With Our Slingshots (Read Slowly Please) from small red women

FICTIONTRANSLATION

Nov 1

By Marta Sanz, Translated from Spanish by Katie King

We were from here, but also from elsewhere. We are the lost children and the dead women. God does not exist—we are proof of that—and down here we always wear a smile.

We know many things. We know that Paula’s memories do not belong to this place. Then why has she come to this two-bit town? To do the dirty work, to unearth our dry bones (metaphorically speaking) and revive us only to reignite the fury of the bonfire and burn us again? Why has Paula come to delve into this pit, enlarging it, disturbing the atoms, and then disinfecting it with quicklime like a hired cleaner or a gardener who only grows chrysanthemums? Why does she want to put names to these remains? Does Paula want to purge her own hidden guilt, like someone who has fattened a pig for the feast of San Antón and then made sausages without washing their hands? Is she bored? What country is she from? And her sin? What drives Paula to break her fingernails in the hard-packed dirt and fill her lungs with dust as she tries to clean the jawbone of a man, probably a good man, who lived just an instant on this earth and then consumed it forever? I can feel the tickle of her brush on my mandible. Who is consuming whom? Does the earth consume men, consume women, or do men—women—consume earth? We cannot answer that last question, and our ignorance is so ironic …

All around us, potatoes, rutabaga, and other tubers sprout, grow, and sometimes die among the earthworms and the chemical fertilizer, among the molars of the vegan men and vegan women. We try to be gender-inclusive down here, and pro-animal, superficially pluralistic. We try to protect the weakest, who, like us, have picked the short straw … but we doubt we can do it. We do not have much strength, and maybe it is better, from now on, to lower our arms in resignation. In the end, we are here because of something much bigger than the games and traps of identity. The epicenes and the hermaphrodites.

So, will Paula be able to resuscitate the dead and watch them rise, holding hands, to devour unleavened bread, and seek out their homes and descendants who will have their very same eyes, same features, same skin tone, same nut-brown circle of areola, the exact same number of grams of dangling earlobe flesh, the identical sharp bridge of the aquiline nose? We are the lost children and the dead women: maybe Paula can help us grow. To grow is to know your name because it is written on the headstone placed above you. We will keep watch over Paula so, like the baby in the story of Solomon, she is not pulled apart when the dead tug on one arm and the living tug on the other. Or when a few of those both dead and living want to skin her alive. Because Paula is about to place her little, lame leg where she should not. We will watch over her so they do not destroy her. We will pull her upward, and from there, we will see her and speak to her in her dreams with words that she will remember just as she finishes her morning coffee and biscuits. We will observe her from above or through the cracks in the earth, next to the red ants and the earthworms used as bait to fish in the river. We will protect her with our slingshots, like guardian angels, because Paula is a generous lady who has come to fill her eyes with the dust of rabbit dung, with the decay of those who no longer hold any memories. Philanthropy, boredom, manual labor, a desire to lose weight, unconditional love …

Paula’s memories are of a house that was very expensive to heat in winter, rabbit ears on top of the television to draw in the only two channels, and simple knobs: one for on and off, one for volume, one for contrast and one for vertical hold—that was the most dangerous one. If you did not know what you were doing you would fill the screen with flickering images that quickly escaped, like dizzying pages that will not allow themselves to be read, until The Count of Monte Cristo, or the game shows, or Familia Telerín, or any program for that matter was deformed and lost. It was a house infused with the scent of stew simmering with ingredients from the urban markets, nothing too fresh or too recently sacrificed—dried and salt-cured meats are more flavorful after all. It was a house with an icebox, a butane space heater, a hot water bottle, a child’s quilted bathrobe, and checkered slippers so that you would never, ever, put your bare feet on the floor when you got up in the morning. It was here that Paula played at reenacting TV shows with neighborhood friends. It was here where she pressed too hard with her pencil on the Rubio calligraphy paper, creating smudges and grooves that she could not erase. It was a house in a city where the children—at least those she knew—did not have to work, did not learn to add and subtract in their heads, did not know the best time to hunt frogs, and did not learn to beat stray dogs with sorrowful eyes. In Paula’s world, children never learned how, if parents weren’t watching, you could decapitate a chicken and watch it run around like mad, all chest and beating wings, from one side of the pen to the other …

