Horror is a popular genre in Ecuador, especially with young writers as well as young readers. Here are some samples: The Procession of the Dead, an Ecuadorian folk legend The Guaguanco, an Ecuadorian folk legend A Chiva Named Desire, by Ricardo Segreda Revenge of the Guaguas, by Ricardo Segreda La Llorana, Amalgamated, by Ricardo Segreda The March of the Devils, by Ricardo Segreda The Resurrection of Princess Munay, by Ricardo Segreda...
There were notable female Ecuadorian poets and essayists going back to the 19th century. However, it took much longer in Ecuador for women to be honored for their efforts as authors of narrative fiction. Elysa Ayala, born in 1879, for example, wrote short stories about the poor who lived on the coast, and her work was published in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Cuba, and even the United States and Spain, but it was overlooked until many years after her passing. Ironically, today Ecuador's most recognized author, nationally, is Alicia Yáñez Cossío. With her 1971 novel, Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City, Yáñez Cossío, who along with Eugenia Viteri with her short stories, became one of the first Ecuadorian authors in the 1970s to challenge the sexism and hypocritical puritanism of Latin American and Roman Catholic culture. Other well-regarded women in this period include Carmen Acevedo Vega, Fabiola Solis de King, Violeta Luna, as well as Luz Argentina Chiriboga and Aminta Buenaño, both much-honored for their articulation of the Afro-Ecuadorian experience, and from a woman's perspective. There are samples of there work below, as well as newer voices such as Gabriela Alemán and María del Carman Garcés. Gabriela Alemán The short story, "Spears," translated by Dick Cluster. The short story, "An Amber Prison," translated by Sarah Jane Foster. The short story, "Red Lips," translated by Juanita Coleman. Aminta Buenaño The short story, "The Strange Invasion that Rose from the Sea," translated by Susan Brenner. The short story, "The Woman Who Mislaid Her Body," translated by Juanita Coleman. Mónica Bravo The short story, "Wings for Dominica," translated by Susan Brenner. Fanny Carrión The short story, “The Idol.” The short story, “Illustrious Paths.” Luz Argentina Chiriboga The short story, "The Mansion," translated by Juanita Coleman. The first chapter from her novel, Drums Under My Skin. The first chapter from her novel, The Devil’s Nose . María del Carmen Garcés The short story, "The Blue Handkerchief," translated by Susan Brenner. Nela Martinéz The short story, "La Machorra," translated by Susan Brenner. Sonia Manzano The short story, "Leda," translated by Juanita Coleman. Eugenia Viteri The award-winning short story, “Shoes and Dreams,” from the anthology, A Taste of Ecuador. The award-winning short story, “The Ring,” included in the anthology, Fire in the Andes. Alicia Yáñez Cossío The first chapter from her novel, Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City. The short story, “The Mayor’s Wife." The short story, “The IWM 1000." Additional reading: Fire from the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, edited by by Susan E. Benner Kathy S. Leonard. University of New Mexico Press. "Que cuenten las mujeres/Let the Women Speak: Translating Contemporary Female Ecuadorian Authors," by Juanita Coleman, B.A., Ohio University, (PDF download). "New voices: linguistic aspects of translation theory and application to the works of three Ecuadorian women writers," by Susan Brenner, Phd, Iowa State University, (PDF download). The Wikipedia list of women Ecuadorian writers....
The Round By Marco Antonio Rodriguez [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] He goes into the bedroom to ask her yet again, to be patient with him and his mother, to forget mama’s crime, that second bowl of soup yesterday, Saturday. But she has his back turned to his plea, her head confined in a helmet of rollers, her hands covered with cream. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] In the light of the nightstand, he imagines the facial mask that leaves bare only a segment of her frivolous features and that makes her look like a fish out of water. He doesn’t know if he should like down next to her, considering that he doesn’t have anything more to say other than what he’s already said so many times, or leave and then come back an hour or two later, after deluding himself by pretending to read back issues of boxing magazines. On turning toward the hallway, he notices the almost astral odor of cosmetics and the obscene crack in the mirror, exactly like hers. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] He closes the door with the same troubled feeling he had when he opened it, but just then she waves her arm at the light as though it were a cloud of tiny moths, she coughs twice. He turns into a rag doll curved into the void, his right hand soldered to the doorknob, listening to the malignant murmur she spreads throughout the house. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] It’s cold and even colder on crossing the passageway that leads to his mother’s room. Perplexed, he looks at the sad olive miracle of her closed eyes. Beyond, his trophies expire, subdued by dust. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] Now in the street, he bends over to tie his shoes. The pale knit pullover leaves bare his neck taut with hands, inhales and exhales through his nose. He jogs down San Juan at an easy pace, annoyed by the dim lights in the shops, the boys in their street corner gangs who still recognize him and stand back to let him pass, the bars that exude their harsh orders. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] At La Merced, in the light of the church’s farthest dome, he thinks he sees the vapid grin of Ceferino Congo, the black deaf mute who lived for a hundred years taking care of the friar’s colossal clock. When Ceferino died, lay brother Valenzuela insisted in catechism class, there was no way to get the hands of the clock moving again. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] He crosses the plaza at the church of San Francisco and 24 de Mayo, where illusions are for sale. He climbs up the hill with the pawnshop and comes to Huascar. Weak, he hides from a pitiful shape, flattening himself against a door. He barely notices the bundle, picnic grounds over which cockroaches swarm, or their raspy razor sharp screeching that rips through the squid belly of the night. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] He breathes in rapid double time, bracing his head until the tendons in his neck jump like wet jackrabbits. (Punish his muscles and prove that they’re still vigorous or wander among his scattered joys like a caged jaguar looking for the freedom he’s misplaced, that generally brought him back to an acceptance of his routine lot in life, but now his resolve slipped away like the string of a broken toy.) [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] He’s worried that somebody might recognize him. Maybe if he were go to back home. Or look for his friends. Or lose himself in a whore from Lima and songs about love lost. A pretty impulse, like the foul smell growing at his side, flashes through his nerves. Exasperated, he checks his pockets, putting together all the money he finds. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] Two forces, both hazy, do battle in him: one compulsive but excessively soft, and the other like a rough, merciless mass in league with time. No matter how often he shuffles the dark deck of his brain, he finds no vengeance that in recent months ravages his blood announcing a death limply calculated. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] At La Esperanza, he can taste the penetrating fumes of stale beer, tobacco smoke, and clandestine sweat. There are only a few people in the bar – the word Sunday comes to mind – all men, except for one brittle woman who drinks alone at the back table. The walls are covered with grime interrupted here and there with etchings of sex organs and hearts pierced with trite phrases. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] Behind the bar, the bartender, disheveled, slides over to him. He’s a man as nervous as a little lizard, his face stale from long nights, with a fuzzy cap bobbing on his head. He makes stupid little hops, shakes his apron, blinks like a simpleton. He shouts champ and his shout wades through the notes, hastily arranged, of a cumbia that booms from the jukebox. Nobody else notices him, but he feels a comforting euphoria and comes in flexing his muscles. When he gets to the bar, the little man with the cap dazes him with a cross fire of shots of cane liquor and infantile accolades. He drinks diligently, quieting the flattery of the bartender. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] He’s startled by a slap on the back. He turns on the revolving bar stool, steeling his jaw and widening his eyes dulled by the first drinks. It’s Pup Cespedes, his old idol; a limping grey stew, his eyes almost invisible in rolls of fat, and a dirty tangle of hair at his neck. Champ, they say to one another, and surrender to an endless embrace, heavy with secret complicities. Still a champ?, the words bubble over to him. You bet boy, the old man answers, caressing him with a fake jab to the jaw. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] They sit down near the table near the woman’s. Pup swears: It’s One-Eyed Moncayo, Colonel Arcentales’ daughter. In the old days we used to call her the Lobster because she had the tasty part in the rear. The King knows the story just like everybody else in the barrio, but he laughs anyway and he looks at the little woman shamelessly. He’s intimidated by the look in her damaged eye, the grimace of her read, toothless mouth, but he keeps looking at her. Pup distracts him, pretending to hit him with his meaty fists. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] It’s like being at Arenas, except without the fans, he jokes. Sure, the King laughs, rubbing himself like a champion against the back of the chair. The drunks turn around to watch, timid, without meaning to, and they start laughing too. Pup orders a bottle of cane liquor and cigarettes, the King that they play Tormentos and Rebeldia on the jukebox. [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] The bartender runs back and forth, accommodating them, his big butt jiggling. Pup settles himself in the chair, works on getting his eyes focused, curls his lips, lights the little candle in the attic, says: The good times, boy, are the ones that get your crotch hot, the punches, on the other hand, they toughen up the soul. Now he pushes his cut rye face toward the middle of the table, knocks over a glass with the left, puts it back where it was, roars: “You what, King? Drink, and I ́ll give it to you straight: A boxer is a Roman candle, he throws off some sparks, four or five years, after that he spends the rest fighting with life, if they left him a whole man.” [vc_separator type='transparent' position='center' color='' thickness='' up='20' down=''] Torments and grief tear ayayayayayay, through my chest, my shattered heart...
