A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his��Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin,and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.Hisson,still a child,sitsat the foot of the bed, attentively collectingthesefinal,hallucinated words.

Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time,and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—h������asits source this ultimate paternal legacy?

Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatesbetween reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’sapproaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light.��An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts,and an evocation of a filial love,��Melvill��contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature’s most ambitious writers.

If you enjoy what you read below, you can from now until midnight PT on October 31st. (U.S. residents only, discount applied automatically at checkout.)

*

Now he knows he’s surrounded by everyone and everything, but he feels more alone than ever. Here, the perfect solitude of one outside but with no way out. Freezing but soon to burn, the fire of a fever already rising inside him. Speaking in smoldering, scorching tongues: sparking words that flame and name, far away and foreign to any warmth of home, to that home he’s dying—and where he’ll die—to return to.

Ready to be one more among so many memories. Wanting to be remembered like this. Epic in defeat. Broken but stronger than ever because there’s nothing left to break inside of him. Nothing to hide, all’s been revealed. All of him to everyone. Exposed to all and after all.

His name pronounced (mispronounced, emphasis on the ultimate syllable, foreignizing, Frenchifying it, making it more removed and, perhaps in that way, worthier of greater rejection) with a combination of shame and condemnation.

His name before a jury that would never dare find for him and, prejudging, would reach a unanimous verdict: “Young Wastrel of a Patrician Family,” and that’s the way—all-caps when written and��italics when spoken—people write about him in letters and speak about him at balls and banquets and masses.

Thus, his sentence to be served posthaste with no possibility of appeal or pardon. But here he is, still begging for someone to at least testify on his behalf and to write his story and to put him into words and, in a way, if not justify him then at least give him a modicum of redemption, a modicum of significance and purpose and reason to exist.

To be written.[1]

To be a being written (him being someone who more than once wished and dreamed he could write it all down and is already ready to transfer the acquittal of such a sentence) on empty and frozen pages like the waters he’s walking across now, barely keeping warm with the breathless breathing of dead supplications and unheard prayers. Messianic and miraculous, yes; but not like the Omnipotent and triumphant Creator on high but like a deity plummeting from higher still, in free fall, prisoner and fallen in his disgrace. His once divine voice no longer commanding, deafening, proof of love and respect but, trembling and weak, dwindling until it becomes a silent and flashing sacrifice he makes to himself. And, meanwhile, as he prepares his own execution ceremony, asking himself, without an answer, why (wasn’t this a distinctive trait of mortals? that almost last and willful gift of your whole life summarized in seconds and in reverse so you could understand it better or not bother? wasn’t that the explanation of the mystery of why so many people died with a Momma, Mommy, Ma on their lips?) all the people and things of this world that he loves or that don’t love him, the whole history of his story, now seemed to converge in this white darkness. Darkness he advances through, previously opaque and obscure and so late, suddenly without time and as if untethered from time, forever and ever, implacable and clean and transparent.

*

Record and file it, even if you prefer not to:

It’s the night of Saturday, December 10th, 1831, and Allan Melvill walks across the frozen waters of the Hudson River.

*

And, oh, when you walk on ice, on water in suspended animation, moods shift and thoughts are thought differently, Allan Melvill thinks. He thinks about how thoughts are thought with the most burning coolness. He thinks about how you think of anything other than that which, once deemed unthinkable, is, as such, impossible not to think about: about how that ice could break and about how, then, sinking to never again rise back up to that surface of superficialities to be ignored or attended to, you would cease to think forever. He thinks about the cold that freezes into crystals that bind together and break apart to separate and rise into the sky to then fall on the living and the dead in always different shapes.[2] With that cold that forces you to close your eyes to discover that, like certain lizards, you can see through your eyelids: his now almost sliced off by the freezing blade of the wild wind that whips his hair into disarray.

The same thing would happen (Allan Melvill thinks now, like he’s never thought before, thinking about what would be thought about or about what one would never dare to think about again but that, in the act refusing, one thinks about, thinking about how he once thought, afloat in a damning floating city of the damned) when we find a way to remain aloft, airborne and truly and joyfully displaced. When man can fly aboard marvelous machines (not just aerostatic balloons) whose sound will be like that of thousands of men clearing their throats after the morning’s first pipe. And with and in those machines, battles will be waged among the stars, and they’ll even make it to that fleeting moon, which, at this very moment, the clouds cover and uncover only to cover it again, and hurl down almost merciful white flakes of snow on Allan Melvill, as if they were soldiers laying siege to that defeated and humiliated deserter of the crucifying crusade of his own life.

But we’ve got a long way to go before that. Now, beneath his feet, that ice is the only solid thing left to hold him up, while around him and above him everything is thin ice in suspense, and the important thing is not to fly but to keep from falling or sinking or drowning.

Thus, in the dark, Allan Melvill remembers first; but then it’s as if he were dreaming, as if he were dreaming himself, or seeing himself from above. And he’d read somewhere that people who lived and wandered through landscapes of endless ices often felt that someone, their doppelgänger, was walking beside them (like that vanquished and enslaved memento-mori walking beside a triumphant Caesar or other victorious generals) and whispering in their ear the more than fifty names snow can be given, but not the names for each and every one of the infinite and always-different flakes that make up that snow and that, first, give the shape of snow to whatever they happen to come to rest upon and, then, to all the shapes they take after giving shape to the snow.

Then, suddenly, to the surprise and wonder of Allan Melvill, his whole life (his life as a father) is lived and relived, it melts away only to resolidify, like an invention invented by the boy who, though he would never theretofore have imagined it, has turned out to be the most inventive and imaginative of his children.[3]

[1] But no, not yet. It will be years before that happens: the sad masquerade of my father (there’s no need for me to wait for the revelations of a future yet-to-be-revealed science that will be dedicated to the interpretation of dreams and daydreams) rewritten wearing different masks like that of a riverway conman or that of a delusional captain or that of an incestuous decadent or that of a by-product of the Revolution or that of a more confusing than confused pale-gray colored scrivener, among many others. And it will be even longer before I comment on it from here: from the marine and oceanic depths of these pages en route to the last and final shore. Me holding and losing my breath; because nothing is more exhausting than swimming upstream, taking in air, in pursuit of the always forgetful founts of memory.

[2] Imagine a book always at high sea. A book adrift and drifting in swirling digressions and dodging not icebergs of small tips and massive bottoms but compact glaciers that have as much to show as to hide. A book that is nothing but a perpetual draft, because every book is never-ending. A book that is the draft of a sketch; because the smallest constructions can be completed by their original architects; while the largest, the truest, always leave the conclusion on the tallest rooftops to fix and secure there the posterity of whoever reads them beyond the one who wrote it.

My case, without looking any further.

[3] His light casts my shadow. The one is the eclipse of the other. I, at his feet, will tell what he, lying there, tells me. He is bound and I’m bound to him; and I trust that all the information that I’ll offer has, moreover, some literary and dramatic value, beyond the tragedy and sorrow of the events that keep that man prostrate here. Thus, I shall send my indefinable imagination (truly the most exact of sciences) off to hunt and track and catch the facts. And then, flay and eviscerate them, as once upon a time I did whales. To those whales that, as the years pass, seem to me more and more the product of youth’s liquid dream. Always taking care to keep their stomach gasses from bursting and covering me with guts and blood and excrement. And to keep from spilling that illuminating sperm of the truth that, once processed, will be irreconcilable as something that happened but, at the same time, will be read (will be read by the light of candles and oil derived from that same whale sperm) as something even truer than it ever was. Reality only becomes really real after crossing the stormy sea of art and arriving safe and sound to the other shore. Not while we live it or write it, but later, when we read it; and only then does everything become logical and inevitable and we ask ourselves how we failed to see it or see it coming.

Thus, everything that one invents ends up (or starts out) being true and, taking place, ends up having taken place to thereby begin to take place.

by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden is available in better bookstores everywhere on October 8, 2024, and available at 30% off (until 11/1/2024) on the .��

Today’s #WITMonth post is an except from

Here’s the jacket copy:

Subtly in the vein of��Dogville��or Coetzee’s��Disgrace, and invoking the works of Agota Kristof,��Un Amor��probes ideas of language, alienation, and community through the eyes of a woman who, when brought into conflict, finds herself on the potential brink of deeper awareness of herself and her place in the world.

