Latin America Chloe Aridjis Carlos Fonseca Claudia Salazar Jiménez Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles Alejandro Jodorowsky Jorge Enrique Lage Lina Meruane Michel Laub Antônio Xerxenesky G. Bostock Guadalupe Nettel Fernanda Torres Julio Paredes Rafael Gumucio Natalia Toledo Yoss
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table of contents #165 Latin America / 2017 September
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Contributors Guest Editor's Letter by Chloe Aridjis Figures over the Strait - Jorge Enrique Lage I Understand - Rafael Gumucio Moving Borders - Guadalupe Nettel The Temptation of Hope - Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles Daily Resurrection - Alejandro Jodorowsky Borders - Michel Laub Sleeping Beauties - Lina Meruane Poems - Natalia Toledo Border Triptych - Claudia Salazar Jiménez The Last - Carlos Fonseca Bulletproofed - Fernanda Torres The Fortean Limes - Yoss Rotterdam - Julio Paredes Guillermo Cabrera Infante: An Interview with Miriam Gómez - Carlos Fonseca Bahía de Acapulco - G. Bostock In Transit- Antônio Xerxenesky
Cover: Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan by Matthias Koch
CONTRIBUTORS
3 Chloe Aridjis grew up in the Netherlands Jorge Enrique Lage is a Cuban writer and Mexico. She studied comparative literature at Harvard followed by a PhD at Oxford in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France in 2009. Her second novel, Asunder, is set in London's National Gallery. Chloe was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She recently co-curated the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool (2015) and is starring in an artist's feature film, “Female Human Animal,” directed by Josh Appignanesi, for release in 2017. She has just finished her third novel, Sea Monsters, due for publication in spring 2018.
and editor. He’s published the books of stories El color de la sangre diluida (2008) and Vultureffect (2015), and the novels Carbono 14. Una novela de culto (2010), La autopista: the movie (2014) and Archivo (2015).
Lina Meruane, a writer from Chile, has
authored short stories and four award-winning novels – the latest was translated into English as Seeing Red (Atlantic Books). She has also published three essay books. A professor at New York University, she is currently enjoying a grant from the DAAD Artists in Berlin Program. Photo by Daniel Mordzinski
Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in
Costa Rica in 1987 and grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, the TLS, and The White Review. He was recently selected by the Hay Festival as one of the 39 most promising Latin American writers under forty. Colonel Lágrimas (Restless Books) is his first novel. His new novel, Museo animal (Anagrama) is forthcoming this autumn. He teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.
Michel Laub was born in Porto Alegre
and currently lives in São Paulo. He is a Writer and journalist, and has been named one of the Granta’s twenty ‘Best of Young Brazilian Novelists’. Two of his books are translated to English and published by Harvill Secker: Diary of The Fall, shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award, and A Poison Apple. Photo by Renato Parada
4 Antônio Xerxenesky was born in Por- Guadalupe Nettel, a Bogotá 39 author to Alegre, Brazil, in 1984. He is the author of the short story collection A página assombrada por fantasmas (2011), and two novels, Areia nos dentes (2008), and F (2014).
and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer”, has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and most recently the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. She has published two English-language works of fiction with Seven Stories Press, Natural Histories (2014) and The Body Where I was Born (2015).
G.Bostock (Kenneth G Bostock, Mexico
City) is a poet, architect and conceptual artist. He currently is based in London, having in the past lived in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Copenhagen. As a poet he has published eight works both in Spanish and English focusing formally on the long poem as conceptual riposte. He was a participant in the Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and was a contributor to the literary almanac Mandorla: New Writings from the Americas. He currently is working on a series of pieces exploring geological traits in language inspired by travel notes written in Iceland.
Fernanda Torres was born in Rio de Ja-
neiro in 1965. She is an actress and writer. She has enjoyed a successful career in the theatre, cinema and on television for thirty-five years and has received many awards, including Best Actress at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. She is a columnist for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and the magazine Veja-Rio and contributes to the magazine Piauí. Her first novel is The End.
CONTRIBUTORS
5 Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean- Born José Miguel Sánchez Gómez in HaFrench film and theatre director, screenwrit- vana, Cuba, in 1969, Yoss assumed his er, playwright, actor, author, poet, producer, composer, musician, comics writer, and spiritual guru best known for his avant-garde films.
pen name in 1988, when he won the Premio David in the science-fiction category for Timshel. Since then, he has gone on to become one of Cuba’s most iconic literary figures – as the author of more than twenty acclaimed books, as a champion of science fiction through his workshops in Cuba and around the world, and as the lead singer of the heavy metal band Tenaz. His two novels translated into English are A Planet for Rent and Super Extra Grande.
Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles is the au-
thor of the novels Blue Label / Etiqueta Azul (2010), winner of the Ibero-American Novel Prize Arturo Uslar Pietri; Transilvania Unplugged (2011); Liubliana (2012), winner of the International Literary Prize Letras del Bicentenario Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and of the Venezuela’s Critics’ Prize 2012; Jezabel (2013); and Julián (2014).
Claudia Salazar Jiménez is one of
the most recognized Peruvian writers of her generation. Her debut novel Blood of the Dawn was awarded the Las Americas Narrative Prize of Novel in 2014. Her most recent publications are the collection of short stories Coordenadas Temporales (2016) and the historic novel for young adults 1814: año de la independencia (2017). She is currently based Julio Paredes is a Colombian writer, editor in New York City. and translator. He is the author of collections of stories (Guía para extraviados, Asuntos familiares and Antología nocturnas, among others), novels (La celda sumergida and Cinco tardes con Simenon), and the biography Eugène Delacroix, El artista de la Libertad.
6 Rafael Gumucio is a Chilean writer and
comedian. He has worked as a journalist for many national newspapers in Chile and Spain, as well as for in the New York Times, and is the author of the novels Comedia Nupcial (2002), La deuda (2009), Milagro en Haití (2015), and El galán imperfecto (2017).
Natalia Toledo (born in Juchitán, Mexi-
co) was the first woman to write and publish in the indigenous language of Zapotec. She has published four volumes of poetry in bilingual form (Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish). Her poetry has been translated into English, French, German, Vietnamese, and Italian. In 2004 she received the Premio Nacional de Literatura Nezahualcoyotl for her book of poetry, Guie' yaase'/Olivo negro.
Matthias Koch is an artist and photog-
rapher originally from Germany. He lived and worked in Chile, Venezuela, Mexico and France and currently established his base camp in the South of France. Photography is for Matthias a tool for philosophical investigation and research of truth as well as a vehicle for artistic expression.
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Guest Editor's letter Dear Reader, We are living at a time when borders and frontiers – dividing lines of all sorts, both geographical and ideological – form part of everyday discourse. It is a time of mass migration and countless individual ones. In Latin America some borders are more fraught than others. Litro invited authors from eight of its countries to write about their own experience of boundaries, real and imagined, resulting in a bold array of poetry, fiction and essay. Rafael Gumucio, who also moonlights as a comedian in Chile, offers a playful account of an English class and the tensions and camaraderie that inevitably arise when different nationalities share the same space. In fragments of trenchant prose, his compatriot Lina Meruane tells a real tale of child refugees, setting their fate against the ominous spectre of bird flu. Alejandro Jodorowsky, cult filmmaker and Tarot card wizard, presents a bleak poem, heavy in apocalyptic tone and imagery. From Mexico we have Guadalupe Nettel, whose experience of borders began as a child and became thornier over time, courtesy of immigration officials in France and the United States, leading to the realization
that the most difficult border of all to overcome is prejudice. Anglo-Mexican poet Kenneth Bostock’s training as an architect can be seen in his experimentation with form and linguistic angles. Natalia Toledo, a Zapotec poet from Oaxaca, creates images that evoke the sense of vulnerability and impermanence that haunts indigenous cultures whose very survival is increasingly threatened. Julio Paredes (Colombia) is also a translator of Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner; his own work bears traces of that psychological complexity and conflicted habitation of space. Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles from Venezuela captures the tremendous anguish felt by the younger generations as they witness the gradual breakdown of civil society. His cri du cœur for his afflicted country feels more urgent than ever. In her narrative triptych, Claudia Salazar Jiménez (Peru) moves through female domestic interiors as well as museum space, demonstrating how most boundaries are more than mere wall. From Cuba we have Yoss, who straddles the worlds of science fiction and heavy metal; here he takes the concept of borders to absurdist extremes, envisioning a wild scenario whereby crossing from one
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country into another teleports you to a third, distant location. Jorge Enrique Lage’s narrative, meanwhile, covers a 45-minute flight from Havana to Miami, his journey accompanied by personal musings on Cuban literature, a literature tightly entangled with the nation’s history and geography. Carlos Fonseca Suárez (Costa Rica/Puerto Rico) offers the tale of an anthropologist and the fixed idea that drove him to insanity; fear of the other becomes a vehicle for a cultural exploration of sickness and solitude. We also include an interview Carlos conducted with Miriam Gómez, the widow of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a dialogue that opens many windows onto the exiled life of the great Cuban writer in London; from his desk he resurrected his native Havana, but he also drew inspiration from local literary and cinematic history. Brazil offers us three very different voices: Michel Laub’s brief, enigmatic text is a hymn of disillusion while hinting at the narrator’s own complicated backstory, while Fernanda Torres explains the need, current and historical, to draw boundaries around oneself, leading to her decision to acquire a bulletproof car. Antônio Xerxenesky’s essay
can be read as a coda to our issue, a meditation on the multifaceted relationship between writing and borders. Where does the self end, where does the rest of the world begin? For the writer who remains at home or the writer who goes abroad, the issue of boundaries remains vital, adding tension to our daily existence, defining the ways in which we relate to others. All our authors have added to the ongoing conversation. And on a final note, I would like to extend a very special thanks to the talented translators who worked on this issue. Their mission, a particular kind of border crossing, is much appreciated.
Chloe Aridjis Guest Editor
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Figures over the Strait
ESSAY
Jorge Enrique Lage - Translated by Lorna Scott Fox Havana to Miami … via Serpa & Hemingway, Flores, Arenas, García Vega, Gustavo Pérez Firmat… Zero
How long is the flight between Havana and Miami? You settle into your seat, have a soda and some nibbles and gaze for a while through the porthole at the clouds floating over a narrow band of sea, the famous ninety miles. Then you go to the toilet. You might have time to open a book, but the landing manoeuvres will probably interrupt before you’ve read more than a couple of pages. Around forty-five minutes. But it’s not a bad idea to get a book out on the plane. Not to read, but to riffle through or just so it’s there, like another passenger. A stowaway. A book to be not read but shown, thousands of feet up in the air, as literary product placement, as performance. A geopolitical statement written in the air. It occurs to me that such books should be Cuban ones, at once attesting to (free?) passage, the state of transit, and turning it into something more complex. Books with something to say by their mere presence on this plane, which for the space of less than an hour is neither in Cuba nor in the United States. Forty-five minutes. But sometimes, especially when you start thinking and choosing what books would fit the bill, it feels like barely five. One As I write this I’m thinking that next time I fly to Miami (I live in Havana) I could take, for example, the latest edition of Contrabando, by Enrique Serpa (1900–1968), an author who is little known outside the island. At the start of the novel, first published in 1938, the main character, who owns a fishing schooner, hears about a US writer who likes to fish in Cuban waters. He obtains a photograph of this writer-angler and pins it up in his cabin. “And whenever someone inquired” – I reread, with amusement – “about that broad American face, beaming with health, I would tell them that it belonged to a millionaire friend of mine.” Ernest Hemingway, of course. Serpa and Hemingway hit it off during the latter’s first visits to Cuba. Two thirtysomething guys wandering the streets of Havana, discussing women (hookers, presumably), carousing at one bar after another. Few close encounters between Cuban and US literature have been as strange and significant as this one. Hemingway was then on the eve of being famous. He wasn’t yet a millionaire; he was a long way from buying his finca on the outskirts of Havana. He embodied “the good neighbour”: an affable, modern figure, and a moderniser. Serpa’s novel turns the American
I Understand
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ESSAY
Rafael Gumucio - Translated by Lorna Scott Fox I’m a Chilean, after all. I’m not free.
