Frontera
by
Carmen Herrera Castro
***
As noted, author Carmen Herrera Castro has generously allowed us to translate from her book, Frontera (Frontier.) However, there is as yet no complete and published translation into English. For those of you who do read Spanish, we offer the following information so that you may secure the book for your reading pleasure:
Sevilla, España: www.wanceuleneditorial.com WANCEULEN S.L. ISBN (PAPEL): 978-84-9993-642-0 ISBN (EBOOK): 978-84-9993=643-7 This is Part One of a two-part translation. |
Children!
Bem vindos, Welcome! to the frontier, a raia! In this borderland live persons, personas, and pessoas, personalities who shut the gate or eye your hens, and dogs that leap like grasshoppers. We can cross twice at the end of the year, advance or retreat, going an hour in a minute. The time zone changes. We become smugglers, all types nobody needs. Trans-frontier time has a whole other quality. Before, all this was open country, afterwards burnt fields, twisted trees, black earth. But we came from Ayamonte to Faro (and from Guatemala to Honduras,) eating bolinhas––dough balls—cream pastries, bacalhau a Brás, strips of pimentón, drinking spring water, bitter cherry liqueur, provincial wine, vinho verde, cross-country, SuperBock, Sumol, Mirinda, Pepsi Cola, and Godovi. AUCTION The boats dock at dusk and in bursts from their hulls, they disgorge a cascade of silvery fish. By the dock swarm all classes of people: tourists, curiosity seekers, restaurant owners, a diversity of questionable seafarers, motley elements that seem to suggest that it is not only fish that they are going to auction off. Quickly, the schools of fish are sorted, distributed in ordered boxes, lined up, overflowing––a group of boxes here, others way over there, another further on, another, another…. The largest fish are not there, having left before by cart on a route bound for the most expensive restaurant kitchens. The auction begins low. Onlookers converge around the auctioneer who blurts out a string of unintelligible numbers. Unintelligible to the ignorant, to those fishermen whose color changes as the tune goes on and the price goes down, and down, and down even more, till someone in the circle makes a gesture, a signal that the auctioneer alone appreciates, that stops the litany in its tracks and, with a deep sigh, as a relief from pressure built up since the ship first left for the sea, is released and scattered to the bottom feeders. Sensing the coming entertainment, the group moves like a shoal of fish, waiting for the auction to begin. BOOM TOWN Each year they reclassify half the town: I have been reclassified, my neighbors said: one day they were in the country and the next they were in the city, without so much as moving from the spot. Then, they believed that might be an enormous advantage. Promoters sprung up like weeds, looking for investment, building apartments, duplexes, chalets…. Some locals got into business and, in a flash, opened places near the port, cute beach bars, nothing like the designer venues of the German and Dutch promotors who also appeared each year, like the gurumelo mushrooms after a rain. Samuel, of Samuel & Partners, had had a furniture business on the Alicante side. He had lived there for about twenty years and married an Española; she died and he decided to return. In spite of the time that he had been in Spain, Samuel did not speak a single word of Spanish, though he understood everything. He appeared one fine day in the town, said that the value of everything had changed a lot, and started Samuel & Partners with his adopted son, Ben, who had been born in Holland of Moroccan parents. Ben largely dedicated himself to smashing up a fancy car every now and then. In the time of Samuel & Partners, he had destroyed a Jeep Cherokee (it was burned up, but it wasn’t my fault, he said), a Mercedes, (wrecked near Madrid), a Chrysler Voyager (had an accident whoknowswhere), and a Jeep BMW (it wasn’t clear what happened to this one, either.) The time that Pepita Castro Marín found him, he had just finished having an accident and was always with a different chick—all very pretty (he was also handsome), all Moroccan, but none of them ever knew about the existence of the others. And, Ben warned Pepita, in an aside, don’t screw up. Ben did not drink alcohol, nor eat ham, though he defined himself as an agnostic. Samuel also said he was agnostic, though he was of Jewish descent. At this time Samuel was more than seventy years old; he was a tall man, well proportioned, with abundant white hair and blue eyes, dressed in fine clothes, informal and still quite attractive. In the town he found four or five girlfriends ( He went with all of them, seriously, yes, successively, and didn’t accumulate them like Ben). The last time Pepita Castro Marín ran into Samuel he was a shadow of himself. Aged, walking slowly, eyes sad… he told her that two months before he had been diagnosed with bone cancer, but that it was going to be cured, because now there are many good treatments (olé the optimists!), and that he had gotten married the week before….