This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: A Venezuelan writer, Raquel Abend van Dalen now lives in Houston, where she holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Thank you for accepting this invitation, Raquel.

Raquel Abend van Dalen: Thank you very much for the invitation. 

A.P.: So, you have a PhD degree in creative writing. Tell us about this step in your life.

R.A.V.D.: When I finished my master’s degree in creative writing in 2014, most of my classmates went straight into PhDs in Hispanic studies or Caribbean studies, literary studies. I didn’t do that, because most people told me, “When you apply, don’t say you’re a writer, let alone a journalist, they don’t like that.” It was like I had to censor myself all the time. I wouldn’t have been able to censor myself in that way, I thought it would have been appalling. So, when I discovered that there was a doctorate in Creative Writing, where the same priority is given to the creative as to the academic, I said, “This is perfect, this is the solution,” and it definitely has been. It’s been incredible, it’s been wonderful.

A.P.: How did you get into literature, Raquel?

R.A.V.D.: I confess that every time I’m asked that question, I answer something different. I already have many versions of how I came to literature. Many things have happened, but one of the essential parts of my life is that my maternal grandfather was a Dutch bookseller; he arrived in Venezuela in the fifties and set up a bookstore in Caracas called Las Mercedes. So, from a very young age, I was always surrounded by stories, books, even stationery. There was a section of pens, papers, notebooks, which also in some way gives materiality to writing. There was a lot, a lot, of magic in my house, a lot of fantasy. For me, being in an environment like this was essential. On the other hand, it’s true that from a very young age I took literature as a very serious job, a very concrete job, because my parents are both artists by profession. They have always considered art in a very rigorous, very disciplined way. Not a day goes by that they are not working, and I think I see literature the same way.  

When I say the art in my house was very concrete and material, I mean their art paid for my braces, my school, the electricity. It wasn’t an abstract or idealized thing, it was beyond the art you find in museums. It was almost like the coins we lived on. So that gave me a perspective of literature as very work-related.

A.P.: How good, how wonderful to have that nourishment and rigor from your parents. Thinking about the doctorate, how do you believe the study of literary criticism contributes or not to the work of a writer?

R.A.V.D.: Before starting my doctorate, I would have told you it didn’t contribute anything because I had no idea. But now I realize that, for me, it has been fundamental to be able to read critically, to establish and think about links between literary and theoretical texts. The truth is that it has made my own writing work much more interesting, even for myself. 

I feel that the work of writing has to be regenerated all the time, and the critical, theoretical perspective opened up a whole new world for me, which made me no longer able to see literature in the same way. I think that’s essential, and being surprised is essential, discovering is essential. So, in that sense, it has been very positive, and that is very necessary.

A.P.: Of course, and of course you have Cristina Rivera Garza at the helm of the program, along with all the material and the guest writers she curates. It’s a magnificent program.

R.A.V.D.: Yes, the program is magnificent, not only because of Cristina—who is obviously a wonderful writer and academic—but she has also been in charge of curating a very special program, bringing writers from different parts of Latin America, even the United States.

A.P.: Raquel, you live in the United States. How do you see the challenges faced by a Venezuelan writer living in the diaspora in this country? 

R.A.V.D.: In my case, I had to come to the United States at the age of 22. The following year, my first collection of poems came out in Bogotá, and then I continued publishing with presses that publish books in Spanish in the United States, such as Sudaquia and Suburbano. In general, my books have come out outside of Venezuela, including Cuarto azul, which, although it came out with a Venezuelan publisher, Kalathos, was published in Madrid. This has meant that, in some way, I remain very little read in my own country, which in a way is a little painful for me because one obviously wants to be read in one’s own land. Another issue is that the economic situation in Venezuela means very few people can really buy books. For that same reason, I decided to publish my book of short stories, La señora Varsovia, for free for a month, and now it can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or Kindle, but it made me feel terribly ashamed to realize that, in general, Venezuelan readers who consume books, who like to read, cannot buy them.

A.P.: What you just said is so interesting. On the one hand, it is sad, and on the other hand, it is inspiring to hear of the ways people are looking to support readers and the work of writers. Raquel, throughout your work you shift between poetry and narrative. How is this happening?

R.A.V.D.: From the beginning, I think I was handling both genres because they were very different things. For me, narrative gives me a space for fiction and poetry gives me a space for reality. For example, many writers have diaries where they write their daily lives and record what they think. I would say that, for me, poetry is a space to think, to understand, to record, even to look at everything that happens to me with humor and irony. Sometimes I have even really digested the poems that may sound more dramatic before making them public. So it’s a very different relationship, and in poetry in general, mine is quite autobiographical, even though I’m not the character, it’s not a poetry of the self, but I do use my own life a lot. On the other hand, in the fiction I write, as you read in La señora Varsovia or Cuarto azul, I use the stories of others.

A.P.: I like that difference you make and how you are relating narrative to a space for fiction, and poetry to a space for reality. In Cuarto azul, for example, the premise is very interesting. But now let’s talk about the re-edition of another magnificent book, Andor. 

R.A.V.D.: I started writing Andor at the age of nineteen. I was very young and had a very different idea of life than when I was able to republish the book. Let’s say that I was able to polish, not so much the prose, because I practically didn’t touch the prose, but certain concepts, certain ideologies. For example, in the first edition I remember there is a moment when the protagonist, Edgar, describes the women arriving at the party in their dresses and the men arriving in their suits. This distinction of genders and clothing didn’t sit well with me when I was able to republish the book. For me they were people, regardless of gender, and for me they were dressed as they wanted. So, in that sense, I changed things that clashed ideologically with the “I” of the reissue. The reedition also made the book visible again because it came out in Caracas in 2013. 

A.P.: The beginning of the book has that very strong image of the oven, along with that image of going back to childhood at the moment of dying, going back to that womb. You can really grasp the symbolism and parallelism you use between a dark oven and the mother’s womb. Tell us more about this book.

R.A.V.D.: What you’re pointing out is interesting, because precisely at the end the mother is like a kind of ghost that is haunting the protagonist throughout the book, it’s what connects everything. This is a book that deals with life and death and the idealization of these concepts, and other concepts.

A.P.: Is Andor a purgatory? 

R.A.V.D.: If you point to the Christian tradition of hell, yes. But, at the time of writing, I was thinking, “What could be worse than hell?” And, in my head, what was worse than hell, which we already see so much in religious and literary iconography, is to be trapped in a place that is nothing, where you don’t finish either dying or living. For me, that confinement was much more disturbing than that of hell itself. So I think that was my intention in writing about that hotel.

A.P.: Now let’s move on to your book of short stories, La señora Varsovia. At the beginning of the book you say, “This book is for those who don’t have a home because they are always in another house.” Tell us about this book. 

R.A.V.D.: Well, this book came about because Gladys Mendís, from Los Poetas del 5, contacted me saying that she wanted to publish something of mine, but she asked me for poetry and at that time I didn’t have any manuscripts ready to publish. But I told her, “I have many stories on my computer that have been accumulating for years, and I’ve never published them.” I asked her if she would be interested in them and she said yes, I should start sending her material and we could compile the book together. It was a nice project that we completed during quarantine. So the dedication in this book is for the “unhoused” like me, which has to do with the fact that right now I am “unhoused,” I have no home and I have also moved at least eight times in the past nine years. That is to say that the home is carried within.

A.P.: You see this a lot in your work, but you also see the relationship and the figure of the mother. What do you think are your thematic lines?

R.A.V.D.: I think perhaps at certain times, in certain periods I have written consciously thinking about gender issues. It’s not something I’ve done all the time, but I have liked to think about the idea of the mother and what corresponds, according to a heteronormative society, to what a man or woman supposedly is. In my case, I have also associated it with sexuality because, in some way, I like to use literature to subvert certain roles. In La señora Varsovia you can see very well how there are these crossings all the time. I like to set certain traps so that if the reader has something in their head, already very settled, and begins to read a story and believes the narrator is a man, suddenly in the third paragraph they realize it is actually a woman who is narrating. Or, for example, one thinks the lovers who are narrating a story are a man and a woman only to suddenly realize they are actually two men. Or, for example, the relationship between a mature woman and a teenager is not that of mother and daughter, but there is an erotic bond there. I mean, I like to try all the time to bring about these types of situations that, as you say, are related to gender, especially now. 

A.P.: Well, Raquel, many congratulations on your work. Thank you very much for this interview and we will look forward to what comes next from your pen.

R.A.V.D.: Adriana, thank you very much. It has been a great pleasure to talk with you.

Translated by Alice Banks

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Venezuelan writer Raquel Abend van Dalen.

This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: Katya, thank you so much for accepting our invitation. Welcome to Hablemos, escritoras.

Katya Adaui: Thank you, Adriana. I’m so happy to be talking with you today.

A.P.: Tell us, Katya, you were born in Peru, but you live in Argentina. Why do you live there now? What do you do in Buenos Aires?

K.A.: Yes, I’ve lived in Buenos Aires for five years. I am a teacher for a really lovely degree program called The Art of Writing at the National University of the Arts. I teach a Narrative Workshop, a sort of generalized study of literature, to students who have just graduated with a film degree, and to students who are taking their very first writing workshop and need plenty of rigor, companionship, love, and compassion. 

A.P.: What do you tell them when, for example, they have to start working past the fear of sharing their writing, or when they come to you with this idea that they can already write, but are in need of more guidance? 

K.A.: I try to quell that anxiety around sharing their work, which everyone has when they arrive at the workshops. I tell them, “The writing comes first, that sense of peace comes first, that feeling of being proud of the material, of creating and weaving something.”

A.P.: How did you get started in literature, what were your surroundings like? What were your first experiences with reading and writing growing up in Lima?

K.A.: It all has to do with my parents’ jobs: my mother was a secretary and my father was an English teacher. So I grew up seeing my father grading tests in another language and my mother writing in shorthand all day. Back then, it was the era of the telephone, and my mom was always chatting with her secretary friends. She was the vice president of the Association of Secretaries of Peru, so she would spend her days taking down little notes that I couldn’t understand. My parents’ languages were cryptic to me and I wanted to understand them, but there were very few books at home—fortunately, my mom was a bit of a hoarder. She would buy the encyclopedias that they offered at the bank, which she would store downstairs, on a shelf. So, even from a very young age, I would crack those tomes open, wanting to know what they said, why there were drawings in them, why I didn’t understand what my dad wrote, and why I didn’t understand those signs my mom wrote down that didn’t look anything like the language she actually spoke. So there was always this temptation to read, to understand, and to pretend that I could read when I actually couldn’t.

A.P.: Katya, you have the best of two countries, Peru and Argentina. How do you view the literary scene in these two communities? Is there any kind of dialogue happening between them? What do you think is happening, what is brewing in this wonderful part of the world? 

K.A.: I feel it is a privilege to exist, to live as part of two such narratively rich places, countries of storytellers and poets. But it must be said that in the Argentine publishing industry—which is quite maimed as a result of the current political landscape, due to its being quite anti-culture—there is a sense of resistance coming from independent publishers. There are municipal awards for creative writing, there are national awards, there is a National Fund for the Arts and sponsorships for literary residencies in the MALBA. In Peru, there is this feeling that everything is very nascent. We have very good independent publishers—as well as larger, more established ones—but still, Lima is so centrist that we won’t read a writer from the outskirts, unless they win a renowned prize. So it is quite an interesting situation. There is a program on the national radio called Entre libros which I hosted a few years ago in order to be able to speak about regional literature. In contrast, Argentina has very strong regional publishers with a noted presence in the capital. Selva Almada has her own regional distributor called Salvaje Federal through which she brings books from small provinces to big cities. Those dialogues are lacking in Peru, and sometimes it’s the editors who get burnt out. Their work is so laborious that they get tired and give up while, elsewhere, others persevere. There is some momentum, but also a need for more support, more dialogue. 

A.P.: Katya, your work spans different genres—you mainly move between novels and short stories. I would like to know: What calls you to write in one genre or another, how do you know whether a given genre will best express your idea? 

K.A.: Well, I begin to feel a bit like I’m being stalked by an idea, that is, I begin to ruminate on it when I go to sleep, when I’m in the shower or in bed. As soon as an idea comes to me, I take out my notebook, write it down, and say to myself, “I have to write about this.” It could be something I saw on the street, a piece of fruit… sometimes it’s something really silly, like a photo I found lying on the ground in Buenos Aires that says “2001” on the back. So I collect things that I find on the street, little pieces of rubbish, CDs, Polaroids, even forgotten pencil cases. I start to piece something together in my head and, when I don’t know what to write, I go back to that material and say, “This has the feel of a short story or this is for a novel.” So, therefore, it’s not that I like one genre more than the other, because they all vex me in their own way, but I love the challenge of trying new things. Even essays and newspaper articles. So I’m always trying to write something, and I do a lot of editing behind the scenes. For me, real training comes from the act of writing, no matter what it is about.

A.P.: And what do you read? 

K.A.: I read children’s books, I read novels, I read short stories, I read essays, I read the newspaper a lot. My greatest sources of inspiration are actually headlines. I mostly just read the headlines, because there are some that are just so great. For example, this one is awful, but it’s very good: “Santa Claus had his own children buried in the backyard.” That was one of my inspirations for Geografía de la oscuridad. How can this person we know as Santa Claus, someone who brings gifts and the magic of Christmas, come out in disguise and kill his own children?

A.P.: One of the characteristics of your writing are these very succinct sentences. Tell us a bit more about your approach to writing.

K.A.:  I really avoid condescension and prejudice in my writing; I’m more interested in work that has to do with dignity and compassion. Over the years, my writing has become less opaque and has instead gained a sense of luminosity. It’s almost as if, through my own grieving processes, of my parents, through the loss of some important relationships, my writing became a kind of celebration of life. Right now I think there’s this sense of hopelessness in both Peru and Argentina in terms of their awful governments. I truly feel like I don’t have much scope to be able to change anything. What I can contribute to the world is what I can do for my neighbor, for my partner, for my dog, the people who are close by. These acts of love, these acts that come from the heart are just small. But I feel that what I can offer, what I can do to do good, is take advantage of the fact that I adore writing and that I can turn that into an offering of love to a world that feels closed off. This is what I can do. And so, I write all over the place. I write in cafés, on the train, on the bus, on planes, even sitting on the floor of the market. Since my background is in journalism, I have a lot of experience writing with lots of noise around me and being able to detach myself from my surroundings (laughs).

A.P.: Let’s move on to your books. And, I should say, congratulations on being a finalist for the 2024 Ribera del Duero Prize. Tell us about your book Aquí hay icebergs (translated as Here Be Icebergs by Rosalind Harvey).

 K.A.: I was going through a process of grieving, My father had died three years prior and my mother had just passed away. So, I left for Buenos Aires to work on my Creative Writing Master’s at UNTREF, the National University of February Third, which is directed by a poet, now a good friend, María Negroni. I told myself, “What I have to do right now is write.” So I put myself on a diet of writing. I also went on walks, went to therapy, and visited friends, but I spent a lot of time on my writing. When I finished the book, I presented it as my thesis and I expanded it and edited it a lot so that I could then submit it to Penguin Random House in Peru. And they published it about six months after I returned to Peru.

A.P.: Congratulations to you. Many of the stories in the book really focus on the relationship between what we are inwardly and what is outside of us. Tell us a bit more about these stories and what inspired them during that important moment in your life.

K.A.: For me, it doesn’t have as much to do with the Iceberg Theory of writing; for me, it has to do with the problem of water. Peru is one of the countries with the most water resources in the world, and yet more than eight million Peruvians still don’t have running water. How is that possible? In my own home, I remember there was running water on the first floor, but not the second. And, what’s more, we also have the floods that come with El Niño in the north of Peru. We go from drought to fires and then to floods. So that made me think, “What is going on with water?” Water has this strange thing about it, with how it adapts to the shape and space of whatever is containing it. So what is going on with water in all its different forms? Upon thinking about the different states of water, I came up with this concept for the book, because short story collections are always a concept, a world, they aren’t isolated facts, right? So I wanted the book to always be ruminating on this idea of water, for it to be the element that is always running through these stories.