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in La Escapa, an arid rural village in Spain’s interior. She settles into a small, shabby house with cheap rent to begin work on her first literary translation, with a skittish and ill-tempered dog—a gift from the boorish landlord—her only company.

Burdened with assumptions about country life, Nat will enter into relationships with the handful of local inhabitants—her negligent landlord, Píter the hippie, the dementia-afflicted Roberta, the young city family who comes on weekends, the unsociable man they call “The German”—from whom she appears to receive a customary welcome.

Mutual misunderstanding and a persistent sense of alienation, however, thrum below the surface. And when conflicts arise over repairs to the house, Nat receives an offer and makes a crucial decision.

In prose as taut and oppressive as the atmosphere in La Escapa,��Un Amor��extends Mesa’s exploration of language and power, confronting readers with the limits of their own morality as tensions mount and the community’s most unexpected impulses emerge.

This book—like so many of Mesa’s—is a slow burn, with tension increasing with every event, every turn of the page. The except below is from the first section of the book, setting the scene, introducing a few key characters, and creating the atmosphere of this part of rural Spain. Enjoy!

Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

She’d be hard pressed to come up with a convincing answer if asked to explain what she was doing there. That’s why she hedges when the time comes, babbling about a change of scenery.

“People must think you’re crazy, right?”

The cashier smacks gum as she piles Nat’s shopping on the counter. It’s the only store in a few-mile radius, an unmarked establishment where foodstuffs and hygiene products accumulate in a jumble. Shopping there is expensive and the pickings are slim, but Nat is reluctant to take the car to Petacas. She rummages in her wallet and counts out the bills she needs.

The girl from the shop is in a chatty mood. Brazen, she asks Nat all about her life, flustering her. The girl wishes she could do what Nat’s done, but the opposite, she says. Move to Cárdenas, where stuff actually happens.

“Living here sucks. There aren’t even any guys!”

She tells Nat that she used to go to high school in Petacas, but she dropped out. She doesn’t like studying, she’s crap at every subject. Now she helps out in the shop. Her mom gets chronic migraines, and her dad also does some farming, so she lends a hand at the store. But as soon as she turns eighteen, she’s out of there. She could be a cashier in Cárdenas, or a nanny. She’s good with kids. The few kids who ever make it to La Escapa, she smiles.

“This place sucks,” she repeats.

It’s the girl who tells Nat about the people living in the surrounding houses and farms. She tells her about the gypsy family squatting in a dilapidated farmhouse, right near the ramp for the highway. A bus picks up the kids every morning; they’re the only kids who live in La Escapa year-round. And there’s the old couple in the yellow house. The woman is some kind of witch, the girl claims. She can predict the future and read your mind.

“She’s a little crazy, so it’s creepy,” the girl laughs.

She tells Nat about the hippie in the wooden house, and the guy they call “The German” even though he isn’t from Germany, and Gordo’s bar—though to call the storehouse where they serve up bottles of beer a bar is, she admits, a bit of an exaggeration. There are other people who come and go according to the rhythms of the countryside, dayworkers hired for two-week stints or just the day, but also whole families who have inherited houses they can’t manage to sell and who live somewhere else half the year. But you never see women on their own. Not women Nat’s age, she specifies.

“Old ladies don’t count.”

During the first days, Nat gets confused and mixes up all that information, partly because she’d listened absently, partly because she’s in unfamiliar territory. La Escapa’s borders are blurry, and even though there is a relatively compact cluster of small houses—where hers is located—other buildings are scattered farther off, some inhabited and others not. From the outside, Nat can’t tell whether they’re homes or barns, if there are people inside or just livestock. She loses her bearings on the dirt roads and if it weren’t for the shop—which sometimes feels more familiar to her than the house she’s rented and slept in for a week—as a point of reference, she’d feel lost. The area isn’t even very pretty, although at sunset, when the edges soften and the light turns golden, she finds a kind of beauty she can cling to.

Nat takes her grocery bags and says goodbye to the girl. But before she exits the shop, she turns back and asks about the landlord. Does the girl know him? The girl purses her lips, shakes her head slowly. No, not really, she says. He’s lived in Petacas for a long time.

“But I do remember seeing him around here when I was little. He always had a pack of dogs and a really bad temper. Then he got married, or got together with someone, and left. I guess his wife didn’t want to live in La Escapa—can’t blame her. This place is worse for girls. Even though Petacas is nothing special—I wouldn’t want to live there either, no way.”

*

Sara Mesa

She tries to play with the dog, tossing him an old ball she found in the woodpile. But instead of catching it and bringing it back, the dog limps away. When she crouches down next to him, putting herself on his level so he won’t be afraid, he skulks off with his tail between his legs. The dog is a piece of work, she thinks, a real rotter. Sieso, they’d call him in the part of Spain she comes from. It seems a good a name as any—after all, she has to call him something. It certainly describes his surly nature. But Sieso is as inscrutable as he is unsociable. He hangs around, but it’s like he wasn’t there at all. Why should she have to settle for a dog like that? Even the little dog in the shop, an extremely anxious Chihuahua mix, is much nicer. All the dogs she meets on the roads—and there are tons of them—run over when she calls. A lot of them are looking to be fed, of course, but also to be pet; they are nosy and curious, wanting to know who this new girl in the neighborhood is. Sieso doesn’t even seem interested in eating. If she feeds him, great, and if not, that’s fine too. The landlord wasn’t kidding: the animal’s upkeep is cheap. Sometimes Nat is ashamed of the aversion she feels toward the animal. She asked for a dog and here he is. Now she cannot—must not—say—or even think—that she doesn’t want him.

One morning at the shop, she meets the hippie, as the girl called him. Now she languidly waits on them both, smoking a cigarette with no sense of urgency. The hippie is a little older than Nat, though he can’t be more than forty. Tall and strong, his skin is weathered by the sun, his hands broad and cracked, his eyes hard but placid. He wears his hair long in a terrible cut and his beard is on the reddish side. Why the girl calls him “hippie” is something Nat can only guess. Maybe it’s his long hair or because he is someone who, like Nat, comes from the city, a stranger, something incomprehensible for anyone who has lived in La Escapa since childhood and can only think of getting away. The truth is, the hippie has lived there a long time. He is, therefore, nothing novel, not like Nat. She observes him from the corner of her eye, his efficient movements, concise and confident. As she waits her turn, she pats the back of the dog he has brought with him. She’s a chocolate Labrador, old but undeniably elegant. The dog wags her tail and noses Nat’s crotch. The three of them laugh.

“What a good girl,” Nat says.

The hippie nods and holds out his hand. Then he changes his mind, withdraws it and moves in to kiss her. Just one kiss on the cheek, which causes Nat to remain with her face tilted, waiting for the second kiss that doesn’t come. He tells her his name: Píter. With an i, he specifies: P-í-t-e-r. At least that’s how he likes to spell it, except when he’s forced to write it officially. The less one writes one’s real name, the better, he jokes. It’s only good for signing checks at the bank, for those thieves.

“Natalia,” she introduces herself.

Then comes the obligatory question: what is she doing in La Escapa? He’s seen her out on the trails and also saw her tidying up the area around the house. Is she going to live there? Alone? Nat feels awkward. She would prefer that nobody watch her while she works, especially without her knowledge, which is inevitable because the boundaries of the property are marked only by fine wire mesh, denuded of vegetation. She tells him she’s only staying a couple of months.

“I’ve seen the dog, too. You got him here, right?”

“How do you know?”

Píter confesses that he knows the animal. One of the landlord’s many. That dog, in fact, is probably the worst of the lot. Her landlord will pick them up wherever, doesn’t train them, doesn’t vaccinate them, doesn’t care for them in the slightest. He uses, then abandons, them. Did she ask for the dog? She can be sure the landlord has given her the most useless one he had.

Nat considers this and the man suggests she give the dog back. There’s no reason to settle if he isn’t what she wanted. The landlord isn’t a good guy, he says, she’s better off keeping her distance. He doesn’t like to speak badly of anyone, he insists, but the landlord is another matter. Always thinking about how to scam people.

