the time the fangs have sunk, in the middle of everything, into my flesh, my eyes will be no good to me either. It won’t make sense to tear off a scrap of shirt, tighten the tourniquet above my knee, hurry, yell.

I think we’ve forgotten why we’re walking, why we’re still pressing forward. But why bother asking. Do any of us even know when we’ll arrive? We’ve emptied out our senses. It’s fate, we said, it’s divine punishment. Punishment for what? we asked. And then: Whose fault is it? And we thrash in the dirt, cursing each other. A kick to the side, a ruptured lip. We’ve rummaged in the belly of every question and nothing has come out. Everything is hollow.

Once in a while, a branch shudders and the leaves burst against my face; some scratch and quicken the pain, others stroke my lids and soothe them. But we say nothing. It’s possible that the one walking in front, the one whose name we no longer say aloud, still knows where he’s going and why. I catch glimpses of him through the green smudges. Sometimes he slips away among the trunks or vanishes into the foliage, but then his body appears again, or the rustle of his progress, or something undefined, the trace of his presence in the humid mist engulfing us.

My arms are crawling with ants, lured by the sweet, sharp scent of dying trees that have daubed me with their sap. Like the ground, I’m a receptacle for the waste snubbed by the trees. As the days pass, the forest coats us with its excess skin. We slowly cease to be this person or that, and we take on a resemblance to the density we’re trying to cross.

The one in front stops short. Then the one behind him, and he stumbles, dizzy. He grabs hold of a trunk, adjusts his aching body so he can rest his back against it. He pants and closes his eyes.

I look at the other one, the one who stopped first: he puts his hands on his hips, spits mud, and wipes his forehead with his arm. I stop walking and all the colossal plants suddenly fall onto me, crushing, endless. I try to lift my head, but the weight of the forest overtakes me. My veins are rivers of gravel in my legs.

Another man appears, though I’m not sure where he came from, maybe from behind or alongside me, I can’t be sure, I hadn’t sensed him there. Dried blood streaks his head from crown to ear, and he’s bootless. His filthy socks show his toes, his blackened nails, his bruises gone darker with dirt and scabs.

I want to call out to the one in front, to plead with him: we can’t stop, we won’t be able to keep walking again if we do, we’ll abandon our strength in the helpless appraisal of our wretched bodies. But there’s no use talking.

I listen. My heart beats slowly in my chest. Outside, the trees sound, the roots creep as silently as snakes, surrounding us. Where are those birds, those monkeys in the distance, how many are there, shrilling with rage.

The one with no boots stands there open-mouthed. His eyes look vacant, overwhelmed. I catch sight of a dark tongue behind his lips, a mass of flesh that drools and can’t still the trembling. He’s not bleeding from the head anymore. His hands are bruised like mine, like the one who rests against the tree and weeps, panting, like the one in front who turns his back to us now.

I hear the muffled sobs of the second one. He’s still leaning against the trunk, and there’s something dark in his face. Looking up, I strain to find the canopy of the tree he clings to, try to distinguish it from the others. Tiny droplets spatter my face. All I can see is a single green and shadowed thing, dense to the point of blindness. The man weeps and his body slumps away from the tree; his knees buckle and he lets himself spill onto the ground.

We’ll hunt in the woods tonight, Antonio had told us, I know a guy, everything’s ready. It was late in the afternoon and we were drinking under the eaves. We saw the path, the front gate of the house, the pasture in the open air. Beyond all that was the horizon of trees, and it looked easy to walk out there in our new boots, carry a rifle, a flashlight. Antonio had spoken to the tracker and he’d take care of everything.

Then we made our way single file, stopped to share a drink. We’d walked for about three hours and nothing had happened, we were angry, thinking that the tracker wasn’t as good as we’d been told. There’s nothing to hunt out here, he’s worthless. Maybe he isn’t even a tracker. Then we lost him. We felt our way forward for a little while, shouting his name, but we never saw him again.

The one in front turns around and looks at us. We’re numbers: he counts us. This morning, I saw that he still had his shotgun, but now it’s gone. His empty hands hang beside him, rub his eyes, drop down again, dangle motionless. There are four of us left, but we’re all tired. He tries to make out some sky, a scrap of dark cloud, but all he sees is the tangle, brown and yellow and green. The branches drip with a rain that isn’t falling anymore.

A mosquito clings to my ear. Now there are two, but I don’t care. My arm doesn’t move. My hand doesn’t pat. My ear doesn’t protest the wild sting as it spreads deep into my brain. The pain must be scattered.

Without looking at each other, we’re all thinking the same thing. It’s the density of the forest. There’s no free space here, no place where our exhaustion can spread itself out. We all hear the fear that reaches us like whispers through the trees, filling the hollow trunks, the eyes of wasps, the dead leaves. They’re the same sounds as yesterday, and before yesterday, and the day before, and the first day: the water’s steady beat, the branches trembling when they release a weight we never saw, the shrieks from somewhere not far off.

We listen to the insects roaming our blood invisibly, anticipating our decay. We listen to the wriggling of the worms, the beak of some bird cracking the tender flesh of fruit.

Nothing new crosses the ruthless wall, and the one in front, who has finished telling us, turns his sickened back once more and starts to walk away. The blood is sticking to my socks, but I follow. My pants are torn. The wound on my thigh starts to bleed again. Where are the eyes that hungrily track this slash in me?

I shake my head and a pair of yellowed leaves falls from my hair, drifting ponderous toward the earth. Everything rots and there are no words for it. The one with the dried blood on his head begins to walk.

I close my burning eyes, my feet advance, but I can’t go any faster. A trembling branch settles back into place, showing me where the one who tells us went, where I must go.

Slowly, I make my way toward the weeping man. He’s sitting on the ground, and if I reached out my arm, my open palm could brush against his jaw, stroke his cheeks, wipe them clean of dirt. I wouldn’t have to remember his name or any other words. I could console him beyond the beasts that crouch in wait for us among the leaves.

Coated in mud and sweat, streaked all over, he’s the same color as the one crumbling on the ground, and his head looks like a misshapen tree stump rising interminably skyward. I look at him as I pass. My body no longer has anything that could be his.

All he says is that soft whimper, like a dog’s, and his dry eyes. He doesn’t look at me, but of course he feels the nausea my body emanates. I think I should think of him, remember a time we did something together. What was his face like? We’ve all known each other since we were small, when the days were radiant. Once again, tears furrow my face. I wipe my eyes. I won’t stop, and maybe he already knows it.

When I press on, the branches will close behind me, the leaves will go still, and the air will halt again, as if nothing had ever crossed any path at all. The rotted leaves will swallow my tracks and all the stenches of my body will vanish in the damp. I’ll leave no trace that he might follow, no footsteps to track and decipher. Then he too will dissolve by that tree. Leaves will tumble down, and the waste will slowly cover his face and shoulders, and his bitter sobs will tangle with the roots, and they’ll creep over the ground together, until they jumble and meld and become one with everything.

It won’t be long before the night comes back again.

Translated by Robin Myers

The Trees is out now from Relegation Books.

In ten intimate essays, Daniel Saldaña París explores the cities he has lived in, each one home to a new iteration of himself. In Mexico City, he’s a young poet eager to prove himself. In Montreal, an opioid addict desperate for relief. In Madrid, a lonely student seeking pleasure in grotesque extremes. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth? 

Saldaña París turns to literature and film, poetry and philosophy for answers. The result is a hybrid of memoir and criticism, “a sensory work, full of soundscapes, filth, planes, closed spaces, open vastness” (El País).

Notes on the Fetishization of Silence 

Until just lately, I was living in another city—to the north, far north, too far north. For half the year, the windows of my apartment remained closed twenty-four seven: it was an old building and the ice used to jam the mechanism for opening them. The subzero temperatures, the hail and snow from November to April—sometimes even May—made any form of spatial communion impossible: outside, the frozen waste; inside, the refuge. The frontier between them was doing its level best to be impassable: steamed up or frosted double-glazing. It was, then, a muffled home with wooden flooring. 

For six months, without interruption, the only sounds were the creaking of the floorboards, the scuttling of the mice inside the walls, water filling the central heating radiators—ancient, painted metal monstrosities standing by the walls. Sound was something that happened indoors. Like when you submerge your head in a bathtub and hear only your own movements, the flow of blood, the dark viscera pulsing in their slow but steady jog toward the tomb. 

In such conditions, house and body perform a species of mirrored dance. The rumbling of the pipes stretching as they woke would make me focus my hearing on my digestive system—slow as a lazy mule, made sluggish by the quietness of everything. The rat-a-tat of the frozen rain—neither hail nor snow: a midpoint between the two—would set my nerves on edge: sharp, pointy nerves like the icicles on the church across the street. The scratching of the rodents’ feet sounded like something murky living inside me and trying to find a way out. And so it was with everything. You might say that an unsettling harmony reigned there. 