The Gillette by Abdón Ubídia Translated by Nathan Horowitz One The man is sitting in front of the typewriter. Distractedly, he observes the keys, the springs, the sheet metal, that inextricable mechanism that can be seen in the intervals between the types. Sometimes his gaze rests on the ribbon, which he bought a week ago and which still stains the pages with an energetic, oily blue-black. He remains immobile while through his brain circulate furtive forms, vague ideas, imprecisions, which make him unaware of what he’s taking in with his eyes in his useless inventory of the icy baroquism of that old Remington, tall and black, like a machine that might have some purpose at a funeral, like a schematic instrument of evil. Something in his chest prevents him from working, or even adopting the proper posture of someone concentrating on work. His ideas are not organizing themselves in his head and he’s not doing much to organize them. It must be the theme of the story which is the problem. The theme of the story is death. The story which has asserted itself refers to the gradual decline of man who, little by little, because of a stupid flair for self-destruction, sets about undoing everything he has been and done in his life: his work, his relationships with friends and family, and lastly, his relationship with another character, Veronica, to whom he assigned in his world the role of nucleus, of organizing principle, around whom everything else articulated itself. Once everything that makes up his professional and personal life is destroyed, the protagonist’s suicide is nothing but an afterthought. And that’s the story. The man is almost finished with it. Only the last part remains to be written, the scene of the suicide. The man knows it by heart and could write it with his eyes closed. Nevertheless, he doesn’t do it, because, now that he thinks about it, he has a slight headache, a gentle hammering in the brain that extends the back of the eyes. He must need another pair of glasses. He should go to the ophthalmologist. But everything feels impossible now. The business of getting a new pair of glasses seems as far-off and difficult as working at the typewriter. He won’t go to the ophthalmologist. He won’t write either. Once, in these circumstances, he would have feared a night of insomnia, the inevitable punishment for a day of lost work. This time he’s not afraid of it. The man passes his hand across his face, across the back of his neck. Suddenly he makes an involuntary movement and knocks the pencil that he uses to underline things off the desk. He picks it up, examines it. He discovers that the point has broken off. He looks for the Gillette. It’s atop the very old, illustrated Larousse. He takes the Gillette and whittles a new point for the pencil. He puts down the pencil, put the Gillette on the Larousse and begins to write. But again, that inertia, that sense that it’s meaningless, stops him from tapping the machine’s keys. He lets his eyes dart around the walls of the room. But the Gillette is gleaming atop the illustrated Larousse. The gleam annoys him. He looks back at the ridiculous form of the Gillette: a weathered surface, two shiny parallels, and in the center something like a frightful mouth with half its teeth smashed out. He picks up the blade and hides it among the dictionary’s pages. He opens one of the drawers of his desk and places the Larousse there. But he thinks that that’s not the solution and opens the drawer and then the Larousse and searches for the Gillette. He picks it up carefully between finger and thumb, carries it to the window and throws it out onto the street. He breathes deeply, looks at his watch and sits back down in front of the typewriter, which he sometimes thinks of as his loom because he has imagined that the written pages that emerge from the top are a kind of cloth. Presently he discovers the open drawer of the desk. Inside it, wrapped in shadows, as if lurking there, is the old German Luger, loaded, ready to shoot. He quickly closes the drawer and involuntarily glances at the bottle of pills he left on the bookshelf jammed with disordered books. Wanting to make a joke, he wonders to himself how he could have remained so long in such a dangerous place without realizing it. The man gets up again, puts on his jacket, and goes out on the street. He’s abandoned that story that’s never going to end, at least not the way he planned it. He advances rapidly down the sidewalk. It’s important that he advance rapidly, pushing his way between the passersby. Two Now, from the other side of the avenue, the man sees her pass through the green-painted doorway and walk up the cobblestone-paved alley. Without knowing it, she approaches him. She has her eyes lowered and her arms crossed over a pair of books, like a high school girl. The man has been waiting for her for an hour without daring to enter and look for her in that strange institute where there is nothing but a library and some enormous rooms with archives that no one consults. He says to himself that it’s a good omen that no one else was waiting for her to get out of work. He says to himself that the summer wind, the blue sky and the midday sun are even better omens. Also, in that part of the city, there’s still enough silence and solitude to talk without interruption. Suddenly she discovers him, too late to avoid him. The man imagines what the woman must be thinking: that if she could tear up one of the cobblestones, she wouldn’t think twice about throwing it at him. The woman has turned away her face with its expression of a frightened little girl so that she can’t hear what the man has not yet begun to say—nor will he, because he has not taken the precaution of choosing his opening words, the appropriate and precise language to initiate his discourse. They walk in silence on the sidewalk, which is almost white with so much light. She acts like she doesn’t know him. He isn’t sure whether to take her by the arm, or once and for all to embrace her and kiss her desperately. “We can talk, right?” he says. She speeds up. She recalls, without sorrow, her final resolution: that relationship ended exactly three months ago. Ended forever. Of course, in the first days that followed the breakup, she was afraid of finding him waiting for her outside the institute or at her mother’s house, and she feared every telephone call that she answered, and every doorbell ring and knock on the door of the office or of her mother’s house. Then, only a few of his words would have been enough to make her crumble. And there wouldn’t have been just a few words, but lots of them. A real avalanche—just like the one that would cover her in an instant if she let him speak now. He was a man of words. He was made of them. They didn’t cost him anything. And he spewed them out with shocking irresponsibility. In those early days of tears and remorse, maybe she could have heard him and gone back with him. Today, though, she feels strong and free. “Speak, you idiot, I’m not going to listen,” she says to herself, her mouth clamped shut with indignation. He follows her in silence, looking at the cement of the sidewalk as if searching for something. “Talk, then,” she says, almost in a sigh. He sees he has won his first victory. She hasn’t stopped at the bus stop, but continues walking with that too-distant, too-frozen attitude too deliberate to be real. And she’s even letting him talk. This is the moment to insist. But now something strange happens. The words slow down and get tangled up in each other in his head. And he doesn’t manage to untangle them. Actually, he doesn’t know what to say to her. To ask her, just like that, to come back and live with him after three months of total silence seems ridiculous. Also, it doesn’t occur to him to promise her anything in return for getting back together with him. And he wouldn’t know where to start with the useless, tasteless, obviously lying offers that would soon seem to her like an interminable litany: he won’t get drunk, he won’t make passes at her friends, he won’t ridicule the concept of domestic life or reject its material aspects, he won’t hate her mother just for being conservative, he won’t demand that she read things she doesn’t like; he will be tolerant and understanding, he will only say what is necessary to say, without excessive theorizing; he will overcome, once and for all, his manic depression—cultivated and periodically indulged in, like a vice—: he will try to become more stable, et cetera, et cetera. The man knows that this isn’t his style. He has learned to avoid simplicity and directness, which feel to him like meager abbreviations that never communicate anything. That’s why he needs the circumlocutions of literature. Furthermore, he doesn’t really want to promise anything. Because he doesn’t really want to change. On the contrary, he wants to remain that half-real, half-imaginary character which is his self. And he wants to justify that self, to explain it; although, now that he thinks of it, he’s not eager to do that now. Because she knows all about it. He’s explained it to her many times in many ways. It’s not worth insisting on, especially not now. So, confronted by the sudden and somewhat unfamiliar need to be sincere, he prefers to remain silent, pursuing her wordlessly like a flustered adolescent. One of his beloved Malcolm Lowry quotes comes to his mind like divine assistance: “Who was she to judge who he had been before she came along?” It seems to him an important phrase, the most respectable of the various justifications he imagines. That quote safeguards his difficult, rebellious way of being. It’s not necessary to speak it aloud. It would require a prologue that doesn’t occur to him now. And there’s nothing for him to do but to repeat it to himself like a prayer. Because the quotations he has consciously or unconsciously picked up from books, and which from time to time, and without his calling them, enter his mind, are, without doubt, the prayers of the personal religion to which he frenetically adheres: language, the dubious path of art, which he sometimes describes as his “stingy, egotistical, perfect alibi.” “I wanted to see you,” he says. “After three months,” she thinks. She doesn’t say it out loud so he doesn’t think she’s blaming him. The woman has made her first mistake: instead of stopping at the bus stop, she’s kept going. She doesn’t know why but it seems foolish to turn around and go back to it. That would be like advertising the fact that she’s flustered. She decides to continue on to the next corner. Behind her, she hears and feels the bus coming. Now she sees it surge by, packed with people heading toward the south of the city. She watches it disappear down the deserted avenue. The houses here seem empty, though there must be some people inside. As they walk, she looks at the small, lovingly-cultivated gardens. Geraniums. Shrubs. Sometimes a dog barks at them from behind a fence. The cool, quick, playful summer wind lifts up papers and dry leaves, and makes a noise like a river in the trees. The sky is blue. There’s not a single cloud, and the sun burns with all its power. It’s the dry season in the Andes: a fearsome sun, with a brisk wind to appease it. She thinks that without the imbecile who walks with her in calculated silence, cunningly pretending he didn’t know what he was going to say to her, she would have wanted to walk a bit before catching the bus anyway, to forget about the darkness and the chilly dampness of her office. “Has anything occurred to you?” she says indifferently. He thinks he understands her new plan. She won’t flee now. She walks slowly at his side and speaks to him with that smooth, calm voice, because she’s told herself that it’s better not to run away, not to provoke a confrontation, the dramatic, total rupture of two people who hate each other. It’s better to stay in neutral territory, to be accommodating, and to tolerate him like a casual acquaintance, nothing more. Which is exactly what he will never accept. So he moves his hand toward her. He tries gently to take her arm. She turns her face to him. She looks at him, hard, strange, as if uncomprehending. He understands: she’s on her guard. She’s defending herself with her gaze, wanting to emphasize her distance. The man withdraws his hand. He does not insist. He consents to give her time. And to yield the point to her; in his own way, to be accommodating. But it’s only a tactic. He will insist again, once, several times, as many times as may be necessary. “I wanted to see you,” he repeats, wanting to go back in time and erase his last gesture like someone retracing his steps after a wrong turn. “Has anything occurred to you?” she would have repeated with the same indifference in her voice to close the circle and disarm him again. But she doesn’t