On the other hand, it is also true that Paula’s city nose—short, flat, keen as a hunting dog’s—had never enjoyed the blossoming rural springtime or the pine trees that smell so good when warmed by the sun. But it was familiar with the aroma of movie theaters, the alcohol-infused flea lotion, the Nata pencil erasers. It knew well the aroma of fermentation in the neighborhood bar and wine cellar where she went to refill the empty soda bottle with wine to warm her grandfather’s stomach. Afterwards, he would tell his granddaughter the story of how he was shot in the leg. The bullet lodged in his femur transformed him into the metallic man, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, and meant he was able to go home and graduate early. He would also tell her about the time they used castor oil to purge his sister. And the story about the boys who hopped onto moving trains. And the one about the men who had to hide in closets and attics. And the one about the shopkeepers who were Francoist informers and about the ditches full of corpses. Paula would have preferred that her grandfather had kept these secrets and historically climactic moments to himself, but her family home was all about confessions, transparency, thick drinking chocolate. It was a place where they listened to radio shows to educate themselves. And a place where Grandfather was always wheeling out of the same old stories. Not that old chestnut. What a bore. Almost as monotonous as reciting multiplication tables. Then, Grandmother would position his hands, and together they recited the children’s prayer: “Guardian Angel, sweet company, by nighttime or by day, do not abandon me …” Paula liked these mysterious verses more than stories about a gunshot wound.

As she grew up, Paula shook the fantasies from her head. She studied numbers. She married a madman, an unnatural being. Just the mention of him gets a wink—of the eye and the anus—from some of us down here, while others make the sign of the cross. For some things, we are still not very sophisticated. We confuse gay with fag, homosexuality with pedophilia, transvestites with transgenders, dykes with witches, criminality with Aristotle’s love for his disciples or with Alexander the Great’s for his soldiers. Some of us are deeply ashamed by this, but others could not care less. Paula Quiñones, granddaughter of Manuel, the Civil War survivor with a bullet in his leg, married a centaur and fabulist. Arturo Zarco, sweet company. Clueless guardian angel. Busy little queer. When Pauli fell abruptly from the romantic nimbus of her rose-tinted dreams with him, we were not there to cushion the landing. No carpet of clouds. No fluffy angel wings or safety nets like those of cautious trapeze artists.

As a girl, Paula was more interested in tales of princesses and genies in lamps than in her grandfather’s stories, but Manuel’s words lodged in her brain without her realizing and transformed her into a gimpy idealist and budding philanthropist. Everything Paula knows, she learned from listening to others, even as she distances herself from the stories she hears, with scientific, almost surgical methods. Just as she is distancing herself now from this place: she cannot just hang about here as if catastrophes were not occurring in other worlds. We will watch over Paula, we will protect her, perhaps we will speak to her, while she is dreaming, with voices that echo like feedback from a mic, remote voices that ring metallically through our bullet holes, blue voices like the color of our fingers at first, but voices that will be, above all, as red as a red pepper. Red, yellow, purple voices: poppy, gorse, lavender flowers that illuminate the dusky prairie. Paula will see us in her sleep: we are a band of dirty, drunken boys with protruding ears, clinging to each other’s shoulders to keep from falling. We will watch over Paula. It will not help much because we never believed in God, and we blaspheme constantly and make the sign of the cross only out of habit. On the other hand, we do believe in benevolent spirits and domestic ghosts, which can be detected by their dilated, radar-like pupils, like the eyes of a faithful pet, in the shadowy corners of a home. We are Paula’s lost dog and her tin-man grandfather, though he was luckier than we were. We are fairly certain that after she pulls our bones from the dry clay, like someone skinning a squirrel, or digging an embedded bullet out of the wall, Paula will not turn our stories into the same old chestnut to be wheeled out amid the scent of simmering stew. We do not want to be lionized like saints. There is no doubt we were the good ones, but we did have our vices and our ignorance. Some of us were not even very good looking. We are the lost children, the ones who never grow up. Also, amid the clay, we glimpse the bodies of women, although down here it no longer matters if we are women or men, if we involuntarily practice all sorts of copulation, desecration, and liquefaction. We do not seek compassion or reward. But we do pity our children, who are now older than we ever were, and they still do not have even a molecule of ash, or Hansel’s bony finger, for urns that for too long have had our names on them. They have no idea where we are.

