Best European Fiction 2014
Page 25
I can live without relationships. But not without animals. That’s why I picked Ancares. On the fourth day I brought home a beetle and some snails; the next night, a weasel. That night I tore up all my writing paper and threw it in the fire, to avoid wasting my time scribbling my little stories. I could use the computer, but that’s like writing on water. I’m writing this on the two sheets of paper that were left in the printer, cramming as much as I can onto each page. When there’s no room left, the story will end. I’ll have to keep it simple, no flourishes or tangents, so that the important parts will fit.
I said that I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I’ll add here that I never have. A sex life, yes. The reviews of my novel praised my sensitivity in the development of my female characters, especially the prostitute. My sexual relationships have all been with prostitutes, if you can call those relationships. I also jack off in front of the computer. And, look, just because my masturbation is inspired by pictures floating around on the Internet, don’t assume it’s just some sort of virtual reality thing, or a videogame. It’s as real as everything else—and to each his own.
I didn’t take any alcohol along. The idea was to detox a bit, but on the fifth day I had them bring up two liters of augardente in the Land Rover. I got drunk during the afternoon watching the animals, then I threw up in the toilet, washed my face, and headed outside as night was falling. Leaning against a stone pillar, I lit a cigarette, and then I saw her.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I slipped on the loose gravel of the steep path. “Good evening.”
“Good evening,” the woman snapped, implying that the stranger here was me.
“I didn’t think anyone lived in the village,” I explained.
“No one does.” In her left arm she was carrying a bundle of oak branches covered in lichen. “Just me.”
I took a couple of drags off my cigarette, and she started back on her way. “I rented Xisto’s house,” I stopped her, “the one that’s all fixed up.”
She rearranged the branches and straightened her head scarf. “Rented,” she said.
“If you like, you could stop by for coffee,” I suggested, “I’m pretty much always there.” She said nothing, but her silence pushed me to continue: “My name is Andrés and I’m a writer, from Vigo. A Pena is a beautiful place . . . So, which house is yours?” I couldn’t imagine which of these ruins could possibly have someone living in it. The woman looked toward the pass and remained silent. “Do you want me to help you with your firewood?” I offered. She tightened her grip on the branches and set off walking.
“My name is Aurora,” I thought I heard her say, her back already to me. That night I finished off one of the bottles of liquor, and I gave some drops of it to the animals. The ones who handle it the best are the beetle and the weasel, the snails can’t handle it at all, worse than me. They flail around like ecstatic voodoo priestesses, these snails.
At three in the morning I saw smoke on the far side of the village. I ran over to get the fireplace going and I fell asleep there, inches from the coals, my head on the seat of the armchair and my body on the floor.
“So, Xisto’s son fixed up the house?” She came up to the door and that was the first thing she said. It was noon and I hadn’t even taken a shower or had breakfast, but I wanted to be friendly just the same.
“Come on in and have a look. I was just about to make coffee. This way you can join me.”
“I’ll leave the door open. There aren’t any burglars around here.”
“Right. Okay,” I stammered. “It’s just that I . . . it’s a hard habit to break, I guess. But you’re right.”
Within half an hour, there were mice, sparrows, botflies, dragonflies in the house. She was interested in the computer, so we spent some time looking at sites about Ancares, music, women’s fashion. She wanted to go pee, so I showed her to the bathroom. Before going in, she commented on its cleanliness, and confessed, “Years ago I promised that when I started collecting my pension, I would eat my fill of yogurt, one carton a day, no less. Well, that day came and I couldn’t follow through because I didn’t have a fridge.” She smiled and went in.
I made the coffee and waited. I heard the animals below and went to shoo them away. When I came back up, I stopped by the bathroom and asked, “Are you all right, ma’am?” No response. “Do you need anything?”
“No, nothing. Thank you, son.”
I thought I heard water in the bathtub. Moments later, she came out wearing my bathrobe. She was tiny and the robe swept the floor as she walked. She had even washed her hair.