“I can get you a dog if you want.”

The conversation leaves Nat uneasy. Sitting on her doorstep with a lukewarm bottle of beer—the fridge, too, is on the fritz—she watches Sieso sleeping beside the fence, stretched out in the sunshine. The flies loiter on his slightly swollen belly, where the marks of old wounds are visible.

The thought of returning him is deeply unsettling.

*

Katie Whittemore

She is surprised by the activity in Petacas. It takes her a while to find parking; the layout of the roads is so chaotic and the signage so contradictory that once you enter the town, an unexpected detour can easily take you right out of it again. The houses are modest, their façades worse for the wear and mostly plain, but there are brick buildings, too, up to six stories tall, distributed arbitrarily here and there. The businesses are clustered around the main square; the town hall—an ostentatious building with large eaves and stained-glass windows—is surrounded by small bars and Chinese-owned bazaars. Nat buys a small fan at one of them. Then she wanders in search of a hardware store, reluctant to ask for directions. She is struck by the neglected appearance of the women, who have left the house with unkempt hair and slip-on sandals. Many of the men—even the old ones—are in sleeveless shirts. The few children she sees are unsupervised, licking popsicles, scampering, rolling on the ground. The people—men, women, kids—all of whom are loud and sloppy, look strangely alike. Inbreeding, Nat thinks. Her landlord is a perfect fit.

She worries about running into him, but it’s Píter, not the landlord, whom she meets in the hardware store. She is happy to see him: someone she knows, someone friendly, someone smiling at her at last, coming over, what are you doing here, he asks. Nat shows him the box with the fan and he scowls. Why didn’t she ask the landlord? It’s his responsibility to keep the property in habitable condition. Not air conditioning, obviously, but a fan at least.

“Or you could have asked me. That’s what neighbors are for.”

Nat looks for an excuse. She’s happy to buy one, she says. She’ll take it with her when she leaves La Escape. Píter looks at her askance, pretending not to believe her.

“And what are you buying here? Tools to fix everything he left broken?”

Nat shakes her head.

“No. Stuff for the garden.”

“You’re planting a garden?”

“Well, just something basic . . . Peppers and eggplants, they’re easy, I guess. I want to try, at least.”

Píter takes her by the arm, steps closer.

“Don’t buy anything,” he whispers.

He tells her that he can lend her all the tools she needs. He says, too, that she might as well forget about a garden. Nothing’s grown on her land in years; the soil is totally depleted; it would take days and days of hard work to get it into shape. If she insists—Nat hangs on that word, insists—he could lend her a hand, but he absolutely advises against it. Although he speaks smoothly, Píter’s voice contains indisputable sureness, an expert’s confidence. Nat nods, waits for him to finish his shopping. Cables, adaptors, screws, a pair of pliers: all very professional, very specific, nothing at all like the indefiniteness in which she operates.

Outside, Píter walks beside her at an athletic pace, straight but flexible. His way of moving is so elegant, so different from the people around them, that Nat is proud to be walking next to him, the sort of pride associated with feeling legitimate. The spell breaks when he points to the windows at the town hall.

“Pretty, aren’t they? I made them.”

Nat thinks the windows clash terribly with the building’s exposed brick, but she is all praise: they suit it perfectly, she says. Píter looks at her appreciatively. Precisely, he says, that’s what he seeks, for his work to befit its context.

“Petacas isn’t the nicest place in the world, but—to the extent possible—one should strive to beautify one’s surroundings, don’t you think?”

“So, you’re a . . .” Nat doesn’t know what you call a person who makes stained-glass windows.

“A glazier? Yes. Well, more than a glazier. A glass and color artisan, you might say. Like, I don’t just cover windows.”

“Of course.” Nat smiles.

They have a beer in one of the bars on the square. The beer is ice-cold and goes down easy. Píter observes her closely—too closely, she thinks—but his eyes are sweet and that softens her discomfort. The conversation returns to the landlord—that cheeky bastard, he repeats—the tools and her barren plot. He insists on lending her what she needs. Just a matter of tidying the yard, clearing space for a table and some lawn chairs, then planting a few oleander and yucca, or some succulents suitable for the harsh climate. There’s a huge nursery near Petacas, very cheap. If she wants, one day they can go together. It seems her plans for a vegetable garden have been scrapped. She doesn’t mention them again.

Again Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

Today’s #WITMonth post is an excerpt from��

is available from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.

Take a French dinner party. In Paris. Chez Armand. A chic dinner. The kind I don’t go to. Pearls, crystal, the works.

Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their right arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this.

Because for them, ladies and gentlemen, conversation has replaced everything else. They neither laugh nor belch. Belching went out of fashion with regicide. That’s the remark my brother-in-law made just to mortify me. At the table. In front of everyone. The day of the funeral. As I was choking back a hiccup between two sobs.

In the time of the Bourbon Louis, he announced with ludicrous pedantry, there was an official called the hastener who was in charge of the king’s belches. Sometimes the king’s belch was slow in coming, and all the courtiers would wring their hands, quiver with impatience, and turn sorrowful countenances toward the royal valve: But let him hasten, then, let this hastener hasten the sacred belch of the king! The hastener and his king have been done away with. And belchery with them. Those are great losses indeed.

Still, I thought, not so great as Lucienne’s death. Forgive me, but my grief is as fresh, if I may say so, as a vegetable. I said vegetable. I really shouldn’t have. That’s the word I often use to evoke her, so calm, so—how shall I put it—so superbly lumpish. But let us stifle our grief. And let us return to that dinner party with which I opened my lecture. We may conclude, from our thorough investigation, that while it is generally admitted that speech is the achievement of all mankind, conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

That is our first and most heartening axiom. A specialty, I emphasize this, that is not exportable. Because it is not merchandise. It is even quite the opposite. I shall come back to this essential point. At the proper time. With the methodical turn of mind that is my wont.

We French, I was saying, are champions at conversation. This distinguishing trait, long elevated to the status of a national virtue, made the reputation of France and secured its reign.

Well, that art at which we excel is today in peril. I am sounding the alarm in our little town in hopes of alerting the highest authorities. Mediocrity, ladies and gentlemen, is going international. The fear of offending prevails more and more over the taste for talking. A generous spirit is discredited, if not condemned outright. It is taken for weakness of intellect. From one end of the planet to the other, conversations are all the same. Their poverty of ideas is now in fashion. And their insipidness is sickening.

*

Conversation is going downhill.

*

That will be our second and most distressing axiom. We live, increasingly, without talking to one another. Is no life, then, worth the telling? We live without talking to one another and soon we will live without living, which gives me the shivers.

Conversation is going downhill and the country with it, they go hand in hand. And it is greatly to be feared, if nothing is done, that they will both wind up in the garbage. The vultures will finish the job. You can count on them.

So here, dear ladies and gentlemen of Cintegabelle, is my rescue plan, conceived in the utmost urgency and which I unhesitatingly declare to be of national utility, since by proposing to restore the luster of speech in the eyes of a world that has forgotten how to speak, it aims at nothing less than the civic renewal of our country and the polishing of its image so that, I’m catching my breath, so that, strong in its recovered prestige, the France of tomorrow may assure throughout the world the civilizing mission that has fallen to her from time immemorial. Might I ask you, children, to please stop snickering. And to stop moving your chairs around. It’s irritating.

The subtle art of conversation, however—to which, I venture to say, I have devoted my genius—offers, aside from that patriotic virtue I have just mentioned, other advantages no less excellent albeit less directly civic. And which to my astonishment have not yet been the object of any detailed study.

The first of these advantages is that conversation is very useful for seducing women.

The second is that it’s even handier for succeeding in society.

The third and most surprising is that in bringing joy to mankind, it contributes appreciably to reducing the deficit of the National Health Service. A subject of satisfaction for our government.

Lydie Salvayre

In the interest of clarity, my lecture will scrupulously observe each step of the following outline, which I ask you to please keep in mind.

Part One: The advantages of conversation, already noted, and upon which we will elaborate with a most mathematical rigor.