According to the education minister, anyone who doesn’t know the language of Shakespeare may as well be illiterate. Twice over in my case, since I live in New York and have just married an American. In a bid to correct this double ignorance, I submitted at the age of thirty-five to four hours of intensive English a day, from which I emerged with a few I can’ts and I don’ts, but having learned lessons about the world and myself. *** Day One The new crop of students at Embassy (a language institute offering immersive English courses in Britain and North America) has gathered in a classroom to fill out an endless test. I peruse the material and, with the aid of Beatles songs, snatches of movie dialogue, bits of French and my Spanish, I feel quite sure I understand the whole thing, and can easily dodge any grammatical traps. Later I get a personal interview with a rather mannered teacher called Tom, and my confidence comes crashing down. He has scrawled, in red, a furious -16 on my paper. My comprehension is poor, he explains, and my grammar is worse. He writes down my level: just one notch above the total beginners. After that we return to the classroom. There are fifty of us, aged between twenty-five and forty, a mixture of Japanese and Koreans, plus a Russian girl who could be a supermodel and an Italian Swiss determined to chat to everyone. George Shapiro, the studies supervisor— attired for the occasion in a red tie and platform shoes (without which he measures about 5ft 3)—delivers the welcome speech. “Congratulations. You’re in the best city in the world,” he begins. Then, with a joviality that doesn’t flag for a second, he unleashes a tsunami of jokes about the school and its staff, peppered with commands, warnings, smiles and more smiles. He introduces us to the teaching team (who appear one by one, like the crew of The Loveboat). “So, where did Michael Jordan learn to play basketball?” Shapiro asks. We all remain tongue-tied, we’ve no idea. He answers for us: “In the street. English is like basketball: you can only learn it through practice. That’s why we expect you to take part in our extracurricular activities.” Cue Debora, a Brazilian woman with a sexy twang in English, who invites us to join her for an expedition to Amish country, a jazz breakfast at the Blue Note, and a meal in a restaurant in Little Italy (of course, none of these activities come free). The welcome ceremony (which lasts three hours) wraps up with a talk from Jonathan, a beardy version of Woody Allen. He tells us what to do in the event of fire (there’s only been one fire in ten years, but you never know) and stresses the no-smoking rule in the building, including corridors, because the other denizens of this tower already object to the
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ESSAY
Moving Borders Guadalupe Nettel - Translated by Lorna Scott Fox
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I felt like an idiot for having accepted this invitation to the country of Donald Trump…
The first border I ever crossed was that between Mexico and the United States; I don’t remember, but I was told about it. My parents took me to Los Angeles where a renowned ophthalmological surgeon would perform an incision in my iris, in hopes that more light might reach the retina of the almost blind eye that I was born with. I crossed that border many times as a child, almost always to visit eye doctors, but also for family reasons: we had close relatives in San Diego and Ciudad Juárez. Along the way we’d see campesinos trudging with their cases or backpacks under the broiling desert sun. My mother always wondered where they came from, and reminded us how lucky we were to be able to travel in an air-conditioned car. In the US, not only were the streets cleaner, the buildings newer and better kept, but there was also something called science, that goddess my parents worshipped to implore her favours. Every medical consultation took place in English. My parents and the ophthalmologist looked at me, asked each other questions, exchanged opinions about my case. And there was I, seated in the chair with little mirrors and glaring lights, not understanding a single word because no one bothered to translate. Two frontiers stood between me and what was going on there: that of language and that of childhood. The second was the worst. An invisible partition separates the world of children, in which everything arouses curiosity and feelings are overwhelming, from the calloused, preoccupied, sensible world of grown-ups. Children are highly aware of this. Adults less so. At some point, we left off chasing ophthalmologists. Not that my eyesight had improved in the least; what happened was that the doctors began postponing the solution to some indefinite future. When I grew up, I’d be able to not only cross the border between me and them, but also fulfil my parents’ greatest wish: to escape from the flat and nebulous world I was born in and migrate to the three-dimensional, overpopulated world of people with bifocal vision, the happy ones no doubt, since it was held so worthwhile to join their company. Though nobody said so at the time, I sensed that I’d also be crossing a further border, the one dividing the world of those with “different capacities” from that of “normal”, and hence superior, people. I believed for years in the existence of this border. From my side of it, normality looked like the States looked from Mexico: a place where folks lived free of cares in almost identical houses, seeming to enjoy an incomprehensible peace and wellbeing. At my tender age, I could already distinguish between those who lived on that side of the invisible yet incontrovertible line, and those who didn’t. On this side lived, for instance, the girl with the hare lip, the deaf-and-dumb man next door, and the school director’s autistic son. Secretly, in a way unspoken even among ourselves, we formed a parallel nation. Now and then one of our compatriots made a desperate bid to escape from it: they had the distinctive feature oper-
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The Temptation of Hope
ESSAY
Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles - Translated by Lorna Scott Fox For the Generation of 2017