“Xisto’s father was always going around spouting this nonsense about how one should take baths more often,” she said, “apparently that’s what they do in Barcelona or somesuch. I see that his son has the same ideas.”
Could anyone really be so ignorant, or was she fucking with me? As we drank our coffee, she kept looking at her hands and feet. Maybe because they were so clean.
“How old are you, Mr. . . . What was your last name?” she asked.
“Thirty-three. Just call me Andrés.”
“I’m seventy-four, if I haven’t lost count. I could die anytime, and I have no one to bury me.”
“Don’t say that, ma’am. Don’t you have family somewhere?”
She went back to talking about yogurt. And the fridge, she kept looking at the fridge. So many years to wait. It had become a sort of challenge, and she had lost.
“If I had eaten more yogurt as a girl, I’d have more teeth now, stronger bones,” she lamented. “Tell me I’m wrong. I bet they gave you as much yogurt as you could eat when you were little.”
I went to the fridge and brought her a vanilla yogurt. I opened it for her. She began to cry, soundlessly. I tried to comfort her, holding her hand, touching her hair.
“Go ahead, Aurora, try it.”
The robe came undone and her naked body was visible. It was the first time I had seen an old lady naked, but the legs and belly didn’t look bad, and some sixty year olds would have envied her bust. The wrinkles on her upper chest formed a sort of multi-strand necklace. Her skin was white, plain yogurt, but what surprised me most was the silver-white pubis, a polar bear.
She ate the yogurt like that, paying no attention to my presence. I looked out the window, nervous. Was anybody else going to crawl out from beneath the stones? When the old woman reached the bottom of the carton, scraping out the last bites, she was still crying.
“My husband also wanted to fix up the house,” she said. “We had been married a week, he was fixing the roof and he slipped. I didn’t even have a child to remind me of him, how he looked. It was the wrong time of the month.”
“My God. That must have been a long time ago.”
“I was about seventeen and he was on leave from the army.”
There was a long silence, which I broke by mumbling, “It’s a sad story.” It was such a banal comment that the next silence was even longer. I swallowed and steadied my voice before speaking again. “Now that you’ve had a bath, why don’t you go ahead and wash your clothes, if you like, Aurora.” She licked the spoon and pulled the robe closed, without a word. “So, why didn’t you ever buy a fridge?” I asked.
She breathed in deeply and let it out, like only old people know how. “If it were new . . .” I understood somehow that she meant life, not the fridge. I went to the bathroom to find her clothes, put them in the washing machine, added some detergent and fabric softener, and set the machine to a short cycle.
“You would have made a good girlfriend,” she said at last. Five minutes later, the two of us embraced, who knows why. I was wearing pajamas and, embarrassed, I tried to hide the erection I got when I touched the old woman’s face. I found that she had beautiful eyes.
I know I made a big deal about being antisocial, but this relationship was different, another thing entirely. The washing machine had finished; together we hung the clothes to dry and got into the bed. I didn’t know what to do, what with a hard-on a
nd that old woman in my arms.
“I also have banana and pineapple yogurt, Aurora. I’ll take care of you.”
She said that she couldn’t give me a hand job because her arm would get tired, and I didn’t dare suggest anything else. I held her against me, stroked her legs, and put a finger inside her. She reacted by pushing my hand away with a “Holy Mother of God!” During the night, the downstairs filled with animal sounds. But the desire to collect and keep bugs had deserted me. When my testicles began to hurt, I went to the bathroom and . . . relieved myself. Other things happened, too, but I’m running out of paper.
Aurora came to live at my house. Before making love, she always took a bath and ate a yogurt. After three days, she gave me a blowjob. I had gotten up to go take care of it by myself, but she called me over with her voice like a stream in summer, said a prayer to the Virgin, and it was divine. The effort wiped her out and she slept like a child. They always say that old age is like a second childhood, one needs a routine: bath, yogurt, fellatio. Never two yogurts, and always vanilla. Soon these all became habits. After a while she let me stroke her sex, and during the next session she guided and corrected my clumsy movements.