Once a day, I’d force myself to leave the house to walk for a while. The sidewalks, bordered by snow on either side, became rough country lanes. The gaunt faces of pedestrians, swathed to the eyeballs in winter clothing, passed like ghosts: the footsteps of others made no noise; only my own, crunch-crunching the ice, forming cold footprints that a flurry of snow would soon blur. And the bequilted children pulled on sledges along those wintery paths like miniature despots of a very civil tundra—timid Mongols whispering orders to their horses, courteous Huns on snow-white roads—rarely cried. 

So, every afternoon I’d walk to my regular haunt, a café archetypically called Club Social, where my hearing would be quickly restored by the Romance hubbub of the Italians, a dearly longed-for sound, vaguely familiar but also strange: words deformed by centuries and migrations; Latin cackles allied to Anglo howls; orders for cappuccinos yelled in macaronic French, with vowels tripping over themselves—vowels muffled by the leaden weight of the damned snow. There in the Club Social on Rue Saint-Viateur, I’d sit for a while to warm up, surrounded by a very particular, even slightly predictable buzz—but at least a noise—that to some extent replaced the non-existent late December sun. 

Later, on my way back home—that incredible, almost soundproof shell—I’d stop in at the bakery frequented by the Hasidic Jews, who would continue grumbling in Yiddish on their cell phones while ordering a dozen rugelach from the Chinese assistant behind the counter. 

At night, the sound of the gigantic snowplows would sometimes interrupt my sleep, passing through the double glazing like a dim but still recognizable memory: whistles, motors, crash crash, metal shovels hitting the cold asphalt. 

Spring wasn’t the rush of joy you see in cartoons, but a constant flow of liquids, a slow drip-dripping: life connected to the saline pack of the thaw. On the roof, walled-in rivers reemerged, drains that suddenly sprang to life and channeled the water from the highest tiles to the barren earth. The icicles hanging from the church, ping ping, gradually losing their shape to become dirty puddles from which drank the first squirrels to appear on the sidewalks. 

In some sense, conversation also unfroze; in the street, polyglot profanities could be heard, and the splashing of car tires through the blackish, watery mud that goes by the onomatopoeic name of slush. 

Returning to live in Mexico City has involved, above all else, returning to a noise that, however familiar, still jars. The transition hasn’t been simple. On the first nights, I woke every half hour, startled by the howling of the neighbor’s dog, a helicopter passing overhead, two people chatting by the elevator of my building. Punctually, at 3 a.m., a series of descending planes would rouse me. At times, resigned to the interruption of my dreams, I’d go to my seventh-floor balcony and listen to the distant motors of the trucks on the Eje, the sirens, a party refusing to die down two floors below. The constant din, impossible to shut out, was driving me crazy. 

After a few days, I bought a packet of earplugs that at least allowed me to sleep more deeply. In the metrobus, I got into the habit of wearing headphones at all times—even if nothing was coming through them—to partially drown out the din of the city, which attained seriously harmful levels of sonic interference. In the café where I used to sit and work, I took to listening to white noise via an app I downloaded on my phone to block out the bachata music coming from the speakers and the conversation of other customers. 

Those early days after landing in Mexico City were followed by others, when I experimented with a wide variety of possibilities. I began to follow a podcast about urban sonic environments that had an episode dedicated to different cities, so that one day I found myself crossing Parque Hundido while listening to the street cries of New Delhi. The fissure that opened between the sound of one city and the vision of another later allowed me to recover a certain form of surprise at the music of the Mexican capital. 

“Last night, the big gray cat of my childhood came to me. I told him that noise stalks and harries me,” writes Antonio di Benedetto in The Silentiary. After an hour spent listening to a program on the sonic landscape of Copenhagen, the distant whistle of the camotero with his cartload of sweet potatoes seemed to me—how can I put it?—exotic, and only through that exoticization was I able to bear the harassment that Di Benedetto refers to. 

Maybe there’s nothing for it but to accept the noise, welcome it, resign yourself to it, or seek out its unsuspected characteristics, like when you learn to stroke an animal on the part of its flank that it likes best. 

I can’t say that the reconciliation has been complete, but there is a tacit recognition that living cities speak, they howl, they shatter the whole night in a crashing of glass. We, their inhabitants, can shudder with impotent rage, buy ever more sophisticated earplugs, or create a level of silence in our beds by putting a pillow over our heads, or closing our eyes in the shower, or in the darkness of a room, or standing at a window only to discover that others are looking at us from identical windows across the street. 

In The Soundscape, the book that coined that term “sonic environment,” Murray Schafer speaks of the need to view silence positively: “If we have a hope of improving the acoustic design of the world, it will be realizable only after the recovery of silence as a positive state in our lives. Still the noise in the mind: that is the first task—then everything else will follow in time.” 

The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge (the first human to reach the South Pole, the North Pole, and the summit of Everest, and whom I met one afternoon in the clammy heat of the airport in Medellín), in Silence: In the Age of Noise, describes an experiment carried out in the universities of Harvard and Virginia: a group of people were offered the choice of sitting silently in an empty room with no distractions or receiving painful electric shocks. Almost half the participants chose the electric shock over passing a short while in silence. 

I wonder if I’d have formed part of that masochistic group who chose the electric shock or been one of the silent meditators. A few months ago, during the long northern winter, I would, without a moment’s hesitation, have plumped for the silence. Nowadays, I’m not so certain. 

All meditation techniques speak of the importance of breathing in the attempt to “still the noise in the mind.” The problem is that one breathes differently in different places. I was born in this noisy city and didn’t immediately learn to breathe well. They put me in an incubator, and after a few hours of observation, the doctors decided I’d be able to learn on my own and sent me home. But I didn’t learn. At school, I used to forget to breathe correctly. Asthma sent me to another, warmer city at a lower altitude and, in those days—and perhaps still—less noisy. In each of the cities I’ve inhabited—whether the bustle of Madrid or the silence of the northern city mentioned earlier—I’ve had to learn anew how to breathe. But in Mexico City I’m constantly learning. I retain air for a whole minute and then exhale in puffs, I take three or four large gulps and then pause, unconsciously holding my breath again. I’m a little like someone who knows how to swim, but only out of the water. 

The labored rhythm of my respiration has a sound of its own that I’m unaware of. At times, while I’m reading, my wife says, “You’re breathing really heavily,” and then I realize that I’m making a lot of noise, breathing like a dog having a nightmare or a pig someone is trying to push along. It isn’t a smooth, even breathing that, in the hypnosis of reading, becomes a hum, but a hurried respiration that trips over itself, gets jammed, and generates a broken form of music. 

It’s the music of me being alive. 

In the northern city, that city that is too far north, I used to breathe differently, as if everything were going to reach me without my having to do anything—as if, ah, there would never be a lack of air, not even in that vacuum-packed apartment. My respiration was a well-oiled mechanism, remote, like the constellations. I used to move from place to place like a smart car. Here, by contrast, it’s as if I’m driving a lawnmower, a dirty machine with awkward blades that might cut off your arm if you’re not careful. 

My silence is a bubble in the interior of that machine (the ghost in it); a bubble that miraculously floats and endures, always in danger of being burst by the rusty metal. 

Translated by Christina MacSweeney

Planes Flying over a Monster is out now from Catapult.

Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator of Latin American literature. She has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, and Jazmina Barrera.

Philip K. Zimmerman is a writer and translator from Spanish and German. His work has been presented in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Guernica, Necessary Fiction, the Berlin International Literature Festival, and the New York International Fringe Festival.

Bonomini’s enigmatic fictions are shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, and remain eerily prescient in their meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation.

Though The Novices of Lerna garnered praise and admiration from the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and Aldolfo Bioy Casares when it first appeared in 1972, Bonomini fell mysteriously into obscurity and remained for decades one of the great untranslated treasures of Argentine letters… until now!

FIGS AND JASMINES

Death used to be different. Something has changed in the way we think about death or the way we die. It’s not that I’ve changed. Maybe it’s just time, pure time, that makes us see the same things as if they were different. Buenos Aires used to be a city of boys with Erector Sets, it was a city of ladies who played the violin, children witnessed masked carnivals, and every neighborhood had blacksmiths because the city and the countryside were more blended together. The bakers, the milkmen, the wicker peddlers, the trash collectors; everyone had horse-drawn carts. Even the dead were carried away in shiny hearses led by shiny-hooved horses. On summer afternoons, for example, after we’d taken our baths, we’d go out in the street and play with our friends. Races around the block and games of rango y mida, cops and robbers, and tip-cat were organized on street corners. When the first shadows began to slip over the tops of the plátanos, our aunts and grandmas would call us in to eat. Later, the lucky ones would take a trip to the ice cream parlor four blocks away for a second dessert. They would eat chocolate ice cream sandwiches with wafers bearing familiar phrases like, “Farewell, pretty gal” or “That’s my cup of tea.” It was the age of wisteria, of coleus, of pinstripe pants and thick denim, the age of white berets and red berets. We’d smoke sarsaparilla. Some men wore garters on their shirt sleeves and chatelaines; everyone wore straw hats in the summer and high boots year round. We would hurt each other’s feelings by calling each other saps, and if you had a big head, your nickname was Zeppelin. Back then, dying was romantic. Not just anyone died. Those who died were very old and very young. Unlike now, when anyone can die. My house had a fig tree. I don’t know if the fig tree held any prestige. I don’t even remember us talking about it, but it was the most important part of the house. And not just because it was in the middle of the courtyard, or because its generous branches spread over our roofs and those of our neighbors. It was important in a way that was somewhat secret and profound. In a home, certain objects will take on a special value for no apparent reason. In my home it was the fig tree. Our fig tree bore white figs, not black ones. For me, white figs are more dignified than black ones. As a child, when I’d visit a home with a black fig tree, I’d feel an overwhelming certainty that the people who lived there were our inferiors. Our home also had numerous jasmines. I’ve always found jasmines to be sickeningly sweet. They give me the same pain in the back of my palate that one gets after eating too much dulce de leche. But I do enjoy remembering those jasmines from my childhood. They were probably the same as all the other jasmines, but to me there was something special about them. I’m talking about those jasmines with fleshy white petals, the ones that turn brown in the place where their petals break off. I enjoy remembering the fig tree and how the wind would fill with its vegetal aroma as it passed sonorously through its branches. And I enjoy remembering those figs and the sticky milk they released when they were plucked before their time. Those figs seemed to stick to the hands of anyone who wouldn’t let them ripen. My grandmas and aunts wouldn’t let me eat more than four or five figs at a time because otherwise I’d get sores in the corners of my mouth. As for the jasmines, their intoxicating scent filled the house, imposing a different tone of voice on summer nights—I wasn’t allowed to go out to play until after I’d taken my bath and watered them. I hated that chore, and yet, I carried a certain attachment to those jasmines because of things I knew about them that I now prefer to remember hazily. The figs and jasmines of my childhood, that time when dying was a little bit magical and a little bit sordid, and, at the same time, something one had no right to do. Yet, impossible as it may seem, dying held a certain appeal. It was like securing a sort of glory or family sainthood. Those who died were always being talked about or alluded to. Secretly, they continued to rule the lives of the living. I’m going to say something foolish: people could kill themselves out of sheer egomania because in the end they’d wind up more relevant dead than alive. I remember my childhood filled with the smell of Faber No. 2 pencils, the smell of jasmine, the soft sound of the wind moving the branches of the fig tree. I remember how the jasmines would brown where their petals had broken off, and how your hands would get sticky from touching the fig tree’s milky stems, and I insist that dying back then was to fill a house, a neighborhood, a city, the world. But those who died were guilty. It was as if they’d snapped a petal off one of the jasmines or plucked a fig before it had ripened. They were the embodiment of betrayal. Needless betrayal. I felt they were guilty of mixing love with hate. To be precise: it was at that time I began to feel disgust for the dead. Hate, shame, resentment, but especially disgust. I’d also had the chance to die. Mine was with the measles. My fever wouldn’t go down. I noticed a circle of terrified and anguished people had formed around me. The doctor stayed by my side all night long giving orders carried out with fear. I was sure sinister things would happen if I decided to die. Aside from the flowers and the weeping and my school friends and the neighbors and people visiting and mourning and a hundred other predictable scenes, the same thing would end up happening to me: they’d turn me into a family saint, a household hero for having died. They’d set up an altar with my picture and some little candles and the silver metal vase. And in November, they’d fill the vase with dahlias from the garden. The same thing would happen: “If he were alive, he would have said…” Everything that occurred after my death would be determined by my absence. And so, I chose to live, but not so much because I wanted to go on living, but because dying disgusted me. You don’t understand anything when you’re a kid. And sometimes, when I was eating a fig and watering the jasmines, I’d think it was better to play the fool and simply let the days go idly by.

Translated by Jordan Landsman

The Novices of Lerna is now out via Transit Books.

CAREFUL WITH THE PEARLS

You open the front door. The light marks the coat of gray carpet in the living room. She’s gone. In the kitchen, you examine the trash and establish her breakfast: eggshells rest atop rotting vegetable carcasses. The air clings to the smell of boiled water, you find a lit burner, the coil is glowing bright red. 

You go into the bedroom, you don’t look for her, knowing she’s gone, but still, curiosity moves you; it’s rare to be in someone else’s house and free to contemplate her belongings, scrutinize traces: the comforter with the impression where she sat down—she changed shoes before leaving; the scent of the air she had breathed; the bathroom faucet, still dripping; the wet toothbrush. On a small bookshelf, her rings. She left with her hands bare forever. 

You go back to the living room. Sit on the love seat. Look in all the corners like you might find something else there. Just one detail could make all the difference. There’s a toy ball in the jumble of TV and telephone cables. (You remember she had a cat, Faustina, who ran away after one week.) At the other end of the room, under the bench where she placed three flowerpots, fraying carpet. 

It’s hot. You open the window to let in some air. Just then the phone rings. Her recorded voice informs the caller, correctly, that she isn’t home. After the recording, a message. 

“Hey, please call me when you’re back.” 

The house is small and pierced by light. There’s a number three hanging beside the front door. 

The whiteness of the walls is slightly blinding. 

She must have left without anyone seeing. Maybe she peered through the window to make sure no one was walking around the courtyard. Maybe she even turned the key slowly so it wouldn’t make a sound. For a long time, she had dreamed of leaving without being seen, you know that. 

You stand and walk toward the door. The key is hanging in the lock. If the key is in your hand, how did she leave? 

You hear the motors of idling cars while the light is red, then they go. She left early, an hour after sunrise. Wearing a green dress, the black shoes with ankle straps, hair pulled back into a ponytail. The street was almost empty, as expected. Just a red car, latest model, stopped at the light. Inside a man sat shaving with a device hooked up to the vehicle. The man did see her, glanced at her, but just kept going. She closed the door softly and left the building. 

The sun is now in the center of the sky. 

You hear the sound of the fridge, then go to the kitchen and open it. There are two large, full bottles of water, a jar of jam, a red ceramic butter tray. In the vegetable drawer: a head of garlic, an eggplant, an onion sprouting green shoots. 

Three packets of instant oatmeal on the shelf beside the fridge. 

You have to pee, so you go to the bathroom. The white shower curtain touches the floor, and you notice it’s spotted with black—unmistakably mold from the dampness. You admire the tile floor, its geometric figures, the smallest is pink and the largest, dark purple; magnificent rhombuses unfolding on a white background. 

That tile was once splattered with her blood. The day the wine made her fall. This story is also about the woman with the high forehead. 

You look in the mirror over the sink. Where she put a sticker of a mandala. That mirror will hang on another wall, in another room, and reflect the face with the high forehead, the woman who will die. Across from the sink, you see two small flowerpots on the window ledge. In those plants lives the woman whose teeth stick out. If you look closely at the base of each plant, you will see her: there, the miniature woman, her body the size of a finger bone, is tending the earth, watering the flowerpots. 

You flush the toilet. Your urine vanishes.

On the shelf, you see a jar of cream with day and night written on the lid in childlike handwriting, followed by a small smiley face. 

You go one room over. On the desk is her computer. A lucky find. It’s the same scene you had dreamed. The interior of the machine makes you think of a body. It’s obvious, but the metal pieces within, the slender cables, confirm the truth of the dream. This machine, you think, is where they uploaded her brain. 

You turn and look at the study walls, which catch your eye because they’re covered in Lotería cards. The sombrero, the devil, the dandy. They fill the space between shelves stacked two rows deep with books, almost collapsing. 

Out the window, you see someone crossing the courtyard. A man, medium build, moving slowly, like his legs are hurt; his shoulders dance, one rises, the other falls. He has large sheets of cardboard under his arm, he’s moving toward the street. 

You go into the bedroom to hide. Sit on the bed, in her imprint, and look out the window facing the courtyard. You take your time getting your shoes off, as if you had all of eternity, and, slowly, you lie down; once your head is on the pillow, your feet come up. You place your hands on your abdomen, fingers laced, and gaze at the ceiling. The dampness has only gotten as far as the walls. Little by little, sleep comes. You drift off. You’ll go toward the depths. She has only just left. She’s traveling to the island. 

•

The man you saw takes the cardboard boxes to the roof. He’s standing up there, you could see him through the window if you were awake. He stacks up all the boxes and then, with a worn length of string, ties them together. 

After eating the egg with a little salt, pepper, and lime, she throws the shell in the trash. She washes the cup she used as a bowl and puts it on the drying rack. Doesn’t realize she left the burner on. 

She stops in the kitchen doorway and looks at her hands. Closes them into fists as if testing her strength. She inhales deeply. Seems nervous. Goes to the door. Turns the key, silently takes one more breath. Something disturbing is waiting outside.

Peers out just before crossing the threshold, makes sure no one’s there, at that moment, walking around in the courtyard. Leaves her house. Doesn’t look back. Pulls closed the handle. Goes, with no coat. Two pearls adorn her ears. 

SUPERIMPOSITIONS 

Ten people are lined up at the latrine. Next is you. You go in, crouch, strain to defecate. Down below, on the far side of the orifice where the waste drops, are humpback whales. When you finish, you wipe with beige paper whose cylinder hangs from a wire. 

Outside, the person behind you in line has gone. 

Summer afternoon has arrived in an immense city. 

Now you walk along the street and are met with that foul odor: vapors rise from the manholes. 

You get to the next crosswalk. The red car, latest model, hits a pole. The driver dies.

You sit on the sidewalk to wait. You want to see if the ambulances will get there fast or slow; it doesn’t matter, anyway, if they’re slow. 

A few minutes pass. Pedestrians stop, like you, to watch what’s happening. The foul smell from the manholes now seems more intense, maybe it’s the smell of death. 

The paramedics hurry out of the ambulance. One of them uses a mallet to smash in the driver’s side window. Then he leans in half his body, comes out, declares: He’s dead. Goes in again, searches the dead man, then says, through his living body: His name was Serafín. 

You stand. Look up and see, high above, an enormous blimp floating in the air. It’s branded with the name of the world’s most famous soft drink (which you then read): Coca-Cola. She bursts into your thoughts, the woman with restless eyes who left for the island. She, in fact, is you. 

•

Two hours have passed since you fell asleep. When you wake up, you feel refreshed. The sewer smell was there because it had to be, you think. 

You remember you witnessed an accident on the highway not long ago, and the boy who died, just fifteen or sixteen years old, had the same name as the driver in your dream: Serafín. 

You go to the kitchen and fill a glass with water. Look through the window at the color of the sky. It’s going to be a spectacular afternoon. 

You close your eyes and think of your mother, who is no longer in this world. 

Something you told her when she was dying: 

“The property, Mom, it’s so beautiful with the trees you planted, they’re huge now.” 

“That was a good thing to do,” she replied from her death place. 

She had wanted the stretch of earth along the street to be thick with pines. 

Once, those trees had burned in the flames of a wildfire. 

As kids, you would search for pre-Hispanic artifacts there, in the freshly worked earth. And you’d find them: shattered pots, obsidian arrowheads, small clay faces, encircling holes dug by moles who chewed at the roots of the plants. 

Then, lodged in your socks, you found peculiar, round, spiny-edged seeds that pricked your ankles. 

•

Faced with the memories and her death, you extend threads from your temples, a proxy for reaching what’s no longer there, what no longer is, and you fail. It makes you angry. 

And you asked her, as she was leaving:

“Give me your hand, let me warm it up a little.” She extended her left hand. You had never experienced cold like that. Took it between your own hands and cradled it like a strange baby. 

Her nails shone bright, were alive. 

•

Talk about the link between earth and sky. Say: If we’d wanted to, Mother, together we could have dissolved our entire surroundings. Your powers, almighty, could have made ghosts of the furniture, of the walls. Maybe they did, and I was just incapable of seeing. 

•

Maybe the employees at the funeral home turned my body on the bed, and there rushed from my mouth a grotesque black liquid, à la Madame Bovary. Then they might’ve taken me feet-first to prepare for the wake. 

It’s true that you went to her wardrobe and took out the coral silk dress she had shown you months earlier. You thought she wanted to wear it that day. You knew—it was a superimposition. 

You could have opened the window so her spirit would exit freely. Could have lit a candle. 

“Please, even a small flame,” you could have said in a whisper. 

Just before she died, she asked when you would quit smoking, and you went to get a cigarette to show to her, to smoke later on the balcony, a slight. 

Translated by Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn

Divided Island is now out via Deep Vellum. 

Lizzie Davis is a translator, a writer, and former senior editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent translations include Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize) and The Devil of the Provinces; Elena Medel’s The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Daniela Tarazona.

Kevin Gerry Dunn is a ghostwriter and Spanish/English translator whose book-length projects include Easy Reading by Cristina Morales (for which he received an English PEN Award and a PEN/Heim Grant) and work by Paul B. Preciado, María Bastarós, Elaine Vilar Madruga, Ousman Umar, Daniela Tarazona, Javier Castillo, Paco Cerdà, and Cristian Perfumo.

Bum-Ba-Da-Dáh-Da Da-Da-Dáh-Da 

The cramp brings her to a dead stop. Feet flat on the asphalt, hands tightly gripping the handlebars. Her womb contracts again and María Eugenia bites her lip. She doesn’t have ibuprofen or anything for the pain. Her meds are stored away in a cosmetics bag hidden in her suitcase; she only uses them for real emergencies because medicines are expensive here. Menstrual pain doesn’t come under an emergency, but, fuck, it hurts. She looks up: the street brings her back to reality. 

Come on, María Eugenia, let’s go. She settles onto the bike again and starts pedaling. The pain in her legs is nothing compared to what she feels in her hips. Her body shudders with the aftershocks of an earthquake and her belly is the epicenter. 

Only a few more streets before she can deliver the order. She knows the last street will be the most difficult because it’s uphill. Freaking Carmel streets. Concentrate on pedaling to forget the pain. Sometimes she imagines she’s in a game and she needs to go faster to win more points; other times she thinks she’s competing in the Tour de France. She tries to spur herself on thinking about the physical side: she’s thinner, her legs are stronger, she has more stamina. Then there are moments when she lives with intense paranoia and fears for her life. She could get knocked down, she could have a bad fall and injure herself, she could even die. 

Some days, she feels so miserable between pedaling and more pedaling that she only thinks about death. She heard someone say that if a Spaniard knocks you down, you’re within your rights to report it and you could be offered citizenship, but she’s not sure, it could be one of those rumors that run wild. She’s also not entirely convinced she wants to stay in Spain forever, hopefully not. 

Her calves start to burn, and she pushes harder. Let’s go, dammit, almost there. The straps of her backpack chafe her armpits, she has to find out how to secure it to her bike, like Cheo does. 

She slams the brakes. 

She touches the ground with her toes and gets off the bike. Something moves, something oozes out, she can feel it. Shit, fucking cup. She pulls her panties out of her crack, pretends that nothing has happened, maybe it is nothing. 

She’s hot, she can feel the damp between her breasts. Luckily, it’s winter, it’s only twelve degrees and, luckier still, the place is on the first floor and she doesn’t have to go up any stairs. She puts the backpack down, carefully takes out the McDonald’s bag and presses the buzzer. A guy opens. Hey! I’ve got your order, María Eugenia greets him, holding the bag out toward him. He looks at her, surprised. Yeah, I know. I’m not Álex, but I’ve got your order just the same. Thanks, he says and takes the bag. 

She hopes he doesn’t give her a bad rating because the account’s ranking would go down and the schedule wouldn’t open on time for her, she’d end up without enough hours. She knows that she looks nothing like the person who, in theory, should be making the delivery, but that’s the game. Álex is a friend who lets her use his account as long as she pays his freelancer fee. It’s not bad, bearing in mind that many people who rent out their accounts don’t just demand payment of the fee, but also take a cut of the rider’s earnings. Enjoy, she says finally, as the guy nods and closes the door. 

María Eugenia turns the bike around, straps her backpack on again. She hasn’t mounted her bike yet when the phone shrieks bum-ba-da-dáh-da da-da-dáh-da. The sound of money, of hunger. She checks where she has to go: a sushi restaurant. 

An aftershock of the primordial earthquake rocks her again. Anyone seeing her in that moment would know that something was wrong. She waits a few seconds for the pain to subside, like a wave rolling out, and then stands up. Getting on her bike, she notices a strange dampness in her underwear. She’s still not used to the menstrual cup and has to adjust it several times before, like magic, everything seems to fit perfectly inside her and it doesn’t leak. It’s been five hours since she put it in and until now she hadn’t felt anything. Maybe she can use the restroom in the sushi restaurant. She always goes to the McDonald’s one as a last resort, when she can’t hold it in any longer. With her period, it’s more chaotic and she usually tries to go at home, or to work nearby so she can escape in case of a leak. 

The sushi restaurant is a twelve-minute bike ride away. Google Maps shows more, but she’s going to try to shorten the journey by taking different alleyways. She doesn’t know what Google Maps was smoking when it designed its routes, but sometimes she only needed to go in a straight line to get to her destination. The app works against her. Better to memorize the names of the streets and bike paths. 