Part Two: Those conditions favorable to the flowering of conversation, which are ten in number:

—the presence of at least two persons;

—the comfort of the derrière;

—the ability to keep silent;

—c�dzܰ��ٱ����;

—c���������ٲ�;

—j�dz��ܱ��������ٲ�;

—the principle of equality;

—a sense of proportion;

—an insouciant disregard for time;

��������dz�.

Part Three: Five examples of conversation selected from among the most common categories:

—amorous conversation;

—literary conversation;

—political conversation;

—patriotic conversation;

—conversation with the dead.

The whole thing enlivened by a number of axioms with which I am not at all displeased. I’m rather fond of axions.

*

So, Part One: The advantages of conversation.

The first of the advantages of conversation, as I was saying, and not the least of them, is that conversation always finds remarkable favor with women. Every last one of them goes into raptures before a clever conversationalist, be he cross-eyed, pot-bellied, warty, a journalist, or deformed. Take me: noticeably ill-favored, with big ears, and a cowlick I spend hours plastering down, I was an immediate hit with Lucienne (a woman impervious to poetry and little given to linguistic acrobatics) the second I began to babble. And I must confess that my verbal vivacity and florid declarations (I commanded, at the time, a whole battery of tricks, classified by genre) did more to lift up her redoubtable skirt than any fumbling gesture I’d never have dared make anyway. I wasn’t that stupid. And kew for a fact that

*

women’s genitals communicate with their ears.

*

If, gentlemen—for it is to you, men of Cintegabelle, that I speak—if nevertheless you prove unable to resist the summons of the flesh, if you are seized with the desire to place your hand on the knee of an altogether too concupiscible woman, I urge you most emphatically: under no circumstances interrupt your harangue. Without ceasing to chatter, keep gaining ground. Advance stealthily and with ingratiating ploys. Like the sinuous serpent of desire. Pursue your reputation garlanded with pretty turns of phrase. In perfect synchrony, lay compliments at her feet and hands on her modesty. From poems to promises, from promises to prattle, you will proceed without mishap to the inevitable place. Once there, stop talking! Pounce!

The second advantage of conversation concerns in particular those scheming, bloodthirsty youths who crave a brilliant career in the Arts and Letters. You will find such young men everywhere, and our town is no exception.

That’s right, my little wolf cubs in the first row, I’ll have you know that you will achieve more through a funny remark, a turn of phrase, or a flash of wit than through your girlfriend’s sex appeal, a complete familiarity with the twelve volumes of Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria, and even the outstanding dishonesty that in France ranks demonstrably among the most important factors of success.

You see, I have a friend (who shall remain nameless), a regional writer, an expert on the arts and crafts of Languedoc, who, whenever he goes out in society, flounders, stammers, stares like an idiot at his perfectly ordinary shoes, and can only bleat “Ah” and “Oh” and “Uh” and sometimes “Hee-hee.” Now, although each of these onomatopoeias contains a world of perplexity and terrifying apprehension, they do absolutely nothing to fuel the fires of literate conversation. As for the few times when this friend is invited to appear on a television program, it’s just pitiful to hear him sputter away! Result: he gets no name recognition, as the rabble say.

*

Lousy conversation is social suicide.

*

Through a quite common misunderstanding, his poor speaking skills make a poor impression on people, whose low opinion of him we find most unfair. But the world is made in such a way that

*

it is not enough to be talented,

one must also look the part.

*

This will be our inevitable axiom. The corollary to which is equally inevitable:

*

To appear to be what one is not is ridiculous,

like dressing up a monkey in a three-piece suit.

*

Linda Coverdale

Or wearing one myself. The results are guaranteed!! am grotesque. Lucienne always told me so. She preferred me in a track suit. To my great sorrow. So is better, it seems, to suit one’s style to oneself. And what’s more, one must know one’s own style. And oneself. And how to make them work together. All that isn’t easy. I feel I’m getting bogged down. Which happens whenever I try to think. I see no other way to land on my feet again (one couldn’t dream up a more appropriate expression), no other way than to quote Baltasar Gracián, a philosopher whom I’ve discovered since my Lulu left me (mourning has its good points, you must admit).

When the bottom has fallen out of everything, this thinker wrote, nothing can replace it. And although you can spruce up what the English refer to as the “packaging” (it’s me speaking now), try as you may to decorate the emptiness with ruffles, doll it up, swathe it in tissue paper, beribbon it with fancy words and frills, the emptiness stubbornly, imperturbably, remains. I will let you meditate a moment on what I’ve just said, before issuing the following warning.

Warning:

Whoever considers the subtle art of conversation simply a useful skill for social climbing is a fool and a cipher. For conversation presupposes, ladies and gentlemen (before swelling into chamber music, or jazz, or rock, depending), an incubation period when the riches of the mind ferment, I don’t like that image because it reminds me of cheese, whereas, we’ll get back to this, conversation is not a cheese, another French specialty along with champagne and the famous spirit of collaboration, and if we absolutely had to find a metaphor here, I’d propose that

*

conversation is a wine that improves with age.

*

Which means that in my eyes, it possesses every virtue.And not only does it not preclude either thought or culture. Which are not acquired in one day. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Lucienne, for example, barely attained their outer edges. And died as lightweight as the day she was born. I’m not speaking of her body, that poor shell, but of her soul, which had the thickness of a blotter. And not only, as I was saying, does conversation not preclude either thought or culture. It positively requires them. Sanctifies them. And celebrates them. Just listen to me, for instance.

The preceding assertion might seem like a perfidious attack against certain modern writers whose profundity of thought and cultural capital—I love that last expression, simply saying it makes me feel rich, but not for long—whose cultural and more particularly syntactic capital is limited to pocket change. But God forbid we should wish them harm! Every poor man is our friend!

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned!

Today’s excerpt is from����by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Janet Hong as part of her . ( All three titles for $30!!!)��

You might recognize Hwang Jungeun from her two Tilted Axis titles: (translated by Jung Yewon) and�� (translated by Emily Yae Won). (Also, Open Letter will be publishing Hwang’s ��in the near future.)

And here’s the current copy for��Year After Year:

Three women—the old mother and her two daughters—contemplate their family life and their bottled-up feelings through the novel’s placating yet oddly unnerving prose.��

Year After Year��is divided into four large chapters; the first unravels from the perspective of Sejin, younger daughter, the second from that of Youngjin, older daughter, the third from the mother’s, and the fourth, back to Sejin’s. Throughout the course of the novel, a number of themes are developed, including its discussion of interracial marriage, different forms of family, and sexual minorities. Circumstances and history forced the mother to the life of obedience, familial obligations and financial hardship forced Youngjin to give up her dream and support the family, and the reality of her culture forced Sejin to be in the closet. And all the while, these three women, while empathizing with each other, seem entrapped in the cycle of forcing each other to further succumb.

Year After Year is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.��

Gravedig

After the Chuseok holiday, before the ground freezes.

So Yi Sunil had said numerous times, and now the time had come. It was the second week of November. At six o’clock in the morning, Han Sejin got in her car and sped along the mostly empty Olympic Highway and arrived at Sunil’s apartment. She pulled up to the shuttered garage and turned off the engine. Her seat chilled almost immediately. The day was bitter cold. It would get a little warmer when the sun rose fully, but they were heading toward the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), where the temperature, even at midday, was lower than during nights in the city. It was the same every year.

Sejin peered down at the cracked, uneven surface of the parking lot and retied her hair. She went up to the fourth floor. Sunil was waiting, everything already packed. Containers of mung bean pancakes, stuffed chili peppers, and stir-fried beef were stacked inside a paper shopping bag, along with some apples and pears, and a bottle of liquor. Next to the bag sat a smaller backpack. She’d said she wanted to use plates this time. Not Styrofoam or aluminum foil trays, but real plates, since this visit was to be their last. As soon as Sejin picked up the backpack, it sagged under the weight of the dishes, and there was a clatter.

They’re going to break. You don’t care?

Why would they break? They won’t, as long as you’re careful, Sunil said, adding, I’m bringing them back.

Sejin said no more and carried the bags down.