A.P.: Wow, what you’ve said about Peru not having water is really shocking. Another of your books is Geografía de la oscuridad, which won the National Literature Prize in Peru. Many congratulations! In this book, you delve into the topic of fatherhood with an acutely intimate lens. Tell us about Geografía de la oscuridad.

K.A.: Well, in my opinion, if there’s something that language can do, it’s make you shut up (laughs). I’m very talkative… I’m gossipy, conversational, inquisitive; what I love more than anything is to converse, to listen, to talk. But when I write it’s as if there were another “me” who is more measured, which doesn’t exist in any other part of my life. I have this judiciousness that makes me say, “Who is this wise old lady who knows when to stop talking?” So, my writing is very elliptical because I need the reader to think and complete the thought with me, not for me but with me. Just like how not everyone could comprehend my father’s English or my mother’s shorthand, not everyone can engage with every piece of writing. Wanting everyone to love your writing is unrealistic. So, I took this style of writing to heart, from beginning to end in that book. Once I finished it, I said, “Well, that was fun, you tried something just for you, a certain style, now let it go.” So all of my writing after that is much less elliptical, but in Geografía de la oscuridad the techniques I used are ellipses, lists, fragments, and lots of heart.

A.P.: Of course, ellipses really strengthen your writing and, just as you were saying, allow the reader to complete an idea with you. Tell us about how you communicate your ideas in such a compact form using only nouns and verbs, but mostly through nouns and the descriptions of what is happening. 

K.A.: I mean, you can’t separate the form from the content, in the sense that horror is a vortex—it sucks you down and leaves you in the deep, underground, or trapped below something. Sometimes we get lucky and the vortex itself spits us back out, but that doesn’t always happen. When I use enumeration, each word, each sentence, is colliding with the next, which creates the effect of blows to the body. So, in order to achieve this, it had to be comma after comma after comma, and testing the rhythm over and over.

A.P.: So Katya, you have a new book, Quiénes somos ahora. It’s a book that addresses fatherhood again, as well as death and motherhood, but it’s a bit different from your previous books. What was it like for you to write Quiénes somos ahora?

K.A.: For me, in terms of writing it, it was a celebration of the life I’ve been given, the only life I’ve been given. There are many moments of giving thanks to writing in this book. It was a change in how I write as well, because I moved away from the darkness, it’s much lighter. It’s still fragmentary, but much less elliptical. But something that happens, for example in Peru, is that some people say, “Where are the chapters?” because they are used to chapters. But it’s important, then, to remember we had La casa de cartón by Martín Adán, which is composed of many vignettes—it’s one of my favorite books. So, this book is a very explicit homage to Martín Adán in terms of its style.

A.P.: Katya, I have to ask, what makes a writer confess their love to their dog in a book? Dogs are a way to talk about these big topics like loss, joy, and pain, but in a way with dogs there are only happy memories, right?

K.A.: Yes, at the time I was writing this book I was reading My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley, which is a really affectionate book. And it actually was my little dog who confessed their love to me, this unconditional love that dogs give. We would always sleep curled up next to each other. After the book came out, I read that single women sleep better when they sleep with their dogs in bed with them (laughs). The link between us and animals is really important to me. I work with this concept a lot in my workshops, but I make them remember that it’s not just vertebrates. In my own writing I always try to remember the other lives that live alongside us, no matter how diminuitive or small.

A.P.: Well, Katya, thank you for this beautiful conversation and congratulations on all of your work.

K.A.: Thank you, Adriana. It was such a pleasure to talk with you. Long live Hablemos, escritoras and thank you for supporting us every day through your work.

Translated by Kathleen Meredith

You can hear and read the full interview at Hablemos, escritoras.

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Peruvian writer Katya Adaui, by Richard Hirano.

This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: Thank you very much, Mónica, for coming on Hablemos, escritoras.

Mónica Szurmuk: Thank you very much for the invitation. 

A.P.: Tell us: How did you get your start in literature, what were your beginnings?

M.S.: If you’re asking about the origin of it all, I would probably say it was at school. I had the measles when I was seven or eight years old, and it was then that I felt like a reader for the first time. I dedicated that week of being bedridden to reading. My mom, dad, and grandparents brought me books, and that was the first time I read an entire book. I was always a reader. Literature, the subject known as “Castellano” here, was always one of my favorite subjects. When I finished high school, which was during the dictatorship, it was very difficult to pursue studying literature at university. And so, instead of getting a degree in literature, I joined a teachers’ institute, which is a teacher training institute, and studied literature there. And thus, I started training as a literature educator.

A.P.: Then you studied in California, so you also come with this influence from American academia.

M.S.: Exactly, I studied at the University of California in San Diego, which at that time had—well, it still does—a program for literature. Not literature by country, but literature at large, which was what attracted me to that program a lot. The program didn’t focus on any specific country’s body of work, which allowed for a more widely comparative exploration of the craft based on theoretical questions. So, I got my master’s degrees there, first in Comparative Literature, then in Latin American Literature. I got my doctorate in what was then called “Spanish,” but which was really Latin American literature. And I always existed at the intersection of different languages, and that’s why being part of that department was so pivotal for me. Many of the professors I studied with came over from other areas, and I maybe wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with people like that if I had pursued a doctorate that focused strictly on Spanish. My doctoral advisor was Susan Kirkpatrick, who was fundamental in my understanding of the intersection of gender, class, and race; I also knew Jaime Concha and Carlos Blanco, and I met Ileana Rodríguez. During those years, a group of female professors from the different campuses of the University of California—who were already working as a collective, and had begun to meet and work together to analyze women’s literature and gender—created a way for graduate students to have a similar collective experience. These teachers were Francine Masiello, Mary Louise Pratt, Martha Morello Frosch, and several others. They had started meeting after a LASA conference, when they noticed that women had no significant presence there, that all the important panels were organized around male-centric issues, that women had little voice. And so, they were the ones who led the way and started holding a series of conferences across the different campuses of the University of California, where graduate students had the opportunity to present papers, to get to know each other, to start collaborating with each other and also to collaborate with them, an extraordinary group of feminist critics. In that sense, I was very lucky to have that experience at that time and also to be in San Diego, very close to the border, where we had the influence of Mexican teachers. 

A.P.: With Ileana Rodríguez, a professor who is as exquisite, exact, and profound as you, you edited the volume Latin American Women’s Leadership with Cambridge University Press, where you feature Francine Masiello, Debra Castillo, Ana Peluffo, Maricruz Castro Ricalde. Tell us a little about this book. How did it come about? What line of research did you and Ileana pursue? It’s tricky to put together a volume like that, isn’t it? Also, whom do you invite and whom do you have to leave out? Because if you didn’t leave some people out, it would be an endless volume. 

M.S.: It was one of those wonderful things that just happened. I was leaving a LASA panel that I had organized with a series of critics in the field of Latin American studies. Among them were Jean Franco, Mary Pratt, and Marisol Vera, director of the publishing house Cuarto Propio. Ileana invited me to work with her on this history of women’s literature in Latin America. The book bears a historical imprint. We wanted to organize it chronologically, and it was very clear that the field of the nineteenth century was a little abandoned at one point, and that changed thanks to the enormous boom around the production of women in the Latin American nineteenth century, that is, both the literary production and the production of the female critics who began to read this literary production in the North American academy. Well, I think in the national academies they read the nineteenth century, but not a lot of women writers from that time were being read. It took these women critics in Latin America, in different countries, in the United States, for these women to be read. And when we arrived, there was already an important nineteenth-century corpus, there was already a very important decolonial corpus and accounts of what had happened before colonial times. We said, “We can’t start in 1492, we have to start earlier.” Then the book was transformed into an extraordinary space. What happened to us is that we thought, when we started preparing the book, that there was much more than we thought, but even so we were very surprised by everything we found. 

A.P.: Great, well, what an adventure, and I imagine Cambridge University Press must have been happy with that volume, and now we can enjoy it. Let’s discuss your first book, entitled Mujeres en viaje. Here, you focus more on the local, on those women who in some way are making history through travel. And, obviously, the Southern Cone has wonderful women authors who were travelers. Mexico has some too. Tell us about that book.

M.S.: I wrote my thesis on women travelers, and what interested me was to think about how Argentina, the Argentine landscape between 1850 and 1930, had been written from the perspective of women, Argentine women who had traveled and had written about other geographical places. But of course, like any woman traveler, the Argentine woman traveler draws comparisons with her place of origin, like the European and North American women who had written about Argentina. In other words, ultimately, my thesis, which later became the book that was published as Women and Argentina: Early Travel Narratives, was a book about how women can build an authorial place from which to write. And, at the same time, it’s about how the gazes of these women see things that men don’t. But, in some cases, they’re very trapped by racial or class determinants of their time. So, what interested me in that book was to be able to think about the landscape, place and the place of enunciation, the place of writing and what we were talking about when we talked about women travelers. What intrigues me is how these women had these writerly experiences when they had no political rights, because at the heart of it all is the fact that these women did not vote, they did not have power over their own children. In many cases, they could already be owners, own property, but in many cases, depending on their national origin, they couldn’t. That’s to say, what are the interstices, what are the places from which alternative identities can be constructed? So, think about these readings. I really like, for example, the readings that Sylvia Molloy did, which try to make their way into the texts and do a very close reading that allows you to see where there’s a small break that reveals the potentiality of the text, reveals the difference, and reveals how we can intervene as critics. There is something that I call “the hospitable archive.” I believe that literature allows us to reconstruct moments of the past, but also, it’s as if it were taking the temperature of a particular moment, where women could say certain things and not others, but this is archived and literature works in a hospitable way, as an archive of that which could not be said, that which could not be articulated but was already there.

A.P.: I find it fascinating, and those are precisely the conversations you can have when you’re joining forces and making comparative analyses. Mónica, you have another book on which you collaborated, Latin American Literature in Transition.

M.S.: Well, I had the opportunity to create a series for Cambridge University Press, which is a series called Latin American Literature in Transition. What it proposes is a global rereading of Latin American literatures, thinking about the category of transition. In other words, how can we think? How can we look again at the ways in which all Latin American literature was written using this category? I liked the challenge of designing a series of five volumes where, from the present, we look back at what happened in Latin American literature. I believe that, due to the characteristics of Latin America, the construction of what we could call literary texts and critical texts has always been parallel. So, what if we review it? It’s like looking at everything with new eyes. The first thing I thought about was how to organize it, and I did so chronologically. There are five volumes organized chronologically. The first begins before 1492 and ends at the time of the revolutions, around 1810; that one was edited by Rocío Quispe Agnoli and Amber Brian. The second was edited by Ana Peluffo together with Ronald Briggs, and deals a lot with the moment of the construction of national states, but also with the construction of all the institutions of national states, from linguistic institutions to institutions such as slavery. That one goes up to 1860. The third volume goes up to 1930 and was edited by Fernando Giovanni and Javier Uriarte. The fourth volume runs from 1930 to 1980, edited by Amanda Holmes and Par Kumaraswami. And the last volume was edited by Debra Castillo and I—it begins in 1980 and goes until 2018, and is like the decantation of everything that happened in the other volumes. And in that volume, we were interested in thinking about what is happening in current literary criticism. So, we have a chapter on criticism, which was written by Graciela Montaldo, and we have chapters that deal with new genres, such as comics and rap. There’s a chapter by Maricruz Castro Ricalde that deals with Mexican cinema in Hollywood. We have chapters about women writers who create new genres as writers but also as critics, as in the case of Liliana Colanzi and Cristina Rivera Garza. We have a chapter on border literature in Portuñol, for example, the literature of the triple border between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. We dedicate a lot of space to thinking about the native languages of Black women as well.

A.P.: You examine the evolution of gender and sexuality studies in Latin American literature from a critical perspective. What do you think about what has been happening in recent years? How do you feel these gender and sexuality studies have changed in relation to Latin American literature?

M.S.: I think these are fundamental areas. And it also seems to me that, particularly with studies on sexualities and dissidence, the feedback is continuous. In other words, it seems to me—unlike in other areas, for example—some critics who were my students a few years ago have been transformed. And it also seems to me that there’s a continuous feedback loop between the street and the university. So, this gives us a way of thinking about literature that’s different, and I’m not saying it hasn’t always happened, but in Latin American literature, for a variety of issues, the echo from the outside has always been fundamental and has been very strong. As is the case in the Southern Cone with the number of writers who disappeared, who were victims of torture, and this has also happened, of course, in Central America and in Colombia, in Brazil. It seems to me that, in the case of sexual dissidence, there’s something that gets developed in the street and then returns to the university. In other words, the feedback is continuous, it’s more immediate. And I would say the same thing happens with the movements of indigenous peoples, with brown women in Argentina, but it seems to me there’s something there that has been thought about in academia and suddenly explodes into the street and has an immediate echo in academia, in cinema, in journalism, in theater. 

A.P.: How wonderful. Well, to close, I’ll congratulate you on the new book, A History of Argentine Literature, that you co-edited with Alejandra Laera. Thank you very much for accepting this invitation. 

M.S.: Thank you very much.

Translated by Will Howard

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Argentine academic Mónica Szurmuk.

Just Before the End (Justo antes del final), Emiliano Monge’s sixth novel, is a story both in time and about it.  In eighty microchapters, each devoted to a year of his mother’s life, Emiliano Monge—or a nameless narrator who suspiciously resembles one Emiliano Monge—inculcates a three-part structure: a conversation with the mother, a corresponding interview with a family member, and an investigation of world events contemporaneous with the year in question.  The book, with echoes of Fuentes’ Aura, is told in the second-person future tense, locating the narrator and the reader on the same plane.  Are we witnessing a narrator in dialogue with himself, immersed in an asymptotic search for his origins as he reconstructs his mother’s story, or is the reader, cast in the second person, the story’s fictionalized recipient, a coparticipant traversing the thin membrane of the page?

The net effect is a spiraling, recursive format performed upon linear chronology, an implicit, reiterative rhythm coextensive with the unwavering march of the years. While the decisive events of the latter half of the twentieth century interpenetrate with the particular history of a single family, the mother—in whose archetypal resonance there’s no forfeiture of verisimilitude—becomes the story’s central figure.  The novel could likewise be envisioned as the 4D representation of its multifaceted protagonist, as the portrait of a woman at once tangible and elusive, intimate and remote.  Whereas in What Goes Unsaid (No contar todo)—Monge’s first production to mine the symmetries and the discrepancies between memory and imagination—the author traces the paternal over three generations, the overlapping biographies of grandfather, father, and son told, respectively, in third, second, and first person, here Monge introduces the other side of the family—with its guiding obsessions, its inherited fixations, and its private rationale.

The novel’s merit—its complex protagonist and innovative structure—is mobilized by its language. Monge’s formal accomplishment is the outgrowth of this technical excellence, the proof of ruthless attention at the level of the prose. Told in a voice equally searching and ironic that alternates spare brushstrokes with syntactic extension, invoking touches of humor and, at times, the plangent notes of a dirge, Just Before the End thrives in multiple registers and, in my admittedly biased view, delimits its own space, both in Monge’s oeuvre and in Latin American literature. I’m delighted to present the opening chapters. The English-language rights are available. Inquiries can be directed to Paula Canal at the Indent Literary Agency: paula@indentagency.com.

Josh Dunn

From Just Before the End

1947

No beginning is easy, your mother will say.

Did you know your grandma got sick the very day I was born?

She’d stomached her aches and pains for years, and when things went from bad to worse, she blamed me.

She never fed me, your mother will say, looking for herself in her voice.  She refused to pick me up. Her arms hurt, her joints ached, her bones were deforming one by one.

Excuses.

If I’d died, she would’ve found me forty-eight hours later, your mother will say, a pause coloring her words. So Ofelia fed me.

Obviously I don’t remember. Ofelia was your grandfather’s patient who ended up working for your grandmother, your mother will say, finding something in her voice. In her sewing shop, that hobby store that grew into a business.

The same shop where my mother worked for decades without complaining about her arms, her joints, or her supposedly bedeviled bones.

Your aunts, who’d told your mother the story of Ofelia, will tell you the wetnurse was unwell.

Something screwy in the head, they’ll add, each making a face. She muttered in foreign languages, wandered from one room to the next. But that’s not what you’ll want them to tell you.

No, your grandfather didn’t make it to your mother’s birth, they’ll say, going back to the beginning because you’ll believe such a thing is possible. The truth is he didn’t make it to her first months, as if he’d forgotten about his most recent daughter, born tiny and destined to be petite.

Their father, your aunts will explain, their voices, you’ll think, tediously woven into one, being the psychiatrist he was, testified in Goyo Cárdenas’s second trial. Before the La Castañeda fugitive spent the next 34 years behind bars.

That case—the mental wellbeing of the accused—kept your grandfather busy during his youngest daughter’s first months.

You’ve heard of the Tacuba Strangler, right?

You’ll read that that year, in France, Jean Genet debuted The Maids, the story of two domestic workers who, after an apparently miniscule inconvenience—they can’t finish ironing because of a burnt-out fuse—, murder the mistress, disfiguring the body of the woman with whom they’d lived in such apparent bonhomie and such intimate proximity that one of them could have been her daughters’ wetnurse; that, in the United States, Edwin Land presented before a jam-packed auditorium the Polaroid Land Camera, the first instant-exposure device in history; and that, in Mexico, the infamous serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández—alias Goyo Cárdenas—was sentenced to 34 years, even though your grandfather, the medical expert, declared the encephalitis he’d suffered during childhood had irreparably damaged his neurological structures and that he should, therefore, be considered not criminal but ill.

1948

Your mother will tell you that from her second year she doesn’t remember bim or bom.

Wait, she’ll say, stopping herself, her voice like a crystal dyed with the colors of the past. I remember the cold.

The curtains were always closed in that crypt of a house. And lowering her voice, she’ll add: they made up a room for Ofelia and me.

So they say. Since she doesn’t remember that space or anything else from her second year, your mother will tell you what her brothers and sisters told her: she never cried, never made a peep. She seemed to be allergic to hair and the cold gave her a rash. She was fragile, sick nineteen days out of twenty.

Her cheeks, she’ll say, repeating what your aunts and uncles told her, were coated with a sheen, a gloss of boogers and dried spit.

Hence, she’ll smile, the nickname: trout face.

Your uncles will confirm the neglected hygiene and the chronic iridescence of their kid sister.

And to justify that nobody thought, for example, to wet a Kleenex or to daub her cheeks, they’ll say that your grandmother had begun using the wheelchair from which she’d rarely—and only if she thought nobody was watching—get up.

Their father—who’d quit judicial work after an altercation in a trial—dedicated more and more time to private practice. He also became assistant director of the hospital where he’d worked for years.

All to say he spent little to no time at home. He was obsessed with mental illness. With diagnosing it. With dodging it. His mother, your great-grandmother, suffered from premature dementia, and his brother, your great-uncle, was schizophrenic.

He always, your uncles will conclude, had a soft spot for the crazies.

You’ll read that that year—a leap year, dooming your mother to an extra 24 hours’ cold—Bell Laboratories brought out the transistor radio whose warblings, your mother will say, defined her scant recollections of her first two years; that, in Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán convened the first silent march in history; that the World Health Organization—fated, among other contributions, to impede the understanding of mental wellbeing—was founded while in England the first ever one-piece hearing aid was unveiled and, in the recently established Israeli State, a sniper downed a first Palestinian boy; that, in France, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published and, in the United States, Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a book fated to enrapture your grandfather and to scar one of your uncles; and that, in Mexico, Mario de Ángeles Roque, accused of murdering and quartering his wife along with their three children, jumped from the witness stand in a foiled gambit to strangle the medical expert who would’ve diagnosed him—your grandfather who, little inclined to listen to the radio, almost didn’t have the time (or the breath) to read Alfred C.

1949

Your mother will untangle a first memory.

It shines like the photos in an album whenever I close my eyes, she’ll say in a firm, iridescent voice. Or like, you’ll think, the embryos of a Polaroid.

In those images, a sequence of superimposed exposures which your mother’s hypothalamus will illumine word by word, Ofelia gets kicked out of the house. Your mother couldn’t say if it happened during the morning or the afternoon. Imploded, she’ll say, a word you never imagined she would use.

Locks of your mother’s hair, the flickers of a half-made sentence, scissors flashing in Ofelia’s hand. The scissors again, Ofelia’s bruised arms, her hair—the dead cells of a woman who’d gone from batty to seamstress and from seamstress to wetnurse—strewn on the floor. The blood. You grandmother in her wheelchair, shouting; your aunts and your grandfather, running; the orderlies he’d called—if not him, who?—pinning Ofelia to the floor amidst her insults in three languages and her protests in four.

She never saw her surrogate mother again. The brutal precision, the untiring exactitude with which she describes Ofelia’s departure stems from, you’ll think, the pain or a feint of the imagination, maybe an amalgam of the two.  You grandpa’s lackies subdued her, you’ll hear. They gave her a shot in the arm or neck. They put her on a stretcher, crossed the living room, and carried her out.

Would you believe those goons dumped her on the street? They grabbed her arms and legs to haul her into the ambulance while one of my sisters ran her fingers through my hair and the other hugged me from behind.

That’s the last image on the reel.

Your aunts, who consoled your mother the day they took Ofelia and who will live only two blocks apart, will tell you your mother moved into their room.

Seeing as she arrived without a bed—the one she’d shared with Ofelia didn’t fit—, trout face, your mother, slept in a dresser drawer. The bottom one, they’ll explain, on the front step of one of their homes. A sweater for a blanket and a t-shirt for a pillow.

Then, seated in the living room, your aunts, the older and the younger, the plump and the peaked, the fabulous cook and the fabulously devout, two women always on the brink of the next laugh and whose words, like your uncles’, you won’t combine again, will tell you how they built your mother’s niche: shoe boxes.

Our grandfather, the miner who became our mother’s stepfather and visited whenever he could, was the only help we got. Great-grandpa spelunker, you’ll think, as industrious above ground as below.

You’ll read that that year, in Havana, a platoon of gringo soldiers desecrated the tomb of José Martí, one of your great-grandfather’s favorite poets, while, in Barcelona, four members of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia were executed by firing squad, the oldest of them not only your great-grandfather’s boyhood best friend but the individual responsible for his marrying your great-grandmother and becoming your grandma’s stepfather; that, in the United States, a movie based on Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman, a film destined to obsess your grandfather to such an extent that he could recite swaths of dialogue and would brag about having seen it some thirty times, was released while, in Quito, a version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, translated and rebroadcast, unleashed the same chaos that had run roughshod over London ten years back, only worse: in that Andean country whose name splits the world in two, a tricked, humiliated, and infuriated mob burned down the radio station and lynched the workers when they learned everything had been a hoax; that, in Vienna, Doctor Leo Kanner, synthesizing numerous theories from the turn of the century, coined the term refrigerator mother and laid the groundwork for the study of autism as a syndrome linked to a cold, aloof parenting style “ubiquitous among intellectuals”; and that, in Vatican City, Pope Pius XII excommunicated any and every Communist—past, present, or future—as if he were Methuselah incarnate while, in Madrid, the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health began and your grandfather’s keynote address, which extoled the merits of psychotropic drugs, heralded the case of Ofelia, a patient who succumbed to neurosis despite a battery of electroshocks and took scissors to her own skin.

1950

That year, your mother will tell you, she stopped sleeping through the night.

Closing her eyes, she’ll second guess herself, asking if it started that year or the next, but opening them, she’ll say she was right: in nineteen fifty, sleep started to elude her.

And not because I slept in a dresser drawer. I couldn’t sleep because of the shouts I heard—or thought I heard—in the boys’ room. Shouts that, despite being muffled by the distance and the doors, were shouts of terror, a plea.

One of those nights, rather than trying to fall back to sleep, I summoned what courage I could. I got up. It may have been less bravery and more imprudence or desperation, your mother will admit, her lips turning into an upside-down smile, saying, without words, that what she’s about to say will hurt.

The smallest, the youngest member of the family tiptoed in the half-dark, one hand covering her mouth and the other scratching at the space in front of her.  The door to your uncles’ room was open a crack.  So, for the first time in my life, your mother will say, her voice surfacing amidst the same capsized smile, their little sister turned into a ghost. I entered that masculine space, only to discover my second oldest brother was gone.

