by Ilan Stavans
It had grown dark outside and my knees were cold when Father finally came for me, after closing the store.
“Chata has gone away,” was all he would say. “We will get you another china.”
After dinner I went into the kitchen and I wormed the truth out of Clara, the cook. She said that Chata and I had been followed by Ramiro. After she deposited me at the school, he waylaid Chata a block away and gave her “siete puiialadas en el mero corazón” (“seven knife stabs in the very heart”). I accepted Clara’s story on faith, not at all concerned that her description matched word for word the title of a popular song. I stamped about the house, pumping my legs high like the palace guards and chanting the song title aloud: “Sie-te Puiia-ladas en El Mero Corazón. Sie-te Puiia-ladas en El Mero Corazón.” The resonance of the phrase, its hard metric beat, gave Chata’s disappearance a finality I could comprehend.
The fuller import of Chata’s death did not dawn on me until the following day, when I was taken to school by her older sister, Elvira, whose braids were neither as long nor as glossy as Chata’s and whose skirts did not smell half as good.
In the days that followed, Chata’s violent death and Arturo’s hard questions got mixed together in my dreams, and my apprehension grew that Chata had been murdered because of me, and because I was a Jew.
Unlike her younger sister, Elvira was a practicing Catholic, and one Sunday afternoon she sneaked me into the cathedral across from the park.
“You must pray to Our Lord,” she whispered, pointing to the pale naked statue, with bloodied ribs and thorns on his head, that hung with arms outstretched from the front wall, in the same place where the Ark would stand in our synagogue; only this place was a lot bigger and scarier.
When I balked at reciting the paternoster she had taught me, Elvira rebuked me, “You must pray to Our Lord to be forgiven for your ancestors’ sins against him. That way you can go to heaven, even if you’re not Catholic.”
Choking back tears, I mumbled the paternoster, not for myself so much but for Chata, who Elvira said had been punished for her sins.
During recess one noon, Arturo again brought up the Jews and Christ. This time Gunter was with him, and there was something in his face I had not seen here before. Gunter’s blue eyes never looked right at yours.
“My mother says all Jews have tails and horns,” Arturo said, with an accusing look. Now this I knew was absurd, because I had seen myself in the mirror.
“They do not,” I said.
“Jews have bald-headed pigeons,” Gunter said, with a smirk.
I flushed because this was true—at least I did, Father did and Uncle Mair, and Mr. Halevi at the Turkish baths, but not Señor Gonzales and the others there that day—their pigeons weren’t bald . . . But then, what business was it of Gunter’s anyway?
“It’s none of your business,” I said. My face was hot.
“My mother says Jews are the devil,” Arturo said, and he gave me a shove. Gunter called the other boys over and said, “Look at the Jew who killed Christ.” Then they all gathered behind him and Arturo and stared at me.
“Leave him alone,” called a thin, furry voice from the back. “He’s not the devil.” It was Coco.
“You keep still, dirty Frenchy,” Gunter said.
“Dirty Frenchy, dirty Frenchy,” chorused the other boys. Someone snatched the beret from Coco’s head, and they all stomped on it, one by one.
“Let’s look at his bald-headed pigeon,” Gunter said, turning toward me, without looking in my eyes.
I was growing frightened now, but not of Gunter, whom I suspected to be the instigator of all this. I feared the mob.
“He killed Christ,” Gunter said in a rising voice, and the group behind him grew tighter. Arturo shoved me again, harder. Torn between fear and anger, I wanted to punch Gunter in the face. But Gunter was a head taller than I, and out of reach.
I stretched to my full height. “At least I don’t make in my pants,” I said, and I looked Gunter straight in the eye.
He made a grab for my suspenders, and I swung at his face. But Arturo held me fast, and then all the other boys fell on top of me. I kicked and scratched and defended myself, but they were too many. When they had stripped off all my clothes—except my shoes and socks—they stepped back to look at me.
“He lost his tail,” Arturo said, almost in relief.
“But he has a bald-headed pigeon,” Gunter said. A giggle that was unlike any sound I had ever heard from a boy, or anyone else, came out of his face.
