by María Ospina
VARIATIONS ON THE BODY
VARIATIONS ON THE BODY
MARÍA OSPINA
Translated by Heather Cleary
First English-language edition published 2021
Copyright © 2017 by María Ospina
Translation © 2021 by Heather Cleary
Cover design by Tree Abraham
Book design by Ann Sudmeier
Author photograph © Simón Parra
Translator photograph © Walter Funk
Vintage scissor images © karakedi35/Shutterstock.com and paranormal/Shutterstock.com
First published in Spanish as Azares del cuerpo (Bogotá: Laguna Libros, 2017); author represented by Casanovas & Lynch Literary Agency (Barcelona).
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Ospina, María, author. | Cleary, Heather, translator.
Title: Variations on the body / María Ospina ; translated by Heather Cleary.
Other titles: Azares del cuerpo. English
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009749 | ISBN 9781566896108 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781566896146 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ospina, María—Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PQ8180.425.S688 A9713 2021 | DDC 863/.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009749
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
To the memory of Gustavo Pesoa and his polished murmur.
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
POLICARPA
OCCASION
SAVING YOUNG LADIES
FAUNA OF THE AGES
COLLATERAL BEAUTY
VARIATIONS ON THE BODY
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: VARIATIONS ON THE VOICE
As its title suggests, María Ospina’s kaleidoscopic first book of short fiction centers on the body. The female body, more precisely, situated in the interconnected but unequal urban space of Bogotá in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Though Ospina’s keen eye for psychological detail allows the situations depicted in this collection to resonate with readers across place and time, the bodies that inhabit these fictions are very much of the years immediately following the escalation of violence in Colombia during the 1980s and ’90s. Armed conflict in the country dates back much further, but these decades marked a massive surge in both the drug trade and the resources assigned to the putative war on drugs, itself inextricably linked to the spread of neoliberalism and the interventionist policies of the United States. The multiform and widespread violence between the State, paramilitary groups, and guerrilla fighters had a massive effect on the social and political landscape of Colombia: the militarization of the countryside forced millions to flee to the relative safety of the capital city, where they encountered different forms of violence, rooted in biases surrounding race and social class. Meanwhile, as Ospina observes in El rompecabezas de la memoria (2017), at the same time that hundreds of thousands of people were being wounded or killed, displaced, disappeared by the State, or recruited to join armed factions, the government was implementing initiatives that sought to promote reconciliation and the reintegration of former fighters into civilian roles.
The bodies in Variations bear the marks of this historical and interpersonal violence. In the first story, a former guerrilla fighter tries to scrub away a battle scar while getting used to the new, corporate set of orders she is expected to follow behind the register of a Carrefour megastore. In the second, a young woman finds that between the baby growing inside her and the child she is paid to care for—but who treats her like a plaything—her body hardly seems to belong to her; the child’s mother, for her part, is left reeling when a friend is killed by a bomb planted on an airplane. Other stories feature a character obsessed with the flea bites that multiply nightly across her skin, teenage girls forced to navigate both their growing bodies and the eyes that fall upon them, women who alter their faces and physiques to various extremes—from waxing and clipping to surgical restructuring. These are bodies searching for connection and completion in a world that tends to slice up and serve: catcalls hail tits or ass; gender norms deride a muscular leg or arm; labor exploitation, fueled by racist othering, knows just what to do with the hands.
Just as each of the women who populate these stories finds her body at the nexus of different desires, expectations, subjugations, and hopes, so too does the voice of each narrative occupy specific social and political coordinates; in several stories, the voice itself is subject to physical and symbolic violence. One form this violence takes is silencing: when Marcela, the protagonist of “Policarpa,” returns to the offices of the publishing house that has bought the rights to her memoirs of her time as a guerrilla fighter, she finds that her editor has dramatically altered her account to remove the texture of her experience—particularly her more lyrical reflections on birds—and all trace of her colloquial speech to better conform to the sensationalist expectations of the market. This stifling of Marcela’s narrative is somatized as a powerful, recurring feeling of nausea—a symptom shared by her pregnant sister, Zenaida, in the following story.
Sometimes this violence is embedded not in censorship or appropriation but in the way a voice is penetrated by others. In “Occasion,” the continual breaching of the boundaries of Zenaida’s body by Isabela’s tugging, unfastening, and untying is echoed in the instability of the narrative point of view: though it is ostensibly Zenaida’s story we are following, we often slip into Isabela’s version of events. These shifts sometimes occur even within the same paragraph and can sometimes be quite subtle (one clear marker, nonetheless, is the description of the woman of the house, which alternates between “mother” and “employer”). As we move into and out of Zenaida’s subjectivity in this way, we grow increasingly aware of the porosity of the physical and psychological spaces afforded to her and, by extension, the precarity of her situation.