The surprise didn’t last as long as the confusion. I inched back and, in the hall, your mother will say, her fingers tracing the upholstery of the couch, I closed my eyes and concentrated. I made out the stifled screams, the thread of my missing brother’s voice—your uncle who, years later, would become the first Mexican to try out for a United States football team.

The noise came from my father’s office. I should’ve left. But rather than turning back, rather than lying down in my makeshift bed and pretending I heard nothing while I pretended to be asleep, I remembered I was invisible. I crouched down, crawled forward, and, with one eye, peered into the room.

My brother was on hands and knees. I couldn’t see what he and my father were doing, what your grandfather was doing to your uncle—your uncle who, decades later, would crisscross the city, driving you from one bookstore to the next.

But your mother will remember the muted suffering, the choked-out cries, and that your grandfather held something in both hands.

The middle brother of your mother’s older brothers, your grandma’s favorite, will tell you from behind the wheel of his taxi that he didn’t even like football.

He played because your grandfather, inspired by Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, made him. Because according to Doc Alfred, who never examined him and who knew nothing of the case, he needed to vent the pent-up energy he didn’t want to or simply couldn’t control.

And he’ll tell you—that same day and during that same commute, taking Calzada de Tlalpan while you look out the window, fixing your attention on a convoy of orange trailers to avoid the dampness eroding your uncle’s features and clouding the pewter of his eyes—about the most frightening moment of his life, the only time he was absolutely terrified.

At twelve, thirteen at most, he’d made the roster of the football team.  That night, your uncle will say, downshifting and accelerating the taxi, while I slept on the floor in my mother’s room, they came. Three or four of them, wearing Halloween masks.

With the blessing of your grandma and the maniacal enthusiasm of my old man, they stuffed my head into a cloth bag and tied my hands behind my back and threw me into the trunk of a sedan. Half an hour, an hour, or for all I knew a lifetime later, they dragged me down a flight of stairs, shouting, telling me I’d better say my prayers because my time was up. They tossed me into the void.

After a fall that seemed infinite, measured by the seconds during which I grappled at the air and tried to regain my breath, I landed in a mass of lukewarm water. They’d flung me off the ten-meter diving platform.

They pulled me out after twenty seconds, their way of saying welcome to the squad. A hazing—I understood years later—my father had concocted.

When I read Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, I knew.

You’ll read that that year, the Soviet Union failed for the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth time to detonate a nuclear bomb, carving crater beside crater in Semipalatinsk; that, in Brazil, the Uruguayan national team defeated the Brazilians two to one to take the World Cup, unleashing a wave of euphoria that culminated in self-immolations: nosedives from the upper deck and the hysteria of ad-hoc acrobats who clambered to the roof, eager to jump from a greater height; that Celia Cruz, quite likely the only singer to transcend three generations of your family’s musical delights, debuted with Sonora Matancera, covering “Rhythm, Drums, and Flowers” by José Vargas whose lyrics say: “A gardener sows a seed / in the soil of his love / another prunes its leaves / for whom does the flower bloom?” while, in Peru, an earthquake destroyed two thirds of Cusco, paving a trail with the dead and turning the living into ghosts, the wordless, faceless, spiritless survivors who wandered for days or even weeks amidst the rubble and the deceased in a psychological if not spiritual daze that garnered the attention of Doctor Raúl Watanabe, a forerunner of Latin American social psychiatry with whom your grandfather would trade innumerable letters: nearly all of the survivors had gathered in the environs of the stadium where Cienciano would play Sports Boys del Callao for the title; that, in Viena, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, responding to the theory of the refrigerator mother, shook what had been to date the pillars of the study of autism, redefining it as an emotional disturbance rooted in the psychological damage inflicted by the mother; and that, in the prefecture of Niigata and more specifically the city of Gosen, the Japanese drawer, illustrator, and animator Yoshifumi Kondō, famous for Princess Mononoke, Only Yesterday, and Whispers of the Heart, but not for his equally decisive Hear the Neurons Sing, a study commissioned by Kyoto University to trace the development of the fetal nervous system as no person or institute had before, was born.

1951

Your uncle’s screams, your mother will tell you, disappeared after he moved into your grandma’s room.

No, I couldn’t say when my parents stopped sharing a bedroom—assuming they ever did, your mother will reply, digressing from what she, apparently, wanted to say.

While my older brother slept blissfully through the night, even the silence woke me up. A silence pockmarked, she’ll add, staring, without realizing it, at the wall behind your chair, by whatever bugs and vermin were chatting in the wainscoting.

Other times, she’ll continue, separating her gaze from the wall and fixing it on the ceiling, her lips drawing a familiar downturned arc, I heard the moans my father never bothered to conceal.  So, not too unlike the year before, one night I struck out on my own. I crossed the house, strolled through the kitchen, and crawled the last meters to his office.

She was a distant relative or the domestic help, your grandmother’s friend, maybe a nurse. Could be a former patient, one of the many who, like Ofelia, became assistants in the hospital, the clinic, or my mother’s shop.

They never caught you? you’ll ask, filling a pause between her words. Not once, she’ll answer. They didn’t see me. Because they couldn’t see me. Because after I’d tried for so long to be invisible, invisibility had become my absolute.

I understood, she’ll explain, gathering her hair over one shoulder, that I already was invisible, that no one in that house paid me any attention.

Yes, her sisters and her youngest older brother, yes. But not at school, where she didn’t have friends, where the teachers forgot her name.

I really believed I was different.  That maybe, my body didn’t exist.

No, no way.

They would’ve nabbed her on the spot, your youngest uncle will contend. One night or another—your mother’s brother will snap his fingers—bango! my kid sister caught in the act.

Your grandpa stayed up preparing for his conferences. Be it in the clinic or the hospital, Pops worked like a horse. Those were the only hours he had left.

I can still hear the paper he gave at the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health, your uncle, the one who could see your mother, will say. It was his doctoral thesis and his research in La Castañeda mashed into one. My oldest brother along with yours truly formed a compulsory, two-seat audience while he rehearsed.

Your favorite uncle, a sensible and to appearances impartial man, a caring father and an exemplary spouse who will vigorously deny your grandfather tortured any child in any way at any time and will categorically reject the suggestion he bedded other women in the family home, will tell you that, thanks to his thesis, Mexican neuropsychiatry shook off Medievalism and began implementing drug therapy as an alternative to electroshocks.

But without realizing it and almost by mistake, your mother’s most brotherly brother, your uncle who countless times and on innumerable occasions will sub for your father and anchor your emotional universe, will wonder if maybe, after your grandpa polished his papers and dared to dabble in the drugs better left for patients, crossing—call it professional curiosity—into a room he hadn’t inhabited or even peered into before, if maybe then the cocaine, the heroin, or some other undiagnosed addiction turned him into someone else.

And although it sounded supremely unlikely—improbable but not implausible—, if his father slipped a former patient into his office during the dead hours of the night, who knew? To the extent that your uncle recalls or would presume to speak, there was only one: his sister-in-law, your grandma’s half-sister.

Your uncle, when you try to pursue the subject, will clearly prefer not to, not denying it but skirting it, precluding it, flitting over its surface. He’ll go on and on about your grandpa’s dissertation, as if a piece of antediluvian doctoral work were the keystone to your questions and the centerpiece of your doubts.

Your grandpa, your uncle will continue, was basically the godfather of Mexican psychopharmacology. He revolutionized the treatment of neuroses and epilepsy, he introduced and popularized chemical castration.

Aberrant sexual practice always fascinated him. And again, estranged from his own voice and aloof to the meaning of his words, he’ll admit that yes, maybe yes, he may have done something untoward to his second son.

But with an indispensable caveat: for his father, his brother wasn’t a case study but a source of inspiration.

You’ll read that that year, in New York, the UN created the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; that, in West Germany, Ilsa Koch, the witch of Buchenwald and the wife of the concentration camp commander, was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the torture, murder, and chemical castration of thousands of human beings, mostly Jewish, while the Mossad, the newly founded Israeli secret service, would disappear seven Palestinians, none of them to return; that, in Mexico, Televimex launched the Stars Channel, the first guests being Celia Cruz—performing “Rhythm, Drums, and Flowers”—and Sansoncito, grandson of El Sansón, a Jota singer and native of Zuera, Aragón, who never recognized your great-grandmother, the half-sister of Sansoncito’s mother, a woman conceived during El Sanson’s tour through the heart of Mexico and fated to perish in an asylum: your great-grandmother who, years later, would remarry, this time to a miner of Spanish descent, as if to remedy her own beginnings; that, on the Enewetak Atoll and in accordance with Operation Greenhouse, the United States military successfully detonated their seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth atomic bombs while, in Mexico, the Association of Spanish Language Academies was created, deriving from the First Congress of Spanish Language Academies and, in England, Ludwig Wittgenstein, an unequivocal opponent of language academies and any suggestion of that ilk—“whatever remains encapsulated in the idea of language’s expressivity is necessarily incapable of being expressed in that language and is, consequently, in the most perfectly precise sense of the word, inexpressible”—, died; and that the Mexican pharmacist Luis E. Miramontes synthesized 19-noretisterona, the first oral contraceptive in history, a pill your mother would take—and subsequently stop taking—years later when, she’ll tell you, in the besotted clairvoyance after a night of drinks, she knew she wanted to be a mom.

Translated by Josh Dunn

Photo: Jonathan Tesmaye Salvador, Unsplash.

City of Asylum Pittsburgh is honored to have hosted Cuban writer and journalist Jorge Olivera Castillo as a writer-in-residence since November 2021. Jorge has published six books of poetry and two short story collections and is a well-known dissident, whose work has been banned in Cuba. It has been a great privilege to welcome Jorge to Pittsburgh as part of our residency program and to witness how he and his wife Nancy Alfaya Hernandez, a Cuban human rights and women’s right activist in her own right, have flourished here. Jorge’s newest collection of sonnets, En el filo del horizonte (On the Edge of the Horizon) was written during his time in residency in Pittsburgh and reflects themes of love, resilience, the despair of political turmoil, and his experience as an artist living in exile. Jorge’s work has been translated into several languages, including Czech, English, Italian, and Polish. 

Translator’s Note by Erin Goodman:

Hard Earth (Tierra dura) is a short story collection by Cuban writer Jorge Olivera Castillo made up of fictional accounts of a soldier in Angola based on Olivera Castillo’s own experiences. “It’s safe to say that this book is the fruit of a miracle,” says Olivera Castillo. “It’s not easy to emerge relatively unscathed from a civil war that took place in the jungle and that lasted for almost thirty years (1975–2002). The few truces that occurred in this period only heightened the conflict. I arrived at that forlorn place at the age of nineteen in the summer of 1981. For twenty-six months I survived in underground shelters, exposed to diseases that almost killed me, sporadic bombardments, insomnia, and hunger. The daytime heat was oppressive, nighttime was cold, and fearsome wild animals made the rounds in the dark early mornings. In short, everything one could imagine from a context where death was as natural as the remarkable duality of lush forests and dusty savannahs: the only landscapes I saw until the day of my much-anticipated return.”

By the time Cuba’s military engagement in Angola ceased in 1991, Cuban casualties numbered around 10,000 dead, wounded, or missing. In total, an estimated one million people were killed and millions more displaced as a result of the conflict. 2025 marks fifty years of independence in Angola, and fifty years since the start of the conflict that would last twenty-seven years. At the same time, the world has been returning to Cold War-era polarization, such that shedding light on another proxy war in Africa could be timely. These stories are told from a personal point of view, with very simplistic language and a matter-of-fact style that focuses on the implications of war on the psyche of young soldiers, rather than pushing any political agenda.

Erin Goodman

“The Feast,” from Hard Earth

The skinless, gutless monkey burned on the bonfire.

It was small, but that didn’t matter much. It would satisfy our hunger and that was enough. We were on the verge of a sunset characterized by thick reddish clouds that took on various shapes molded by the breeze..

“That one looks like a horse,” Arturo pointed his index finger toward the sky through the thin veil of smoke covering his face.

“I don’t think it looks like an animal. Hunger has stimulated your imagination,” replied René, crouching and turning the body of the headless primate on the wooden spit held up by stilts on each end of the campfire.

“It wasn’t an illusion. The cloud was in the shape of a horse. Look! Now it’s a crocodile,” he enthused with his arm extended in the direction of another discovery.

 “Compadre, stop looking up there. Come back to earth, where our problems are. I don’t even have the strength to lift my head,” said Bernardo.

“I agree. An empty stomach is why you’re seeing a whole zoo in the sky,” said René.

“Nah. It’s just a distraction from the hunger pangs.”

“We’ll be eating in twenty minutes,” René added.

The announcement stimulated the salivary glands of two of the three soldiers.

It would be their first bite in the two days they had been in the jungle. They supposed they were the only survivors who had managed to escape the devastating attack from the enemy troops.

Since their successful fugue, they had been wandering aimlessly through the dense vegetation that camouflaged hundreds of animals, some less evasive than the monkey on their spit. 

Arturo had led the hunt. He hit the target on the third shot. There was just one bullet left in the only magazine. René and Bernardo only had their sharp Russian Kizlyar knives. Their firearms were long gone: both weapons rested at the bottom of the Bomkula River, relegated to a memory of how they had overcome that obstacle in a frantic chase that had begun amid a hail of bullets and explosions of mortar shells.

“I need a break,” said René, pausing from spinning the animal’s rapidly diminishing flesh.

“From what I can see, there’ll be almost nothing left!” exclaimed Bernardo, getting up to take over the cooking duties.

“That’s normal, the volume decreases as it loses body fat. The point is to eat something, even if we’re not satiated,” said René. “So, is this the first time you’ll be eating monkey?” 

“It’s my third time,” Bernardo interjected.

Before answering, Arturo made a face and sighed.

“Honestly, the first time I could hardly eat it,” he said. “That was about six months ago in Benguela. We hunted four monkeys slightly larger than this one. I only had one bite and I swallowed it practically without chewing. My world was turned upside down. Although I wasn’t as hungry then as I am right now…”

“Maybe this time you’ll wish you had more. Look how toasty it’s getting. It couldn’t be better. And who knows what’s ahead in the coming days. We need to replenish our energy. Nobody knows how long we’ll have to hold out. We’re in limbo. It seems like there’s no way out of this jungle, it’s like we’re trapped.”

“René, you’re right that when hunger strikes, there’s no room for scruples. How long until dinner?” Arturo joked.

Bernardo assessed the hunk of smoking meat without interrupting his circular arm movement. The monkey would soon be taken off the rod and divided up equally.

“The feast begins in ten minutes,” he announced, raising his voice slightly as if it were a special event. He had assumed the stance of a professional announcer with the palm of one hand cocked to the corner of his mouth to broadcast the news.

The darkness crept in stealthily, breaking the near picture-perfect twilight. The gentle, varied colors yielded to twilight’s menacing shadows.

The three men were minutes away from a fleeting but vital moment of glory. They would face their second nighttime foray, now with only one bullet left and a pair of knives. At least their hunger would be somewhat sated by the bland flesh of the monkey.

They would wholeheartedly celebrate the chance to break their fast and the fact that they were alive.

The sun showed its last flashes. Arturo, leaning against the trunk of an imposing tree, discovered the shape of another animal in one of the clouds blown by the wind.

It’s an elephant, he thought, without voicing the idea.

“I think we can divvy it up now. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little raw inside,” René suggested.

Bernardo agreed, grasping the wooden stick by both ends and bringing it next to the fire near the tree where Arturo sat.

The chunk of meat was about eight inches long and barely four inches wide.

“Any more time and we would have had to settle for sucking on the bones,” René commented.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” said Bernardo. With a couple of deft movements he extracted the spit from inside the ape and unsheathed his knife from the right side of his leather belt.

Arturo accepted his portion unenthusiastically. Bernardo had carved the meat like a professional butcher.

The soldiers began to quench their voracious appetites. They were aware of its limits. Their emergency dinner was rationed and bland.

René bit frantically,  hardly chewing. Arturo took his time between bites. He didn’t feel as voracious as his companions who were determined to gnaw it down to the marrow.

Night thickened over the jungle. The curved sliver-moon was dulled by the fog, giving it a melancholy hue.

“It was delicious, wasn’t it?” Bernardo exclaimed, before taking a sip of water from his canteen.

“I have to admit that it wasn’t bad,” responded Arturo, gnashing at the last piece of meat. “I didn’t savor it like you did, but it was worth it. Now we can hold out until we can hunt something else or find our way out of this labyrinth.” 

“Don’t throw away the bone,” said René, holding out his hand.

“I expect your solidarity, mate,” said Bernardo with a wink to reinforce his message.

René looked at him sideways without answering, concentrating on breaking the bone.

“Here you go,” he said dryly.

“Are you upset?”

“No, not at all. Everything’s fine.”

Arturo was the first to lean back against the tree.

In just over a minute, the flames of the bonfire reignited. René had rekindled it with remarkable skill.

Each soldier took his place around the base of the tree. The bark of the trunk showed thick, perfectly outlined striations, shadowy in the gloomy night yet tinged with fine embers from the fire flickering over the mound of dry branches.

The evening was intense. Darkness weighed on their exhausted bodies, as they lay blissfully oblivious to the harsh intermittent jungle noises.

At dawn, the three lay in almost the same positions. The hyena’s first bite was to René’s abdomen. Not one had tried to defend himself. The herd feasted on their corpses.

Translated by Erin Goodman

Three Sonnets from On the Edge of the Horizon

I

At the edge of the landscape
goes life with its brightness and
solid shadows, stuck in old cloths
that claim to mask the wound,

that wind along the vast obverse
of the soul in its intermittent breath;
expatriated in an exilic flash
that ceases suddenly in its reversal.

The days, the seasons go by,
in the pupils of the crowd, lost
in the customary cycles 

of speculating on the conditions
—abstracted, sitting, or squatting—
of a trip to who knows what village.

V

Like a spark of light that goes out,
in the slow passage of hours
that mark the beat of each dawn,
obsession is bred by certain virtue.

It seemed the radiance of a diamond—
sprinkled like holy water
over a sole parishioner who meditates
prostrate before an extravagant altar.

In reality, a confused gesture,
embrace rehearsed a thousand times,
the promise of future growth

uncovering the extent of abuse,
motivated by reasons unknown,
betrayal ever present, addictive.

VIII

The moor, the rope, the precipice
complete the dowry of vileness;
they offer us the crude certainty of
the universality of torture.

Greedy promises notoriously made
to serve us up on silver platters,
omens the prophet unleashes
with gestures revealing

a euphoria whose aim is the expedited
mutation of a spacious, rosy orchard
in a garden of bitter truths—

impunity without mitigation,
the insignificance of forgiving, and
the insufferable burdens the human back bears.

Translated by Jonathan Bennett Bonilla

Photo: Pedro Domingos, Unsplash.

Erin Goodman is a literary translator residing in Boston. She selected and translated a collection of poetry by Juana Rosa Pita (b. 1939, Havana) entitled The Miracle Unfolds (Song Bridge Press, 2021), and the memoir by former Chilean minister Sergio Bitar, Prisoner of Pinochet (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). Her short fiction and poetry translations have appeared in Poetry International Rotterdam, spoKe, Northwest Review, Presence, New England Review, and Los Angeles Review, among other publications.

Jonathan Bennett Bonilla (they/them) is a writer, translator, editor, and educator who grew up between languages, moving around the United States, Costa Rica, and Spain. Bennett Bonilla is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts and also teaches literature and creative writing in the Humanities Department. Their area of specialization and interest is in History, Theory and Practice of Social Movements. Bennett Bonilla is an advocate for social justice and is committed to disrupting white supremacy and cis-hetero-patriarchy in all of its institutional forms.

The following selections come from A Garden Razed to Ashes, an English translation of the 2014 book-length fragmentary poem, Un jardín arrasado de cenizas by Víctor Cabrera. This work by Cabrera draws inspiration from the instrumental “Japanese Folk Song” as performed by Thelonious Monk (and his quartet) on the album Straight, No Chaser (1967). The instrumental by Monk is, itself, a bebop adaptation of the piece of Japanese traditional music, “Kojo no Tsuki” [The Moon over the Ruined Castle], composed by Rentaro Taki in 1901. In these fragments, we can observe the transmission of ideas across time and space as different musicians and authors reimagine the same melody, orchestrating and improvising different approaches to the same melody, carrying the same premise from Tokyo to New York City to Mexico City and beyond. In addition to containing echoes of Monk and Taki’s musical work, Cabrera’s work is also highly self-referential, and the poem comments on the writing process which produced it. Reading this collection, we can see behind the curtain to observe how being transfixed by this haunting and enigmatic work of music can lead to the generation of boundless creativity.        

Layers of meaning permeate every aspect of these fragments. Throughout A Garden Razed to Ashes, induvial words simultaneously carry connotations in multiple fields such as music theory and architecture or dance and astronomy. Recurring evocative images in the poem also come to embody strata of significance. A solitary island with a cherry tree growing on it, a contemplative bird, and the faint, distant echo of an ancient garden’s ruins, as well as other motifs, go beyond merely explaining the different versions of the music that inspired them; rather, they create a new world out of the tones and textures of the tune. In addition to Cabrera’s words and images, the formal composition of these poems also reflects the disparate cultural influences that lead to the creation of the music that inspired this book. Jazz music lends its essence to aspects of the poem in the use of rhythm, repetition, and improvisation. The influence of Japanese culture can be felt in formal features such as the haiku structure, and in images such as cherry blossoms.

Cabrera is a highly prolific author and editor whose writings include collections of poetry and short stories. A Garden Razed to Ashes is representative of his style, as his works often enter into dialogue with other works of art including popular music, television, and film. 

Interested publishers should contact the translator at jlrich30@louisville.edu. 

James Richie
Louisville, Kentucky 

From A Garden Razed to Ashes

A suite within a suite. Tokonoma. A mental shelter. An isolated nucleus.
In the ether vision house, there exists an opportune point for detachment. A minor hideaway for
transcendence.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
Returning is the beginning for a new point of departure. Nothing is the same after being itself. Nobody is devoured twice by the same flame – the flame changes. Nobody is anything.
…………Revision. Perversion. Diversion.
…………Edition. Redemption. Innovation.
…………Introspection. Introversion. Introvision.
Treason and Tradition.
…………Variance and dissonance.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
…………Repetition. Reedition. Repetition.
…………Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.
A space contained within another space. A fractal song. An infinite melody.
                                                                                                                                           The foggiest idea.

*

I hear footsteps in the neighboring room. Not words. Slight sounds. Dubious murmurs in a spherical language. Airy syllables before a broken mirror. Encrusted cortex splinters. An archetypal orbit whirls beyond this emptiness. The drifting island’s silhouette. 

Someone besieges me from the other side of these walls. Breathing like a blazing shadow comet. Someone else hears my footsteps there. Those murmurs. My coughing. Someone who, without knowing me, is already leaving an impression on me. 

With eyes closed, I behold the softly-lit dimension. 

*

Suspended moment
The bird contemplates the sea
From the garden pond. 

*

What is the opposite of polishing?
I’m talking about stickiness. Superimposition. Purification-opposed ploys.
Instead of resolving tensions, focusing on their razor-sharp edges. Giving tribute to the scraps.
I’m talking about murky mixtures. Altered states. The corruption of sacred metaphors.
Distant domestic static murmurs are present. The universal frequency of Pandora’s beat box. Can anyone here hear my thoughts?
If I say I’m blanking out, it’s because I’m calling upon a garden razed to ashes. 

*

There is a latent flourishing on my borders. A secret spring sustained by its auguries’ tension. Flowing through stalled mental mechanisms: palpable internal storms upon typing certain phrases. Sudden attacks on the island’s borders. Synthetic discharges.
If I woke up now – if this very moment I interrupted these visions’ outflow – in the suite’s yellow space, I could perceive the light swing of the cherry blossoms. 

Translated by James Richie

Photo: Josh Wilburne, Unsplash.

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.