Trinity Journal of Literary Translation
Online: The Silkworms
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87
trans. Ursula Meany Scott
Despite it being forbidden, Claudia brought some silkworms home. She took them out
of the glass jar where sooner or later they would run out of air and put them in a cardboard
box that must have contained cds going by its shape, and which she found in the hall cupboard. She pierced holes in the lid with the tip of the kitchen scissors. And she hid the box in the toy basket, where her mother would never look.
Claudia’s mother said that animals were only beautiful when they were loose in the
countryside. That cities were for people. But on many weekends when they still lived with
Claudia’s father, she and her sister used to brought by their parents to the zoo. They were all happy: the family who posed in photos with balloons and candy-covered apples, and the animals who lived shut up in the enclosures.
That day, so that her mother wouldn’t suspect anything, Claudia behaved exceptionally
well: she cleared up the kitchen, did her homework and helped bathe her little sister. She
brushed her hair and put on her slippers for walking around the house even though they hurt her. To her mother this behaviour seemed normal and she didn’t offer any praise.
Lately she was very distracted. She dropped cups when she was washing up, she left her glasses behind her all over the place and every time someone called on the telephone she asked Claudia to leave the kitchen and close the door behind her.
That same night, Claudia’s mother forgot to give her a kiss when she went to bed.
She didn’t even switch on the hall light. All night long Claudia lay there frightened that something would climb out from under the bed.
Over the following days, Claudia made the most of the gap between the moment she
arrived home from school and the time it took her mother to go and pick her sister up from
the crèche to feed her worms a couple of mulberry leaves. Claudia had decided that the worms with the black stripes were the males and those with the plain white bodies were
the females. What she liked best was running her finger over them because they were smooth. On the other hand, when she put them on her hand, they were more sticky. The worms’ legs were ribbed.
There were very few people in her class who had silkworms. She was very proud.
Claudia was no longer the strange girl because she spent the day painting or because her
parents didn’t sleep together. She was special because she could do something that the others weren’t allowed to do. The teacher had asked who could look after the silkworms