Paula does not listen to music when she travels but eavesdrops on the conversations of others and their breathing as they sleep. Sometimes she also closes her eyes. We have seen her. She isolates herself, but it is an isolation without bullet-proof glass, without physical barriers. She does not use a headset or play video games on her smartphone. We would love to have one of those and scroll through the screens. We get the impression there is water beneath the glass, that the device is a fishbowl, but we do not yet have enough data to be sure. Paula does not read a book. Hers is an island that could easily be taken with a rowboat.

When the bus leaves the highway and turns onto a local road, Paula cannot take her eyes off the countryside. The bus passes through two small towns where the unpaved streets are deserted, and not a soul peeks out the windows. To the left and the right of the road, calves boxed between thin metal sheets repeat the only movement available to them: lowering their heads to eat. Caged calves and pigsties. At the entrance to her destination, a bouquet of flowers scorched by the heat of the asphalt is tied to the safety rail, left there by the very elderly daughter of one of us. Her offering marks the spot where she thinks her mother’s bones may lie in the jumble of a mass grave. Or maybe the flowers commemorate the motorcyclist who broke his neck there on the way home after fighting with his girlfriend, and soon a new gravestone will gleam in the cemetery with one of the usual surnames: Cordero Beato, Beato Cordero, Caberizo Ríos, Ríos Beato. The converted Jews—the most impeccable Christians—fattened many pigs to give to the priest. That is who we are, though we do not realize it: new Christians, boys and girls, men and women, people who want to forget their origins because the memory pains them. They try to forget in order to purify themselves or because they lack courage. Brothers in disguise in a crowd of disguised brothers. Let us leave it at that; even though today our tibias are feeling damper than ever, we do not want to discuss it right now. Laziness wins out, and drowsiness, which, at the very least, we are entitled to.

Some people would have paused to admire the lovely contrast of the ephemeral poppy with the sturdy rockrose, the floral undulation of the countryside that has been caressed—in reality, beaten—by strong men and women. But it is the caged calves, the sun-scorched flowers on the withered bouquet, and the empty towns that affect Paula more profoundly, more than each of the bones that she will unearth. Our finger bones, our skulls, our discontinued femurs will no longer belong to the pit and the oddly nurturing mounds of earth and can be buried in a place where our loved ones can honor us and crown us with wreaths of red, yellow, and purple. Then we will be transformed from the material into the spiritual, although in life we never really believed in that. We hope the transition takes only a moment, and then we can carry on as if nothing happened. Particles lost in the breeze, pollinating the flowers after all the bees have been electrocuted or poisoned.

Paula looks out the window, stunned by the panorama, the animals, the oil slicks from traffic accidents, the grain silos, the bales of hay, the smell of pigs. Paula absorbs these impressions while on the cross-country bus and then in the taxi that she catches afterward to reach the main street of this town that has become a refuge for artists, who we deeply distrust. Also here are those who flee the frenzy of the modern world and the mobile phones that bedazzle us every time we glance at them. We, the lost children—the dead women, in general, refrain from commenting on this point—have always thought that this is a place where imbeciles and unnatural men reside, those who maybe did not like a nice breast, or a little wiggle. The taxi driver says nothing. When they arrive in the center of this dusty little town perched on a rise that looks like an old man’s hump, Paula pays the driver and tips him. As soon as she leaves the vehicle, she anticipates, as a woman, the problems that could trip her up—go steady, feet! Paula inventories her errors: the lack of a hat, the noisy wheels of her suitcase, the impropriety of mini shorts with her lame leg (above all things, the lame leg, and yet to us her slight lurch, the excessively rhythmic progression of her legs, seems charming), and the unequal exuberance of her thighs, one thin and the other one …

At exactly four o’clock, the men, both the pious and the perverse, play cards in the bar. Paula is not one of those people who shows up in this town with a cheap suitcase and the flag of the Spanish Republic pinned to her T-shirt. She does not carry a guitar in a checkered case, and she is not searching for relatives. And she does not have a hat, which is her one unforgivable omission because a big drop of sweat rolls down her forehead as she walks down the main street. Despite her short shorts, she thinks that her bad leg will protect her from the men’s stares. She is mistaken. There are no more farmers here and no more lust, while there is an excess of women’s thighs, some like magnificent hams, others as fibrous as a cyclist’s. These are the thighs of young women who watch what they eat and on weekends come to this high mesa to practice ecotourism, swim in the pool, hunt for seasonal níscalo mushrooms among the pines, or pretend to nibble bacon and cheese marinated in olive oil. “Delicious!” say the liars spitting the unctuous wad under the bar. The men playing cards and dominoes in the bar at four o’clock are not interested in looking at movie-star thighs, polished like wax, rock hard, the antithesis of jelly. Their eyes, with pupils dilated from liquor or contracted by caffeine, record a different image: the soft limp of a lovely woman with her mane of long brown hair gathered in a loose bun, pulling a wheeled suitcase, like a flight attendant. The men at the bar glance out of the corner of their eyes, pretending not to, and have already registered and memorized the image of the pretty lady with the limp who awakens a smirk in some and commiseration in others. In the worst ones.

It is summer. In the distance you can hear splashing and shouts from the municipal pool. The air smells of pigsty and chlorine. Paula has stepped out of the taxi. She has come to unearth bones. We said that her little brushes tickled our jawbone, but that was partly an expression of desire—it has been so long since we have had a shave—and partly a bit of poetic license. The many hours spent down here in the generous company of our abiding Professor, executed beside us by the firing squad, have made us authentic scholars. No. Paula has come to ask questions that will unearth bones. No. As the inept detective Arturo Zarco, who loved her and left her, would say, she has come to play the heroine in a Spaghetti Western. We are following the sequence of her actions as she steps forward on her good leg in this founder-less town. We will also be her sweet company. One that is more attentive than the queer detective. We will not abandon her by night or by day. We are the lost children and the dead women who caress her lips and who, when danger arrives, provoke her thirst, anguish, and shock. Not that it will help much.

Paula moves through—Or across? Which is it, Professor?—the dividing lines of this two-bit town. She will have to learn quickly to sniff out and recognize the urine markings of each inhabitant at every corner. We observe her. We do not take our eyes off her. She intuits our presence, turns to look, but cannot see us. We are quick to disappear. Today, we can see Paula is confused: if she were not, she would not be heading toward the only house, the one place in this town where the pretty lady with the limp should never, ever, have put her asymmetrical feet.

About the author and translator:

Award-winning novelist, poet, and scholar Marta Sanz is one of Spain’s leading feminist authors. She proclaims her style is subversive, social, and political, but it is also full of sharp wit, wordplay, and a dazzling array of styles and genres. Critics are calling small red women her best work to date. The plot revolves around efforts to identify victims of Francoist violence, executed and buried in mass graves in the aftermath of the Civil War. In October 2021, Sanz was awarded the City of Santa Cruz (Tenerife) Best Crime Novel for 2020, and small red women has been named a book of the year by the EL PAÍS book section “Librotea.” Sanz says the title honors the brave women who put themselves at risk to defend democracy and protect the most vulnerable. The title is in lower case, she adds, because literature is meant to challenge conventions and because sometimes women diminish themselves for love. Sanz holds a PhD in contemporary literature from Complutense University of Madrid. Her novel Farándula won the 2015 Premio Herralde for fiction and was published in English as Showbiz by Hispabooks in 2018.

Dr. Katie King is a journalist, scholar, and literary translator whose poetry and prose translations from Spanish have appeared in print and online. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies and is a Harvard Nieman Fellow. She has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in Spain and Latin America. Her research focuses on the evolution of translation and translation studies in the digital age and on the literature of Spain in translation to English.