Almost everything of what is human is alien to me. It’s been a while since the world’s problems (the blatant failure of the romantic propositions of Italo Calvino) have upset me. The fleeting nature of information, generalised across social media, prevents reflection and despondency. Outrage is a hashtag, a harmless virus that turns social drama into light entertainment. Faced with excessive noise, I chose silence. However, my indifference was not prompted by some fit of misanthropy or arrogance. The trouble is that a certain experience, a situation I have failed to confront, stops me seeing the big picture, passing judgment or adopting a position with regard to matters that seem beyond me. I’ve become a passive onlooker, obsessed with resolving a single problem: the breakdown of my citizenship, the voluntary relinquishment of my passport and my exile by choice. My inability to understand what happened in Venezuela over the past twenty years has revoked my moral authority. The impressions that follow (notebook fragments, insomnia insights, napkin jottings) are no more than a vain attempt to give meaning to my sense of a defeated nation, a vanished society, a country divided by real walls that seemed uncontroversial when they first went up. I don’t recall how or when my idiosyncrasy took shape. To trace the genealogy of being Venezuelan may look pointless at first, but the wholesale rout suffered by the men and women of my generation compels me to improvise a response. The basics of citizenship were instilled into us at primary school; there was nothing invasive or traumatic about it. Those were outwardly normal years. I suspect, however, that much of what took place later was already lurking behind the blandness of the syllabus. For a long time, our school churned out apathetic, conformist personalities. Wellbeing was a slogan, with no credible alternative to compare it to. We all knew (and still they reminded us every day) that we lived in a wealthy country, blessed with people skills and the bounty of oil. The Bolivarian catechism, part and parcel of the curriculum from nursery to sixth form, cast an efficacious spell. Nobody took the trouble to question that tendentious, retrograde teaching. The nation’s founders lacking biographies, their exploits were related by hagiographers. Even today, the Venezuelan social imaginary is comprised of a set of sagacious maxims formulated in the nineteenth century, which have hardened into commonplaces. Political discourse was the great heir of these defects, with the result that any vision of the nation that wanted to be taken seriously had to stick to the nineteenth-century script. In this way, we legitimised anachronism. We forgot about the future, we made the past into a project, regression was the only possible model of society. They taught us we’d found El Dorado, whereas had we opened our eyes and ears we’d have seen that we were, in reality, up to our necks in the Guaire River. Poets and storytellers intuited the gist of this farce. The visions of the country offered by Reinaldo Solar and Alberto Soria, heroes of novels by Rómulo Gallegos and Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, put their finger right on it, and yet many readers found it easier to deplore those critiques as needlessly pessimistic. Pancho, the heroine’s uncle in Teresa de la Parra’s
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POETRY
Daily Resurrection Alejandro Jodorowsky - Translated by Lorna Scott Fox
They divide the Earth with bloody lines waving cloths with stripes and stars, full of pride in plastic trophies they issue laws that kill our souls, dangling the deadly bait of credit they make us slaves to figures. Baleful merchants graft our brains with adverts hiding abstract threats, traffickers sell ego-building gadgets to any fool who feels empty inside, artists lick their limitless navels, priests promise viscous heavens, politicians applaud their own nods and winks, therapists sheathed in cars like shouts of platinum investigate their patients’ excrement, the poisoners of the seas connive with poisoners of air and earth and blood to rule what span of life can be allowed to every human being, mothers shriek with calcified virtue lauding the hands of the padre who rummages through the innocence of their cowed children, obsequious at dawn in impeccable ties assassin architects erect concrete phalluses where zombies fester in low-lidded tombs and tinkle long white fingers over keyboards. Picture-perfect gurus peddling metaphysical aspirin, breasts blown up like footballs to hook gluttons of the gaze, youths proud of being parasites, despising the sublime, smart ladies, faces shielded by placentas of their offspring, handing rubber entrails out and rosaries in hospitals, clowns elected President by rubbish-hungry masses guzzling space and time and candied images. Haughty eyes denying miracles, mouths spewing definitions, dogmas, oilrigs, chains, impregnable laws, commandments piled inside the chest like massive rocks, hats that weigh hundredweights, planet-shredders,
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Borders Michel Laub - Translated by Daniel Hahn London is a city that is now reaching an end.
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In its search for the birdseed in the cage, this is the bird’s flight. London is a city spread over tunnels that are always the same and trains that always go to the same places. A park with no friends, alcoholics alone in a cinema that offers cheap tickets on Wednesdays: after a few weeks, nothing can remain a novelty. On Tottenham Court Road you can read it on the walls: Glad you aren’t a sheep in the U.K.? Animals – says the advertisement – travel in appalling conditions before being slaughtered. But there are other appalling stories in London too. One of these is about a guy called Justin, who does the rounds of Soho offices carrying a basket of sandwiches and sweets. He’s twenty years old and he never works alone, because his boss prefers his vendors to go around in pairs: one keeps an eye on the other, every movement, every bit of info collected in every conversation. In January, the public services are chaos. The cold is an earache. Oxford Street, Wardour Street, D’Arblay Street; on each of the roads that follow on from one another, amid the leftovers from the New Year and accents that might sound like childhood, Justin memorises the prices and fillings of the sandwiches – bacon, lettuce, brie and jam, chicken and sweetcorn. In the plastic cup he puts away the banknotes and the coins. The pair divide out their cut at the end of the morning. Enough for each to pay his rent, for each to buy beer, cigarettes, a phone, a lottery ticket if anyone still believes in luck. It’s enough for food, too. Chicken and chips, says Justin, that’s Ana’s favourite. She’s looking for work: she tries in shops and restaurants, but nobody wants anything to do with any more Brazilians. Nobody wants anything to do with anything coming from someplace else, Ana complains to Justin. She likes complaining, always has. Sometimes it’s possible to have a bit of a rest while visiting the offices. Justin asks if he can sit down beneath an awning on Dean Street. Then, his mouth full of chocolate he’s stolen from the basket, he goes on telling stories about Ana. The two of them met some months earlier, when she was here as a tourist. She had to go back, she had a boyfriend in São Paulo, her boyfriend was planning to marry her. Except Ana never stopped writing to Justin, daily, very many times in a day, until she’d summoned up the courage to come. She told her boyfriend, and the rest is a tale of obsession. The boyfriend made threats, said he was ready to pursue her for the rest of her life, across the rest of the world. Obsession is a total feeling, it’s fuel and sparks and impulse, but Justin doesn’t even think about it in the room he’s rented with Ana in Shepherd’s Bush. He doesn’t think about anything when he returns to the café, hands his boss the money, he needs to get home right away. Don’t you want to come round?, he asks. I accept the invitation. It’s not even that far, we don’t even have to change trains, I’m very familiar with the