The good thing about Carmel: going downhill. She cools down quickly in the breeze. Sometimes she gets scared and hits the brakes, but she usually enjoys it. She’s on the flat once more and pedals calmly. She feels something ooze out again but can’t check it, it’s overflowing. Now she knows it’s definitely blood; she feels the warmth filling her vulva. She knows when she’s staining her clothes, though she can’t explain how. 

Fuck! At least my leggings are black, and my coat covers my ass. She tries squeezing her vaginal muscles as if she could hold it in that way. When she reaches the sushi restaurant, there are two riders waiting, both sitting on the low wall by the entrance with their thermal bags on the ground. María Eugenia leaves her bike and greets them, knocks on the restaurant’s door. Hi, hello, I’ve got this order, she shows her phone to the Asian woman who approaches. Okay, a few minutes, the woman responds. María Eugenia can see them already putting some trays into a bag, presumably for the riders waiting outside. Hi, I’m sorry, would it be possible to use the bathroom, please? It sounds like she’s begging. The woman looks at her and shakes her head, sorry, love, it’s not allowed. Okay, thank you. 

She leaves the restaurant and stands by her bike, waiting. Right then, they hand two bags to one of the riders, an Indian or Pakistani, she can’t tell. The other rider is rolling himself a cigarette. She sees it and it makes her want a smoke too, but then she’d be thirsty, and her water bottle isn’t that big. Plus, it’s months since she last smoked, and it seems like this time she has finally quit for real. She feels like she can breathe better and that she’s fitter, not to mention her ability to smell things that she used to miss. 

She moves away to the corner of the restaurant and, trying not to be seen, puts her hand underneath her buttocks and pats the area. I knew it. It’s damp. She looks at her fingers, they’re lightly stained red. She smells them even though there is no need: yep, blood.

Shitballs! Okay, last one then I’m going home. This sucks, I smell like ass. She grabs her water bottle and cleans her fingers. She doesn’t have any more black panties, she’ll have to do laundry, and from now until it dries, she won’t have any option but to wear colored leggings, the ones she doesn’t like because they irritate her inner thighs. She wants to sit on the low wall at the entrance to the restaurant, but the tiles are white, she would leave a mark. She shifts her body weight from one foot to the other. While she waits, she replies to some messages. Hola mami, I love you too. Yes, all good, working right now. Heart emoji, sunflower emoji. Yeah, it’s near Sants, I’ll send you the address later, thumbs up. Hahaha LMAO that killed me, crying-with-laughter face. Sara, can you turn on the hot water? I’m coming home to shower coz I’ve leaked. Injection emoji. 

Sara is one of her housemates, there are three of them: María Eugenia, Sara, and Yunalivi. Yuna is at work and Sara is the only one at home because she works remotely. Sara is also the only one who has papers, the contract for the rent is in her name. She sublets the other two rooms because paying for an apartment on her own would be a real pain. María Eugenia and Yuna pay three hundred euros each for their rooms, Sara puts in the rest. María Eugenia isn’t too sure what Sara does, but she does know that she earns good money, that it’s something to do with numbers and codes, and that she’s always sitting at the computer typing. 

Sure, Maru. Plugging it in now. 

They decided to unplug the boiler when they weren’t using it to save on electricity. Sara has a thing about wasting electricity or water. She also forces them into rigorous recycling and has slowly convinced them to use solid shampoo; now the three of them share the same bar. The menstrual cup, of course, was also Sara’s idea. She had fabric panty liners and period undies that absorb blood, but María Eugenia didn’t trust them. She was only giving the cup a trial and, look, it was already letting her down. Fuck, Maru, listen to me. Don’t be afraid to really stick it up there, it’s not going anywhere, she reassured her. It’s got this stem for you to pull on. One thing though, you’ve gotta break the vacuum in there, otherwise you could hurt yourself. 

The first time that Maru put the cup in, she panicked. Then she couldn’t feel the stem and thought that she would have to go to the walk-in clinic for them to take the cup out, but it turned out that she just wasn’t used to sticking her fingers very far up. Tampax have a cord to pull on and you can avoid the rest of it, with the cup she needed to explore a little. María Eugenia had put her fingers in and shoved; in that moment she thought that giving birth must be the worst and most painful thing in the world. 

Babe, you’ve gotta relax when you put it in. If you’re all tense, it’s not gonna open properly. Look, what I do is fold it like this or like that, Sara explained folding the cup like a U, and bam, in it goes. Then I put these fingers in and gently touch the base to see if it’s flat, if you feel a little lump or something, it’s still folded. If it irritates you or hurts, you can put a little lube on it, but you don’t really need it, that’s for pussies. A gut punch doubles her over, squeezes her swollen belly. The waitress comes out again and gives a yellow bag to the other rider. The guy throws his cigarette to the ground and gets on an electric scooter. The woman comes back straight away and gives her a package; Maru stores it in her bag and looks at the delivery address, which is only revealed once you have the order. She has to go to Carrer de l’Arc de Sant Cristòfol, another fifteen minutes by bike. 

She sits as comfortably as she can and without thinking too much about the stain spreading across her buttocks and inner thighs, she pedals. When she sees other riders, they greet each other, though she never feels truly comfortable because the vast majority of them are men. She has seen so few women that they all know each other. 

It doesn’t surprise her that female riders aren’t very common. It’s tough work, not just physically. She regularly encounters odious men who stare at her or find ways to make innuendos while she delivers their food. More than the customers, pedestrians or drivers are the worst of all. Alright love, enjoyin’ yerself on yer bike? some idiot said to her once, licking his lips. He was with friends and all four of them laughed. The number of sexual comments she gets just for smiling while riding her bike is surprising: some people have such twisted minds. Enjoying her bike ride and showing it only provokes obscenities. Not to mention her fellow riders who mock her, exclaiming in a pack that she can’t take more than five orders, at most, that she’s not fit enough to make up to a hundred euros a day, like they do. She keeps silent and smiles, cursing them all under her breath. Dickheads. 

Like in many other jobs, it’s not easy for her to be taken seriously. They all think that she does it as a side hustle, that she’s not biking all day. Well, they’re wrong. Hey, mamita, you’re so tasty, topped off with that repulsive lip-biting and eyes that penetrate her. Just what I needed. María Eugenia looks at the guy who is laughing and watching her from the sidewalk, grabbing his balls. She looks away, almost breathing fire. What she would really like to do is get off her bike, stick her fingers in her vagina and then wipe them across the face of that imbecile who is still shouting things at her. Force them into his mouth. Take your mamita, that’s tasty, huh? In your face, you toad. The light changes and she moves on. 

She is about to arrive when she feels that the reservoir of blood is now breaching its levee. She brakes in front of a narrow building with pretty little balconies, gets off the bike and notices the seat is stained. A darker patch than the black of the seat, shinier. She tries to stand up straight, but the pain in her belly doubles her over, she feels like a hunchback. She takes the order out of her backpack and approaches the entrance to the building. Before she can ring the bell, the door opens and a girl with curly hair appears. That’s for me, thanks so much, the girl looks at her, surprised, of course, to see not Álex but a young woman looking pained. She smiles at her, and María Eugenia returns the smile with the corners of her eyes. She grabs the bag and offers her some coins that Maru accepts with profound gratitude. Sometimes angels do exist, in the form of people who give a tip, or so she likes to think. Oh, thank you so much, she says. The young woman closes the door and leaves her there with her pain and her stain. She puts the two euros in her koala, or riñonera as she should call it here, and gets back on her bike. She doesn’t think she’ll accept another order, she’s hurting, she’s done. Her head is starting to pound. 

They’ll probably lower her rating for not completing these peak hours, but she just can’t; she needs to get changed, shower, throw herself into bed and cling to the covers. Now she will take an ibuprofen, because the pain is stronger than her money worries. 

Only another fifteen minutes of movement before she can get home and give herself over to the task of relaxing, she no longer cares about the stain or if blood is still leaking. She managed to make forty-two euros in six hours. She can’t do any more, she’s not well today. Today she does believe the comments from her fellow riders: that she can’t do it, that she’s not fit or strong enough. If only you all bled from your dicks and your balls hurt as much as my womb does, I’d love to see you then. The image brings her comfort. 

She thinks about her parents and her younger brother, still on the other side of the Atlantic, hoping everything goes well for her and that she’s able to save at least enough money to bring him over. The thought depresses her, she tries to get it out of her mind by thinking about other things, but a bitter taste remains in her mouth. Today it’s period pain, tomorrow what will it be? One of her worst fears is getting sick: with no documents, no money, no insurance, and responsible for three lives that depend on her. She bites her lips to keep from crying. I’m hormonal, that’s all. I’m fine. 

***

She finally reaches her street and as she opens the door to her building she feels the levee break, the great flood is coming. She goes up in the elevator to the fourth floor, opens the door to the apartment, and hears Sara typing at the computer. The hot water’s ready for you, Maru, she shouts without looking away from the screen. María Eugenia places her bike on the stand they got to avoid marking the walls. She leaves her backpack in the corner and takes off her shoes. She only wears socks or slippers at home, Sara’s orders, of course. Thanks, Sara, you’re the best. So, has there been a murder in your panties? A massacre. 