Eventually she began to stay in bed fifteen hours a day. I brought her yogurt in bed, and she asked me to be with her, to kiss her shoulders, her back, her toes, her calves, her thighs, her spine. She let me suck at her breasts, and she learned how to smoke like Marlene Dietrich.
“You shouldn’t be alone, Andrés,” she blurted out one day.
“What do you mean, alone? You’re here. With you I can’t be alone.”
“Me?” she asked. “That’s something else.”
“What do you mean, something else? My whole life I felt alone until I met you. Now is the first time I’ve been not-alone.”
“Life is long,” she pronounced. “Your life isn’t whole.”
“With you it is. I don’t need anything else. You’ve changed everything. My life before was a sham. Now I never even turn on the computer or open a book. The only thing we need is yogurt. Could there be anything more fantastic?”
“For me, no. I spend years calming my hunger for yogurt with carton after carton of milk, and now I get yogurt in bed. But your situation is different.”
“I was a miserable man before I came to A Pena, Aurora. I would be nothing without you.”
“What nonsense. I’m the one who should be saying that.”
“If it’s a question of getting more yogurt, I can have them bring a couple dozen cartons up in the Land Rover. They have a cooler so that things don’t spoil. Eat as many as you like; the people who live the longest are from the valleys of the Caucasus, and their diet is made up largely of yogurt. I read somewhere that they live one hundred and twenty years. Let’s forget about time, Aurora.”
That night, lying side by side, she took my erect penis and played with it in her hand. She came closer and led me to her pussy.
“Very slowly,” she said. “We’re not in a hurry. Lovingly.”
I just repeated her name. A hundred times. That body was Aurora, heat, it was me. Outside the village slept in ruins, and the birds sang though morning was far off. The rocky peak surveyed the paths and trails, in the shadows the earth exhaled a moist breath through a blanket of fallen leaves, the rocks of the slope awaited the next slide, butterflies were dying by the hundreds, streams ran dry, the starved worms had already fled from A Pena’s cemetery. In the bedroom, I could hear the hum of the fridge and I thought about the yogurt, about the creamy, sweet softness of cultured milk, about Aurora’s skin. I thought that I was no longer myself, that she was the one doing all the moving. I lifted a leg above hers and moved around behind her, grabbing a breast in each hand.
“Do you like this?” I whispered. I felt her excitement and I began to move more vigorously. “Do you like it like this?” I stopped once and again to touch her clitoris, grab her back or her neck, play with her nipples. “Time doesn’t exist, Aurora. There’s no age, no death, no world. Can you hear the wind? Tomorrow will be beautiful.”
Through our embrace, I thought I felt her come; I’d never felt anything like that before. It was soft, an orgasm without fanfare. Then she lay unmoving, relaxed, silent. I kept going for a few seconds and the feeling of her buttocks against my belly, of her upper thighs, quickly made me ejaculate with a euphoric squeak and a small, inaudible fart. Nothing in the world could have seemed more extravagant to me at that moment, and I thought: “Shit. This is how babies are made. This is how life starts.”
I got up to wash myself. When I got back, Aurora was sleeping, but I decided not to wake her. There were wet spots on the sheets. Whether she died during the night or while we were making love, it must have been a peaceful death. And, indeed, the morning was a beautiful one; not until afternoon did the mist come down from the mountains. I sat down in front of the computer and searched the Internet for “sex and death.” There were snuff pages, Nazi orgies, and oriental porn sites, all of them violent. The Net didn’t understand.
