by Julián López
On my desk there’s hardly anything but a photo in a frame. Beyond that frame made from strips of lacquered wood there is a window. Beyond the window are the crowns of the plain trees, the airy crowns of the hardwood trees from Tucumán with its branches like women’s legs in black stockings. Further beyond, the wall that separates the street from the large lot where there used to be a wine bottling plant, the warehouses where loads of Cuyo grapes were delivered, the long queue of trucks that were followed by bees, chasing after a home from which they had already been turned away.
—
Who was that beautiful young woman?
—
In those lots you could build things that no longer exist. In those lots you could build a happy cemetery where we choose to lay our memories to rest, an expanse of lawn that stretches all the way from the sea to the mountains where the ideal world they dreamed of still persists.
Beyond the warehouses are the train tracks, a huge space covered in grass and crossed with silver rails on which the trains arrive at the capital, the nexus of worlds. Where a factory stands now, there were once dark cities, the warehouses were once barracks that were captured and emptied and captured again. That wire where socks and shirts sit drying awaits its gallows, waiting for more trucks, the ones that will inject a new mix of concrete to construct shining cities where there was once a blur. Where there were once factories and the Middle Ages, new, ultramodern buildings with views of the river will rise like Transformers.
How powerful the urge to put on a clean shirt.
And what would that woman with noble and bluish skin, so distant from mundane trivialities of the world, think of all this?
What would she think of the lapacho flowers, for example? Would she be enchanted by them if we walked through a park in the last of the evening, the only time of the day that the trees stand calmly?
If I bring my eyes back from the window, the photo frame with the strips of lacquered wood reappears, the harsh photo that displays my face, and hides the expression on my mother’s face, her hair as sumptuous as a bullfighter’s cape in the wind. The two of us in shorts. Me in the cable-knit sweater she made to shelter me and her in the blouse that holds her back and sets her free.
Should we speak of the scent of white soap, its modest, antifascist, undefeatable cleanness?
Outside the photo there are piles of books that spill over scraps of paper covered with unreadable messages. Things that I wrote down urgently and that I now cannot understand. There is always a cup of tea on my desk, a revolution that didn’t last me very long and with time revealed its conservative tradition: black tea, piping hot, a heaped spoonful of sugar, and a streak of fresh, cold milk.
Where could it be, what could have become of that thick, woolen, cable-knit sweater?
It was summer in that photo, but there was so much wind around the cliffs. You can see my whole face, and it seems expressionless, or with an expression that says I knew, without knowing, that I was approaching the unknown peak of her tiny body on the edge of the void.
In my room there is nothing, not even hardly anything. A desk where I sit each morning, opposite the window, a mess of papers, but nothing really. On the walls there are no Aztec suns, no fields of poppies, no tulips in the foreground that hide the image of a little row of Dutch houses. I don’t like to travel, every geography ends up seeming like the edge of a cliff for me.
I want a room with walls that say nothing, a room with a window that lets me see a wall where every day something is written over the top of something else that was written the day before. A room where the world outside resounds and all of a sudden makes me head down the street, just as I am, in shorts, my hair in a mess from having recently got out of bed, in flip-flops, running in a lively impulse that I can’t contain because I heard laughter, and I went to the window to see, but that wasn’t enough. Heading out into the street to breathe in a huge mouthful of air, to approach those girls who laugh like brooding hens. These girls no older than fourteen, the straps falling off their sweaty shoulders. Those girls who laugh as they pull along a massive cart full of cardboard in the street among the cars. Those happy dark-skinned little girls who fight over an ice cream that melts while they laugh, from all the effort of hauling that carriage of cardboard by the wall in the street, the crib of a baby sleeping off its drunken nursing. And me running with my mouth open to breathe in all the air of that laughter, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know what to do, and I call out to them, and I catch up and stop, almost breathless, and I crouch down before looking at them, before I ask them what they’re laughing at.
And the girls, surprised, turn around and stop laughing and look at me crouching and heaving, and maybe they’re angry because they’ll have to start hauling that heavy mass again after I made them stop with my shouting, and they look at each other because they don’t know how to react, and then they look at me again. And they roar with laughter full of air. They look at me, and they burst into laughter. And I breathe.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julián López is a poet, actor, and director of the literary association Carne Argentina. He lives in Buenos Aires. A Beautiful Young Woman is his first novel.
Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia.