A short while afterwards I heard footsteps in the corridor. I waited and recognized my mother’s voice. ‘What’s going on, Tristán? Has something happened?’
From our room you could hear the voice on the telephone more clearly than Tristán’s. I opened the door a crack. Now my uncle was apologizing for calling so late.
‘Something’s come up. More of an opportunity than a problem. We’re leaving on a trip. Tomorrow.’
I heard silence. A long silence. And I’m choosing my words carefully. That’s what I heard. Silence could be heard just as much, or more, than words on that telephone.
‘You’ve had another row with Valeria, haven’t you?’
I closed the door. Tristán was a bad liar. A really bad liar. And Mum must have known about the quarrels that her brother and his wife had. I wasn’t interested in whatever else they had to say. We would go back home the next day on the first coach. That was the last thing I heard Tristán say. And that was what I had decided a short while ago, nothing more and nothing less.
‘I hope the children haven’t been a pain.’
That was when the best summer of my life came to an end, unexpectedly and abruptly. I closed my suitcase, then shut Pedrito’s and sat down on the bed.
A few hours later Tristán knocked on the door. He had the same clothes on as the night before, his hair was unkempt and he smelled of wine. For the first time he looked old. To a thirteen-year-old girl a fifty-year-old man is old. I felt sorry for him, really sorry for him. He looked at me, trying to act as if nothing had happened. But he wasn’t even surprised that our bags were packed.
Valeria didn’t like goodbyes and even less so if woken up when she was fast asleep. What’s more, she’d had indigestion the night before and needed to rest. But he promised that as soon as they got to America they would send us postcards. Understood?
‘From Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela,’ he said. I couldn’t look at him.
We walked along the road like three shadows, as if there were nothing to bind us together. My brother was still half asleep and cross about not saying goodbye to Valeria. Tristán was breathing like an asthmatic and had withdrawn into stony silence after his torrent of excuses and lies. I was listening to the silence again and wondering about a whole host of things for which there would never be an answer. I took a deep breath when we reached the village square. The bar was opening up, and the owner, with a broom in his hand, looked at us and couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked staring at our bags. None of us bothered to reply, but I was glad that the bar was open and that the owner was there. Just like any other morning when nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Tristán remembered that we hadn’t had any breakfast and sat us at a table with two chairs and ordered a couple of pastries. Then he leaned against the bar and downed a brandy in one go.
‘What’s indigestion?’ asked Pedrito.
‘What Valeria had yesterday,’ I answered without looking at him and keeping my eye on the bar. ‘It’s an illness you get better from straight away.’
My brother was furious.
‘It’s all his fault,’ he said pointing at Tristán. ‘Everything he told us was lies. He’s treated us like small children.’
He took a drawing book out of his bag and ripped out a page I immediately recognized. It was Valeria, half-woman, half-jaguar, diving into the river.
‘I don’t want any of the others,’ he said.
He was about to rip up the drawing book, but I stopped him. We quarrelled. He ended up giving in and, shrugging, put the only sheet of paper he wanted in his pocket. I thought of Aunt Berta, my scrapbook and our argument. This situation seemed somewhat similar: some drawings, someone wanting to rip them up and the other person trying to stop them. But now, as in those periods of drowsiness I had told my uncle about, I understood everything. And I saw Berta when she was young, incredibly beautiful and in love with a fascinating and adventurous Tristán. She was ecstatic, mad about him but too attached to her own sense of security to accept any other way of life. And that’s what had caused the bitterness and hatred, her inability to contain herself when, years later, she recognized the same emotions in her own niece. She had destroyed her future by being a coward. ‘Excessive caution,’ I remembered. Something I would never forget. Just as I would never forget Valeria and her terrible affliction: jealousy.
I went over to Tristán with the drawing book under my arm. He had another glass of brandy in front of him, but I pretended I hadn’t noticed. I needed him to clear things up for me. To clear up whether there was any truth in what Valeria had said or if what she’d said was simply an explosion, revenge, an outburst of anger when terrible things are said that haven’t entered our heads before. I also wanted to know where she could have gone off to so angrily and why I’d seen strange markings and geometric shapes on her body in the moonlight. More than anything else, the most important thing I wanted to know was whether the Wahyes-Wahno existed or not.
I didn’t get to ask anything. When Tristán saw me, he clicked his tongue several times and shook his head. I realized he was asking me to keep quiet. I also realized, although his lips hadn’t moved, that he knew exactly what I was thinking.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not you.’
He took a deep breath, put his hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes.
‘Your brother’s still young and he’ll forget, but you won’t. You’ve been among them. And they accepted you. From the start.’
I think he smiled. I’m not sure. At that moment the bar owner announced that the coach had arrived, and I felt happy and sad all at the same time. I wanted to laugh and to cry and, more than anything, I really wanted my uncle to carry on talking and not to stop talking as we walked to the coach and not to stop until the driver started the coach up. But it didn’t turn out exactly that way.