She closes the bathroom door and takes off her socks, then her T-shirt, and finally her leggings and underwear. Shit. She forgot to put on dark underwear. These are beige and the whole ass is now dyed burgundy, she’ll have to wring them out by hand in very cold water to remove the stains. At least the blood hasn’t fully dried. She puts them to soak in the sink. Twisting, she spots the scab of blood on her ass. She turns on the shower and waits a few seconds for the water to heat up. She sticks her fingers in and takes out the cup, blood spills over her hand and down her wrist; the cup is full and now there are clots on the shower tiles and running down her thighs. She puts her head under the hot water and relaxes. 

The water flows, cleans the ceramic shower tiles, white again now, sweeps away clots, blood, and with them her frustration at only earning forty-two euros. Don’t think about that, Maru. Tomorrow you’ll make more money. She closes her eyes and massages her stomach, her hips. 

Bum-ba-da-dáh-da da-da-dáh-da, bum-ba-da-dáh-da da-da-dáh-da. 

Fuck! The goddam sound of money, of hunger. She’d forgotten to cancel the last hour. Where did she leave her phone? Sara, reject the order pleaaaase! she shouts, half out of the shower. The music insists. Sara! she shouts again, more forcefully, this time holding on to the shower curtain while trying to open the bathroom door. She miscalculates and slips. Falls flat on her ass, taking with her the shower curtain and the metal shelf where they keep the shampoo, conditioner, soaps, razors, and a thousand other things. 

María Eugenia gives in; everything hits her all at once in an uncontrollable wave of emotions. She surrenders to the tears that are camouflaged in the water pounding her face. 

The music stops and the bathroom door slowly opens. 

Sara discovers the wrinkled mass of curtain on the floor, the bathmat soaking up water, and the corpse of poor María Eugenia sobbing under the flow. Are you okay? she whispers. Maru? she gets closer. No! I am not okay! María Eugenia covers her face with her hands. She weeps. 

Sara can’t help but chuckle, the scene is just too funny: María Eugenia sprawled in the shower like a jellyfish on the shore, surrounded by conditioners, the shower curtain a shroud, the poor thing sobbing with her hair over her face. They look at each other and both break into fits of giggles. They laugh nonstop until the bum-ba-da-dáh-da da-da-dáh-da, bum-ba-da-dáh-da da-da-dáh-da pulls them back to the present again. 

Translated by Katie Brown

From Savagery is available for preorder via Restless Books.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she learns about the attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only an epidemic of femicide but also persistent racism, deforestation, and a deep longing for answers to her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance—and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a lamentation for the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history and truth; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is now available via Restless Books.

KILLED BY HER HUSBAND

Her skin was lovely like
a white rose petal,
but we know from the papers that, when they
fought,
he used to call her
albino gobshite.
The police suspects that
Tatiana Spitzner, 29, a lawyer,
did not commit suicide
but was thrown from a fourth-floor window
by her husband, Luís Felipe Manvailer.
Images from the security cameras show
Tatiana
being beaten in their car,
being chased through the garage
and assaulted inside the lift.
Neighbors heard her shouting for help.
They also heard the dull thud
of her body hitting the tarmac.

It was Alceu who killed Eudinéia & Heroilson who killed Iza & Wendeson who killed Regina & Marcelo who killed Soraia & Ermício who killed Silvana & Creso who killed Chirley & still more, Degmar was killed by Ádila & Ketlen was killed by Henrique & Rusyleid was killed by Tadeu & Juciele was killed by Itaan & Queila was killed by Roni & Jaqueline was killed by Sinval & Daniela was killed by Alberto & Raele was killed by Geraldo and none of these crimes, which happened seven, ten, twelve years ago, took any more than three hours of a court’s time.

Regina annoyed Wendeson, she used to break his concentration with the crap she had on the radio & Ermício found a photo of Silvana on her phone wearing a bikini & Daniela wanted to split up with Alberto & Rusyleid wanted to take a break from Tadeu & Degmar had already asked Ádila for a divorce & Iza died, actually, because she refused to channel funds into Heroilson’s cachaça. That’s what Iza was like, Heroilson told the judge—a complicated woman, difficult even. Do you know who Silvana sent that photo to, of herself in her bikini? To a colleague at her office. I let Silvana work and she did this to me, Ermício testified. In her bikini! Turn down that fucking radio, Wendeson had warned a thousand times. But who says Regina ever obeyed?

Ermício & Henrique & Heroilson were drunk at the time of their crimes. The problem, one said, was that her rudeness got too mixed up with my cachaça. That was the problem. Queila died because she got a promotion, from clerk to the clerks’ manager. She thought she was all that, her murderer said. And Sinval asked Jaqueline, in tears: did you screw that guy, Jaque? To which his victim replied: yes, I screwed him all night, Sinval, he isn’t a dickless wonder like you, he’s got a job, Sinval, he has a big dick and he’s a driver & one crucial detail: Tadeu acted in self-defense, this must be pointed out. In legitimate self-defense, Tadeu cut off Rusyleid’s head.

The conclusion I reached by my second week in court was this: we women are dying like flies. You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us. Men get another lover and kill us. Men are taken down a peg and kill us. Men get home tired after work and kill us.

And, in court, everyone says the fault is ours. We women know how to provoke. We know how to make life hell, how to wreck a guy’s life. We are disloyal and vindictive—it’s our fault. We are the trigger. Really, what are we doing here, at this party, at this time, in these clothes? Really, why did we accept the drink we were offered? Worse still, why didn’t we refuse the invitation to go up to that hotel room with that brute if we didn’t want to fuck? Well, now we’ve been warned. Don’t leave the house, certainly not at night. Don’t get drunk. Don’t be independent. Don’t go this way, or that way. Don’t work. Don’t choose that skirt or that neckline. But whoever said we follow the rules? We wear miniskirts. Necklines down to our belly buttons. Shorts that barely hang on by our bum-cracks. We go too far. We go down dark alleys. We keep our pussies charged up and ready to go. We draw conclusions. We work all day. We’re independent. We have lovers. We giggle loudly. We support the household. We let it all go to shit. The strange thing is we don’t kill. It’s incredible how rarely we kill. Given the stats on how many of us are dying, we ought to be killing more often. But, due to some problem that could be glandular or could be structural, possibly ethical or possibly physical, we prefer not to kill. That’s how it is; we generally end up tossed onto waste ground, like Chirley. For defiance. We are chopped up and buried, like Ketlen, in the yard. For disobedience.

You could have filled a stadium, one of those really big ones, with the fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and daughters and sons and cousins and friends who came to the courthouse to grieve the deaths of these women. In the hot sun, amid the storms, I saw them arrive in groups, all as crushed as the people from Txupira’s village. I was miserable for them. I took photos of a few. Rusyleid’s mother was as pretty as her murdered daughter. “Do you want to see my girl?” she asked, and showed me Rusyleid smiling in a 3 x 4 photo that had grown so worn it had the velvety texture of old paper money. This is Rusyleid: lighthearted, hard-working, a good girl, never in trouble with anyone, I don’t understand why they killed my little girl. Silvana’s son, Cauã, who was six months old when she died, already knew how to read and write, his grandmother told me. “Since he started going to school, he’s been calling me his mother. I think it’s because of the other children. He wants to have a mother, too.” I thought of taking these photos back to show my boss. To show her the sweet little face of Cauã who still cries and misses his mother. But dead women’s children have no value in Denise’s book of statistics. So I stuck them into my notebook where the dead women were piling higher everyday. The women from the court cases as well as those I fished from the papers. Already my notebook was overflowing with murdered women and I still had another week of work to go.

During that time, there were two longer hearings with white defendants and their own private defense teams. Both were acquitted. Dalton and Reinaldo got away with it. One was a businessman, the other a dentist. One rich, the other a millionaire—they walked free. When I mentioned this to the state’s defending counsel, he said: “That’s standard for crimes in Brazil these days. We’re just putting Black people and the poor away for longer and longer.”

The dentist murderer had injured his right arm with the knife he’d used to kill his wife. Before he appeared in front of the judge with his eye-wateringly expensive lawyers, there was some complication with his condition and he ended up losing his arm. The jury decided for that reason and that alone, he’d already been punished enough. A dentist without a right arm is like a singer without a voice. A storyteller without a tongue. A footballer without a foot. The homicidal dentist left his trial by the front door, smiling, with his new lover hanging off his bionic arm.

The other defendant, despite being found guilty by the jury, enjoyed a similar fate. Given that he was responsible for the distribution of chilled drinks across the state and a major patron of the city’s cultural life, a first-time offender and a good father, the judge gave him a one-year prison sentence. One year! But with probation granted on the spot, this murderer also left by the front door.