I turned toward the wall. My chest ached from the effort to hold back tears. Several of the boys had drifted away, as if they wished to distance themselves from the two leaders.
Silence, except for the trickle of the fountain and the heaving of my chest. Coco came forward and offered me his crushed beret so I could cover myself.
More boys moved away, and I saw that the girls had all gathered at the far end of the patio, behind the fountain—all except Grace Samayoa. She sat on the rim of the fountain and stared at me.
“Don’t look,” I said to Grace Samayoa, and I turned to one side. But she kept on looking.
Then Grace Samayoa said, “I hate you,” and she walked toward the girls at the far end of the patio.
I covered myself with Coco’s cap, and I cried. I cried at the top of my lungs until Miss Hale came. She cleared everyone from the patio and told me to get dressed.
The following year I was left back in kindergarten. Miss Hale and my parents agreed I was underage for the first grade.
Bottles
ALCINA LUBITCH DOMECQ (b. 1953)
Translated from the Spanish by Ilan Stavans
Alberto Manguel, the celebrated Argentinian-born Canadian translator and editor, once divided writers into two categories: those who perceive a single corner of the world as their entire universe, and those who wander everywhere in the universe looking for a place called home—the particularists and the universalists. This novelist and storyteller unquestionably belongs to the first group. Her novel The Mirror’s Mirror: or, The Noble Smile of the Dog (1983) established her as a postmodernist in the tradition of Italo Calvina and Jorge Luis Borges, and Intoxicated (1988), her memorable collection of tales from which “Bottles” is taken, immediately elevated her to the level of master of the short story genre. A surrealist examination of motherhood, this tale has as protagonist a woman alienated from herself, a robot-like creature trapped in her own corner of the universe.
MOM WAS TAKEN away, I don’t know exactly where. Dad says she is in a nice place where they take good care of her. I miss her . . . although I understand. Dad says she suffered from a sickening love for bottles. First she started to buy them in the supermarket. All sorts of bottles—plastic and crystal, small and big. Everything had to be packed in a bottle—noodle soup, lemon juice, bathroom soap, pencils. She just wouldn’t buy something that wasn’t in one. Dad complained. Sometimes that was the reason we wouldn’t have toilet paper or there wouldn’t be any salt. And Mom used to kiss the bottles all day long. She polished them with great affection, talked to them, and at times I remember her saying that she was going to eat one. You could open a kitchen cabinet and find a million bottles. A million. I hated them, and so did my sister. I mean, why store the dirty linen in a huge bottle the size of a garbage can? Dad says Mom didn’t know anything about logic. I remember one night, after dinner, when Mom apologized and left in a hurry. An hour later she returned with a box full of wine bottles. Dad asked her what had gotten into her. She said she had been at the liquor store, and she immediately started to empty every single bottle into the toilet. All the wine was dumped. She just needed the bottles. Dad and I and my sister just sat there, on the living room couch, watching Mom wash and kiss those ugly wine bottles. I think my sister began to cry. But Mom didn’t care. Then Dad called the police, but they didn’t do a thing. Weeks later, we pretended to have forgotten everything. It was then that Mom began screaming that she was pregnant, like when my sis
ter was born. She was shouting that a tiny plastic bottle was living inside her stomach. She said she was having pain. She was vomiting and pale. She cried a lot. Dad called an ambulance, and Mom was taken to the hospital. There the doctors made x-rays and checked her all over. Nothing was wrong. They just couldn’t find the tiny plastic bottle. But for days she kept insisting that it was living inside her, growing; that’s what she used to say to me and my sister. Not to Dad anymore, because he wouldn’t listen to her, he just wouldn’t listen. I miss Mom . . . She was taken away a month later, after the event with the statue in the living room. You see, one afternoon she decided that the tiny bottle wasn’t in her stomach anymore. Now she felt bad because something was going to happen to her. Like a prophecy. She was feeling that something was coming upon her. And next morning, before my sister and I left for school, we found Mom near the couch, standing in the living room. She was vertical, standing straight. She couldn’t walk around. Like in a cell. I asked her why she wouldn’t move, why she wouldn’t go to the kitchen or to my room. Mom answered that she couldn’t because she was trapped in a bottle, a gigantic one. We could see her and she could see us too, but according to Mom, nobody could touch her body because there was glass surrounding it. Actually, I touched her and I never felt any glass. Neither did Dad or my sister. But Mom insisted that she couldn’t feel us. For days she stayed in that position, and after some time I was able to picture the big bottle. Mom was like a spider you catch in the backyard and suffocate in Tupperware. That’s when the ambulance came for the second time. I wasn’t home but Dad was. He was there when they took her away. I was at school, although I knew what was happening. That same day we threw away all the bottles in a nearby dump. The neighbors were staring at us, but we didn’t care. It felt good, very good.
BRAZIL
Love
CLARICE LISPECTOR (1925–1977)
Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero
Perhaps the most complex story in this volume, “Love,” collected in Family Ties (1960), is to Brazilian letters what Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” is to English literature: a meditation on feminine angst. During a tram ride, Anna, a happy housewife and mother, is thrown into existential despair when she confronts the face of a blind man chewing gum. Like the narrator of Sartre’s Nausea, Lispector’s protagonist is horrified by the dense fluidity of existence, which challenges the neat arrangements of domestic life as well as her reflective consciousness. Lispector’s The Complete Stories appeared in English in 2015. Benjamin Moser’s biography, Why This Word (2012), follows her existential and aesthetic journey in minute detail.
FEELING A LITTLE tired, with her purchases bulging her new string bag, Anna boarded the tram. She placed the bag on her lap and the tram started off. Settling back in her seat, she tried to find a comfortable position, with a sigh of mild satisfaction.
Anna had nice children, she reflected with certainty and pleasure. They were growing up, bathing themselves and misbehaving; they were demanding more and more of her time. The kitchen, after all, was spacious with its old stove that made explosive noises. The heat was oppressive in the apartment, which they were paying off in installments, and the wind, playing against the curtains she had made herself, reminded her that if she wanted to she could pause to wipe her forehead and to contemplate the calm horizon. Like a farmer. She had planted the seeds she held in her hand, no others, but only those. And they were growing into trees. Her brisk conversations with the electricity man were growing, the water filling the bank was growing, her children were growing, the table was growing with food, her husband arriving with the newspapers and smiling with hunger, the irritating singing of the maids resounding through the block. Anna tranquilly put her small, strong hand, her life current, to everything. Certain times of the afternoon struck her as being critical. At a certain hour of the afternoon, the trees she had planted laughed at her. And when nothing more required her strength, she became anxious. Meanwhile she felt herself more solid than ever, her body become a little thicker, and it was worth seeing the manner in which she cut out blouses for the children, the large scissors snapping into the material. All her vaguely artistic aspirations had for some time been channeled into making her days fulfilled and beautiful; with time, her taste for the decorative had developed and supplanted intimate disorder. She seemed to have discovered that everything was capable of being perfected, that each thing could be given a harmonious appearance; life itself could be created by man.
Deep down, Anna had always found it necessary to feel the firm roots of things. And this is what a home had surprisingly provided. Through tortuous paths, she had achieved a woman’s destiny, with the surprise of conforming to it almost as if she had invented that destiny herself. The man whom she had married was a real man; the children she mothered were real children. Her previous youth now seemed alien to her, like one of life’s illnesses. She had gradually emerged to discover that life could be lived without happiness: by abolishing it she had found a legion of persons, previously invisible, who lived as one works—with perseverance, persistence, and contentment. What had happened to Anna before possessing a home of her own stood forever beyond her reach: that disturbing exaltation she had often confused with unbearable happiness. In exchange she had created something ultimately comprehensible, the life of an adult. This was what she had wanted and chosen.
Her precautions were now reduced to alertness during the dangerous part of the afternoon, when the house was empty and she was no longer needed; when the sun reached its zenith and each member of the family went about his separate duties. Looking at the polished furniture, she felt her heart contract a little with fear. But in her life there was no opportunity to cherish her fears—she suppressed them with that same ingenuity she had acquired from domestic struggles. Then she would go out shopping or take things to be mended, unobtrusively looking after her home and her family. When she returned, it would already be late afternoon and the children back from school would absorb her attention. Until the evening descended with its quiet excitement. In the morning she would awaken surrounded by her calm domestic duties. She would find the furniture dusty and dirty once more, as if it had returned repentant. As for herself, she mysteriously formed part of the soft, dark roots of the earth. And anonymously she nourished life. It was pleasant like this. And this was what she had wanted and chosen.
The tram swayed on its rails and turned into the main road. Suddenly the wind became more humid, announcing not only the passing of the afternoon but the end of that uncertain hour. Anna sighed with relief, and a deep sense of acceptance gave her face an air of womanhood.
The tram would drag along and then suddenly jolt to a halt. As far as Humaitá she could relax. Suddenly she saw the man stationary at the tram stop. The difference between him and others was that he was really stationary. He stood with his hands out in front of him—blind.
But what else was there about him that made Anna sit up in distrust?
Something disquieting was happening. Then she discovered what it was: the blind man was chewing gum . . . a blind man chewing gum. Anna still had time to reflect for a second that her brothers were coming to dinner—her heart pounding at regular intervals. Leaning forward, she studied the blind man intently, as one observes something incapable of returning our gaze. Relaxed, and with open eyes, he was chewing gum in the failing light. The facial movements of his chewing made him appear to smile and then suddenly stop smiling, to smile and stop smiling. Anna stared at him as if he had insulted her. And anyone watching would have received the impression of a woman filled with hatred. She continued to stare at him, leaning more and more forward—until the tram gave a sudden jerk, throwing her unexpectedly backward. The heavy string bag toppled from her lap and landed on the floor. Anna cried out, the conductor gave the signal to stop before realizing what was happening, and the tram came to an abrupt halt. The other passengers looked on in amazement. Too paralyzed to gather up her shopping, Anna sat upright, her
face suddenly pale. An expression, long since forgotten, awkwardly reappeared, unexpected and inexplicable. The Negro newsboy smiled as he handed over her bundle. The eggs had broken in their newspaper wrapping. Yellow sticky yolks dripped between the strands of the bag. The blind man had interrupted his chewing and held out his unsteady hands, trying in vain to grasp what had happened. She removed the parcel of eggs from the string, accompanied by the smiles of the passengers. A second signal from the conductor, and the tram moved off with another jerk.
A few moments later, people were no longer staring at her. The tram was rattling on the rails, and the blind man chewing gum had remained behind forever. But the damage had been done.
The string bag felt rough between her fingers, not soft and familiar as when she had knitted it. The bag had lost its meaning; to find herself on that tram was a broken thread; she did not know what to do with the purchases on her lap. Like some strange music, the world started up again around her. The damage had been done. But why? Had she forgotten that there were blind people? Compassion choked her. Anna’s breathing became heavy. Even those things that had existed before the episode were now on the alert, more hostile, and even perishable. The world had once more become a nightmare. Several years fell away, the yellow yolks trickled. Exiled from her own days, it seemed to her that the people in the streets were vulnerable, that they barely maintained their equilibrium on the surface of the darkness—and for a moment they appeared to lack any sense of direction. The perception of an absence of law came so unexpectedly that Anna clutched the seat in front of her, as if she might fall off the tram, as if things might be overturned with the same calm they had possessed when order reigned.
What she called a crisis had come at last. And its sign was the intense pleasure with which she now looked at things, suffering and alarmed. The heat had become more oppressive; everything had gained new power and a stronger voice. In the Rua Voluntarios da Patria, revolution seemed imminent, the grids of the gutters were dry, the air dusty. A blind man chewing gum had plunged the world into a mysterious excitement. In every strong person there was a lack of compassion for the blind man, and their strength terrified her. Beside her sat a woman in blue with an expression that made Anna avert her gaze rapidly. On the pavement a mother shook her little boy. Two lovers held hands smiling . . . And the blind man? Anna had lapsed into a mood of compassion, which greatly distressed her.