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FICTION
Sleeping Beauties Lina Meruane - Translated by Megan McDowell But they weren’t the ones who watched in the darkness…
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Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future. —Rebecca Solnit Motionless. Sunk in oblivion. They were there but not there entirely, heads bent and lips parted. A narcotic respiration seeped from their pale mouths, and that was their only movement, chests inflating imperceptibly. Their arms, their shoulders, their necks grown thin. They were living cadavers arranged in lines, surrounded by women who had come to identify them. Identify them. They were not bodies wrapped in thick black garbage bags, or covered in bloody and crackling newspaper, faded by the sun. They did not seem like the destroyed bodies of the thousands of refugees who appeared onscreen like an alarm, day and night. They were young, vigorous, healthy, brown, black, pale, stretched out now on cots under white sheets so clean they shone when the hall’s curtains were opened, the ironed, starched curtains. Stiff like eyelids. *** Through the openings in the cloth, still flocks of birds watched them. *** They, the migrant children, were wrapped in shadow and the restless clucking of their mothers, who prayed softly so as not to wake them. They let them sleep, those children who no longer belonged to any one mother, but to them all. And the mothers wanted them to wake up, but did not want to be the ones to wake them. *** The birds began to peck at the windows, the sound threatening to revive the children. Those damned, uniform birds wouldn’t leave them in peace—what could they want? The mothers thought about birds, and also about the police who were all around, circling them. In their imaginations they went on feeling a tapping, a pecking. Because the nurses on duty appeared and then silence reigned. According to the nurses, pecking or no the children were not going to wake up, and the mothers knew that it was true. They had tried at first to break the children out of their stupor. They had shaken them, demanded they stop playing dead, said they didn’t think this game was funny at all, not with everything else that was going on. Everything else, they sighed anxiously. But then they had yelled at the children. They’d made threats. They had begged the children to open their mouths and swallow one spoonful of soup. The soup dribbled out between their lips. They hopelessly lost weight, the children and their mothers.
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Natalia Toledo - Translated by Diego Gómez Pickering In Zapotec, in Spanish, in English.
Ra biziaa ca lindaa Ridide’ ca dxi nexhe’ lu xhaga ne ná’ ca gue’tu xtnine’. Rarí’, ndaani’ yoodi’, ma gaxti’ xhaga ne ná’. Bixhozedu biasaca’ ne zineca’, ladxido’do’.
La herida de los linderos Paso mis días sobre las mejillas y los brazos de los muertos. Aquí, en esta casa, ya no quedan mejillas ni brazos. Nuestros padres migraron y con ellos, nuestros corazones.
Boundaries’ wounds I spent my days between the deads’ cheeks and arms. Here, at home, there are no cheeks nor arms left. Our parents migrated, and our hearts with them.
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24
Poems
POETRY
Border Triptych
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44
FICTION
Claudia Salazar Jiménez - Translated by Rosalind Harvey
1. Her birthday It’s Saturday and I wake up. It’s May. The sun shakes me a little, quite agreeably. It’s then that I feel an indescribable urge to head to the seafront, to breathe in the Pacific, that smell of early autumn sea where the breeze and the soft drizzle blend into one, an urge to eat ceviche, to cycle around and look out at the ocean. It’s a cool morning and this time, the sunshine hasn’t hurt my eyes, everything is very grey, with that light so peculiar to Lima, a luminous, unmistakable grey. Valeria sleeps at my side. As I slowly peel open my eyelids, I remember that today is her birthday and so I decide not to wake her; let her sleep for a little longer. I can’t be bothered to get up and make breakfast. Some Huacho sausage sandwiches would go down really well right now… I think of that sausagey smell and start getting up. I stretch, imagining the scrambled eggs stirred into the sausage, and the orangeish colour of the fat that sometimes drips out of the sides of the sandwich, making the corners of your mouth deliciously greasy. I run my tongue ever so slowly along the edge of my lower lip. I sit up. Valeria stirs slightly; if I start cooking the sausage she’ll wake up as soon as she smells it, for sure. I go to the bathroom. The morning light hangs still, as if waiting for something, perhaps for the scent of the Lima sea to come in and flood the entire house. The cold water splashes my face, I peel my eyes open and there I am, staring back at myself in the mirror. In the distance, I can hear sirens. There are a few birds, too, but they’re not wood pigeons. Then it hits me. It’s not the first time it’s happened, but I can’t understand why it’s always on a Saturday. I feel a nomadic sadness that lasts no more than thirty seconds. I finish washing and the Huacho sausages vanish from my mind. Today there will be no Pacific, but there will be a walk along the banks of the Hudson River. And a good brunch with scrambled eggs, pancakes and Mimosas. Endless Mimosas. And that’s just the way it is; best not to anchor yourself so as to be able to exist. I go back to the bedroom, walk over to Valeria and sing softly to her in Portuguese, Parabéns a vocé nesta data querida, congratulations to you on this happy day. No reaction. I try again. Parabéns a vocé nesta data querida, muitas felicidades, congratulations to you, best wishes… She stirs, the covers slip to one side, her eyelids begin to flicker like a Venetian blind. I kiss her gently on the cheek and breathe in her scent – she smells of home, of affection, of embraces; I inhale into her neck and she reacts as if being tickled. Once more I sing, Hoje é día de festa, cantam as nossas almas, para a menina Valeria uma salva de palmas, today is for celebrating, let our souls sing, let’s all clap for little Valeria. She claps and cheers, her eyes still closed, and gives me a hug. I want to have brunch in that place that looks out over the Tagus, I hear her say, but in which language I cannot tell.