*

She loaded the bags in the trunk and spread out a blanket in the backseat. She started the car and turned on the heat. When Sunil finally appeared from the entrance of the mid-rise, Sejin was crouched in front of the car, examining the ground. Two rusted screws, dull and as fat as a thumb, protruded from the surface. They were all that remained of the parking barrier. Her brother-in-law had installed it to prevent people from parking illegally in their lot, but it must have been a hassle for him and the tenants to get in and out, because it was removed one day, leaving behind these two screws anchored deep into the ground. They weren’t too sharp, but sharp enough to puncture a tire if a car drove over them at a certain angle. On her last visit, Sejin had mentioned they could be dangerous, and Sunil had said she’d relay the message.

They’re still here, Sejin said, standing up.

Sunil frowned, shaking her head.

Did that mean she’d told her son-in-law, but he’d done nothing? Or that she hadn’t mentioned it yet, because she hadn’t found the right time to bring it up? Without asking any of these things, Sejin helped Sunil into the backseat, taking the duralumin cane from her and stowing it in the trunk. She then removed Sunil’s right shoe, helping her prop her leg onto the center console and covering her swollen knee with a blanket. Sunil was wearing a wool cap with a small brim, a pair of thick quilted trousers, a red-and-brown cardigan in a dizzying pattern, and a skinny knit scarf wrapped around her neck.

You won’t get cold dressed like that?

Sunil said she had on many layers underneath and patted her belly. She’d also packed hiking boots, which she’d found stored neatly in a box. They belonged to Sejin’s older sister, Yeongjin, who hadn’t touched them after using them once. Though they were a little big, as long as Sunil put on an extra pair of socks before setting out, they should fit just fine. At last, they left.

*

Hwang Jungeur

They headed northeast. If they traveled 100 kilometers an hour, they would arrive at their destination in two and a half hours. Grandfather’s grave was in Jigyeong-ri village, in the town of Galmal of Cheorwon County, Gangwon Province. Both women called him Grandfather, but he was actually Sunil’s grandfather, which made him Sejin’s great-grandfather. He was buried deep in the mountain where a frontline military unit was stationed. The graves of other Jigyeong-ri residents lay scattered over the mountain as well. They needed to pass through the military base in order to access the graves. And so, every year around Chuseok, villagers gathered in front of the base, carrying sickles and bundles of food. After leaving their IDs at the checkpoint, they hiked up the mountain to hold memorial ceremonies in honor of their ancestors, each family escorted by one or two armed soldiers. From the mid-eighties, Sunil visited her grandfather’s grave every year without fail, but once Sejin got her driver’s license and a car of her own, Sunil went with her daughter. When Chuseok drew near, Sunil would give an old neighbor from the village a call and ask when everyone was planning to head up the mountain. Then she’d call Sejin and update her on that year’s visit.

Hey, let’s have some gotgam.

Sunil pulled off the end and tore the dried persimmon in two. She held it out toward Sejin, who accepted it without taking her eyes off the road. The car continued to glide forward. The sun was rising, and to their right, the mountain fog was creeping down toward the rice paddies spread below. Sejin said they weren’t going to be late after all, since there was no traffic on the roads, but Sunil was worried the workers had headed up the mountain already, and said they should have set out earlier.

We need to make the last offering before they start digging.

Sunil was born in Galgol, north of Jigyeong-ri, but after she lost her parents, she went to live with her grandfather in Jigyeong-ri. Some of her relatives had disappeared without a trace in the border clashes that took place along the 38^th parallel during the Korean War, and her grandfather, her only remaining next of kin, took the five-year-old Sunil in, raising her and getting her to run errands for him. When she was fifteen, she was sent to live with a distant relative in Gimpo, and there she helped at a market until she married Han Jungeon, in a match arranged by one of the merchants. Sunil liked to tell Sejin how she’d never in her wildest dreams expected her grandfather to make the long, inconvenient journey to see her get married, but he’d come after all, dressed in his worn traditional coat. He’d sat in the wedding hall for a bit, eaten some noodles, and then left.

Grandfather passed away in Jigyeong-ri in 1978. At the crack of dawn, three or four men from the village had shouldered his coffin and buried him halfway up the mountain. Sejin had never met him, but she knew what he looked like. A framed photo of him hung on the wall of Sunil’s apartment, along with their family pictures. In the shot taken head-on, he had a scruffy beard and wore a fabric skullcap over coarse, white hair. Just from his face and expression alone, one could tell he was very short, and that his forehead, eyebrows, eyes, and nose were round, like Sunil’s. He seemed like someone Sejin had met many times, perhaps because she’d grown up staring at his picture her entire life. So she visited his grave every year, feeling as if she were looking in on him. But before this, Sunil had made the trip on her own, changing buses several times. Neither Jungeon nor her older daughter Yeongjin had any desire to accompany her, and Mansu, her only son and the youngest of her children, had been too young or hadn’t known the way to the gravesite to go with her.

Why go through all that trouble every year?

Janet Hong

Yeongjin and Jungeon couldn’t understand why Sunil went to such lengths to visit her grandfather’s grave. How could they possibly know about the dried-up burrows or the shrubs draped occasionally with snakes, and how, in just a year, the weeds would have grown as tall as a person that they’d have to hack them down with a sickle in order to pass through? Or about the moss and the trees twisted from lack of sunlight, the burial mound crushed and trampled by wild boars, the chestnut trees surrounding the grave, or the silence of pine trees? Sejin alone knew the reason why Sunil went up the mountain every year, cutting a path through the forest. It was her home. For her mom, that grave was her childhood home.

Grandfather, I’m a granny now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come next year.

For the past few years, this is what Sunil has been saying at the graveside, but this visit was truly her last. She was seventy-two years old and planned to have knee replacement surgeries in both knees next year. Once a child of the mountains, she’d been surefooted on steep terrain, harvesting fiddleheads and young shoots off angelica trees, but now she needed a cane even on flat land, and she walked slowly, grimacing from the pain. She’d held out for several years, saying each time it was her last, but she couldn’t manage the wild rugged terrain anymore and had finally accepted the truth earlier this year. After worrying about Grandfather’s resting place that would lie deserted deep in the mountains, she resolved to dig up his remains and get rid of the grave altogether. After all, no one would visit him once she was gone.

Year After Year is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.��

The large image associated with this post is copyrighted by .

Officially out last Tuesday,

From the recent :

Below is an excerpt—translated by Katie Whittemore, whose translation of this novel is as ambitious and admirable as the book itself—from a section when Juan is approaching the US-Mexico border, and is in a place like Ciudad Juarez.

You can purchase ��from better bookstores everywhere, , , or .

*

Juan opens his eyes in the dark, not waking completely. He stays like that for a time, on the edge of his dream. He’s on the train, he thinks at first. And then: I’ve fallen off the train, the train has run over my legs, my arms, my head. He is surprised to be alive, if that darkness isn’t actually death. I’m dreaming, he thinks. I’m in Navaja’s car. I’m in the Chichimeca desert. On his horse. In the arms of the Little Widow. In the arms of my wife. Then he perceives the faint outline of square window, and on the other side, the red and yellow lights of automobiles speeding past on the highway. Much more slowly, memories return to him, in ambiguous waves. He feels along the wall until he encounters what turns out to be a switch and the light from the lamp blinds him like the flash of a gunshot. Gradually he comes into a heavy, viscous awareness of his surroundings. The lamp. The vase where the same withered flowers languish. The bed, his bed, immune to the train’s violent jerking and his horse’s trot. Finally, he remembers, or decides he remembers. Everything is calm. Only the same rhythmic sound persists; not the Beast’s vibration, but a hand knocking on his door.

He stands to open that door.

He sees a very young woman on the other side. A girl whose childhood. has been diligently erased, with deep red lipstick and dabs of makeup. She has a bottle of tequila in one hand and two small glasses in the other. A certain expression of neglect. Her eyes shine with a light that is at once familiar and remote.

“Can I come in, papaíto?”

She can. She does so, slowly, hesitant, with her too-short skirt, flesh-colored bra, and swing of her cheap earrings. She sets the bottle and glasses on the night table and then turns to him with something that isn’t quite determination but aspires to be.

“You’re not going to sit?”

