We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  You stopped the car when we’d reached the enormous park that lay just north of the city. We walked through the grass that grew along the riverside and sat at the tables set up in the shade of the trees. Newsboys wandered through the umbrellas and benches, declaiming newspaper headlines announcing the soccer team’s victory as if singing them. A middle-aged man wearing only one shoe shouted “Viva! Viva!” while brandishing a tiny “open car” flag from a taxi with both hands. A group of young men and women leapt and danced about, their naked torsos painted in stripes of white and pale blue. Men stinking of alcohol approached, leeringly entreating me: “Hey, c’mere, milongita …” A street musician tipped his violin so its strings ran parallel to the river’s flow, playing as if the river were his real instrument. The reflected light from the river limned the edges of everyone’s bodies so sharply that they looked as though the slightest touch would split their flesh to the bone. Except you: your form wavered still, as if behind water. I’d said I wanted to go swimming, but as I watched your body undulate before me I was overcome by the feeling that I was already submerged, looking up at you from the riverbed. And maybe this was why every sound around me—the rumble of the river, like the sound of the heavens crumbling bit by bit; the music that so resembled it; the shouting of the crowds; the gravel crunching in three-four time beneath car wheels—reached my ears as if through water, muffled and echoing. You threw your arms about my waist, your muscles crushing me tight against you, and you said something I couldn’t hear even as your breath blew right in my ear. I nodded and smiled as you continued speaking. The only thing I could hear clearly was the approaching wind. Looking toward its source, I saw a young boy with a wisteria basket hanging from his arm that overflowed with blue blossoms. The boy was singing, advertising his wares in a voice like the blowing wind. Listening to him, the breeze ruffling my hair, I felt my spirits rise.

  I called out to the boy: “Hey, chiquilín!” The goldeneyed chiquilín stopped before me. The seat of his denim shorts had been ripped and now was patched as if to hide his precocious development, but what made his legs look truly unnatural was the fact that he wore left shoes on both his feet. When I pointed this out, he replied, “Both my feet are shaped like left feet. Big toes sprout from the right side of each. So all my shoes are left shoes, and my socks too, and my tights.” I asked him to remove his shoes and show me, but he stubbornly refused.

  “Why do you have two left feet?”

  “It’s my parents’ fault.”

  “Oh, they’re … closely related?”

  “No, not that. My mother slept around on my father, so he grew a cuckold’s horns and I ended up with hooves.”

  “Why did you have to grow hooves?”

  “Because long ago, my mother slept with me as well.” “I see. So you were cuckolded too. Did your father sprout horns then?”

  “My mother said that when my father’s horn turned into a real horn, she lost her use for him.”

  “So your feet got this way because they turned into hooves?”

  “After a while. I walked on them until they split back into toes, but they both ended up as left feet.”

  “How old are you?”

  “A thousand years.”

  “Exactly?” My eyes widened in surprise.

  “Exactly,” he said, laughing bashfully. I found myself blushing a little myself.

  Feeling left out, I broke into the conversation, asking, “What is it you’re selling?” He replied, “I have bouquets of voices.”

  “Here, I’ll take one,” you replied, handing the chiquilín three bills. He told us he was going to sing “Prelude for the Year 3001” for us, but your expression clouded and you said, “Enough with the future. Sing something with some history to it.”

  And so, taking on the persona of a wanton woman, the boy began to sing “A Milonga for the Melted Moon.” His voice seemed to contain the hoarse voices of multitudes, men and women alike. I knew the song. It told the story of the chiquilín himself. How hooves sprouted from his feet, how his father found out about his affair with his mother, how horns sprouted long and hard from his father’s forehead and crotch, how his father used the horns to kill his mother, how his father went to the printer’s shop where he worked and stuck his head into the paper-cutting machine, killing himself. An orphan now, chiquilín, you vowed never to grow up and sliced off that which protruded from your body. You lived on as an eternal boy, never quite a man, never quite a woman. You made your living singing in your pure, eternally unblemished voice, but in the end you were still only a child and could only earn so much. You could never make enough to eat, so when the maté you drank finally dried up you came here, joined the other musicians in feasting on the light the river reflected and the dancing girls in drinking its silver water; you all ended up drunk, dancing together. But even as you danced, you were never more than waist-high to them; the dancing girls were always kind to you, this being who was neither man nor woman, but who’d lived too long and done too much to be a child. You’d drunk enough silver riverwater that your body shone bright as a moon all night, the eyes of the city always on you. You became the city’s center. You danced with the girls, surrounded by it. The city spun around you. It spun: yira, yira, yira.