say anything. She begins to get disgusted with herself. Very much despite herself, she feels wooed, courted. Very much despite herself, she feels herself playing the game. Again she wants to run away. She looks again and there’s no bus anywhere around. A ramshackle truck laden with bricks appears. She represses the impulse to lift her arm and signal the driver to stop and pick her up. The truck goes away. The distance to the next corner seems endless. Really, it’s a very long block. Two or three times longer than an ordinary one. At the end, above the irregular, compact profile of the city, above the sudden blue of the mountains, rises the perfect, brilliant snow-covered cone of the volcano, luminous in the deep sky. She would have preferred a winter landscape, gray and rainy, better for reinforcing irreversible decisions. The sun begins to suffocate her. She wants to take off her jacket. But her arms are bare and the man might take it as a provocation. He always said he liked her arms, her skin, her smooth shoulders. He’s too dirty-minded not to think of it as a provocation. Now she wants to hate him. She needs an immediate reason to hate him. She observes that they have just passed some gardens, where bougainvilleas and roses protruded between the bars of fences as if offering themselves to the passersby. The man doesn’t notice things like that. Of course he doesn’t. He’s not the type who gives flowers. Or perfume. He used to say that perfume was a slow-acting toxin. And that cut flowers reminded him of funerals, and that he felt it was better to leave the flowers on their plants, appreciate them there, share the world with them without mutual aggressions. That statement about his feelings was only partly true. Like everything about him. Except, of course, his total lack of courtesy, of politeness, which was completely true. He never gave her a special surprise gift. Except once when he bought her a watch. He must have done it by mistake. He was personally involved in all the other attentions he paid to her. He took her out to eat, took her dancing, took her to films, things like that. Sometimes to the point of exhaustion and even when she didn’t want to go. At last they reach the other corner. They stop. The man vainly attempts again to take her arm. It’s barely a gesture at all. The man feels he has suddenly lost his sense of reality. Now that he should talk, he doesn’t talk. Now that he should insist, he doesn’t insist. The concrete situation altogether escapes him. He’s only able to grasp (to appreciate, as if it were a dream) what he sees before him: the two of them, together, in silence, on a random corner of a deserted street on a fantastic midday of sun and wind. The past is only a vague suspicion and the future seems harmless. So why talk. It occurs to him that sometimes, that precise kind of interruption of action comes over him. Especially when the most prudent thing he can do is wait. And in that moment he is waiting, wisely, patiently, for the confused set of reactions that must be occurring inside her to calm down and cease, and then his timetable and her timetable will synchronize. That’s why he’s surprised to see the bus stopping at the corner. That’s why it seems unjust that the woman says “Goodbye” and begins to get on the bus. So there’s nothing to do but hold her back by force, and say to her in an actually violent tone of voice, “Stay here, we have to talk!” And it doesn’t matter to him that on the other side of the half-pulled down bus windows, the people first look at them with surprise and then burst out in a single enormous laugh while the driver swears and accelerates. The man realizes he has committed his first error. The woman’s face is burning. Behind the lenses of her glasses, her eyes fill with tears. She’s furious. As if from far away, the man hears her say, “What do you want from me!” She frees herself from his grip and backs away. It’s not only anger she feels, but fear, too. She doesn’t know what to do. She turns around and starts walking back the way they came. She draws away. He follows her. He stammers an apology that she doesn’t hear. He decides to shut up. They walk. Suddenly the woman stops, leans against the stone wall, covers her face with her hands and cries piteously. A fast whirlwind passes close to them, carrying with it a spiral of dust, leaves and papers. Very far down the street, a fruit vendor pushes his cart. The man leans toward the woman, takes off her glasses and helps her dry her eyes. She permits this, but when he tries to kiss her, she avoids him without ceasing to cry. He caresses her hair. The woman permits it but only for a moment. The man resolves to wait. The papers the whirlwind has flung up are white against the intense blue of the sky. High above and off to one side are two kites, one yellow, the other red. The strings are invisible, but he sees their long tails made with rags. The skeletons of some other kites are tangled in power lines. He takes her gently by the arm, he pushes her gently, obliging her to walk. She lets herself be guided without offering any resistance. Soon they cross a street that intersects the avenue. The woman has stopped crying. She sobs from time to time. Her eyelids are a bit swollen and her eyes are red. He thinks this is a shame. She has begun to speak. She repeats, again and again, in a faltering voice, the many reasons why she will never go back to him. He listens to her, unconvinced. It seems to him that she is exaggerating and that she is coming out with some gratuitous slanders. He prefers not to contradict her. He sees that the woman is trying to convince herself with her reasons. When of her reproaches there remain only her lowered gaze, lost in the pavement, and some uncontrolled sobs, the man doesn’t hesitate to whisper to her: “I won’t let you leave me ever again.” It’s an affectionate phrase meant to invalidate everything she’s said. But it’s true: he won’t let her leave him again. The sun at 1:30 p.m. is like a mad fire. The little whirlwinds, and the gusts that come down from the heights and the snowcapped peaks, can do nothing to cool the baking earth. Now the real heat begins. The two of them are lucky to run across a little restaurant in that part of the city. Red-striped white cloths cover the tables. Behind the counter, the owner—almost round, dark-skinned, her cheekbones enormous—doesn’t stop looking at them, stony, indifferent, immobile like an idol. The man devours his sandwich and calmly sips his beer. She doesn’t want to eat. And her bottle of cola is untouched in front of her. Uncomfortable on the stool with its unequal legs, her jacket folded on her lap, she observes the man out of the corner of her eye. She’s surprised to realize that she has forgiven him. She finds that in the lethargy of the afternoon, she has even begun to reproach herself for her own insecurities, her capricious, spoiled-little-girl character. It’s the furious light and the crackling joy of the dry season that are to blame for this. Now only a bit of dignity and self-respect keep her apparently firm in her original decision never to go back to the man, who, for his part, looks at her from the other side of the table with optimism and tranquility that sink her, disquiet her. Yes, the weather is to blame. Without its splendor, she wouldn’t have remembered the damp cold of her office, or the silence and darkness she had carried within her for three months—the void left by a love, a habit, that had been, and then was no longer. She thinks the man must have felt the same way, and that’s why he’s come looking for her. She reflects that love is like a secret dance requiring distances and pauses: the ritual of two people who search for each other without knowing it, and come together and draw apart and come together again. She thinks fearfully that the reencounter is imminent. She finds it hard to keep herself incredulous and distant. Although in a way, the man helps her to keep resisting, by appearing too confident and optimistic. At that exact moment, the man is remembering a phrase he found in a book and adopted as a personal definition: “I’m an uneasy mix of external timidity and internal arrogance.” That was from Raymond Chandler. But the man believes that if he had not read the phrase, he would have written it himself. Under normal circumstances it applies to his own way of being. Now, however, the equation has been reversed. Now, on the outside he makes a show of his nonchalance, while on the inside, he’s shaken by the fear of losing her, of having lost her already. Curiously, three months earlier, at the time of the breakup, the quotation seemed to help him find the stoicism and resignation he needed at the natural demise of a much-loved phase of his life. The breakup was hard, but he pretended to accept it, like an inconvenient and unforeseen pain that comes from outside. Like an accident in which no one is at fault. He found within himself the arrogance or shamelessness he needed to pretend things were normal: he ignored the void that grew within him: he had short-term sexual encounters, he drank, he started a publishing company, and he made progress in the writing of that short story which, at a certain hour of that very morning, he had abandoned, leaving it trapped in his old Remington typewriter. In writing the story, he had taken certain personality traits of the woman (who from the other side of the café table eyes him mistrustfully, like a prisoner planning her escape), and used them to create the female character, whom he had baptized Veronica, a name that did not evoke anything special to him. Moved by that same absence of inhibition, he had written in a version of himself as the male character, who has to leave Veronica to be faithful to a vision which has captivated him for a long time—the temptation of disgrace. The writing of the story went along smoothly until very near the end. To be precise, until its author became revolted by the conclusion he had foreseen, which was, ironically, the very idea that breathed life into the story and made it possible. In the scene in question, the main character, whose voluntary wanderings through the regions of misfortune have enclosed him in ever-narrowing circles, is sitting in front of a mirror holding a Gillette blade between his finger and thumb. The basic elements of the scene are clearly described: the main character; his reflection in the mirror; the Gillette; the jugular vein under threat from the Gillette: any sudden movement or decision in that last circle will be purely instinctive: life, or death; either the distance will be maintained between the character and his reflection in the mirror, or both of them will fall into the same shadow. Of course, certain external components of the story are not written into it. In the first place, the fact that the scene had taken place in reality, ten years before, and its tragic end shocked and saddened the city (which puts the author in a difficult position: how can we use other people’s tragedies for artistic purposes without profaning or falsifying them?). And in the second place, the fact that when sitting down to finish writing the story, the man had, like a painter posing a model, left a Gillette blade atop his Larousse dictionary. The interruption of the story happened surprisingly, almost fantastically: when the man needed to pick up the razor blade to sharpen the point of the pencil with which he underlined the words he would have to change, a kind of short circuit came over him, a superimposition of imaginary and real, past and present. The fictional character facing the mirror, the author facing the page (another mirror), and the man who committed suicide ten years earlier, all coincided at a single point. For an instant, the imaginary was real, the present was the past, and the future didn’t exist. And at the center of it all, like an axis, the calm, pure, splendid form of the razor blade halfway to its destination. The writer looked death in the eye, pausing on the threshold of absolute zero. And like the character in his story, his only possible response was purely instinctive. So after his initial bewilderment, all he could think of was getting out of there, running away from the freezing shadowland that was trying to draw him in. He made his way back along the path he had taken to get to that point. He threw the Gillette away, stopped trying to write the story, abandoned the dark, nicotine-saturated apartment in which the fogs of the rainy season seemed to linger still, and went to look for her. In the café, the woman is looking at him strangely. The man’s face has darkened. His mind is somewhere else. The woman doesn’t trust that expression. The man recovers from his momentary mental flight. He gets up. He goes to the counter and pays the bill. He returns