Sterling Bennett Traducción: Lirio Garduño-Buono Cayman

CAYMAN

At Collin’s house, where the men gathered to write. I took my notebook and went outside for a short night stroll, figuring darkness was more suggestive than indoor lights. I eased the screen door shut, crunched down the driveway past the four plastic flamingos on the lawn and climbed the footpath and turned left along the dike that held the swamp back on one side and the Pacific on the other, and crossed the old, riveted bridge, still painted here and there, now closed to cars for safety reasons. Below, beside the black water of the swamp, against a bank of sand lay–I counted them–seventeen caymans with their narrow snouts and fat bellies, one twice the size of myself, two more only slightly shorter, yet still heavier than me.

I stumbled down the path at the end of the bridge and approached from downwind so they would not smell me. They lay facing the west, listening, I assumed, as I was, to the rumble and thunder of the Panamanian surf. I crabbed my way toward them, my notebook on my belly and my penmanship pointing skyward. When I let myself down with a little bump, there was thrashing, enough to induce a limbic tingling down my spine that they had not come straight at me. When the water settled and my heart slowed, I found my pen and began to write.

I wrote about the Caymans, their eggs, their cousins the crocodiles and alligators and iguanas and lizards, and then acquaintances and colleagues at the university. I wrote as medieval poets do, about chastity and unrequited love.

“O horn-browed beauty,”I wrote, “what is this longing to dance with you in your fetid keep, if only you wouldn’t clamp those shapely jaws on me who sings your scaly charm?”

As I wrote, I noticed bubbled brows watching me from just above the surface, gliding toward me.

“I will write of your belly white like mine,” I wrote. “But never about that place nearer your tail. What about breasts? Some sort of rounded form that poets love?”

Still silent—to be expected—she drifted closer, rose out of her slimy sink, and trudged up the bank until I thought it wise to back away.

Something kept me in my place. Was it the look she gave me? It must have been a she, I thought. I saw some sort of softness below her neck.