I went for a walk through the village, trying to find her house. A cricket chirped somewhere in the lumpy ground along a stone wall, I plucked a long piece of grass and stuck it in the hole till I got it to come out. It was a male; I closed it in my hand and put it in the pocket of my shirt. In one house was a bed with the sheets still on it, all covered in dirt and grass. In another, a coffee pot sat atop an iron stove, the roofless kitchen open to the sky. In another there was a calendar from ’63 with a picture of the Virgin. In yet another I startled some turtledoves that had nested in the rafters. To die in A Pena was a double negation; to be buried, a redundancy.
Even so, I would do it. As I walked, I decided that from then on I would never eat yogurt again. I would stop writing novels; I would start keeping animals again in my parents’ house. I was sure of all this until I found Aurora’s house. The door, half open, had once been painted green. There was no kitchen, just an open hearth with a black pot suspended above the ashes. A cot, sunken with age, with a woolen mattress and a linen bedspread. A three-legged table, on top of it a bunch of cabbage leaves and a pile of chestnuts. A dresser full of old clothes and a fair bit of money in bills and coins. The rest of the house, all of the space in the two rooms, was filled with hundreds of empty milk cartons, whole milk, two percent, skim milk, different brands. Piled in a corner, below the bed, stacked against the walls, carpeting the floor. A convocation of milk cartons, all waiting for yogurt to come and turn them into garbage, bringing an end to memory. Aurora!
Today is the last day of my month here, and no one has called me, no one is waiting for me. I am writing between the lines I’ve already written, for lack of space. When I have paper, distance, energy, I will tell the rest of her life, I’ll fill in some events that, I hope you’ll excuse me, didn’t happen exactly the way I’ve told you here. But nothing ever happens the way people tell it . . . never mind, that’s another story.
TRANSLATED FROM GALICIAN BY NEIL ANDERSON
[SWITZERLAND: GERMAN]
CHRISTOPH SIMON
Fairy Tales from the World of Publishing
THE POETS AND THE READER
By now, the poets were living in Ireland for tax reasons, but there was no readership there. People knew only of one reader, and she was over in Scotland. In the end, a young poet set out for Scotland, where he found the reader and, ere long, became her husband.
One day, sitting out in the garden, he was pondering his imminent tax return. “But I have a reader,” he reminded himself, “and my colleagues in Ireland have none.” And privately, he felt very pleased with how good fate had been to him.
His colleagues back in Ireland, meanwhile, were keen to plagiarize the young poet’s idea. They, too, set out for Scotland. Ere long, they took up position behind their young colleague’s house, waited until everyone had fallen asleep, then crept in, got hold of the reader by the shoulders, and began to drag her away. Just as they reached the door, the young poet woke with a start and m
anaged—just—to grab his reader and wife by the feet. A rough tussle followed, in the course of which the reader was ripped apart. The poet’s colleagues took the top half of the body back to Ireland, while the young poet was left with the bottom half.
And so, ere long, they were sitting in Ireland and Scotland, carving the missing bits out of wood. They did this particularly badly, so the poets in Ireland ended up with a reader who was always falling over, and the young poet had one who couldn’t turn the page.
THE POET AND THE POEM
A poet was travelling with his publisher. Passing through a forest, they came upon a poor proofreader who asked them to give her a little something. The poet handed her a franc, the publisher gave her nothing.
They’d hardly gone any further when an editor came toward them, also requesting that they give her something. The poet gave her his gloves, the publisher gave her nothing.
A while later, they came upon a translator—she’d have appreciated something too. The poet said to the publisher, “You give her something, you have several fortunes!” But the publisher refused, and the poet let the translator have his last rusk.
The first of the women, though, was the Virgin Mary; the second, Joan of Arc; the third the Lord God himself who rewarded the poet with two wishes.
“Just two?’ the poet asked. “Why not three?”
“Two,” said God.
The poet asked for a poem that would leave every audience that heard it rejoicing; and for a game bag with which he could catch everything and anything.
“You forgot to ask for the best thing of all,” God admonished him.
“What’s that?”
“Spiritual salvation!”
“I’d only go and lose it!” said the poet.