to her. “Let’s go,” he says quietly. She follows him. They walk toward the avenue. The man has decided not to insist. Nevertheless, he insists. That’s when the miracle happens. He feels her press against him gently, take refuge in him, come to his side as if arriving from very far away. And he receives her and protects her. And the silence breaks like a bottle full of words that no one knew were inside; and he talks, and she talks, and he tells her, and she tells him. And they make promises to each other that they’ll break later. And at that moment, the man senses the energy of the dry season, and the blinding afternoon sun, and he knows that the friendly wind that plays with the two of them is the same as the one that, a little way ahead, lifts up a yellowed scrap of old newspaper, spectacularly useless, which seems a metaphor for what’s happening inside him; meanwhile, the woman—without being able to suppress a few sobs (because she is a woman)—is feeling half-happy, half-guilty, and thinking she’s doing the stupidest thing she’s ever done in her life, and only an idiot could get back together with a man so difficult and so strange, eccentric is the word, who will never resign himself to accepting the simple, straightforward things of the world, because he will always be suspicious of them, analyzing and interpreting them, in search of hidden meanings and motivations, when all he ends up doing is confusing and tangling up everything. This is what the woman is thinking, when with surprise, she finds that these kinds of thoughts aren’t very important to her, and when they reach the avenue and the man hails the taxi that happens to be there and the taxi stops in front of them, she finds that they’re even less important, and even less when he kisses her and loves her, while the taxi flies down streets and avenues toward that working class neighborhood that she hasn’t seen in three months but which she knows like the back of her hand. And while the man, for his part, too, is making discoveries, such as that if literature has been useful to him at all, it is because it shows him the interior of life as if it were an exterior—that is, objectively—, and now it shows him that up until that morning, he had not been able to introduce into his recent adventures the elements of reason, lucidity or judgment; judgment of his own errors and weaknesses, which, in slightly different forms, were also the errors and weaknesses of his character, and among which could be included forgetfulness and carelessness with respect to his obligations toward the surrounding reality—other people’s reality, everyone’s; the reality which he is at this moment watching out the window of the taxi, that whole luminous, contradictory vastness that flows before his eyes in splendor and infamy, and which—because he chose to be a writer of stories—claims him as its spokesman, demanding that he decode it and name it. This he thinks, along with various internal negotiations and amendments concerned with the woman, and he thinks many other things, pulled as always in the sharp zigzag movements that characterize his ideations and don’t let him linger on a memory or a joy as long as he’d like, but drag him from one side to another, keeping him permanently unsettled inside, which is, more or less, his way of life, his style, which in the future he will somehow have to control, so that what he has been able to rebuild on this day might not fall to pieces again. The familiar space of the neighborhood encloses them. The taxi stops. They get out. She looks at the old building, at the windows of the apartment on the second floor. He goes to open the building’s front door, but first, turns his head to look around. By chance, he locates the tenuous metallic reflection a few meters away. Leaving the key in the lock, he picks up the now-inoffensive Gillette. The woman, watching, tells herself it’s crazy to move back in with a man who’s so crazy that he picks up razor blades off the sidewalk and puts them in the breast pocket of his shirt. For his part, he only smiles. Soon enough, he’ll explain it all to her. He doesn’t want to waste time now on confusing explanations. The man has always believed that happiness and sadness, independent of the events that provoke them, are not emotions that can last a long time. Now, as he ascends the steep wooden staircase, he knows that it’s not worth the trouble to jeopardize his current happiness with useless invocations. He should, instead, seek to benefit from his favorable position. As he will doubtless benefit from the dry season itself. All the signs point to it. The intense wind that blows and whistles under the door, seeming to offer him advice. The woman at his side who kisses him and loves him. The sudden illumination that has left in his mind the perfect tone that he needs to finish the story he’s writing. And now that the breakthrough has taken place, love will come, and after that, a friendly evening with yellows and scarlets that will smolder in the sky and paint pink and violet on the snowcapped peaks and blue on the green mountains, and after the evening will come the night, which will be brisk and starry, or perhaps with an enormous moon that will light up even the farthest reaches of the Andes, and he will see it all with new eyes, or with the eyes of one who, by a lucky chance, has saved his own life....
A short psychological novel set in the illusory splendor of Latin America in the 1970s, "City in Winter" details the existential crisis of a protagonist who risks his personal security when he gives shelter to an executive who is on the run from the law. City of Winter by Abdón Ubidia Translated by Nathan Horowitz What people call bad luck is actually something that we keep inside ourselves at all times. It’s like a sum of money that’s not written down on the balance sheet of a company. Sometimes when we’re distracted or bored, we take a single coin out of that secret fund and use it to make a small wager with death. It’s a harmless game, of course. The risk is so small that we have every chance of winning. I step on the gas when the light turns red because I know I’m in a part of town where there’s not much traffic. I point a gun at my head and pull the trigger because I remember clearly that it’s not loaded. The “risk” is little more than an illusion. I haven’t won anything, but I’ve won the illusion that I’ve won. It’s like playing Russian roulette with a revolver that has a million empty chambers. Maybe this begins to explain why I brought Santiago into my home. We were seated at one of the outdoor tables at the café we always went to. Looking, talking, listening, between sips of beer or of cappuccino that had already grown cold, its foam hardened around the edge of a crystal cup. Young people and not-so-young people, passing by along the happy avenue, graceful, modern, carefree, looking for a place to sit in that café or in the restaurant next door. The style of the moment dressed them in clothing that was deliberately poor-looking, and light. One could see this especially on the girls: blue jeans, sandals, sometimes a light blouse wrapped around a body that was almost always attractive and flexible. I’m speaking, of course, of what we preferred to see. And there were tourists, hippies, wanderers of all kinds. It was a nice place. The tables had colorful parasols, and amid them grew two trees that had their trunks whitewashed with chalk. On the other side of the dense lines of cars was the supermarket, and above that rose the gothic towers of the nearby church. In the sunset it was lovely to see them bristling up against the blushing sky. One day I thought that I would have time to speak of the fantastic sunsets of my city. I even created a phrase to use on some special occasion, because in those days I didn’t fear the affectation that I considered an occupational hazard for any conversationalist. The phrase went, “There will always be a blushing sunset to save us from death.” I never had the opportunity to say it. It’s that there were so many things to talk about. Starting with the city, suddenly modernized, in which it was no longer possible to recognize the traces of the town it had been not so long before. No nuns, no narrow alleyways, no tiny plazas paved with cobblestones. These were the days of concrete overpasses, avenues and glass highrises. The old town stayed behind, in the South, while the city reared up among the mountains to the North, as if fleeing from itself, from its past. In the South, everything was grimy, old and poor, it was everything we wanted to forget. In the North was all that exciting modernity whose strange ecstasy could be perceived in the shop display cases adorned with posters in psychedelic colors, and in the new discotheques where those same colors flashed like lightning to the sound of the driving rhythms of drum sets and electric guitars. You could see the modernity in the long tresses and the afros of the kids who greeted each other from windows of their cars with their thumbs raised, pointing to the sky, as if to say, “Everything’s on its way up,” because, in fact, everything was on its way up, and not only the buildings and the business deals, but also what Santiago called people’s “vital experiences.” “It’s the oil,” Andrés would pronounce, slowly releasing his words, wrapping them in the great spirals of smoke from his black cigarettes. It’s not that we thought he was mistaken, but Andrés was one of those solemn and transcendental men who descend into the depths of their souls just to tell you good morning. And that invited us to rebut him without paying much attention to the validity of his opinions. In the end, we were just having a conversation. So one of us would shoot back, “It’s not that, bro, it’s the whole new era!” At which point the others would add new arguments that allowed us to enjoy, to savor, to fall in love with that phrase that seemed to be made of echoes—the new era!—, and which was able to sum up, in itself, a whole diverse group of phenomena, and present them in definitive form as an unmistakable lifestyle, a way of laughing and suffering, living and dying, unmistakable. Once we had talked about it that way, there was no need to evoke the habitual and borrowed example of the fin de siècle or the Roaring Twenties; there was no need, but in the evening, watching the sun set could get boring sometimes, and we had to avoid those regions of conversation within which too long a silence could fall, so we spoke of the can-can and the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or Chicago and the gangsters, or the infinite tenderness of Charlie Chaplin. All this helped us reach the conclusion that in that city, it was our turn to experience, in our own way, a special age with its own system of signs and meanings, a belle époque of our own. It had changed the city, it had broken into our lives, turning everything around, inflicting upon us a fabulous confusion, as a result of which nothing would ever be the same again. And the only thing that we managed to understand, surrounded by all that chaos, was that we moved as if lost in a vertiginous, draining, almost anguished search for happiness. That was what dragged us to the parties and the drinking binges, the movie theaters and the restaurants, the marijuana sometimes and the alcohol almost always. Meanwhile the city was overflowing its edges, the dirty and clean investments were shaking the cash registers of the rich, the roulette wheels in the casinos spun tirelessly, and our lives and the lives of the people we knew acquired unimagined forms. There was one who blew his mind on drugs. Another didn’t stop until he was a millionaire. Many more were on their way to becoming millionaires. Still another one after becoming a millionaire suddenly lost all his money. Of course, some suicide attempts took place, but the most frequent result was what we used to call a “couple crisis,” a blanket term that included divorces, separations, reunions, adulteries and other conjugal catastrophes. Couple crises propagated themselves across the city like a virus. So much exterior change seemed to demand alterations and readjustments even in people’s intimate lives. Within this framework it was comprehensible that someone, deliberately or not, would in some way embody all the transformations of the new era. That was Santiago. Now, leaning toward the center of the table, among whispers, hints, key words and worried faces, we spoke about his strange fate, or, better, about his strange behavior. Today I would define Santiago as a cynic, an egotist, and a megalomaniac. In those days, I rejected such epithets. I considered them inevitably charged with an empty moralism that defines nothing apart from the ill will of those who employ them. Today, on the other hand, I prefer