Translated by Allison deFreese
Earlier, she had crumbled a few small clumps of dirt between her fingers and opened her mouth to the wind.
She had stretched out her hands and wiggled her fingers in the air.
All she had to do was lift her body off the ground.
She peers under the neckline of her shirt and can see her breasts, bruised by the caliper-like hands that had gripped them. A smell like something burning reaches her nose. She stretches the fabric a little more and it yields, as her body did.
She can make out the outline of her belly; her once elastic belly is leather stretched to the point that a small crack appears below the navel as the mark of a newborn son who has burst her skin into a map of rivers branching in many veins. She notices that some folds of skin bulge with a bit of fat, transforming her into a mother, and today, a grown woman. She had been fruitful and procreated, like in those dreams where she always wakes up at the end.
She is sweating. She is her ripped shirt, each tear or slit a moment from her life. She feels as if the ground isn’t pushing her away or rejecting her only because it hasn’t noticed her presence. The trees that reach the sky can’t see her either. She is an anonymous detail in this natural landscape, though vegetation has found its way into the creases of her knees and the leaves stick to her back. Later, her absence will become nothing.
All she has to do is lift her body off the ground.
But her hands, two puppets that have taken orders for a very long time, no longer obey her. Their marionette strings broken; they no longer answer her commands. She studies her hands, and they plead with her, exhausted. At least she can stretch her legs. Will she find a way to make her puppet body sit up straight?
She had started down the path that morning. She didn’t usually venture too far, as if the house were an elastic band that pulled her back home when she came to the end of the reel. When she reached the edge of the Escobar Nature Preserve, she not only ignored the tug that would usually have made her retrace her steps, but also disregarded the sign that warned against entering the wildlife area due to recent heavy rains. She wandered along the path, lost in thought and weaving together the threads of a phrase —in the little quiet that remained in the house—as if these words would bring with them a love that danced inside her.
The bird calls were devoid of harmony: The monk parrots were loudest as they devoured palm fruits and scattered the husks, those damp droppings that stuck to the soles of her sneakers. She entered the preserve on a narrow path that led between two streams carpeted with water hyacinths. Though she couldn’t see the water, she knew the bulbous plants absorbed oxygen and were suffocating the streams. She placed her feet carefully and her throat tightened.
She opened the gate at the end of the path and walked until she reached the shrubby trees that formed part of the “white mountains” in that region. She noticed that no one else was visiting the preserve that day. All she could hear was the continuous squawk of the monk parrots, who seemed to move away from her in unison as she continued her walk. She felt agile and, to the rhythm of her breath, she continued across the terrain, leaving fleeting footprints as the grass flattened for a moment with each step, then sprang back to full height. Everything around her seemed malleable yet resistant. Her body had been that way, too, she thought, because she hadn’t made it work too hard, just an acceptable amount.
Continuing her leisurely walk, she substituted one word with another again and again and sang softly to herself the paragraph she had typed that morning. The sign she had ignored at the entrance of the wildlife area had warned of standing water, and the wetlands stretched as far as she could see. As she reached the edge of the slight shadow that the plants and vegetation cast, she found the path covered in mud mixed with leaves that had been shredded by the storm.
She paused when she saw the flash of green light at the edge of the shadow where the small woods began. It was a dead monk parrot, its wings stiff against a rigid body, a bird with short legs and gray feet with claws for nails. A few of its feathers were missing and had been plucked out. As she looked at the bird, and though she felt no pity, a feeling of confusion swept over her; the same confusion that had started the previous day and brought on this hike. Standing before the rigid bird, something she had thought to herself yesterday grew more intense: her love of writing surpassed the love she felt for her family.
She crouched down to touch the parrot. Its body was still warm. A heavy wind had cleared the sky following the storm, and a gust filled her shirt, making it balloon out, lifting it above her head. Her screams mingled with the cries of frightened monk parrots who had been watching her from the trees as she inspected their dead companion. The man with caliper fingers seized her around the waist and forced her to the ground as if he had a job to finish. No sooner had he entered her body than he was gone.
Her head shrouded by her shirt, she didn’t see his face. She felt the ground tremble as the man whacked at a tree before running away, lashing out at nature as if the tree were the guilty party and had torn her top.
The grass where her battered body lies is no longer soft, and the mud is churned-up where she sinks into it now after the attack.
All she has to do is lift her body off the ground.
Could a phrase reach her and encourage her to stand? Suddenly, all the furniture falls on top of her, the whole weight of the bed, the dining room table; her hands fill with debris—hands that are never quiet perturb her mind like scenes from a fast-paced movie, images she is creating race across her scrambled memory. The reel stops on a frame of her immersed in writing: the rest of the house in shadows, light flickers on the screen—she is typing at top speed, snatching a few minutes from her domestic time—but then catches a glimpse of herself standing before her family and stating, “I stole nothing,” as she saves for herself alone the exaltation she feels from one or two words.
The streams drowning under the water hyacinths return to her mind like an ebb tide. She takes her neck in her hands. Is there a way to scream a written prayer? Could she reach the voice in her throat through words? Her words could forge a path between the knotted plants, push them aside in a current of paragraphs, and exhale signs, like air bubbles rising from the water to the open sky. But she writes in silence, the door ajar.
She stretches the torn neckline of her top until she can see her naked sex and the watery thread that descends between her legs: she has been injected as if she were wearing a straitjacket and given a tranquilizer. As if reciting a litany, the man kept repeating she should keep quiet. She remembers him now as the guard at some penal colony or psych ward: he wore a green, two-piece uniform, his pants held up by elastic. His pants didn’t have a fly with a zipper or buttons. Everything happened quickly.
Confused, that’s how her body feels, her head turned to one side in an ambiguous gesture. Her torn shirt is her body because her body, which she sees by peering down the neckline of her top, feels like a thing with no owner, and although she’s not in pain, she can’t find the words dancing inside her.
The sky is always there, and she can see between the treetops, though that space seems void of any meaning. At any rate, her vision doesn’t allow her to discern if anything is living in the canopy. She scans the sky because she can’t stop, not because she has a reason. She clutches her ripped shirt, bites a fingernail, tears off its crescent tip, scratches at the wet earth, and buries her nail next to the stiff bird.
Night falls and her writing time has passed; family time is also over on this day without people in the middle of the nature preserve. Something small is wiggling under her naked back. The flock of green monk parrots stirs. One after another, then in unison, they make their noise; though this time their screeches are somewhat more subdued than when they sounded the alarm as she screamed.
She starts to breathe with an open throat and feels safer because of the contact with the muddy earth that, instead of swallowing her alive, instead of burying her next to the bird, has started to support her body. She feels for the mud with her hands, clears away the leaves, sweeps away any residue from the day on her hair. She contemplates the mud as if analyzing a text: she’s been attacked, the man tore her shirt, but she can hear the words dancing inside her again. Her eyes grow fierce and her need to stand becomes urgent—a living desire, like what fallen animals feel—she writes inside her body, breathing the phrases that further open her throat.
She sits up. She can see her clothes, the mud, the sky, love, her writing, and the house. She has traveled beyond the warnings; other urgent matters reignite inside her. She sees the tiny mound of mud by her side, the small tomb where she buried her nail. She reaches for the bird and makes it a place in the grave. Her body beats with the pulse of what did not die.
All that remains for her to do is to get up from the ground.
Afterwards, she stands.
***
Translator Bio:
Allison A. deFreese’s translations of Claudia Aboaf’s work have also appeared this year in Bridge Eight. Allison met and began collaborating with Claudia thanks to Luis Chitarroni (1958-2023), to whom she will always be grateful.
Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash