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FICTION
The Last
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Carlos Fonseca - Translated by Jessica Sequeira I write to understand this man whose ideas drove him insane…
I never knew him. What’s left to me of him are the scenes I’m able to imagine, starting with the five boxes from the archive his widow left to me. Anecdotes passed to me by members of his family, editions in German, English and French of his three books, descriptions of friends who visited him during the absolute seclusion that marked his last years, a handful of yellowing photos in which already he appears old, lost amidst his phobias, terribly distant. I also have a copy of an essay translated into Spanish by an old student of his. That same Paraguayan student who years later, once he was professor, would speak to me of the man with the excessive enthusiasm of one who believed he had known – even if only for a brief year, hedged off by the first signs of malaise in his old mentor – a true genius. That same former student who years later would convince me to travel to the Swiss Alps, in search of the archives of an anthropologist I’d never even heard of. No. I never knew Karl-Heinz Von Mühlfeld, but immersed as I am now in his archive, I can recreate his life as if it were the shape of a puzzle piece, and imagine him perfectly, lost amidst the long hallways of that Caribbean sanatorium where he would spent the last ten years of his life: his hands hidden inside the white gloves he’d begun to wear decades before, his mask always on, his slow steps those of someone who believes every step forward is dangerous. I can imagine him, hunched over his own body in just the same way he’d once hunched over his obsessions, prisoner of the same fixed ideas that years before had led him to become a well-known professor of anthropology. A man who had carried his ideas to the limit, only to look at himself in the mirror one day and tremble with horror. I spend the free hours of my day imagining scenes like this. The rest belong to the archive. It’s there that I find the facts that constitute the biography I think of publishing someday about such an eccentric man. It’s there I find, for example, basic information: date of birth, primary studies, fixations of adolescence, first forays into anthropology. From there I’m able to draft brief and precise sentences like this one: “Karl-Heinz Von Mühlfeld, proponent of the sociology of the masses, was born on 15 April 1932 in a small town on the outskirts of München. Twenty-six years later he was awarded a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Paris with a thesis titled, according to the translation a Paraguayan student would propose years later, Imitation and Contagion: Thesis on the Psychology of the Popular Masses. It was a work marked by the profound influence of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde on the young anthropologist. A work whose principal thesis is as easy to summarise as it is difficult to prove: in the heart of modern sociology – marked by the emergence of the phenomenon of the popular masses – one can find the principle of imitation as contagion. In other words, contagion produces culture. Culture is nothing but contact and imitation.” I write things like this with the sole intention of coming to understand this man
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54
Bulletproofed
ESSAY
Fernanda Torres - Translated by Gitanjali Patel I went on adventures that are no longer possible.
Translator's note: The Portuguese word for bulletproof (blindado) has a number of different nuances including, covered with a protective coating, bulletproof and, more simply, protected. This story is an exploration of the author's choice to protect herself and bulletproof her car. The translation bulletproofed is both a literal reference to the narrated events, as well as a nod to the position the author is defending in the story.
For over a decade, I travelled around Asia and Africa. I toured around Europe with a theatre group, I made films in Mexico and lived in New York. I went on adventures that are no longer possible: I drove from Paris to Greece before taking a flight to Egypt, from where I travelled to Italy via the Mediterranean and then back to Paris. Yugoslavia was still a country, Hosni Mubarak was ruling the roost on the Nile, Gaddafi reigned over the Libyan deserts and the Twin Towers were still standing. I was 26 when the Berlin Wall fell. For me, the end of the Cold War made the world seem both small and accessible. Today, thousands of refugees fight to cross the same borders that I’ve travelled over, some of which no longer even exist. Wars have razed entire countries from the map, and cities I’ve visited have suffered through genocides. The end of the eighties saw the victory of liberalism, which brought with it a feeling of prosperity, for the West at least. But future troubles were already manifesting themselves in the present. The end of history was probably not going to happen for a while yet. A strange man was sitting at the bar, dressed in a suit, in a hotel in Cairo. He offered to buy my boyfriend and me a drink. Sipping on a daytime whisky with a sullen expression, he seemed tense and remorseful. He kept saying that we were in a free country and that he believed in humanity. Perhaps it was our youth, or our thirst for risk, that made us accept the invitation to go for a spin around the city with this dodgy Egyptian in his bulletproof Mercedes Benz. We arrived at a swanky club where he introduced us as his friends, constantly reiterating that we were in a free country and that he believed in humanity. Our tour continued to a soulless apartment where a scantily clad woman was staying, but we were back driving around in the Mercedes before we knew it. It felt like were in a Buñuel film; we couldn’t seem to escape from this depressed drunkard who was convinced we were in a free country and who kept reiterating his faith in humanity at every opportunity. This was when I noticed a pamphlet on the floor by the backseat. The paper was the expensive sort, like in those leaflets real-estate developers use to sell luxury real-estate in Miami or Abu Dhabi. This pamphlet, however, was promoting the sale of arms. A well-presented soldier dressed in a bulletproof vest was pictured front, and side-on, demonstrating the bold design of his armaments. On the next page there was a modern-looking gas mask. Further on, there was an assorted mix of pistols and machine guns to equip any battle. Our guide was a dealer in the