‘You’ve got the keys to a secret world,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘Enjoy it. And if one day you want to share it, then share it, but choose who you share it with carefully.’
His last words sounded sad to me. Then, speaking in a louder voice, he said he didn’t like goodbyes either. He slapped Pedrito on the back and leaned back on the bar again. My brother and I picked up our luggage, boarded the coach, sat down in the front row and waited. I didn’t know if it was the best or the saddest day of my whole life. My brother stifled a yawn, and I began leafing mechanically through the drawing book. There was Tristán, lost in the jungle, bare-chested with the red bandanna around his head. There was the woman who saved him with the two babies in the sling around her neck; the village he was taken to; the natives’ faces looking at the injured man; arrows flying through the air; members of the tribe at the point of melting into the trees, changing colour, changing their appearance, disappearing into lakes and swamps or becoming one with the luxuriance of their immense green world. The huge funnel. And it was more than strange. Those sheets of paper that Pedrito no longer wanted, those faces, that vegetation and the villages in the drawings were almost exactly the same as I had imagined them. I was going to tell him. I was going to ask him why he had thought of tying a red bandanna around our uncle’s head or why he had drawn a gigantic funnel using every shade of green. It was the same bandanna I had given him, and they were the same concentric circles I was scared of being swallowed up by while I was seeing through Tristán’s eyes. But I never managed to get a word out this time either. Pedrito had just fallen asleep on my shoulder. I did my best to make him comfortable on the two seats. I put a jumper under his head and sat down in the seat behind next to the window. Then I discovered it. The driver had just closed the luggage compartment and was handing some baskets and a package to an elderly couple waiting on the pavement. Now I remembered the scene of just a few minutes before. Two passengers were getting off. And two passengers were getting on! An elderly married couple and my brother and me. Two for two. It was a draw. Pedrito was asleep, the bar owner hadn’t realized either and Tristán, who wa
s leaving the bar just then, without looking at us, was turning towards the path that would take him home. I ran to the back seat and rapped on the rear window. Although I knew he couldn’t hear me, I shouted, ‘A draw! It’s a draw!’ The coach started off, and Tristán, still with his back to me, as if guessing I was calling out to him, raised his right hand in farewell. Then he stumbled along the path until he disappeared around a bend.
I would never see either of them again. I already knew that when I was at the rear window of the coach. I knew – or rather I saw–just as I did in those periods of drowsiness wandering through different times and recognizing places I’d never been. In my mind I could also read some letters that still hadn’t been written. Short letters sent to the family, written by both of them from far-off places. Letters that one day would stop arriving without anyone being in the least bit concerned. I heard the words ‘Go with the flow!’ again as my parents smiled and shook their heads and Aunt Berta pursed her lips in a rictus grin full of bitterness. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the adult Pedrito, now an architect, very serious and formal, picking up some plans from his desk and the Valeria-Jaguar drawing, slightly yellowed with age, in a frame on one of the walls of his studio. But, more than anything, I felt that I was my own person; I was me. I was at the rear window of the coach stretching out the last moments of that summer and experiencing a strange emotion I couldn’t quite explain. It was a sad happiness or a happy sadness. And, once again, I wanted to burst out laughing and burst into tears as well. I was euphoric and dejected all at the same time, and now that I’m the same age as my aunt and uncle must have been back then I remember it was a deep and intense feeling. I was a thirteen-year-old girl, and I’d fallen deeply and passionately in love with Tristán. And although I didn’t know that that first love was an impossible love, I did know that it was mutual. Because with my face still at the window, without being able to see anything but the dust raised up by the coach on the road, I had no doubt whatsoever. I had given him my admiration, all my affection, the intense dreams of a teenager. And, in turn, he had left me his most precious asset as a legacy. The fabulous and secret world of the Wahyes-Wahno.
WORLD SERIES SEASON 2: SPAIN (CASTILIAN) THE WORLD SERIES IS A JOINT INITIATIVE BETWEEN PETER OWEN PUBLISHERS AND ISTROS BOOKS
Peter Owen Publishers
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL, UK
Peter Owen and Istros Books are distributed in the USA and Canada by Independent Publishers Group/Trafalgar Square 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610, USA
Translated from the Spanish La habitación de Nona
Copyright © Cristina Fernández Cubas 2015
Represented by Casanovas & Lynch Agencia Literaria S.L.
