The image of my father, by contrast, has more points of reference: two more decades of meetings, silences, and meals eaten together. The memory of him in 1994 is frequently superimposed by the memory of my ailing father, sedated in his hospital bed, a morphine-induced smile on his face. I occasionally manage to forget that he’s dead, and I imagine him sitting in an armchair in the living room, shouting at a rerun of a soccer game. In my imagination, I’m sitting beside him, but instead of looking at the TV set, I’m carefully observing each of his features—searching for myself in them, terrified by the acceptance that they are also mine.
One part of me knows that I can’t stay in this bed forever. Lately I’ve been thinking of making drastic changes. Perhaps I’ll go to San Cristóbal de las Casas. Or better still, I’ll take a bus to Villahermosa, where I can start a new life, with another name (Úlrich González, for example). The new life of someone who had no father, no mother, who didn’t kick a pigeon in a square in Mexico City or lose anything in September 1994.
Perhaps, before boarding the bus, I’ll take a walk through the area around the Taxqueña terminal, the streets of Colonia Educación, attempting to understand the nuances of the unspeakable answer that has been growing inside me, devouring me. Perhaps, before changing my name, I’ll also walk to the cemetery where I buried my father, to scream at him in a way I was never capable of screaming when he was alive—the way my sister and my mother used to scream at him when he was still a part of their lives. But before doing anything, before thinking about getting out of bed, before finally becoming the person I always should have been, I’d like to finish writing this.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for their support in the writing of this book.
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Daniel Saldaña París is an essayist, poet, and novelist born in Mexico City. His debut novel, Among Strange Victims, was a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. His work has appeared in BOMB, Guernica, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, the Guardian, and elsewhere. In 2017, he was named by the Hay Festival as one of the best Latin American writers under the age of forty.
Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, and her translation of Daniel Saldaña París’s novel Among Strange Victims was a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She works regularly with authors such as Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, and Julián Herbert.
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