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FICTION
The Fortean Limes Yoss - Translated by Lawrence Schimel
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Something very strange was happening with the planet’s borders…
“Separated by what unites us, united by what separates us.” Slogan of the “Archipiélagos” radio program (Miami, 1990s) At midnight between February 28 and 29, 2020, above every aerial, terrestrial, and maritime political border on Earth a diffuse luminous curtain became visible, which seemed in slow, continuous movement. To the inhabitants of the more boreal or austral countries, it reminded them of the polar auroras, some high atmosphere meteor that was very familiar at those elevated latitudes … except that this new phenomenon seemed to take place flush to the ground. This would already have been front page news of the world media … but what came after made much more noise. The first affected seem to have been a small group of hopeful Sudanese who, fleeing from Tunisia in a fragile and crowded dinghy, tried to reach the island of Sardinia in the wee hours of the night. The 104 immigrants disembarked splashing and congratulating one another for having reached solid land without problems. Also somewhat surprised: no local contact was waiting for them on the beach. Some, exhausted by their tense travels, preferred to wait for them there on the sands. The bravest continued inland. Ahmed Osman Bashkir, an ophthalmologist from Jartum, was the first to contact with the locals: a family of fisherman who took in the tall, thin Muslim in astonishment: the colour of their own skin was rather dark, but without the subtle blue tones of the Sudanese. They were also struck by his almost-spherical matt of thick, curly hair. But with the easy hospitality of the poor, they feasted him from their meagre stores. Ahmed spoke to them in Italian, which he had studied a little. Nothing. He tried French, Arabic, and Nubian, languages which his friendly hosts also didn’t seem to understand. Nor could he manage to recognize the language they communicated in. But when the oculist, with a degree from Cairo, tried English, the eyes of one of the fishermen lit up, and he responded with a perfect British accent. That’s how the astounded Sudanese learned that he had been taken in and fed by the Sharapandatara family. And that he wasn’t in Sardinia, nor in Sicily, nor in any other part of Italy or even the Mediterranean … but in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. At two a.m., Lufthansa flight 845, a modern Airbus 380 with 523 passengers on board, traveling from Frankfurt to Zurich, found itself suddenly surrounded by various Su37 fighters with camouflage markings, and ordered imperiously (first in Spanish, then in Eng-
Rotterdam
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Julio Paredes - Translated by Thomas Bunstead It had never been his intention to travel via Rotterdam…
The freighter slowed as they drew into the port. Having been tossed around constantly for the past several days while the ship had been traversing the Channel, to begin gliding smoothly like this added to the uneasiness now resident in Cárdenas’ chest and back. He lay down on the cabin bed and replayed the final phone conversation he’d had with Irene two days before leaving Bogota; she had found an apartment in the centre of Madrid, she said, not far from the university campus. Previously uninhabited for two years, the landlady was letting her rent it for next to nothing on the understanding that she would clean and help out with odd jobs. He heard Irene’s soft voice in his head again, the tone with which she explained the world. It would be a bad idea, he felt, to mention the night he’d gone up to the top of the ship and looked out over the dark waters, or the vertiginous feelings that took hold of him; how he had clung to the metal beams, aware of the small strip – how small – separating the tips of his toes from the clear air beyond. Now, as he looked through the porthole at the night outside, the unmoving stars, it struck him that the most important thing, when he saw her, would be to stay patient – Irene’s beauty was sure to make him feel very impatient. He ought not to try his luck the moment he arrived, better to tell her about the Caribbean, the incredible light it contained, and how he’d arrived at the port minutes before the freighter was due to set sail; his flight from Bogota had been delayed because of a papal visit. He thought about inventing some kind of metaphor from the turbulent time the Pope had spent in Colombia, the second Pope ever to come to the country; the blessings he had brought to that disjointed, brutal place had almost prevented Cárdenas from catching the freighter, the one that was to finally deliver him to Irene. A pope who was Polish, like the port in which this freighter was due, at the end of its journey, to disappear. *** In the morning, after coming ashore, they were divided into two groups by the customs officers. A man dressed in civvies motioned curtly to Cárdenas to pick up his bags and come with him. Cárdenas knew how this went – it had been the same on his two trips to the US – and calmly did as he was told. They went into a room and the officer pointed, with a forefinger that seemed incredibly chubby to Cárdenas, to a long bare table. It was like a meeting between deaf-mutes, and Cárdenas obediently placed his suitcase, laptop case and rucksack down on the table, and started unzipping them. The man pointed him over to a wall and waited for him to go and stand by it. Two more officers came in. One was a policewoman with a blue kepis on her head, and blonde, golden-sheening hair pinned up, and the other was a man, fat like the first man, and like the woman wearing a police uniform. They then made Cárdenas empty the contents of his luggage before each of them, with excessive slowness, inspected the seams of the bags. The woman worked with such conviction, such measured skill, that Cárdenas began to worry she might actually find some secret compartment even he did not know about.