English translation copyright © Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts 2017
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
The moral rights of the author and the translators are hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Paperback ISBN
978-0-7206-1953-9
Epub ISBN
978-0-7206-1954-6
Mobipocket ISBN
978-0-7206-1955-3
PDF ISBN
978-0-7206-1956-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Davor Pukljak, frontispis.hr Author photograph © Pilar Aymerich Typeset by Octavo Smith Publishing Services
* * *
This work has been published with a subsidy from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport of Spain
OTHER TITLES IN THE WORLD SERIES SPANISH SEASON
Julio Llamazares, Wolf Moon (translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles)
José Ovejero, Inventing Love (translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles)
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
‘The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page,’ wrote St Augustine. Journey with us to explore outstanding contemporary literature translated into English for the first time. Read a single book in each season – which will focus on a different country or region every time – or try all three and experience the range and diversity to be found in contemporary literature from across the globe.
Read the world – three books at a time
3 works of literature in
2 seasons each year from
1 country each season
For information on forthcoming seasons go to www.peterowen.com
OTHER TITLES IN THE
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
SEASON 2: SPAIN
JULIO LLAMAZARES
Wolf Moon
Translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
978-0-7206-1945-4 / 192pp
Defeated by Franco’s Nationalists, four Republican fugitives flee into the Cantabrian Mountains at the end of the Spanish Civil War. They are on the run, skirmishing with the Guardia Civil, knowing that surrender means death. Wounded and hungry, they are frequently drawn from the safety of the wilderness into the villages they once inhabited, not only risking their lives but those of sympathizers helping them. Faced with the lonely mountains, harsh winters and unforgiving summers, it is only a matter of time before they are hunted down. Llamazares’s lyrical prose vividly animates the wilderness, making the Spanish landscape as much a witness to the brutal oppression of the period as the persecuted villagers and Republicans.
Published in 1985, Wolf Moon was the first novel that centred on the Spanish Maquis to be published in Spain after Franco’s death in 1975.
JOSÉ OVEJERO
Inventing Love
Translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
978-0-7206-1949-2 / 224pp
Samuel leads a comfortable but uninspiring existence in Madrid, consoling himself among friends who have reached a similar point in life. One night he receives a call. Clara, his lover, has died in a car accident. The thing is, he doesn’t know anyone called Clara.
A simple case of mistaken identity offers Samuel the chance to inhabit another, more tumultuous life, leading him to consider whether, if he invents a past of love and loss, he could even attend her funeral. Unable to resist the chance, Samuel finds himself drawn down a path of lies until he begins to have trouble distinguishing between truth and fantasy. But such is the allure of his invented life that he is willing to persist and in the process create a new version of the present – with little regard for the consequences to himself and to others.
José Ovejero’s existential tale of stolen identity exposes the fictions people weave to sustain themselves in a dehumanizing modern world.
PREVIOUS SEASONS IN THE
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
Season 1: Slovenia
Evald Flisar, Three Loves, One Death
Jela Krečič, None Like Her
Dušan Šarotar, Panorama
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
SEASON 1: SLOVENIA
JELA KREČIČ
None Like Her
Translated by Olivia Hellewell
978-0-7206-1911-9 / 288pp
Matjaž is fearful of losing his friends over his obsession with his ex-girlfriend. To prove that he has moved on from his relationship with her, he embarks on an odyssey of dates around Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. In this comic and romantic tale a chapter is devoted to each new encounter and adventure. The women he selects are wildly different from one another, and the interactions of the characters are perspicuously and memorably observed.
Their preoccupations – drawn with coruscating dialogue – will speak directly to Generation Y, and in Matjaž, the hero, Jela Krečič has created a well-observed crypto-misogynist of the twenty-first century whose behaviour she offers up for the reader’s scrutiny.
EVALD FLISAR
Three Loves, One Death
&n
bsp; Translated by David Limon
978-0-7206-1930-0 / 208pp
A family move from the city to the Slovenian countryside. The plan is to restore and make habitable a large, dilapidated farmhouse. Then the relatives arrive. There’s Cousin Vladimir, a former Partisan writing his memoirs, Uncle Vinko, an accountant who would like to raise the largest head of cabbage and appear in the Guinness World Records, Aunt Mara and her illegitimate daughter Elizabeta who’s hell bent on making her first sexual encounter the ‘event of the century’. And, finally, Uncle Švejk, the accidental hero of the war for independence, turns up out of the blue one Sunday afternoon …
Evald Flisar handles the absurd events that follow like no other writer, making the smallest incidents rich in meaning. The house, the family, their competing instincts and desires provide an unlikely vehicle for Flisar’s commentary on the nature of social cohesion and freedom.
DUŠAN ŠAROTAR
Panorama
Translated by Rawley Grau
978-0-7206-1922-5 / 208pp
Deftly blending fiction, history and journalism, Dušan Šarotar takes the reader on a deeply reflective yet kaleidoscopic journey from northern to southern Europe. In a manner reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, he supplements his engrossing narrative with photographs, which help to blur the lines between fiction and journalism. The writer’s experience of landscape is bound up in a personal yet elusive search for self-discovery, as he and a diverse group of international fellow travellers relate in their distinctive and memorable voices their unique stories and common quest for somewhere they might call home.
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