to use them without thinking about them. And I add that he never knew either loyalty or shame. Three marriages, three divorces, and an involvement in some shady business deals did not prevent him from building a solid career as an executive with entrepreneurial aspirations. Sometimes he dropped by the cafe, good humored, carefree, but with an edge to him. He would tell a couple of jokes, describe his new projects, and then depart with a witticism that was almost always ironic. We would watch him thread his way between the tables, get in his new car, and speed off in a squeal of tires. “He’s a social climber,” we would say, or think, as if the phrase meant anything other than that we envied him; our envy, in turn, was a mix of a little nostalgia and a little bitterness. Suddenly, the news came: Santiago a fugitive: he had written checks with no funds on various accounts and for large sums, and had signed promissory notes with what we supposed were huge interest rates. All that to cover other accounts and other IOUs which, according to the rumors, all came due at the same time. The illegal business in which he had been involved was denounced to the police by an ex-partner, and when everything started coming down on his head, he had no choice but to sign other promissory notes and flee. I should mention that we were not scandalized by the deed itself—the fact that he had swindled people, or committed fraud, if you will. In the new city it seemed that everyone was swindling someone, according to their individual initiative. Some more, some less, it’s only natural. Some people didn’t play that game, of course. I’m probably exaggerating, but that’s the impression I had. There was no other way to explain so much waste, so much impetuous, accelerated splendor. The Argentines who used to sit at a nearby table would drawl, “Look, man, look, this is the city with the most Mercedes Benzes per person that I’ve ever seen, man,” and at that moment a magnificent Mercedes would glide down the avenue with someone smiling inside. Furthermore, there were many, many tales told of dirty dealings in the city. So one more swindle didn’t scandalize us. Even the fact that Santiago had committed it seemed logical to me. The strange thing was how he had done it. In that crude, clumsy, makeshift way. Without any kind of precautions, without thinking of an escape route, an emergency door that could save him if the business turned out badly. The strange thing was the audacious and irresponsible way he had carried it out, like a gambler who throws the dice knowing that disgrace or fortune depend on the instant in which the little cubes stop moving and remain motionless with the conclusive, definitive faces on top. No. Santiago had not planned any escape routes. Now we didn’t know what to do with him. Andrés couldn’t keep him more than a couple of days. People were always going to his house. With the police and the creditors on his trail, it wasn’t safe. There were two or three of us possible hosts for him. At least until Andrés could find a way to get him out of the country. We couldn’t count on Manuel, who was not present. That left Fausto, Rodrigo and me. It would have been easy to say anything, to give any pretext, to elude the responsibility of giving him refuge with an obvious and at the same time unappealable lie. To say that there wasn’t enough space, that an aunt was coming to stay, even that we were moving house, et cetera. After all, there wasn’t much that tied us to Santiago: just some evenings at the café; a pair of disdainful opinions that we coldly shared about the modern age, to which we gave little credibility; and, of course, the factor that matters least in such cases, the memory of a now-distant past that we had shared. But instead of answering Andrés, we preferred to remain indecisive, keep watching the street, and make quiet, inarticulate comments about the whole Santiago situation, basically avoiding specifying anything. Would it be appropriate to call it fear, the thing that kept Rodrigo, Fausto and me from making up our minds? Fear of having problems with the police, of being charged with obstructing justice, of finding ourselves mixed up in a terrible situation? Fear of finding that we were afraid? Maybe not. Maybe it didn’t go that far, maybe it was only detachment, disinterest, negligence. But that indefinability weighed on us. A good observer would have seen it. We all had the same lethargy, the same torpid way of smoking and sipping, the same exaggerated sorrow on our faces as we avoided each other’s eyes. “It’s OK, he can come to my place,” I said, almost without thinking. Of course, I must have thought about it. Looking at the circumstances abstractly, Santiago had shown himself capable of betting everything on a good or bad throw of the dice. And he had lost. It was the right thing to lend him a hand. In the face of his boldness, to spend some time looking after him, to wager a single coin from the personal fund that I mentioned earlier, and bring him home, really wasn’t a whole lot. Apart from that, one can never avoid having twisted thoughts. Let me explain. When a beloved grandfather is dying, it’s impossible not to think of the good that will come of it: an inheritance. I believe that example is not new, but it serves to illustrate perfectly the nature of twisted thinking. Our so-called higher principles aid us in controlling our twisted thinking; but there it is, with its claws buried deep in our brains, and the fact that we try to drive it away doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. So at the same time as I let myself be carried away by the desire to help Santiago, I must also have seen clearly the events that rendered that assistance necessary: his sudden financial and legal collapse, that whole sick joke that had dropped him on his face—everything that at that moment had made Santiago into little more than his own corpse; in short, the spectacle of Santiago without those relationships he had cultivated, without his dizzying lifestyle, without his business trips, without his projects. Susana accepted reluctantly. “It’s fine,” she said, but I could tell that she was debating between contradictory sentiments. On the one hand, there was Santiago, an old friend from when we were teenagers (though she hadn’t seen him for years), the ex-husband of Paulina, her best friend (also lost from sight at that point), a witness of the first times we had gone out together; and, on the other hand, there were the natural concerns of a housewife: the uncertainty, the fear of confronting an unforeseen situation. Yes, it was evident that she had her own twisted thoughts, though they were different from mine. The next night Santiago came to our house. Andrés brought him, perhaps with excessive precautions. At around midnight we heard the iron gate open and footsteps crossing the patio. The taps on the kitchen window sounded just afterwards. Susana and I had been waiting up for a long time, yawning, sometimes making suspicious comments about Santiago, sometimes trying to link those comments to some remote memory of the old days, but failing to gain an understanding of this new figure of a Santiago who was capable of quick takeoffs and crash landings, of splendor and collapse, of the pinnacle and the abyss. When he entered he seemed jovial, almost happy. He was followed by Andrés, who bore an unopened bottle of cognac. Wrapped in a very fine, expensive, black overcoat, in what must have been the latest fashion, Santiago made himself comfortable in a corner of the kitchen and as if he were unaware of the situation—that is, his situation—he initiated a discussion that was sometimes sparkling, sometimes trivial, full of questions and surprised gestures, an amiable chat of old friends who run into each other again after many years and who don’t manage to find the common ground they had once shared. He asked about our lives, about the children, about our plans and projects for the future, things it had never occurred to him to ask me about on other occasions. He looked at everything. He seemed to be making an inventory of what was around him. It’s not that the house was badly furnished. The middle class tends to standardize its tastes and at the same time to dissimulate that uniformity. And that was our house. Modern furniture, carpets, lamps and a bar, pictures on the walls (among which was a kind of still life, sketched in the advertising agency where I worked, which I kept with me partly because I liked it and partly to displace the inevitable Last Supper embossed in silvered metal, a gift of Susana’s mother). And amid all that, unique details: a few antique porcelain figurines, a floor lamp entirely of crystal, and a very old piece of furniture expressly placed in the corner to insinuate a remote connection to the old days, a connection that of course might not really have existed at all. I wouldn’t say that in those days our house was a very poor one. But in the avid gaze of Santiago I read what he, perhaps unconsciously, wished me to read: his pretended surprise, his feigned incomprehension. He seemed to be saying: “But how is it possible to be so conservative? Nothing has changed in your lives.” Later, at around four in the morning, when there wasn’t much left in the bottle of cognac, I was able to verify my perception. Andrés had departed, as grave and profound as ever—although his tiredness and successive yawns had somewhat damaged his composure—with the promise to take him out of the country in two weeks. When I closed the door to the street, Santiago wasted no time before coming out with a sarcastic comment: “There goes the soul of safety, the sultan of security!” Apparently, to Santiago, Andrés’s arguments for not continuing to keep him in his house carried no weight. He never believed that the number of people who came and went all the time over there would be a real obstacle to his remaining. He looked down on Andrés, and in his scorn, he saw him in the midst of a colorless world of simple accomplishments, defending, at all costs, what Santiago called his “security,” a word in which Santiago packed everything that implied a lack of risk, everything that was measured and programmed within men; that is to say, within the context of the strange moral scale that at that point I distinguished in him, “security” implied all that was cowardly and pathetic. He added something else. I don’t recall it clearly now. In any case, I think he used the word “predictable.” I think he spoke of a predictable family, a predictable future, a predictable house—everything that was done intentionally, deliberately. He said that, but there was no bitterness in his voice. On the contrary, his scorn for Andrés seemed accompanied by a little bit of sorrow. And he spoke very well, as if trying to find definitions, to make concepts precise. Back in his armchair, despite the advanced hour, with his hands closed about the cup of cognac, his voice soft, his conversation flowing, almost friendly, he looked at Susana and me as one looks at a pair of secure confidantes with whom one needs to hold nothing back. But I saw that behind his gaze, in his heart of hearts, as he was defining Andrés, he was also defining us. And I rediscovered, with each of his words, that first tiny recognition that he had when he entered our house. It was also a predictable house. And Susana was a predictable wife. Or so it seemed to him. In those moments I saw Santiago playing the role of an odd kind of judge. We were the ones being judged, there was no doubt about that. Recovered now from the first impact of not having found in him anything resembling the fallen angel that I imagined when I decided to put him up, I had time to observe him better. Completely disconnected from reality, or from that which others understood to be his reality, the man was dedicated to living out his own personal legend. He had made of his life a kind of epic journey in which his present ruination was nothing but another bump in the road. Santiago was his own hero. He walked his walk, he liked it, he justified it and he glorified it with concepts like “vital experiences,” “life,” “the authentic,” “bravery and audacity.” Seeing him like that, hearing him like that, enormous in the middle of that conceited, ostentatious personal space, in the middle of that mythology that he created around him, what an urge I had to tell him to shut up, stop all this gesturing, come back to reality, start thinking clearly, evaluate things correctly. In any case I remained silent. It wasn’t the most appropriate moment to say anything to him. Apart from the fact that words like clarity and reason were simply not in his vocabulary. I had figured that out. It was useless to debate with him. The deliberately charming tone of his voice itself prevented me....