Because she is already sitting on the bed, on the very edge of the bed, as if she would like to occupy as little space as possible. Juan is still standing, his hand on the door handle, looking at the girl’s bare legs. Her hands, so small, as if created to hold a piece of art. Her white throat. In some ways, she reminds him of the women he saw advertised from the train, depicted on huge signs on both sides of the train track; women who were stunningly beautiful but also a little faded, mistreated by the elements.

“They call me the Güerita,” the Güerita says.

“I’m Juan.”

“I know. They told me you’d be waiting for me.”

He waits a few moments before closing the door. Then he sits down beside the girl. He opens the bottle and fills both glasses. The girl accepts hers in silence; her hands don’t meet around the glass. She isn’t even looking at it. Her eyes have just discovered the book on the night table, open to the Padrote’s page.

“You know him?”

The Güerita is about to reply, but in the end says nothing. Her eyes are fixed on him again, with an intensity that might be confused for fear. Eyes very open but simultaneously afraid, as if they were plumbing the depths of a well. At first, Juan doesn’t catch the significance of that look.

“Am I so like him?”

She nods slightly. The glass doesn’t quite make it to her lips.

“Navaja says you’re brothers.”

“H������-�����dzٳ�����.”

They drink from their glasses at the same time. Between them, a silence has opened, made not only from a few centimeters of mattress, but from minutes or centuries of distance.

“He was the one who brought you here, right?” Juan asks.

�Ԩ���.”

Juan takes another drink, long and full, to decide what he needs to ask.

“Did he force you?”

She shakes her head so vigorously she almost spills. No, no he didn’t force her. The Padrote, his brother, his half-brother that is, is a good man. If she’s there, it’s because it’s her choice; she wants to make that clear. She entered prostitution with all five senses, nobody forced her. She was looking for an opportunity to earn some pesos and the Padrote gave it to her. How could that be bad?

“You’re here because you want to be.”

�Ԩ���.”

The girl takes another swig of tequila. It’s a long swig, deliberate, long enough to decide what she is going to say next.

“The Padrote is a good man,” she repeats.

*

Juan Gómez Bárcena

The girl’s life encompasses twenty-one years—or that’s what the girl says, at least, although she doesn’t look more than eighteen—and takes as long to be recounted as the time she needs to empty three glasses of tequila. She talks about herself this way sometimes, in the third person, as if hers was a story she could better understand from a distance or from greater heights. Maybe this is why it doesn’t exactly seem to be a person’s life, but a chronicle of a character who never existed or the obituary of a girl already dead. There are, as in all the stories Juan has heard, certain common elements. The south. A birthplace that was poor or hungry or wretched. To the north, a drain that swallows up everything it touches, first her papa, then her mama; later, her older and younger siblings. One day, the gravitational force of that drain would end up catching her, too. She was eighteen at the time, although it seems to Juan that when the girl says twenty-one she means eighteen and fifteen when she says eighteen. Before setting off, she was told to leave behind anything that could identify her at home, so goodbye passport, library card, bills. Even shopping receipts. She was also told to neutralize her accent, because then there was no way to find out where she came from, and they’d have nowhere to deport her to. She followed those instructions to a T, and now nobody can guess her nationality. Try if you don’t believe me, papa.to, she says. Don’t know? Her clients often try, and they almost always fail. Guatemala, they say. Salvador, Honduras. They’ve even taken her for Argentine. And she says: Nope, nope, nope. But I’m going to tell you, papaíto. I’m Nicaraguan. From Managua. But only to you: to the police, I’m pure Mexican. Although if she really thinks about it, she says, staring into her glass, what is pure Mexican? What purity is there in anything, if we’re not talking about pure heroin or purebred dogs, which, by the way, die sooner the purer they are. Well. They told her not to take anything and nothing was what she took. Nothing except a few hundred dollars in her socks, and a suitcase with a change of clothes and a Virgin of Guadalupe prayer card. She packed the prayer card face up, so the Virgen could breathe. And the journey had its setbacks and its small tragedies; not all of those who accompanied her had the same luck, but thanks to God nothing happened to her, the Beast was good to her, maybe it respected her because she prayed a lot to the Virgin or maybe—and it scares her to think this—it was nothing but chance, plain and simple. The fact is she reached the border in ten or twelve days, safe and sound and with most of the dollars still balled up in her left sock. But in the end, it turned out she didn’t have enough for the crossing; the prices changed year to year, and in the previous eighteen months, the polleros’ fees had gone up: supply and demand, sister, they told her, this is America, this is the free market. And so she tried—unsuccessfully— to climb the border wall, along with two guys who also didn’t have the money to pay the pollero. And then they tried to swim across the Río Bravo—successfully, in a sense, because even though she didn’t manage to reach the other side, she didn’t drown either, not like one of the boys did. It was in that moment, soaked to the bone and shaking, when she decided to give up the dream, or a specific part of the dream, and settled down right here. In this city that kisses the border with El Paso and from that kiss, from that species of encounter or chat or intercourse between the two cities, nothing good is born. A city with a gentleman’s name, but that was better suited to the name of a murdered female, and there are so many to choose from. Of course, back then she didn’t know anything about this city, nothing about the murdered women, nothing, really, about almost anything. The worst thing about poverty, the girl says, is that it’s not just your pockets that are empty, but your head, too. It costs money to know certain things. And she had nothing, knew nothing, just what was advertised on TV, that Coca-Cola is life and that it’s a good time for the great taste of McDonald’s; that Vicente Fox is the change you need and Felipe Calderón wants you to catch his passion for México and you know that Peña Nieto will deliver. Because advertising, the girl says, is free. It might be the only free thing in this world. Anyway. She arrived in this city whose name she doesn’t want to remember with very little, with a couple hundred dollars and the address of her sister-in-law’s friend written on the back of a flyer. Her sister-in-law’s friend took her in as best she knew and could manage. The next day, that woman got her a job at one of the city’s textile factories. Because sewing was among the few things the girl knew how to do. There, in that sort of stable or hothouse or mammoth cathedral, where all the people were women, bent over their sewing machines, strafing scraps of yellow canvas. It was so bright indoors that outside always looked like night. Very white light, like a highway gasworks. Or a hospital waiting room. Or the front window of a cafeteria open twenty-four hours. In fact, the factory was open twenty-fours a day, and inside you could eat lunch, shower, even work out in a kind of gym. When she earned enough, the girl told herself, she would cross the border. And that, earning enough, might still take a few months, because the pay was, shall we say, somewhere between low and really low, but her sister-in-law’s friend told her no, they couldn’t complain, especially considering what was going on. The girl, who knew nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather she believed something in a blind and irrational way, a way she herself couldn’t explain. She knew things had always been bad. And that they would continue to be bad. And that the poor would continue to find reasons not to complain. She was poor and—in accordance with her own theory—she didn’t complain. Besides, what was there to complain about, what with the trimestral bonuses for employees and labor conventions, her sister-in-law’s friend recited, impassioned; there were prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, employee of the month, employee of the week, social security, free uniform laundry service; they took out a life insurance policy for you while you were alive and paid for your funeral if, God forbid, you died. It was enough for the girl because the girl was going to leave. But between leaving and not leaving, while she machine-gunned scraps of yellow canvas in that stable or cathedral or hothouse, while she shared a mattress in a shared room in a shared apartment, while those things were happening, she says, other things were happening that she disregarded, at least in the beginning. There were tiny notices in the papers, between the crime section and the horoscopes. Flyers pasted on bus shelters or streetlights, and on them the faces and names of very young girls. Girls who weren’t old enough. Old enough for what? What does she know, old enough to be alone, to be lost; to be, basically, all blurry in a black and white photograph, as if their own disappearance had caught them off guard. It’s true that, in time, all or almost all of them turned up, poor things, mutilated and dirty with dust and blood, abandoned in the empty lots in Lomas de Poleo or the landfills of Santa Elena or the Cerro Bola hillside, under a jumbo inscription written in whitewash that said READ THE BIBLE. Just like that, in the imperative: Read the Bible. They turned up around there, and the newspaper devoted the same tiny space to them again, only now they were a female cadaver, and in the days following the press release someone, merciful or pragmatic, went around taking down the flyers with those photos that looked like they’d been taken for a First Communion. Other times, other bodies turned up, bodies no one identified or claimed, women for whom nobody had put up posters, and then the press release was even smaller. This is awful, I would say to my sister-in-law’s friend, the girl says, although it’s probably fairer to say that by that time she was not so much the sister-in-law’s friend as her own. The girl’s. What’s awful? the friend would ask. Well, the stuff about those poor little girls. And she, the girl’s friend, would gesture with whatever she had in her hand, a little scrap of yellow canvas, for example, she would make that gesture and say that it was sad, of course it was sad, but those little girls weren’t little girls; most of them, in fact, were lost. The girl didn’t understand: well of course they’re lost, haven’t you seen the posters? But her sister-in-law’s friend, the girl’s friend, didn’t mean that. She meant that they worked in prostitution, did she get it? They took drugs or sold them or both. They went out alone at night or in bad company or tempting men in roadside bars. They were girls who paid for the trip north with their bodies, the body’s ATM, the cuerpomático—and on saying this, cuerpomático—the sister-in- law’s friend touched her breasts. Oh, the girl says she responded at the time. That was all. And she was left thinking about the pictures she’d seen on the posters, which looked like they were from a First Communion, or a quinceñera at most. She thought about that for a few days, about their First Communions, about where and how they had celebrated their fifteenth birthdays, and about how their parents must have suffered over the bad lives their daughters were living.