In nine of the fourteen cases, the victims knew their executioners. Six were killed by their husbands, two by their boyfriends, one by a neighbor. Some had already filed formal complaints. This too was part of my work: to evaluate the statistics. Only Raele, the clerk, didn’t know her attacker.

“You seem surprised,” Carla later remarked. “Type ‘killed by’ into Google and see what you get.”

Later, I tried it.

“Killed by”:
Killed by her boyfriend
Killed by her husband
Killed by her ex
Killed by her partner
Killed by her father
Killed by her father-in-law . . .

The problem with discovering this kind of thing is that you get addicted. Every day I’d type in “killed by” and get that tide of blood head-on. It doesn’t matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn’t matter what you do for a living. It’s dangerous being a woman.

Translated by Sophie Lewis

What if this complex figure—a father, militant, and writer who delved into the regime’s political crimes—had also sought to reveal the truth of his own daughter’s death?

Elsa Drucaroff’s imagining of Rodolfo Walsh undertaking the most personal investigation of his life is an electrifying, suspense-filled drama in which love and life decisions are inseparable from political convictions as he investigates the mystery of what happened to his own daughter.

The head of intelligence for Montoneros, a clandestine Peronist organization coordinating armed resistance against the dictatorship, Rodolfo Walsh was also a prolific writer and journalist, seen as the forerunner of the true crime genre with his 1957 book Operation Massacre.

What if beneath the surface of his Letter to my Friends lay a gripping story lost to history?

The following excerpt belongs to the book’s prologue.

 Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff, translated by Slava Faybysh, is now out via Corylus Books.

July 1972
Double Baptism

I

There’s not much traffic early in the morning on the Pan-American Highway, where a van and a Fiat 1500 are behind a truck from the Molinos Río de la Plata company. The truck driver is about fifty years old, and hanging from his rearview mirror is a picture of the Virgin of Luján and a small plastic frame with photographs of Perón and Evita. The Fiat driver signals to the van, which pulls ahead of him. In the Fiat, Pablo and Mariana watch this maneuver in tense silence.

The two vehicles in front screech to an abrupt halt as the van crosses in front of the truck in the middle of the highway. Meanwhile, Pablo and Mariana leap out of the still-moving Fiat and rush over to the truck. They are very young. With precise movements Pablo opens the truck door and climbs up on the footboard, pointing his revolver at the driver’s head. Mariana, who’s in on the other side now, is also pointing a gun at him. Their hands are trembling; the driver sits completely still. Pablo begins reciting a speech he’s evidently memorized. His voice comes out thin at first, cracks, then resumes with more confidence. “We’re from the Montoneros Organization, and this is a revolutionary expropriation. You’ll be fine, as long as you don’t make any sudden moves. We have no intention of hurting a fellow worker. Now please step out of the truck slowly, and don’t say a word.”

The man begins to move and Pablo steps aside to give him enough room to climb out, still pointing the trembling gun at him. Suddenly a shot goes off. There’s a hole in the roof of the truck and the three of them stare at it, transfixed. A second later, Mariana tries to make eye contact with Pablo, her face a mixture of terror and relief. Pablo, meanwhile, is gaping at the truck driver, who’s frozen stiff midway through the process of getting out. The twenty-year-old boy’s face looks terrified, like his son’s face that time he was playing with matches on the living room floor and nearly set the rug on fire.

“Take it easy, sonny,” the man stammers, without moving a muscle, “You wouldn’t want to shoot down a Peronist worker, right?”

II

Pablo’s driving the truck now and Mariana’s in the passenger seat. They left the driver behind at the edge of the road, asked him to wait a while before calling the police—and that’s what he’ll do. Pablo and Mariana’s faces are drained of all color and they sit in silence.

With the van right behind them, the truck barely makes the turn off the Pan-American Highway onto the bumpy dirt road into the slum. Curious at the sight, people come to their doors. Some kids run beside the vehicles.

The truck comes to a stop. Pablo steps out and climbs up on the bumper. He had been on the brink of killing a man, out of sheer clumsiness, but he’s already forgotten this in his euphoria. He opens the back of the truck and jumps inside. He smiles, because now comes the sweet part of the operation. The cargo consists of cooking oil and sacks of flour.

The van driver sets off a streamer bomb, and confetti flies through the air as Pablo, megaphone in hand, shouts excitedly, “Compañeros! Montoneros has expropriated 250 gallons of oil and 10,000 pounds of flour from the Molinos Río de la Plata company, which belongs to the multinational consortium of Bunge and Born! Montoneros has come here to return to the people what belongs to the people! We have taken back from the imperialists these goods that were produced by the sweat of the people’s brow! Compañeros! We fight for social justice to continue the work of General Perón and Evita, the work for which our general was exiled from his people! We fight together until he returns to his rightful place! Perón or death! Venceremos!”

Pablo and Mariana work quickly in the back of the truck, passing bottles and bags, first to each other, then to the assembled crowd. The youngest kids are shouting excitedly. Some older ones bring out a drum, and they begin dancing around it. It’s mostly women reaching out for the food. Many of them have smiling faces, but some are standing at a distance looking on with distrust. Most are curious. People say “gracias.” Some even go so far as to say, “gracias, compañeros,” “Can I have another one? I have a big family,” “Did you really steal this?”

A pregnant woman takes a bottle of oil from Mariana. “What a godsend, you have no idea!” Mariana grins at her, then looks at Pablo, who’s standing with a bag of flour hanging from one hand, beaming.

The truck gives up its cargo in this fashion as the party goes on around them. A voice shouts from the megaphone, and Pablo and Mariana discover for the first time that they want to be together.

III

They’ve just parked the truck on an almost empty suburban street, next to a vacant lot. Pablo and Mariana jump out and run a couple of yards down a side street. It’s winter and gets dark early. The light is already fading.

IV

Night falls. On a narrow suburban side street, a modest well-kept house is surrounded by bare land. Visible behind the softly lighted window are the outlines of people moving about. A family is getting ready to eat. The mother is arranging a tray, assisted by her daughter. The father, who’s just come home from the factory, is watching the news on TV. The son puts away his notebooks so his mother and sister can set the table. No one’s looking out the window at the yard that the father tends to on weekends, or the small vegetable patch, the two tire swings he made for the children, the vacant lot full of tall weeds that extends beyond the barbed wire fence. There, somewhere in the weeds, at a safe enough distance, the sound of muffled moans can be heard, then a brief gasp of pain, sighs, then giggles. It’s there, on the cold ground surrounded by tall grass and bushes, where Pablo and Mariana are now lying still. Pablo slowly detaches himself and covers her with his jacket.

Mariana is radiant. “First job. First time. I guess you can call it a double baptism,” she says. It’s night now, and though the stars are sparse in the sky, a brilliant orange moon is rising from behind the low houses.

Translated by Slava Faybysh

Salt is now out via Veliz Books.

i. The Fall

From December to March we spent our summers in the seaside city of Mar del Plata, in a big stone house that belonged to my paternal grandparents. On top of the mossy tiled roof, a Santa sleigh weathervane protected us from misfortune. It had been rusty for years, arbitrarily pointing East.

My sister Julia and I were always in charge of decorating the house for Christmas. We set up the tree next to the fireplace. It was a plastic eyesore, so scrawny it looked like one of those unremarkable poplars in the foothills. We spruced it up with an eclectic collection of ornaments: balls of different colors and sizes, a little one-eyed angel, a bright pink beat-up Star of David, a puppy inside a red stocking. The final touch was showering it with garlands and cotton balls. The cotton was key: it gave the illusion of being swaddled in snowy white, a cloak of happiness.

Next, we set up the manger inside the fireplace. The figures of Mary and Joseph belonged to the same set, but baby Jesus was larger than both his parents put together. There were also two Balthazars among the Three Wise Men. No one ever noticed; everyone looked at our collection and saw a manger—there was a general attention deficit at home.

Finally, we took the Christmas cards that came every year around the holidays and put them up on display. Most of them bore only the uninspiring signature of some manager, one of Dad’s colleagues, but collectively they gave the impression of something important. Mom didn’t help us at all, totally oblivious to tradition; instead of buying the customary turkey or vitel toné for our Christmas Eve dinner, she got ham and cheese ravioli.

Two days before a sticky hot Christmas, when we were about to start putting up the holiday greeting cards around the mantel, fireplace, and stairs, Julia announced she wasn’t into it anymore. She was thirteen, two years older than me. She dropped the cards and disappeared down the hall. We had a communication problem, my sister and I. We used to pull each other’s hair, scratch and spit at each other. We hated each other for days on end. When I yelled for her to come back she couldn’t even be bothered to answer. I just took the cards and put them all Still annoyed by her insolence, I decided to surprise everyone with something special: using two leftover shiny garlands to decorate the sleigh weathervane.