  The chiquilín’s song came to an end and in an attempt to express the emotion rising within me, I kissed his fore-head. But that somehow seemed inadequate, so next I pressed my lips hard against his. His moonlit eyes wide open all the while, he just stood and let me. The chiquilín’s lips when mine left them shone wetly, a pale shade of rose madder. With these lips, he began to speak.

  “You were born in this city, weren’t you? Only women born here can understand my song.”

  “You seem to be like me. You seem to have my memories.”

  “Do you sell anything else? Don’t you have anything else in that basket of yours?” Burning with sudden emotion, I interrupted again.

  “I have a bouquet of blue eyes.”

  He withdrew from his wisteria basket a clutch of long stems topped with large, round balls like lollipops. Each sphere was an eye the color of the legendary lake that lay in the unexplored regions of the north. You salivated at the sight of these spheres that shone wetly as if freshly sucked. Seeing the hunger in your eyes, I thought for a moment and then bought you the blue-eyed bouquet. Squinting as if dazzled by brightness, I received the bouquet from the chiquilín in exchange for five bills and then, before I handed them over to you, said, “All of these eyes are my eyes. These are the eyes I used to watch you dance. By giving you my eyes, I’m giving you back your past. You’ll remember if you know me from before, you’ll remember who you are, you’ll remember everything.”

  “That’s a lie! These eyes are mine!” shouted the chiquilín suddenly. As if anticipating something you were about to say, the chiquilín burst into tears and threw himself at my feet, looking up at me from below.

  “You don’t remember, but exactly four years ago today you came to me even though I danced here, drinking the light of the moon. You had no one else either; you were a wanton woman, a yira. The sight of the two of us dancing together is burned into the eyes of this bouquet. Suck on these eyes and you’ll remember.”

  You licked your lips and reached out to take one of the eyes. The bouquet shook and the eyes brushed against each other, jingling faintly like bells. I tickled your side, preventing you from grabbing the eye you reached for. You glared at me for a second with hatred-reddened eyes of your own, but soon enough their gaze returned to the chiquilín. Bereft of companions, I wanted to shout at you, tell you that you and I were the couple, not you and he. Keeping me in the periphery of your vision, you spoke to the elderly child.

  “I’ll never forget you. I’ll keep this bouquet with me always. If I could just keep remembering you, I can keep from doing the same things I’ve always done.”

  “It relieves me so to hear you say that. I’ve lived this way too long. I’ve been singing the story engraved in those eyes and now
I’m so, so tired. If you take care of these eyes for me then I can disappear at last. I just ask that from time to time you caress your body with the bouquet. Put my eyes in your mouth, caress them with your tongue. That way I’ll be able to touch you still. Don’t leave me all alone again, please.”

  “I promise. And keep watch over me, too, all right?” You’d once said that those who bore the same reef-hued eyes belonged together, and now you stared at these light blue eyes with tear-filled, light blue eyes of your own. Realizing that if it weren’t for me you’d never have exchanged words with this wizened brat, I was crushed and hung my head. And as I did, I caught sight of my feet. Sucking in my breath, I quickly shifted my gaze to the chiquilín’s. It was he and I who were alike, not you and he. You’d made a mistake; this love too would be yet another repetition.

  He was looking at the chiquilín and I with sympathy in his gaze. Yet he was the one all the eyes in my hand stared at.

  “Well, now I’m going to disappear. I leave you everything I have left.”

  And with that, the chiquilín slipped the knife from the sheath at my side, and, after pressing it briefly against the pad of his fingertip to confirm its sharpness, plunged it into one honey-colored eye before I had a chance to stop him. For a moment I couldn’t see what had happened. The blade dazzled my eyes, and just imagining it entering his eye, a sharp pain lanced through the back of mine, darkening it. By the time my eyes adjusted to the brightness and the blade, the knife had already penetrated the entire eyeball, slicing easily as if through gelatin. A thick, syrupy fluid that was not quite clear and not quite silver ran down the knife’s handle, and I swallowed my own saliva hard. Ten centimeters in, the knife had reached the point that it could gouge, and the eyeball emerged skewered on the blade like a sea turtle egg. Exposed to the air, its color turned from that of a cat’s eye marble to that of the sky. After gouging out his other eye, he faced me with his syrup-seeping sockets and sightlessly fumbled his eyeballs from his hands into mine, speaking in a voice filled with intense emotion.

  “Now I am bound to you more strongly than that man. There’s nothing left for you to do.” The chiquilín winked at me with one of his ruined eyes. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to lick the fluid that ran from his sockets like liquid candy.

  The child had smashed his eyes for you, but when his eyelids closed, clear fluid ran from beneath them. It glittered with the light of the tangerine sunset that the river reflected. Transparent semicircles like scales filled it, refracting the light. He walked toward the riverside, the sound of his passage dry, as if he were an insect jumping through grass. The fluid still flowed, leaving a trail like a slug’s behind him. The child seemed to shrink as the fluid poured down. Thin creases appeared on the nape of his neck, sucking in the light from the river even as it illuminated them, darkening the area around him. A black mist gathered at his feet. But as you followed after him, all you seemed to see was his shine.

  Liquid, sweet as candy, covered your entire body, made you glitter like an ice sculpture. I couldn’t help but follow, but you shone so brightly it was hard to look at you directly; I became afraid I’d lose you. With only your voice like the blowing wind to guide me, I reached out to touch you. “Mentira, mentira, verás que todo es mentira,” you sang, “I’ll be reborn in 3001 and around I’ll go again: yira, yira, yira.” Lost in the light that danced down around us, I felt an overwhelming empathy with you and tried to sing along, reaching my hand toward you, but I stumbled and fell to the ground. Your body, now a mass of melted glass, fell too.

  The boy collapsed soundlessly at the river’s edge. When I ran to him, I saw only the boy’s shriveled, blackened skin and a turgid flow of colorless fluid. His mouth, now just fleshless lips, still dripped with the remnants of his song: “Yira, yira …” I touched my finger to his colorless blood and sniffed it. The odor was so raw it turned my stomach. I brought my finger to your raspberry lips and I heard you swallow in anticipation.

  The fluid ran slowly down the backside of his finger, light from the reddening sky transforming it into grenadine as it flowed in a string to the ground. Returning to myself, I quickly put the finger in my mouth, but instead of sweet it tasted faintly salty. There was no change in my memory, not even when I scrambled to put one of my newly acquired eyes in my mouth as well. Disappointed, I looked over at the chiquilín and found that his body had turned transparent and lost its voice, that he was now a pale, silvery puddle trickling slowly into the river. The chiquilín had died, and the body he’d formed from the river-water he’d drunk was returning to its source. The blood I’d tasted had been concentrated riverwater. I could hear the river flow within my body with a sound like violin strings being rubbed, and I felt as if I were transforming into the river myself. Hurriedly shedding my clothes, I dove in.

  I was suddenly displaced, bereft. Doubts over-whelmed me: why was I here, what was I doing? I stood and watched as the evening light turned your tears opalescent, as your naked body dove into the river like a bird taking flight. It occurred to me that I was always watching things—perhaps you had always been just a trick of the light carried to me by the wind; perhaps instead of being excluded from your company, I’d always been alone. Last night I snuck into your room as you watched the soccer game on television, intending to stab you with my knife, but of course I couldn’t do it, in the end all I did was steal a red handkerchief as I retreated—but perhaps all this too had been just tricks of the light, things I dreamt in my room in the city on the river’s far shore. I felt as though I were playing a leading role in a game our pursuer was playing with us, that my very existence depended on our pursuer’s gaze. Indeed, this feeling became a certainty; I was sure our pursuer was hidden somewhere even now, watching my every move. And in fact, hadn’t there been a mermaid etched into that metal handrail back there?

  But there was no one around that I could see. The breeze brought only the sounds of a far-off flute and passing cars. I slowly shed my clothes. The cheap dress looked faded under the sunset, the color of persimmons, and its passage over my shoulders left a cold, dry, fluttering echo on my skin and sounded like velvet being rubbed, like the song of a bandoneón. Shedding my shoes as well, I heard another sound, this one like knocking on a wooden door. I was muttering to myself, but it sounded like a bass line. I waded slowly into the river to its rhythm.

  The light split and danced within the river, and it was brighter there than on land at noon. When the sky darkens, the stars that appear are formed of light the river reflects. Or perhaps it is the star’s light that flows down into the river. The truth is, no one can recall the light’s true source. It is simply said that just as sand heated by the sun all day stays warm even at night, these grains of silver so bathed in light retain it still and thus the river and stars and people are formed.

  His skin now scaled, the chiquilín swam past me. His shape remained unclear. But I could tell it was him because of the lack of eyes. The river teemed with others like him, silver-scaled creatures not quite mermaids, not quite people. Indeed, the translucent, silver water itself was fish. Silver fish, large and small, formed the water’s substance. When they died, these fish melted into a liquid that filled the spaces between those that still retained their shape. The liquid moved as the fish swam, and this was how the river flowed. There was no upstream or downstream, just movement; the river flowed in whatever direction it wished, rumbling as it went. The multitudes of sounds it contained reverberated across the entire surface of my skin, from the subtlest susurrus undetectable from the shore to the all-too-familiar rumbling that we’d grown so sick of—the sound of a lover peeling an orange; of the breath inhaled by a skylark just before it sings; of thunderclouds as they gather; of my cries as a baby, and my mother’s irritated outbursts in response; of my parents moaning on their shabby mattress; of blades crossed, metal scraping metal; of my whispers into the ear of a man I’m only pretending to love; of velvet sighing; of footsteps across a hardwood floor; of a door creaking; of l
ight cutting through the silver curtain of the sky. I heard murmurings, too, “Yira, yira,” “Mano a mano,” the sounds of memories that had poured into the river, numberless and endlessly repeating. I realized that to be in the river was to hear these sounds forever, and I was overcome with a terror that seemed to crush my pelvis—I had to escape this shadowed netherworld while I still retained my shape, before I rotted and melted too. I struggled, but the river’s current was too strong, rendering me immobile. The memories of the dead twined around me, starting with the chiquilín’s. I realized that following him had been a mistake. Perhaps the chiquilín had been a devil all along.

  Unable to swim, you needed to be saved and of course I would be the one to do it. It was a struggle searching for you in this cloudy river that stank and tasted of rotting fish. The light refracted unpredictably in the water, forming shapes I mistook for you again and again. When I finally found you, you were undulating like a jellyfish, adrift but heading nowhere. I thought perhaps you’d hear me through the water so I called out in a loud voice, but you just stared blankly, uncomprehending. I brought my legs together and rippled my body like a dolphin to reach you, and then swam the same way back toward the surface once I’d secured you in my arms.

  When you appeared before me, slicing through the water like a glittering knife through flesh, you were a merman. Scales of every color in the rainbow covered your lower body and your long hair waved like kelp. Absorbed in this vision, I reached my arms around your neck and clung to you. But as I did, I heard the chiquilín’s voice behind me, calling out for me to stay, freezing me. I could hear it singing: Please don’t leave me all alone. Thinking that if I turned to look I’d be lost forever, I shut my eyelids tight and thought of only you. I told myself I had to accept you now that I’d nearly led us both to a watery grave; it was only fair. And as I did, I recovered some of the feelings I’d had when we’d first fallen in love.