*

Word by word, drink by drink, the girl has drained her glass. Now she fills it again. Time for the second tequila has come and with it, the heaviest part of her story. Because the factory where the girl worked might have had labor agreements, and prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, and employee of the month, employee of the week, and social security, free laundry service for their uniforms, but it also had a very strict policy about punctuality. If you got to work late, even just a minute late, you didn’t get in. Two minutes. That was how late the sister-in-law’s friend was, the friend who was, by that time, the girl’s friend. At least that’s how the girl would remember her: as her friend. That’s how she has been fossilized in her memory: the wee hours of one morning in some summer month in such-and-such a year. It was two minutes past midnight: that she can state with certainty. Two minutes late and they wouldn’t let her in. That was as much as the girl knew and what she would later tell the police, when at eight o’clock in the morning she got home, never to see her friend again. She didn’t actually tell the police right at that time, because first she wanted to be patient, wait a couple of hours, and then because the Mexican police have their procedures and protocols. One was required to wait so many hours, entire days, before filing a report. How many hours, how many days? The girl doesn’t recall. What she does remember is that the commissioner who met with her was very gentlemanly, very polite, he pulled out a chair for her and even asked how she liked her coffee. She asked for it with a splash of milk because she’d heard that was a classy way to order, with a splash of milk, although she didn’t even like milk and only sort of liked coffee; but she was weakened by her tears and intended to please the police every way she could. I-don’t-know-what percentage of the muchachitas—that’s what he called them, “muchachitas”—reappear within seventy-two hours of their own volition. That’s what the commissioner said. The girl doesn’t remember the figure: it was a high percentage. And the other percent? she asked, coffee cup trembling in her hand. The commissioner raised his eyebrows. A short time later, they called to tell her that her friend belonged to the small percentage, not the large group. It wasn’t the norm: at least not according to the statistics. There were inquiries. There were witnesses who said they’d seen a black car stopped at the factory entrance, and also a white motorcycle, and a car that was a sort of a pistachio yellow. There was a small press release. There were posters with a blurry photograph. Her sister-in-law’s friend was nineteen and in the only picture the girl had of her, she was smiling and winking at the camera. That was how the neighbors would see her, multiplied and laminated and cyclostyled by the city’s streetlights and bus shelters. One afternoon, after posting a dozen leaflets around a block far from the apartment, she overheard a conversation between two boys who stopped to look at one of posters. The picture of her winking friend. She didn’t hear or didn’t recall hearing what the first kid said. But the second kid replied: One of those girls with the body’s ATM, he said, grabbing his balls. She started to cry and the boys asked her if she needed help and she answered that she didn’t need any help thank-you-very-much. But she didn’t cry, however, when the police called her. Identifying the body wasn’t as hard as she’d imagined, either: by then, she’d had lots of time to read plenty about the girls who got lost in that city. She knew what she could expect. She knew about ritualistic mutilations, nipples bitten off, rampageous rapes, the female cadavers—as they were called—that turned up with stiff arms, as if embracing the air; as if they were still embracing the last man who fucked them. In gynecologic positions, the experts said, which meant that the thing never ended, that, even dead, they looked like they were still getting fucked. As for her friend, the murder or murderers respected her, all things considered. Up to a certain point, at least. The deceased’s demise was caused by strangulation, and most certainly occurred the same day as the kidnapping. She had been raped, yes, but only vaginally; no matter how thoroughly they explored her rectum, no signs of abrasion, tearing, or dilation were found. That, the absence of anal rape, was of great consternation to the medical examiner. The modus operandi, he said with a sigh, appears to have changed. But she, the girl, wasn’t interested in the modus operandi. Over the preceding weeks she had read everything she could get her hands on about the wave of femicides, in the papers or online—because her factory, in addition to paying for your funeral if, God forbid, you died, also had a kind of employee internet café where they could call their relatives or play solitaire or do whatever they liked. She knew as much as could be known about the subject, which wasn’t a lot. She knew the guilty party was a serial killer who mimicked other serial killers, imitators in theory but just as lethal in practice. She knew blame lay with the patriarchy. She knew blame lay with excess: an excess of women and an excess of desert. Blame lay with the gringos, who crossed the border like they were going on safari, hunters ready to claim their female trophies. Blame lay with the Mexicans, who no longer believed in the Virgin of Guadalupe with the intensity of yesteryear. Blame lay with the government. With the narcos. With the narco-government. Blame lay with the women, who walked alone. Blame lay with the women, who walked in bad company. Blame lay with the women, who were pretty. Blame lay with shamanic rituals and black magic and the Santa Muerte and the Aztecs. Blame lay with living like this, partway between the city and the desert, between Mexico and the United States, between Heaven and Hell, on that irresolute land between something and nothing. Blame lay with values, with a lack of values. Blame lay with poverty. Blame lay with the desert. That’s what the girl read, and read, and read, like she’d read ads before, other claims, other highway signs and leaflets and billboards. Fuck it all. The factory, too: fuck it. As the deceased’s next of kin—her? she was her sister-in-law’s friend’s next of kin?—she was left a bit of money. With that money, she bought what she had come to buy. Prices had gone up again—supply and demand, sister, free market—but still she had enough, she had enough, and when she went to hand over the bill to the pollero, the girl, who, until that moment, had known nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather believed something blindly, irrationally, in a way she herself could not reasonably explain: that the price of her friend’s cheap death meant that she’d have to pay so dearly for the passage.

*

The end of the story lives at the bottom of the third glass of tequila. The girl looks down at it, and looks again before she finishes.

*

Purchase ��from better bookstores everywhere, , , or .

Included below are pieces from three letters: the one that Alya writes to set things in motion, one about overly ambitious publishing, and one that I dedicate to Elon Musk. Enjoy—and ��

(And if you like this, check out the .��, recently retranslated by Shushan Avagyan, is a fantastic place to start, and we will be reissuing a number of these, slowly but surely, over the next few years.)

*

Letter Three

The second letter from Alya. In this one, Alya asks me not to write her about love. The letter is tired.

My dear, my own. Don’t write to me about love. Don’t. I’m very tired. As you yourself have said, I have come to the end of my tether. This daily grind pulls us apart. I do not love you and I will not love you. I fear your love; someday you will hurt me because of the way you love me now. Don’t carry on so. I still feel we have much in common. Don’t frighten me! As well as you know me, you still do all you can to frighten me, to repel me. Your love may be great, but it’s far from joyful.

I need you; you know how to bring me out of myself.

Don’t write me only about your love. Don’t make wild scenes on the telephone. Don’t rant and rave. You’re managing to poison my days. I need freedom—I refuse to account for my actions to anyone!

Yet you demand of me all my time. Be light-hearted or else you’ll fail at love. With each day, you grow more melancholy. You should go to a sanatorium, my dear.

I’m writing in bed, because yesterday I went dancing. Now I’m going to take a bath. Perhaps we’ll see each other today.