I took the decorations and walked out of the garage, where there was always a ladder leaning against the wall. I started to climb. The hydrangeas surrounding the house shrank below me. With the wind, I thought, the garlands would turn the weathervane into a shooting star. I looked down the deserted street. There was only one car parked on the whole block: It was my mother’s. The driver’s window was open, and her elbow was poking out.

I kept on climbing. Behind the neighbor’s hedge, a black Lab was sleeping on the grass. Outside the house across the street, a man in a muscle shirt was skimming the pool. Our roof was a lot higher than the others, but I wasn’t afraid; I was excited about the change of perspective, pretending I was a giraffe. When I got to the top, I took a deep breath and with the back of my hand pushed my sweaty hair from my face. The wind brought a fishy stench from the coast that made me scrunch up my nose and all of a sudden the ladder started pulling away from the wall.

I clung to the sides in fear but realized too late that I was already falling backward. I let go and jumped, thinking I was closer to the ground than I actually was. I turned in mid-air, and my whole body smacked against the flagstones around the house. Later they told me it was a ten to fifteen-foot fall. The last thing I remember is a pale stray cloud in the sky and, far below, the fleeting look of my mother’s face, inside the car, her jaw dropped, watching me fall—an image I’ve since tried in vain to process.

“Don’t move, Ema. Please don’t move,” my mom told me when I came to, lying face-up on a hard bed, no pillow. I had been rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Buenos Aires.

“What happened?” I asked, my mouth dry. When I tried to turn my head to see where we were, I felt a jolt so intense that, before losing consciousness for the second time, I saw tiny stars flickering around me, like in cartoons.

When I came to again, my dad was holding my hand. I knew it was him before I even opened my eyes because I recognized his calloused and hairy fingers. He had the hands of a beast.

“Ema, I need you to be as still as a statue. I’ll give you a quarter for every minute you don’t move,” he whispered in my ear. “Stay put…stay, stay,” he said as if speaking to a pet. Once he was sure I had understood, he explained that I had crushed three dorsal vertebrae: the third, under the shoulder blades, the sixth, a little bit below that, and the eleventh, right where I’d have breasts someday.

“What is dorsal?” I wanted to know. Dad found a piece of paper somewhere in the room and drew a bunch of horizontal lines, one under the next, in a column. Those lines were the vertebrae that made up the spine, he explained, the structure holding my skeleton. Three were damaged. He highlighted them to indicate they were broken. On top of those horizontal lines, he drew a long, vertical one—my spine. He smeared a few little lines around it to signify that it was swollen. By the time he was finished drawing, all I saw were menacing hieroglyphics, and I felt even more lost than before.

As he spoke, I glanced at the room around me, moving my eyes from one corner to the other like a cuckoo clock, trying to make sense of my new reality. The pain had faded along with my clarity. I felt blurry. At times, I dissociated and saw myself from impossible angles. Years later, I learned I was given IV morphine.

“And that’s why you can’t move, Ema, not even a little bit. Not until this line in the center gets better,” Dad said, pointing with the pen to my spine. Before leaving, he kissed me on the forehead and gave me a pinch on my chin.

Deciphering the meaning of “dorsal” was my one obsession during those first days of convalescence. Little by little I came to learn that and a few more things, through half-heard whispers, the hoarse voices of doctors responding to the tense voice of my mother somewhere in the room. Because of this constant whispering, in my nightmares I swapped witches and ghosts for paraplegics and amputees, uncertain of the kind of monster I was up against.

The orthopedic surgeon checked in every afternoon, poking my feet and legs. He smiled every time I said it hurts, it hurts. I named him the Tin Man. He never offered me a lollipop or a kind word, but I later found out he traveled all around the country telling my story at conferences and collecting enough diplomas to plaster the walls of his office. My accident had been labeled exceptional—it was a miracle I wasn’t paralyzed.

The first two nights I spent in the hospital, Mom stayed with me, sleeping on a chair I couldn’t see because I couldn’t move my neck. I know there was also a window somewhere because nurses opened it daily to air out the room, though they couldn’t really get rid of the smell of iodine and lethargy stuck in my mouth. My vision was limited to the moon-like white ceiling, where water stains turned into mice, birds’ beaks, and mouthless faces. These were my imaginary friends during my hospitalization.

On the third night, when she was told again that it was not possible to provide an extra bed for overnight stays, Mom went home to sleep and sent Juvencia instead, a Paraguayan maid who had started working for us three weeks before. It was she who endured sleepless nights on a chair without armrests while I was in the hospital. Her only comfort was a pillow the night nurses smuggled in for her, which she had to secretly return every morning.

Juvencia was stocky, with dark skin and frizzy hair. Her brown eyes were the size of the marbles my cousins kept in a jar. I don’t know what kind of clothes she wore because I only ever saw her in the blue uniform with white polka-dots that fit tightly around her hips. Whenever someone entered the room she hurried to put on her flip-flops. The rest of the time she preferred being barefoot.

She spoke to me in Guarani with a sweet smile, like a guava fruit. Che mitãkuña, che mitãkuña, she’d say, my girl, my girl. That’s what she called me from day one. Every morning she washed me for hours with a damp cloth that now and then she twirled with her chubby arms. All the while she whistled a calming mantra, but I couldn’t surrender to the ritual. Her touch between my legs, my thighs, and armpits made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to physical contact. Mom had never hugged me. Dad wouldn’t even put his arm around me for a picture. We were like a family of bowling pins. I put up with this ceremony for two weeks until I finally asked Mom to please tell Juvencia not to take so long cleaning me. She blushed.

“I specifically asked her to do it like that so the morning would go by faster. I thought you’d like it.”

“I don’t. Just ask her for a quick wash, please,” I begged her. From then on, the bath took ten minutes.

Mom and Dad had decided against putting me through surgery. They were suspicious of shortcuts, so my recovery took the longest road: casting and waiting. The former happened three weeks after my admission into the hospital when the doctors burst into my room waving an X-ray and proclaiming loudly: “The swelling went down!” To put the cast on, they took me on a gurney to another room, where they hung me vertically from a harness while a crowd of white coats inspected me. I felt the dissociation of the first days again. It was as if I was seeing myself from the opposite corner of the room. What I saw was a life-size puppet being covered in bandages and plaster. I felt high, happy; the cast meant that I’d be able to leave the hospital in a few days. But when they took me back to my room, I first saw my reflection not in a mirror, but in my mother’s eyes. She was crying in horror. She had to cover her mouth with her hand to hide the tremor in her lips. She hadn’t understood the armor would cover me from top to bottom, including my head. Only my face and arms were bare. A mummy in a sleeveless shirt.

“It’s okay, Mom, I’m fine,” I comforted her.

It didn’t work. There was no way to cheer her up. A malignant growth of denial had been developing in her for many years.

Translated by Denise Kripper

Music for Bamboo Strings will be available on March 1, 2024 from Sundial House.

From Music for Bamboo Strings

THE GREEK VASE

They fought on the vase an impossible war: the vase had resisted years of horror, of blows. He remained, naked, above his adversary; the adversary, perhaps too young, also showed a certain nakedness. They fought like lovers, like enemies, immobile. Without declaring themselves victor or vanquished. Near them wait strong men with bull’s legs. We observe the vase, that eternity from which we’ll never drink.

LANDSCAPE ON A POSTCARD

I could stretch out my hand and touch the object, the pure flesh, sleeping beside that body. I saw everything like someone looking at the landscape of a postcard. When I closed my eyes, your face and my face were lost: someone sang a love song. Horns sounded, the fruit rolled along my hand. We are made from simple things, I thought; more or less human things, repeated until exhaustion. I could guess that ancient scent. There was a lamp, some bodies in silk and an early morning. I would lie with elegance: it happened in Istanbul, my hands resting upon the book, his body beside my own, promising disaster.

STILL LIFE

While the birds pecked the fruits, we argued about the taste of rotting meat. Without subtlety. Without beauty. As if we were contemplating an old photograph or a black and white movie. The calling of ascetics or madmen, they said. Frightened by something that we’d never know; the birds took flight. With a certain slowness we approached the site of their feast: the scent of the fruits burning on their lips. Still life without other attributes.

THE HABIT

The light upon the so-red awnings and the city that doesn’t know how much beauty shall remain of this. We speak little, just the essential, someone might say. Nobody promised anything. Your hand brushed mine from time to time, artlessly. We had the sea, desire, and some words we spoke with heaviness, like someone acting out of habit.

THE PEACE OF PORTRAITS

The body falls. The shadow insinuates a gesture. We search for herring on the Sebald coast. To be there, I wet my body with leaves, drew circles in the palm of my hand while the fishermen spoke of the wind and the stone moon. Everything happens in the peace that portraits imagine. Dogs barked without any echo; a body trembled beside my own. I shall dream very simple things: the movement of wind through the leaves, an adolescent face, a forgotten amphora.

Translated by Lawrence Schimel

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