The Intelligence of the Species by Abdón Ubidia Translated by Nathan Horowitz Nearly year I visited that place, a typical tropical Third World city. Flat and broad, disproportionate, with a small wealthy zone surrounded by precariously- inhabited swamps. The perfect squareness of its central streets laid down like a weaving atop the humid plain. A broad river of turgid water. Ferryboats. Barges. Lubricated air caressing sweaty bodies. There was a waterfront with tall buildings. Then the commercial district. The financial district. The hotel district. Low, barren mountains seemed to reverberate on the horizon. This time, I was staying in a hotel next to a public park. In the park was a gigantic tree with a colony of iguanas that seemed to move only rarely, as if to the rhythm of the slow palpitations of the foliage caused by the breezes of warm, stinking air that blew in from the port. Perhaps wishing to make me feel guilty when he heard what company I represented, a man told me that the enormous ficus tree was one of the last of its species that remained after the coastal forests had been cut down. And that the colony of iguanas was perhaps the last remaining population of that species along the whole length of the coast. That impressed me quite a bit. When I learned that I was going to have to wait in the city an extra week for a seat on the plane to return to my country, I asked them to change my room. From the hotel's restaurant Fd seen that the end of one of the tree's branches nearly touched the window of one of the rooms on the seventh floor. There was an iguana on the branch that had barely moved in days, its stillness contrasting with the rapidity of its fellows. It must have been ill. With an ambiguous smile, the receptionist told me I was in luck, the room was unoccupied. I couldn't sleep the whole night. The window's curtains were closed. But I knew that on the other side, very close to the glass as if emerging from the night itself, and watching the yellow light that shone through the curtains with its ancient reptile eyes, was the iguana. I got up several times. I tried to read but I couldn't concentrate on the adventures of the secret agent in the bestselling spy novel I'd bought at the airport. I put the book down and turned on the TV There were no local channels. The stations stopped broadcasting at midnight. Typical of tropical countries in those years. I left the TV on with the sound off and the screen filled with static. I went near the curtain. But I didn't touch it. I went back to the novel. Then the newspaper. Then the cigarettes. Eventually morning came. I took a shower and went to the restaurant. From there I could see that the iguana was still clinging to the branch. I went out on the street. Walked around the city. Doorways with peeling paint. Vendors of various things walking around. Glass display cases with all kinds of merchandise. The people, sallow and small, buying, selling, walking around. Someone shoved me and ran away. Maybe he had been trying to steal my wallet. Or my watch. I felt more out of place than ever The city had always been hostile toward me. I had been ripped off there several times. Maybe even now, someone was following me to attack me. I felt slightly dizzy and the palms of my hands moistened. I thought about visiting the headquarters of the company I did business with. Invite some executive to lunch. Or one of the secretaries. As I had on other occasions. I didn't do it. I didn't feel like pretending to be sociable. Or catching some tropical disease. I went into a bar I walked out. I walked down the avenues. As always, I got lost. After midday, I hailed a taxi and returned to the hotel. I went directly to my room. The smell of cleanliness greeted me. The room had been made up, and the curtains were open. I went to the window. I slid it open, to the left. The tree was right in front of me. And in the tree, very close, within arm's reach, the iguana. I pretended not to see it. I tried to look off to the left. To examine the half-gothic, half-modern architecture of the pale yellow church that rose from one side of the park. I couldn't do it. Against my will, my eyes sought out the iguana's eyes. They weren't red, as I had imagined them. They were pale green. The pupil was not round, either, but vertically elongated. I examined the scaly, oblong body with its central crest of spines. It was somewhat less than a meter long. The tail, adorned with black rings. The arms, almost human. The iguana's skin seemed not to be an intrinsic element: it seemed to have been put on afterwards, like a wetsuit. It was marked with a broad combination of blues, grays, oranges and yellows. I leaned halfway out the window. Seven stories down, people were walking hurriedly. I didn't dare touch the triangular head that topped off the lethargic body. I slowly passed my hand just a few centimeters in front of the half- open mouth, which looked like a fish's. The iguana barely moved. And its prehistoric eyes barely blinked. It really must have been sick. And confused after taking a wrong turn down this branch. Maybe it sensed its death approaching, and didn't care anymore. I raised my eyes and spotted two other iguanas on distant branches. For a moment, in the depth of the foliage I made out a fragment of another body darting toward the center of the ficus. I thought how strange it was to have in front of me all that remained of a nearly-extinct species. How many individuals lived in the tree? Twenty? Fifty? Not many more. I revisited an old idea of mine: "We individuals are not really individuals. We are expendable parts of our species. The species is the real individual." I closed the window and left the room. The elevator brought me to the ground floor. I didn't drop the key off at the desk. A prostitute smiled and winked at me. I ignored her. The doorman didn't get to the door fast enough to open it for me. I crossed the street. An old wrought-iron fence enclosed the park. I walked around to one of its gates. This was the oldest park in the city. It had a stone fountain and a gazebo with columns of wrought iron painted green. Then there was the ficus. The trunk was enormous, and the thick roots spread out across the ground. Up above, in the dense foliage, many oval pupils must have registered my presence. A robin flew out of the ficus and headed for a palm tree. I looked for a long time and only lowered my head when dizziness came over me. My neck hurt. At my side, four or five children — shoeshine boys and candy vendors — asked me for money. I sent them away with a few harsh words. Then I examined the ficus's old trunk. One chainsaw would be enough to finish it off. I shivered. I was out of sorts. But that might have occurred to anyone. I resolved to calm down. I walked the few blocks that separated the park from the waterfront. I wandered out on the wooden pier. There, I got on one of the ferryboats that crossed the river. Night had fallen when I went back to the hotel. The window of my room was still open. The light from the street vaguely illuminated the outlines of the ficus tree. I didn't turn on the lights in the room. I must have slept for several hours. And when I awoke, I lay still without wanting to move. I only got out of bed at dawn. Then, of course, I went to the window. The reptile had not changed its position. It made me think of an exhausted policeman. Or a fugitive applying for an impossible asylum. I turned around and went into the bathroom. I unscrewed the nickel-plated tube of one of the towel racks. I returned armed with it. First came the menacing movements. Then the hard jabs. Then the desperate necessity of wounding the scaly skin. But the dying iguana wouldn't budge. It remained stuck to the branch by its sharp claws. Finally I swung the tube with all my strength at the triangular head. I thought I heard something like the chirp of a bird come from the silent mouth. Perhaps it was just my imagination. In any case, the body loosened its grip and fell to the street — which at that hour of the morning was still deserted — with a sound like that of a soft fruit hitting the ground. There was a silence. Then I perceived an agitation racing around the whole tree. Tremblings of leaves. Palpitations. Shakings of leaves. I even saw a pair of iguanas running in opposite directions. I wiped my hand across my sweaty face. And kept staring out the window without any urge to look down at what had fallen to the street. I went back into the bathroom. I wasn't able to put the tube back in. I took a long shower. Then I left the hotel. I went to the waterfront. I ducked into a floating restaurant. I ordered something. I didn't touch it. At any other time I would have felt like doing some tourism in the surrounding villages. But not now. Sitting in that little restaurant watching some aquatic plants — lechuguinos, the locals called them — floating adrift on the roiling waters of the river, was almost the same as sitting in my room at the hotel. In any event, I still had five hot, humid, endless days until I could take my return flight. But what would it mean to return? I felt the presence of the void. It was the same void I had felt just before I killed the iguana, when I drew near the window and had a strong desire to jump out of it. I returned to my interior nonsense: 'And what if we individuals are nothing but expendable cells of the body of our species?" In the final analysis, I might consider myself an individual who could be sacrificed for the greater good of something I would never be entirely able to understand. Despite my sorrow and revulsion at the turn of events, my life had become entirely devoted to being a salesman in remote backwaters. Wasn't I, then, a living example of such a sacrifice? "My God, what a horrible age I'm at," I said to myself, thinking that I had reached a point in my existence where lies were impossible and truths were stranger than they had ever been. "Abandoned by my species. I'm the loneliest man in the world," I went on, feeling I had been completely used up and squeezed out. "I worked and I reproduced, and now I can't make sense out of any of that," I added. Then a shaft of light fell onto my heart. "And what if I try to escape?" I said to myself "To whatever extent I can," I added. Observing the community of iguanas had helped me understand it all at once. The iguana I killed no longer belonged to its species. It had outlived its usefulness. Condemned to die of old age or sickness, its fate was unalterable. Somehow it knew that. But beyond it and the other iguanas — among them — above them — there was another entity. Let me see if I can explain it all at once. I'm referring again to the species. Cornered by man, up in that tree. I had had the opportunity to see it in the totality of its physical manifestation. It was like a god. It had the lives of the individuals at its disposal. It materialized in them, but it was not them. It knew more than they did. It impelled them to live, to eat what they could, to reproduce, to build nests for their young. It had figured out a way to survive the invasion of humans, if only barely. And perhaps there were now mutant iguanas that could live in the sewers, or in the polluted waters of the port. Amidst all that, there was the fragility of the particular lives of the individuals. The world's mind was not in them. It was in the species. The species was the bearer of true intelligence and knowledge. That iguana, exposed to death, lost at the end of a branch, separated from and forgotten by its kin, with no will to fight for its life, had taught me well. Its species had repudiated it. Its individual life and death had become unimportant. Who knows what message it had received, expelling it. I had received mine. It was a profound, silent message, a command I didn't want to hear; if it had had a voice, it would have said this: "Your existence doesn't matter anymore. It now has no meaning. Therefore, you should not defend it. You are now allowed to die, if you wish." Did I mention that I had followed all the rules for humans? That I had gotten married, had children in whom I barely recognized myself, owned a house, worked at a demanding job? Did I mention that one day I had the sensation that I had diligently complied with everything that had been required of me? Did I mention that one day I felt exhausted, empty, and ripped off? I don't know how the spirit of my species was able to communicate with me. But I do think that on that day, I received the expulsion message. If I died, my species — which as everyone knows is the most intelligent of all — would go on populating the planet, expanding its frontiers, eliminating other species, throwing itself into the sky, reaching the stars. My death wouldn't change any of that. Seated at one of the little tables of that floating restaurant, in front of a plate of food that had gotten cold, watching the lechuguinos floating in the turbid water of the river, I realized that I could escape and save myself. One thing was certain: to return to the hotel, wait for the plane, fly back to my country, go home, and go back to work, would be to accept the death that had been arranged for me. So I made a decision. I called the waiter over and paid. I walked to the pier I waited. I wasn't in a hurry At last, balancing on the small waves, the ferryboat drew alongside. Across the river were the miserable little villages. And beyond them the mountains. And then what remained of the tropical rainforest. I would not lack for horizons. In some town I would find a woman, and a job perhaps as odious as all jobs are. It wouldn't matter I'd get together with the woman, I'd love her and have children with her, I'd build a house and I'd work. And when that damned message — the void — returned to me, I'd leave again in search of other women, other houses, other children, other jobs. Perhaps that way, with so many different lives, I would postpone the end that had been decreed for me, and stay within the good graces of my species as long as possible. From a railing of a wooden ferryboat packed with poor people, I watched the lechuguinos floating in the turbid waters of the river....
Telepathy and Other Imitations By Abdon Ubidia, Translated by Nathan Horowitz I had a girlfriend when I was a kid. Her name was Susi. She was skinny and had freckles. I won her over with the only skill I had: imitating animals. It was during summer vacation, in a dry little town. Calling Susi my girlfriend is just a manner of speaking. Neither of us knew anything. She and I were just always together. Sometimes we were by ourselves. Sometimes we joined the gangs of kids that roamed the white sand paths, the streams with their banks of red clay, and the eucalyptus woods, or got together in the morning to go down to the swimming pool, or in the night to sing around a bonfire, catch fireflies and gaze at the starry sky. There was a boy who played the accordion. Another recited poetry. Another was famous for his traps to catch three different species of doves. Another boy could swim like a fish. I couldn't do any of these things. When I jumped off the board, they had to pull me from the water half-dead. My animal impressions impressed almost no one. My mother and father got really mad at me one day. My aunt was asking me questions and I answered her with whinnies. "What grade are you in?" I whinnied. "When did you learn to whinny?" I whinnied. "You really like horses, huh?" I whinnied. "That's enough, boy! Don't be an idiot," my parents said at once. But, though I nearly burst into tears, I didn't stop whinnying. Other times I would bark or meow. I felt, though, that my masterwork was to baa. I could even confuse the sheep themselves. Did I say that my poor little talent attracted Susi? She was also different from the rest. Instead of playing marbles or hopscotch, she preferred to climb trees with me. Hidden in the bushes on the other side of the chain link fence, I would call to her with three quacks. "Go on, Susi, the duck is looking for you," said her mother one day. I was mortified at being discovered. In the luminous afternoons of that dusty summer, I would meet Susi at the gate of her family's little summer house and we would go walking into town. Tiny, identical homes. Streets of parched earth. Steely blue-green agaves, some thrusting up a single shoot laden with capers. Jagged-leafed higuerillas. Ovens for calcining limestone. Ovens for baking bread. The dry park. The church with its miraculous Christ. The villagers, a barefoot child, a bundle of firewood, a cow, a donkey laden with sacks of quicklime. I think that was happiness: the blue sky, the wind that shook the trees, and Susi walking beside me. She would tell me about her parents, her friends, her life in the country's interior in a city that I would only come to know much later. Always seated on a porch was the Professor, as everyone called him. Paraplegic, old, wrinkled like parchment and dry as the land itself. Forever repeating his eternal discourse to anyone who came near: the climate here, excellent for rheumatism; the "healthful waters," rich in iron and other minerals; the limestone quarries; the likely deposits of coal, et cetera. Such an expenditure of hot air seemed an attempt by the old man to convince himself that he had not spent his life in vain here at the edge of the world. The pool lay underneath a tremendous pipe, next to the river. In the fantastic cliffs and outcroppings above, you could see all the ages of the earth. Layers of limestone, sandstone, sandy clay, blue clay, and red dirt. High above, at the top of the mountain's wall, appeared thin, solitary algarrobo trees stretched by the wind. Along the river, green proliferated. And, in the middle of the river, among the round stones, barely covered by the yellow waters, there were, every so often, enormous black chunks of lignite, corroded by time. According to the Professor, these were irrefutable proof that there were coal deposits in the area, which would, in the "promissory future," transform the destiny of the nation. "Healthful" and "promissory" were his key words—among others even stranger. One day, Susi told him of my skills as an imitator. "Let's see, boy. Begin your act," he said without smiling (he never smiled). I strove to excel at my imitations. Susi approved each grunt, whistle, or meow with a nervous laugh, while the Professor, grave and attentive, listened in silence. When I concluded my repertoire, he commented: "I congratulate you, boy. You have a brilliant future as an animal imitator." He fell silent, pursing his lips. He focused his eyes on an imaginary point and meditated. "But there is one bird whose song you won't be able to imitate." "He can imitate anything that was on Noah's ark," Susi protested. The Professor spoke a name I've since forgotten. "It's a bird that lives in caves and only goes out at night," he added. "Its song isn't like other birds'. It has no voice. It sings with its mind. Its song is telepathic. A Frenchman who came here thirty years ago told me about it. He took a few pairs back to his country to study. He told me he would write and tell me what he found out, but he never did." The Professor's voice sounded tired and hesitant, as if he were trying to remember something in the distant past. "The people of this village," he murmured, "say that only people who are in love can hear that song. If that's true, I think I've heard it only once. But that was centuries ago. Never again. Never again." He made a gesture that could have served to brush away a fly or a bad memory. Then he resumed his explanation. "I think it's left over from before the great flood. This is a land where dinosaurs used to roam. Some time ago the intact skeleton of a mammoth was found nearby. Anyone can see that the universe must have begun here. The volcanoes, the mineral waters, the iron, the coal, the limestone, the whole landscape proves it. Even the starry nights, so pure you can see the whole sky gathered together here. That's why I say it's from before the flood. Because some of those animals had no voices. They had a gland in their brains for calling to each other telepathically. We have it too, but it's atrophied and we can use it only very rarely. The scientists should figure out how to reactivate it, instead of making atom bombs." When we left the Professor, Susi and I went to the pool and told the other kids about the strange bird. The next morning, the expedition to the caves was ready. Somebody carried a Petromax lamp, somebody else had a flashlight, another an air rifle, another a butterfly net. It was a fiasco. The caves we entered either weren't very deep, or they narrowed quickly. We found nothing but some bats and a few ferns. Two boys caught a bat and carried it back to the changing rooms at the pool. They crucified it on a wooden door and stuck a lit cigarette in its mouth. The other kids laughed and joked, and, in passing, made fun of Susi and me. And a chubby little girl, her eyes brimming with tears, said to us, "There's your telepathic bird, you bastards." The episode brought us even closer. At twilight, Susi and I went back to the caves. That's when we saw, flying out of a cave, a flock of strange, silent birds, large, fast and black against the orange sky. "The Professor never lies," said Susi. "But we can't tell anyone about this." That's how the secrets began. Another secret involved us climbing to the tops of a pair of trees that had grown up together in isolation in the middle of a dry plain. They were very tall and they rocked back and forth slowly. Their crowns moved apart and came together with the sudden changes of wind. We pretended we were