Alya

5 February

*

Letter Seven

Ģ����ý Grzhebin on canvas, about Grzhebin in the flesh. Since the letter is written in a penitent mood, the trademark of the Grzhebin Publishing House is affixed. Here too are several fleeting remarks about Jewry and about the attitude of the Jews toward Russia.

What to write about! My whole life is a letter to you.

We meet less and less often. I’ve come to understand so many simple words: yearn, perish, burn, but “yearn” (with the pronoun “I”) is the most comprehensible word.

Writing about love is forbidden, so I’ll write about Zinovy Grzhebin, the publisher. That ought to be sufficiently remote.

In Yury Annenkov’s portrait of Zinovy Isaevich Grzhebin, the face is a soft pink color and looks downright delectable.

In real life, Grzhebin is pastier.

In the portrait, the face is very fleshy; to be more precise, it resembles intestines bulging with food. In real life, Grzhebin is more tight and firm; he might well be compared to a blimp of the semirigid type. When I was not yet thirty and did not yet know loneliness and did not know that the Spree is narrower than the Neva and did not sit in the Pension Marzahn, whose landlady did not permit me to sing at night while I worked, and did not tremble at the sound of a telephone—when life had not yet slammed the door to Russia shut on my fingers, when I thought that I could break history on my knee, when I loved to run after streetcars . . .

“When a poem was best of all

Better even than a well-aimed ball”

(something like that)

. . . I disliked Grzhebin immensely. I was then twenty-seven and twenty-eight and twenty-nine.

I thought Grzhebin cruel for having gulped down so much Russian literature.

Now, when I know that the Spree is thirty times narrower than the Neva, when I too am thirty, when I wait for the telephone to ring—though I’ve been told not to expect a call—when life has slammed the door on my fingers and history is too busy even to write letters, when I ride on streetcars without wanting to capsize them, when my feet lack the unseeing boots they once wore and I no longer know how to launch an offensive . . .

. . . now I know that Grzhebin is a valuable product. I don’t want to ruin Grzhebin’s credit rating, but I fervently believe that my book won’t be read in a single bank.

Therefore I declare that Grzhebin is no businessman, nor is he stuffed either with the Russian literature gulped down by him or with dollars.

But, Alya, don’t you know who Grzhebin is? Grzhebin’s a publisher; he published the almanac Sweetbriar, he published Pantheon and now he seems to have the most important publishing house in Berlin.

In Russia, between 1918 and 1920, Grzhebin was buying manuscripts hysterically. It was a disease—like nymphomania.

He was not publishing books then. And I frequently called on him in my unseeing boots and I shouted in a voice thirty times louder than any other voice in Berlin. And in the evening I drank tea at his place.

Don’t think that I’ve grown thirty times narrower.

It’s just that everything has changed.

I hereby give the following testimony: Grzhebin is no businessman.

Grzhebin is a Soviet-type bourgeois, complete with delirium and frenzy.

Now he publishes, publishes, publishes! The books come running, one after another; they want to run away to Russia, but are denied entry.

They all bear the trademark: zinovy grzhebin.

Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred—soon there may be a thousand titles. The books pile on top of each other; pyramids are created and torrents, but they flow into Russia drop by drop.

Yet here in the middle of nowhere, in Berlin, this Soviet bourgeois raves on an international scale and continues to publish new books.

Books as such. Books for their own sake. Books to assert the name of his publishing house.

This is a passion for property, a passion for collecting around his name the greatest possible quantity of things. This incredible Soviet bourgeois responds to Soviet ration cards and numbers by throwing all his energy into the creation of a multitude of things that bear his name.

“Let them deny my books entry into Russia,” says he—like a rejected suitor who ruins himself buying flowers to turn the room of his unresponsive beloved into a flower shop and who admires this absurdity.

An absurdity quite beautiful and persuasive. So Grzhebin, spurned by his beloved Russia and feeling that he has a right to live, keeps publishing, publishing, publishing. [. . .]

*

Letter Twenty-Six

Ģ����ý a mask, battery-powered, engines, the length of the hood on the engine of the Hispano-Suiza; some general comments on internal-combustion engines and about how the Hispano-Suiza automobile would wear rings in its ears if it were a human being. Speaking as a driver, I’ll say this: the letter is full of quiet fury and slander.

Today I woke up in the middle of the night. I was awakened by the incomprehensibility of the object in my hands.

The object proved to be a black paper mask and I found myself standing in the middle of the room.

It would clearly be a good idea for me to visit a sanatorium.

It’s bad for me to talk about love.

Let’s talk a bit about automobiles.

It’s sad to ride in taxis!

The saddest thing of all, though, is to ride in a car with an electric engine. It has no heartbeat; it is filled with heavy batteries and they are charged, but the plates will lose their charge and the engine will stop. I’ve started a lot of cars in my day; sometimes they hit me with their cranks. I’ve helped a lot of people get started.

Sometimes, even in Berlin, I feel like starting an engine which some driver is unable to handle. I did that twice, but the third time I made a most humiliating mistake.

I walked up to start the engine and it was electric, with a false radiator and, of course, no crank. How do you start a car��that has no heart, no crank to turn? It even looks artificial, like false shirtfronts and cuffs; the hood is put in front supposedly to cover an engine, but inside, more than likely, is nothing but rags.

They pretend to be internal-combustion engines.

Poor Russian emigration!

It has no heartbeat.

In Berlin, it is impossible and improper to speak Russian loudly on the streets. Why, the Germans themselves hardly speak above a whisper. Live, they say, but keep quiet.

Cruise around town, without noise and without hope, in a dead, battery-powered automobile. Run, without breathing, through whatever you once possessed; then, once you run down, die.

Our batteries were charged in Russia; here we keep going around in circles and soon we will grind to a halt. The lead battery plates will turn into nothing but sheer weight.

The acid will turn rancid.

The Russian newspapers in Berlin smell of this rancid weight.

Rancid and weighty are the words I have written.

We’d better talk about types of automobiles.

Do you like the Hispano-Suiza, Alya?

What a mistake! Don’t give yourself away.

You love expensive things and you would gravitate to the most expensive things in any store even if all the price tags were scrambled the night before. The Hispano-Suiza? It’s a bad car. An honest, noble car with a true stroke, a car with the driver sitting on one side to flaunt his impotence—that’s the Mercedes, the Benz, the Fiat, the Delaunay-Belleville, the Packard, the Renault, the Delage, and the very expensive but formidable Rolls-Royce, which has an unusually supple stroke. In all these cars, the design of the body follows the structure of the engine and the transmission; moreover, the design is calculated to minimize air resistance as much as possible. Racing cars usually have long noses, high in front: this particular shape, at high speed, offers the least resistance to the atmosphere. Have you ever noticed, Alya, that a bird flies with its blunt breast forward, not its pointed tail?

The length of an engine’s hood is determined, of course, by the number of cylinders (four, six, occasionally eight or twelve) and by their diameter. The public is used to long-nosed cars. As for the Hispano-Suiza, it has a long stroke; that is, there’s a great distance between the top and bottom centers of gravity. This car is extremely dubious and forced, so to speak—a cocaine sniffer if there ever was one. Its engine is high and narrow.

That’s its own private affair.

But the hood is long.

Thus the Hispano-Suiza uses its hood as a disguise: there is a space of almost two feet between the radiator and the engine. That two feet is a lie made expressly for snobs; that two feet is a violation of good design and it infuriates me.

If I ever come to despise you, if I ever sing . . .

Disappear, you paths

On which I trod!

. . .then I will consign my memory of you not to the devil, but to that void inside the Hispano-Suiza.

Your Hispano-Suiza is expensive, but worthless. Its chassis often comes with folding seats instead of doors. That must appeal to gigolos.

The steering wheel is set at an indecent angle; if the Hispano-Suiza were a man, it would have rings in its ears. Your Hispano-Suiza has its radiator in the wrong place. It runs around in false cuffs. It will never love you. All this I find more interesting than the life and times of the Russian emigration.

However, the Hispano-Suiza does hold the record for distance covered in mountainous terrain.

*

All excerpts from , translated by Richard Sheldon��(Dalkey Archive Press)