Deluge Fast Approaching

“The white gate of Diego’s teeth opened in a smile. He was asking me about Lolita from the pool, but he couldn’t quit grinning. Blue bikini, flowers with cells of yellow and white petals, pinched mouth, aristocratic neck, as if I’d forgotten. But I had. I had forgotten all about her because…”

Rainy season picked up where it left off last year. Rosa sat for a while with the translator — Axel, a Swedish post-grad, rougher around the edges than anticipated, brusque about the food — and watched concrete dissolve on TV. Axel’s hotel was in Lomas de Chapultepec, expensed by himself, but for the sake of the project he was willing to sleep in Rosa’s apartment. Axel was agreeable. His honesty was refreshing, almost nostalgic. 

The last translator, French, had been a slushy romantic, but not this one. 

Rosa discussed thousand-dollar espresso machines with him for two hours. Grinding beans rapidly became unacceptable conversation as Axel explained, no longer nebbish in the slightest, that coffee was the most erotic human creation. Rosa disagreed; for him, it was atomic war.

“Why nuclear weapons?”

“Often we’re drawn to the things that hold the most power over us. I can’t stop a nuclear bomb. It kills me regardless. I only have pour-over, though.”

Axel watched a little more TV as Rosa prepared the coffee. As he recounted to Rosa, Axel had spent the past few months in Colombia, then a brief tour of Venezuela alongside a fellow Swede with a keen interest in Chávez, but returned as flat and dreamless as he came. There was no sudden inclination to heal the world or stir up a revolution, only neutral realpolitik and a few souvenirs for his family back home. It wouldn’t have mattered either way, as long as he didn’t go the route of the Russian translator who, through piecemeal and unflattering interpretation, assumed that Rosa was picking at the scab of old philosophies in his latest book. There was nothing of the sort: Vargas Llosa was a headache, too sticky and political; Paz’s Nobel Prize cemented him amongst the greats, but wasn’t to his taste; Marquez could be OK, but that was about it.

“Don’t worry about staying,” Rosa said. “I’ll ask my neighbour for some more cushions. Her son went away to university.” The translator didn’t say thank you for the coffee, but Rosa didn’t mind. “I like the company.”

“You do? Then why live alone?”

Rosa saw the city from the window: grey, asphyxiated, sluiced with rain. The heat refused to break regardless. The student in the apartment above would stay in and listen to her music as loud as possible with the intention of driving Rosa upstairs, which he never did, and the aunt next door would lament the weather with corn liquor. Eventually Rosa grew tired of the TV and switched it off. Being high up gave him the vantage of a vulture, not quite golden; if Rosa was down there, on the street, everything would be washed away, even him. 

“I concentrate better,” Rosa said. He sat on the other edge of the sofa, ectopic from Axel and meaning every inch of it, bringing his skinny knees up to his chest. Closer meant something. Closer implied transferal.

Despite the humidity, Axel refused to wear shorts. The pale microhairs on his arms made him look bleached, like he’d spent some time soaking in formaldehyde, and his eyes were good and analytical. The Korean translator was much the same — curious without prying — but this was the first time Rosa had ever let a translator penetrate the delicate tissue between private and professional.

True, then, that it was a good thing Axel asked few questions. It almost bore asking why he’d bothered travelling all that way in the first place — for Axel’s friend to fawn over Venezuela’s new government? For the tequila? To sit drinking bland coffee with an author? At least the translator from Brazil had been warmly bored by Rosa, noting down her thoughts in-between brief spasms of visible disappointment. Mythologising was pointless. She’d been a journalist for some years and had seen plenty of idols scorned, but her own was too big of a cross to bear. After that, she stuck religiously to translating Chilean erotica and preening Brazilian-Japanese relations with Portuguese-language visual novels.

“Concentration is key. You’d like Sweden.”

“No, Sweden’s not for me. I don’t enjoy the food. I’m better here off here, where not being wanted is par for the course,” Rosa said. “My parents have a property in the countryside that I visit, but that’s about as far as I’ll go. Coming to the capital, being a foreigner in my own city, that’s enough, if not too much.”