riding on the backs of those giant reptiles from the Professor's discourses. We would take eucalyptus and capuli nuts up there with us, and pebbles from the river, and let them fall, to watch them shrink and disappear out of sight. We would converse in those heights, with fragments of phrases half-lost amid the noise of the wind in the leaves, while the crowns of our trees moved together and apart. Up there, I told her that I had come to that town completely by chance. First because the climate had been recommended to my grandmother for her rheumatism, and then because my mother was in hospital in our city, very sick, and my father couldn't leave her alone. Otherwise we would have gone to the beach like always. And up there, Susi asked me, one day: "Do you know the big secret?" "What one?" "The secret of life." "I never heard there was one." "This afternoon I'll show you," she said. We met after lunch and went to the river. We walked along the bank, gathering ferns and little white flowers. Sometimes I would pick up a pebble to give her, and she would tuck it in the pink purse she always carried. At one point, we came to a shallow area where the river curved. There was a lot of oily oxidation on the rocks. Susi said it was good for mosquito bites, and added that we were almost there. The path was getting narrower. There wasn't much space between the river and the moist cliff wall covered with ferns. We had to take our shoes off and wade. I rolled up my pant legs as much as I could and she gathered up her skirt in back and tied it up in front like a washerwoman. Her calves were much more tanned than her feet and thighs. I told her so. She laughed and said it had happened to both of us because we didn't go to the pool more often. The water was up to our knees and sometimes deeper. I felt the sand and the pebbles move under my feet among the whirling currents. Then the river turned abruptly. A little beach appeared, surrounded by bushes and grasses. At the other end was a small waterfall. "This is the place," said Susi. "Now we have to hide and wait." He was perhaps a bit younger than she. After kissing, they took their clothes off and bathed in the waterfall. Then they went on the grass and started to do something I had never seen or had any idea that people did. "OK, let's go," said Susi. I told her that I, personally, had no wish to move from my hiding place. Then Susi couldn't keep from laughing. The couple scrambled away in one direction and we in another. Back in town, seated on a stone bench in the park, Susi explained to me what her older sister had explained to her. "But don't say a word about what we saw to anyone. It's a big secret," she warned. I listened to her, half-intrigued, half-annoyed. She was ten years old, like me, and going into fifth grade. But she knew a lot more things, and in light of them, my imitations seemed useless and stupid. "I'm never going to imitate animals again," I told her. "Why not?" she asked, and I thought I saw a flicker of complaint cross her freckled face. I didn't know what to respond, and she dropped the subject. "Tomorrow let's go on bikes to the Inca ruins," she said. "And the day after tomorrow, we'll ride horses to the volcano crater." But there were no Inca ruins or volcano craters. That night, my father came in from the city. My mother had gotten worse and they were going to operate. She had asked him to take me to her. We would leave at dawn. I had never seen a face as sad as my father's was, that night. It was the face of desolation itself. My grandmother tried to console him, speaking of God and Christ and the miracles and the saints in heaven. But she looked as sad as he did. It was very late at night, but we weren't sleepy. My father suggested we take a walk around town. At that hour, everyone was asleep. The only light came from the stars, a silvery splendor that barely sketched the outlines of paths and houses. As we walked, my father talked to me about the stars and the constellations. Their infinite number and infinite distances. Light years, and our insignificance. He pointed out Orion and Ursa Major, Venus and Mercury. "Among these millions and millions of stars, there must be a planet like ours. But its inhabitants are probably more advanced—they've probably discovered immortality." He fell silent with a sigh. And we walked quietly for a long time, listening to the wind whispering in the trees and, from time to time, the hoot of an owl. "Mars," he said suddenly, "is identified by its red color. And Venus by its brightness." But I couldn't see either of them. Nor the Milky Way, nor the other, more distant galaxies, nor the deep, black, infinite sky constellated with ancient stars that perhaps didn't exist any more except as waves of light. My eyes were full of tears and I could barely see the path. I wasn't crying for my mother. I was sure the operation would do its job, as turned out to be the case, because it wasn't right that anything bad should happen to her. I was crying for Susi. I was never going to see her again. I was sure about that, too. And I had no way to tell her so, or even say goodbye. I don't know how I calmed down and got my father to follow me along the path I always took. I had an idea. We approached Susi's house. And I began to call her with my mind, trying to imitate the echo I thought I'd made out when the strange birds were flying out of their cave that evening by the river. When we passed in front of her house, I found that Susi had heard the sound of my thought. I could see her at her window, barely illuminated by starlight and waving goodbye with that gesture I'll never forget. I never went back to imitating animals out loud. And despite the years that passed, and the wanderings of my capricious heart, I was only able to imitate that telepathic song a couple of times more, just twice more, in all my life. ...
Like a Ball of Yarn in the Snow by Luis Aguilar Monsalve This morning my grandmother took me shopping in Manhattan. When she asked me to go with her, I had no qualms about pleasing her, because I was in an angelic mood. Besides, I knew she would buy me a chocolate sundae in Rockefeller Center, if I didn't get on her nerves and said yes to everything what she wanted to hear. I am not going to bore you by telling you how my grandmother looked and looked at sweaters, silk scarves, Italian shoes, linens from Belgium, fur coats and more tatters at Macy's. Bored, I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out the story of Roald Dahl, “The Umbrella Man” that she gave me; then I started to imagine and play with it to hide my annoyance. It is winter and it has snowed today like never before. My sundae was great as usual. The shops' windows were dressed in Christmas decorations and seasonal music is playing everywhere. I could not resist its charm and I have been humming White Christmas all day. I think, before continuing with my story, I must tell you that my grandmother is a seventy-two year old woman and I am thirteen. She is very tall and thin and she looks like a typical Nordic person. I'm tall, slim, blond and freckled. She has more grandchildren, but I feel I am her favorite because I like to spend time with her and I love it when she tells me stories by Eyvind Johnson, Vilgot Sjöman, Camilla Collett, Lars Gyllensten and others. When we left Macy's it was still snowing. “We'll have to take a taxi, taking the bus now is going to be ridiculous,” said my grandmother annoyed. The snow was coming down in blankets, and it was very cold. I suggested going back to the store: I wanted her to buy me some clothes and a remote control car; now I was acting better than an archangel. She didn’t pay any attention to me, perhaps she felt she would end up broke if she bought me things. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the store in the shelter, for which also served as a taxi stop. While we waited, a middle-aged woman approached us and touched my grandmother's left arm with her cane. My grandmother was somewhat surprised because we had not seen the woman approaching, and looked at her suspiciously-if looks could kill. The woman seemed incredibly kind, and in my opinion she had one of the nicest smiles, her already wrinkled face showing dignity and well-kept teeth. As she smiled, her blue eyes scrunched up and twinkled between her wrinkles; they looked like the rays of sunshine I used to draw on my school notebook. “Excuse the intrusion, but I need your help...
Interlude of Images by Luis Aguilar Monsalve I was notified that I would leave on Friday. But it was on Wednesday I received this wonderful news. The first thing I was going to do was tell my wife that I would soon see her; I repeated this phrase every moment: I'll see her on Friday, I'll see her on Friday, I'll see her...
The Gentleman of Saint John by Javier Vásconez Translated by Martin Connolly He seemed a little older than the last time those soldiers had seen him… Italo Calvino As a child, soccer or hopscotch held no interest for me: play-acting was the thing. And not just any role: I was Julius Caesar, no less. With armor fashioned from old cardboard and a piece of hard leather for a shield, I would sweep from room to room in all fury, banging away at my tin-drum, rushing headlong through parlors and corridors and bedrooms. That was how I got on –for years on end, even. At least until that incident with Ramón, our black servant. I was nine. It was my first set-back, my first disappointment. I could assume my role at any time, but public holidays and church days were best, when I could battle away endlessly with my imaginary enemies in the half-light of the Blue Room. The family portraits –part of the luxurious décor throughout our grand house– played their role as enemy too: they had to put up with my assaults and my fierce battle cries. I remember one portrait in particular: to the side of the old walnut writing desk loomed the unmistakable presence of The Venerable Bishop Castañeda. Ancient, with his stark, onion-white complexion, he would visit my dreams like some kind of goblin –a spectral being, hunting for anything precious to take. Mother named the rooms according to the color of the curtains and carpets in each, a general tone which would alter slowly in the dying light of day, and then again in the glow of the gas lamps lit by our maid, Petamaría. In such light, the faces of The Most Serene Saints, or the countenances of various noblemen and pious ladies, would glimmer with a bluish glow or olive-green tint. Of course, being a child, these subtleties were lost on me: all I could think about was myself, my other self, as Julius Caesar, Emperor of the Romans, in command of the West Alps. I went forward with confidence, Petamaría’s broom, transformed into a highly-strung Andalusian bay, pawing the ground and prancing towards the statues...