¿con quien? With whom? ¿con la ultima? the last one? yes, yes (but the last one was…? La Tere Castaño Robleado?) because, according to Pepita Castro Marín’s calculations, the Argentine psychologist was the penultimate… In the end, she didn’t know if he had gotten married to la Tere Castaño Robleado or to another woman because she was driving and Samuel was walking, and the car had stopped in the middle of the road with all those drivers honking, and with that sign in plain view, Adiós, Samuel & Partners. The office was closed and at that moment it appeared that no one was there. Pepita Castro Marín had not turned to look at Samuel, imagining that he wanted to enjoy the time he had left, a lot or a little; and when she thought of la Tere Castaño Robleado (or whoever had married him, knowing what he had), in spite of herself the hairs rose, hedgehog-like, on the back of her neck. |
PUNK
In her time of civil service, when she was a respectable person with a respectable job, respectable friends and an official boyfriend, Nati Peña Núñez alone preserved the memory of the Ayamonte Carnival. She came to the town with other officials from the Huelva office, ready to have a good time. The first thing that they did when they arrived was to get mirlitones, the little toy flutes of Carnival. The flute is very easy to play, you only have to toot the melody with a shrill voice and the instrument will reproduce it with a distorted squeak. Right away the group tuned into their surroundings, going from one bar to the other, blowing their mirilitones and drinking one shot after another. The group crossed paths with four young men dressed in black leather, with chains and piercings. One of them planted himself right in front of Nati Peña Núñez, eyeing her with a fixed stare. She became very nervous and an unexpected excitement rose up from her trembling knees, nesting in her stomach. Nati Peña Núñez’ mouth was dry. All her saliva had collected in the hollow of her mirliton and dripped down to the end of the instrument where a long thread of spit hung, about to fall. She only saw it when the boy, not taking his eyes from hers, lowered his head, opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue decorated with a little silver ball to catch the trickle that slid down and fell. She laughed nervously with her lips tightened over her nozzle, but the laugh produced more spit and a new shot spurted down and over that obscene tongue. He asked for more. Nati Peña Núñez’ blew several times. The boy turned away, without taking his eyes off her, shouting, how good your kisses taste! Her friends, who had advanced several meters in the opposite direction, called to them. Nati Peña Núñez’ hesitated, the punk also, they looked in each other’s eyes, turned their heads back at once to look at their respective colleagues, apparently from two different planets, looked at each other intensely once more…a long pause…and said, in unison, adios! PEDRA At the border, putas are always on the other side of the line. Between cups and cups of medronho, a sweet aperitif, in the taverns of the Algarve, the men pined for the skills of Maria Aparecida Coelho da Silva, Chocho, “snug pussy,” of Esphana. They missed her when she went to work in Spain but they understood: in the puticlub, the bar where men picked up whores, “Wild Man” Porras y Porras rode bareback. The civil guard, stationed on the Paymogo road, made more money and the work was so very, very easy. GORDITA Near Bordeira lives a Dutch couple, Chris Naaktegeboren, very thin and tall and Annemik Borst, large and fat. Quite fat. The day the Lucía Rojo Redondo went to vist them, Annemik told her story in nederlandishportuñol, a mishmash of Dutch, English, Portuguese and Spanish. Her mother was a German Jew and her father, a Dutch Calvinist. As a child, her mother was in a concentration camp, and her father spent many months hidden in a false ceiling, together with his cousin, so that the Nazis would not get them and send them to work in Germany, as it seemed that was what they did with Dutch boys who were too young to fight in the war. When Annemik was two, her mother, who never got over the experience of being in a concentration camp where the majority of her family died, was put in a mental hospital from which she never left, and Annemik had to live with several host families. And, since in Holland there were so many religions—one family was Presbyterian, the next Catholic, the other Calvinist…Annemik Borst, at nine years old, decided that religions were just a joke. Despite carrying the weight of her history, Annemik Borst, was a happy person, loving and spontaneous. When Lucía Rojo Redondo came back to visit her, Annemik gave her an embrace, wrapped her arms around her, burying her in her fat flesh. Lucia stayed enveloped, needing the affection because she had separated from her latest boyfriend, and the embrace made her feel better. Lucía Rojo Redondo remembered her chubby friend who at fourteen years old dedicated herself to discovering feminine sexuality. And she recalled a passage from A Thousand and One Nights: when she walked naked, her flesh trembled, like cream jiggles in a Bedouin's bowl. Lucía thought that one of the sweetest-smelling things in the world was the embrace of a fat woman. |