“You want to travel but never stay. If something happens, there’s no obligation to stick around.”

 “I’m not an avoidant person,” Rosa said, “just a difficult one.”

“And no part of you goes into your writing?”

“...I was tangled in a gauzy mesh of memory so fine-laced that it might’ve been possible to escape were I willing. That memory contained me very well, very comfortably. It sustained me, so I sustained it. I knew being tangled prevented me from seeing things straight. He asked me if I would tell him what this memory was, so I said…”

“No,” Rosa said. “I must be the exception to the rule,” he added, laughing still, hiding his face behind slim fingers. “I’m—” His head collapsed to his knees. “OK, so they tell me that there’s something very special about the phrase darse cuenta, that it can’t possibly be translated into realise. There’s something unique about it, that’s all. In order to preserve the integrity of my book, some American thinks everybody who isn’t is carving meaning out of cultural heritage alone.” Rosa shook his head. He was a pulsing nerve of unmanifested destinies and energies. “Lluvia isn’t rain, it’s a special type of rain. It’s the mushiest thing I’ve ever heard. There’s no word in English for chingar, except there is. All of this to say, why create something out of nothing? Why not take me as I am?” 

“As you are then, Rosa.” 

“Soon it’ll wash away,” Rosa said, turning to check the window once again. “And you’ll go back to Sweden and I’ll go back to writing.” He wrinkled his nose. “I really do think that’s for the best. I’m meeting a Spaniard next.”

“A Spaniard?”

“Don’t get me started on that. I’ll never beat Cervantes at his own game,” Rosa said. “More coffee?”

Axel said no and reached for the notebook in his satchel. Rosa’s body pricked up then, listless, and could not stop the impulse to move about and tidy his belongings. The loose blanket over the shoulder of the sofa suggested laziness, a first-rate layabout. A thin, shivery fur of dust accumulated across the TV screen prompted a similar variant of allegations. Bare feet exposed the weakness of the flesh, so Rosa looked for his slippers. Even his own mouth, which had spoken so virulently against the autopsy of words, had betrayed him then. How could he have forgotten something so simple? 

“It’s not like I’m writing a biography about you,” Axel said. One of two possibilities emerged henceforth: he was psychic, prickly only because he picked up Rosa’s paranoia, or he was simply observing the perfunctory wet stabs of Rosa’s spit-damp thumb against a coffee stain on his own t-shirt. 

“Aren’t you?” 

“You said there’s nothing about you in your writing,” he said. “So I’m inclined to believe you. Anyway, I didn’t think much to the English translation. It lost a lot of nuance midway, the bit about the…” He waved his hand symbolically. “...It’ll come to me eventually.”

Rosa bit the knuckle of his index finger. He heard the girl still wailing upstairs, a little banshee with stockings and traditional parents, but as usual made no move to calm her down. Sometimes he felt the same, like screaming at Axel and saying that the angle of the rug was as unimportant as the sun’s rotation in the sky, but even that didn’t track. Crops didn’t die over Oaxacan fabric. Crops died shrivelling inwards, shy, rotting, sapped of liquid to the root, heads bowed in solemn prayer.

Axel grinned. He jerked forwards amicably, knocking his notebook off the sofa in the process, and shook Rosa’s bony knee with realisation. 

“The protagonist was in love with Diego, right? It seemed pretty obvious when I read the original.” He was really blond, with a small brown freckle beneath his eyes — green, not blue. “Like spending too much time thinking about the right word that you don’t say it at all.”

“...that Lolita nor any other girl could compare to it, that pleasant and perfumed air lifted around it, that my stomach stirred for it, that my heart yearned for it…Diego needed no more explanation, and said, ‘If only I’d realised that rainy night with you would make such an impression,’ with his usual flair, then, ‘but there’s nothing bad about replacing memories with new ones, hm?’ So, naturally, I closed that gate’s latch very tight. After that, I never saw him again.” (Excerpt from Rosa Matías Ramón Alvarez’s ‘French Doors’.)

(Another end-of-year short story project!)