The next story, “Saving Young Ladies,” offers another kind of polyvocality—perhaps the most challenging of the collection to translate. The protagonist, Aurora, has just moved back to Bogotá after years living in the United States and spends her days in intense solitude. The closest thing she has to a human connection, in fact, is the time she spends watching the comings and goings of the girls in a Catholic residence across the street from her apartment, where they live, study, and—if they choose—prepare to take their vows. Aurora becomes increasingly fixated on one of them, and increasingly determined to save her from her oppressive surroundings. This salvation, however, is tinged with erotic projections and curiosity and clearly responds far more to Aurora’s emotional needs than to those of the girl she is trying to save.
The intermingling of spiritual salvation and erotic desire is reinforced by the story’s central narrative conceit: sustained intertextual references to the poem “The Dark Night of the Soul” by San Juan de la Cruz. The poem, written in the late sixteenth century while the soon-to-be saint was imprisoned by his fellow Carmelites for being too fervent in his religious beliefs, traces the journey of a soul as it sheds its earthly yoke and unites with God’s love, through the metaphor of a young woman who sneaks ou
t of her house at night and travels through the dark to lay with her Beloved. This poem holds a mirror up to Aurora’s conflation of desire, curiosity, and redemptive fervor, and its first verse appears in its entirety toward the end of the story, reframing the events that precede it. What might not be immediately apparent, however, to a reader whose early education did not include reading San Juan de la Cruz, is that Ospina weaves phrases and terms that point to this canonical poem throughout. The narrator’s description of the “sosiego” she seeks, and that of the residence under her constant surveillance, corresponds to the phrase “estando ya mi casa sosegada” (“My house being now at rest”), which closes the first two stanzas of the poem and is the circumstance that allows the speaker to escape into the arms of her Beloved. The phrase is repeated in full toward the end of the story, the only difference being a shift from “my” to “her.” In that same paragraph, the image of petting the stray dog’s “flowery breast” is an echo of the speaker’s “pecho florido,” upon which the Beloved lays his head in the sixth verse of “The Dark Night of the Soul.”
Intertextual references of this kind present an extreme example of Walter Benjamin’s claim in “The Task of the Translator” (the preface to his 1923 translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Tableaux parisiens”) that the German “Brot” cannot truly stand in for the French “pain,” because each carries with them a constellation of cultural associations that push the chemically similar combinations of wheat, water, and leavening toward incommensurability. If the ways in which bread is made, sold, shared, and eaten in two different sociohistorical contexts is enough to make us rethink what it means to reproduce a work across languages and time, this challenge will be even more pronounced when it comes to references made to a text that is canonical in the translated language but not widely known in the translating one. This is doubly true when multiple translations exist of the text being invoked: not only will the resonance and associations necessarily be different, if the reference is caught at all; due to these competing versions it becomes nearly impossible to pinpoint those words that evoke or harmonize with the poem. Thankfully, we have translator’s notes to point out these gestures—and, hopefully, the spirit of the references can be felt in the intermingling of erotic and religious language, even without the detective work of going back to see which words from the quoted verse at the end of the story appear throughout.
Even when told in the third person, each of these stories has its own voice—a voice tied to the bodies that move through the collection, interacting in different contexts and roles. Sometimes the difference is pronounced, as in the visual effects of “Policarpa” and the comical use of the first person in “Fauna of the Ages.” Sometimes it is quite subtle, as in the collection’s final two stories. Challenging the categorical moral and political narratives so often imposed on this complex historical moment, Ospina’s variations on the voice offer us a glimpse of Bogotá as a multifaceted microcosm of interconnected worlds.
Heather Cleary
Mexico City, October 2020
VARIATIONS ON THE BODY
POLICARPA
Not being devoured is the most perfect of feelings. Not being devoured is the secret goal of an entire life.
Clarice Lispector, “The Smallest Woman in the World” (tr. Katrina Dodson)
She scratches the ridge of her spine, right where the tag of her uniform is torturing her skin. It feels good. She digs around back there as her coworkers, assembled at the entrance to the superstore, applaud enthusiastically. She claps, too, until she stops to scratch again. She rejoins the daily ritual of customer appreciation just as the crowd begins to disperse. An old man struggling to push his cart along the aisle is the last of the shoppers who got up at the crack of dawn to take advantage of the store’s First Saturday discounts. She studies her coworkers’ lips, watching for the exact moment when their welcoming smiles fade, when their supply of celebratory gestures runs out. Her eyes bore into the other two women who started there recently, like her, but they seem to find nothing strange about any of it. Everyone goes back to their workstations.
Diana, the cashier assigned to train her at the register, walks up to her. Each woman reads the other’s name on the tag pinned to her chest.
“Hey, Marcela. Let’s get started.”