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FICTION
71
INTERVIEW
Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Cities, Two Islands Carlos Fonseca An Interview with Miriam Gómez
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Deep inside the Gloucester Road apartment where the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante resided from 1967 until his death in 2005, the visitor finds a majestic landscape. This landscape – which the writer once referred to as an inverted tromp l’oeil – is in fact a sash window that frames a magnificent view: beyond it, a sequence of six mesmerizing arches produces a mise-en-abyme that tempts the viewer into remembering Joseph Gandy’s nineteenth century pictorial interpretation of the Bank of England in ruins. Hidden from the nearby bustle of trendy Kensington, with its noisy proliferation of Bentleys and Lamborghinis, the window seems to open onto a different city: one as grandiose as the neo-classical London of Sir John Soane, a city that appears frozen in time like that spiral staircase that rises like bindweed amidst its six arches. The visitor who, guided by the elegant and extremely generous Miriam Gómez, widow to the late Cuban writer, is confronted with such a view can’t avoid but remember the first lines of Cabrera Infante’s autobiographical novel Infante’s Inferno: “This is my inaugural memory of La Habana: climbing marble steps.” That window, one could risk saying, hides – within the heart of modern London – the memory of La Habana. The daily vision of that staircase lost amidst vertiginous arches must have remained, for the exiled writer, the passageway to that city which he had lost three times. A first time in 1962 when, after the affair regarding the government’s censorship of PM, his brother’s documentary, as well as the closing of Lunes de Revolución, the journal for which he worked, he decided to accept a post abroad as the culture attaché in the Cuban Embassy in Brussels. The second time in 1965 when, after returning to the island to bury his mother, he realized that the revolution he had initially supported had taken an irreversible turn. And lastly, a third time, when in 1972, after months of struggling to write a film script based on Malcolm Lowry’s unsettling Under the Volcano, he suffered a psychic collapse that would force him to undergo electroshock therapy, a treatment which resulted in a loss of memory that threatened to erase all recollection of that city whose decadent splendour and sumptuous resonance he had delectably documented in his 1967 debut novel Three Trapped Tigers. “Guillermo lost his memory and with it those memories related to La Habana. That’s when he spread the map of La Habana over his desk and decided to write, street by street, the memories he had of the city,” Miriam Gómez recounts, pointing to a desk lying at the very centre of the couple’s studio, half way between that magnificent window full of Cuban memories and the window facing Gloucester Road. One then realizes that it was from that desk that Guillermo Cabrera Infante, arguably La Habana’s greatest narrator, took upon himself the task of salvaging – through writing – the city and its memory from the power of oblivion. Neither he nor Miriam Gómez returned
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G. Bostock
There is a language of both and lack of, a night song. Lessened trail in accumulation, shelter woven through the over-reaching strings of broken breath. In the threads that wave back a longing shore. Dew. Pause. A periodic interchange of meaning within meaning. A double exposure. Shortened and drawn on more-than-smooth similitude. There is language in distance, in effort and misalignment. In being so-so tropical, arsenic and proustite, banana leaves, sand all over. Basalt boulders and beachside vibes, Acapulco is just the pretext, nuance and integer in the off calling out. Effortlessness. Leaning too heavily, taken conviction. All too tropic. Topic, but not. My bad. On the margins of inference, the bay and the mountains, language folded over. Form that is port and starboard. Meaning unaware. In the nocks and crannies and the vastness of minimal consequence. Language braided in the brackish gust over magnetised steel shavings, thought’s splinter, coconut husk, lily blossom. A becoming grid and curve. To such, an analog reciprocation, an echo its mass and spin. In an idea of an idea, the seed and the cipher that is neither continuum or progression. Not coincidental, not derivative. Syntax of yearning soil, red patched earth, form of the fertile sultry bluff and mourning wind. There are secret props to all the links in being. The brokenhearted, the smitten, a coco-loco, spectre and balance. Acapulco, said place. Obsidian that is breathing words on words on words. Like film, elastic. Like hoop transit. Object and image of everyone and no one. Known in unknowing. Say, for example, the marquee of a Moorish bar, outline in sand castles, wet footprints fading on the concrete pavement, seared with sea shells and tanning lotion. Guitar riffs. On the brink, on the water’s edge. Its own time. Over the rhythmic waves. Lips, between want and love, for a ragged care the bay, the beckoning heave of this stretch of the Pacific’s coast, a sheltering shadow pointing at ocean treasures and cryptic vows. Say a language, genealogy, empty shared beliefs. Coincidental. Of causality and the imprecision of omnipresence. Of Johnny Weissmuller sun tanning in the Flamingos or Maria Felix in El Papagayo. Of day-to-day mythologies mirrored on clammy brows and tired glances. Hordes of immanence, as trannies and teenage prostitutes, tourists and pedlars, dwell over swell and sunset, a casual look of
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Bahía de Acapulco
POETRY
81
In Transit Antônio Xerxenesky
The waitress told the writer in question that they usually didn’t get much of his kind there…
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A writer must travel, it is usually said. A writer must leave his desk, discover other cultures and so on and so on. A writer must not be like Kant, who designed an entire moral system without ever leaving his small town. Kant wished to be universal. A writer wishes to be universal, but is soon told that universality is dead, all that is left is its putrefying corpse, the Western illusion of universality. So one should be local, and travel all around to understand that there is something out there called the Other. Or something like that. Anyway. A writer must travel, it is said. *** The writer in question, which is me, but which will be called “the writer in question”, because it is also not me, made his very first passport in 2013, when he was 28 years old. That means he avoided international travel for 28 years. His first novel took place in the border between Mexico and the U.S.; he had never been to any of those two countries. Some of his short stories took place in Argentina, which he did visit, but hey, Argentina was driving distance and did not require a passport from the writer in question, which is from the South of Brazil. *** In 2015, the writer in question was invited to a very famous and prestigious literary residency in the American Midwest. The writer in question accepted the invitation and arranged an unpaid leave from his full-time job in Brazil. The writer in question was, and still is, delighted with the concept of literary residencies. For a few months, he can close his eyes and pretend to be a successful First World writer, that is, someone who does not work on a full-time job totally unrelated to literature, that is, someone who is expected to do nothing but write fiction. *** Once in a while, critics reflect: why are Brazilian novels so short? Why are Latin Americans so obsessed with short stories? Well, most of us do not have the free time to do the Franzen manoeuvre (which is: to write a 600 page novel no matter the subject). *** His stay in the U.S. for three months was terrific. The writer in question was delighted with his free time, with the green leaves of grass, with the cute squirrels, with the idea of walking alone at night not afraid of being mugged. The writer in question was so pleased with the nature that he tried to read Walden sitting on the grass, only to discover that the U.S. also have annoying mosquitoes. Still, everything is so perfect and peaceful that he wonders how can anyone write while being so far away from chaos. *** It was so funny: everywhere in the U.S., they asked the writer in question for ID if he wanted to order a beer. Once, in a bar, after seeing the Brazilian passport, the waitress told the writer in question that they usually didn’t get much of his kind there. It took him a while to un-