She likes hearing her name again after so long. But it hasn’t been easy to get used to. She needs to practice every day, saying Marcela, Marcela, Marcela to herself, over and over. Now Diana is saying it, and she likes that. Diana might even become a good friend one day. The two squeeze into a small booth facing one of the registers.
“They’re not that hard to use, but everyone makes mistakes the first few weeks. You might forget the code for a vegetable or something, but you’ll be fine if you’ve worked in retail. What did you do before?”
“I cleaned offices.”
It’s the first thing she thinks of. The only office she knows in Bogotá is the publishing house on the seventh floor of a building on the corner of Eighty-Fifth and Eleventh. She’s only gone there a few times to meet with her editor. They ask every time for photo ID at the entrance, and she takes out the shiny new card with her real name on it, then presses her finger to a machine taught to recognize her prints. One could say she works there, but not cleaning, and not full time. One could say her job is to reveal her identity.
The people at the Agency told her right away not to say anything about her journey (that’s what they call it, which she finds a little strange) for at least the first few months. The advice seems obvious, but she doesn’t know what to say when someone pries into the hidden corners of her past. In the harsh light of the superstore, she scolds herself for improvising and scratches her neck again, where the nylon tag itches her relentlessly. Then she bites off a piece of the dry crust that has covered her lips since she moved to Bogotá.
Diana starts up the register. She punches in a few zeros. The cash drawer pops open and hits their stomachs.
“Why’d you leave that job?”
“Ugh, it was the worst. The hours were long and the pay was awful. The way they exploited us, I almost went nuts.”
“Yeah, well, it’s getting harder and harder to find decent work. Where are you from?”
“I grew up in Teorama, a little town in Norte de Santander. But I’ve been working in Bucaramanga and Bogotá forever.”
She gives the true part of the answer proudly, ignoring the psychologist’s advice. In the first group therapy session the Agency organized, they were told to imagine their journey as a natural transition. Something as inevitable as a snake shedding its skin. That’s how the psychologist put it, adding that prudence was key in the first phase of their return.
The sirs and misses brought into their therapy sessions (accustomed to the symmetry promised by the word comrade, she finds it funny that everyone here is “sir” or “miss”) utter jungle and mountain cautiously, seriously, the words heavy enough to shut down conversations on the spot. Hearing them talk, Marcela feels like a warrior swinging from vines in a wilderness full of predators.
Standing with her hip pressed against Diana’s at the cash register, Marcela thinks that if they grow closer one day and she decides to tell her everything, Diana will ask her about animals, weapons, trees, and danger. And probably about how closely she lived with death. She imagines feeling overwhelmed, unsure how to explain it all. She imagines Diana struggling to understand the shards of the story she reluctantly offers and trying to decide whether or not they could ever be friends.
In the Health and Beauty department, which she was assigned to so she could familiarize herself with the products, Marcela learns about exfoliation. The first time she sees the word on the bottle of a soapy liquid gleaming with promise, she hunts for a definition on the label. Then she buys one that claims to scour away impurities and applies it with discipline every morning to the raised scar that interrupts her shoulder. She wants to sand down the pinkish mark so the wound won’t reveal as much. Whenever
the psychologist talks to them about their journeys in the Agency’s group therapy sessions, Marcela thinks of those impurity-scouring soaps. She imagines them gradually sloughing away her one and only skin.
Since she began working at the superstore, she buys something from Health and Beauty almost every day. Whatever seems new and interesting. Tinted moisturizer, hair-removal kits, neon nail polish and a bottle of acetone, oatmeal facial soap. The jars don’t all fit on the lone shelf in her room.
Since she began working at the superstore, she’s also been having dreams about her dog. In the worst one, a pit viper bites her right on the nose. Marcela witnesses the attack but can’t do anything to stop it. The skin on the little animal’s face slowly dries up and peels away while she’s still alive, until her head is nothing but bones. Marcela tries to save her by collecting every piece of skin, every whisker, that falls to the ground. Her sister helps her attach them again with a glue they pick up at the store, but her sweet little dog dies on them.
At their third meeting, Marcela’s editor hands her a stack of paper. The first draft of her unfinished manuscript.
“All right, Marcela,” she says. “Let’s see what you think about this part. It’s a transcription of what you’ve told us with a few changes I made for clarity and flow. There’s still a lot of polishing to do and details to fill in. Read it and let me know if it looks good to you, or if you have a problem with any of my cuts or additions.”
Marcela takes the mass of pages and begins to read out loud. The editor follows along on her screen.
At the start Initially, when I started thinking about leaving my departure, I figured I’d write the whole way because I’d heard about people who had gotten out and told their stories and I thought that telling it would help untangle everything that jams up your occupies a person’s head mind at times like that. And I also wanted to have a written record. If I died along the way, I wanted at least to leave my story testimonial behind, so someone out there would get understand who I was and what I went through. You know?