For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we reorient “vermin” to the top of the food chain in “The Rats” by Guadalupe Dueñas. Our narrator embodies a voice of classism and privilege, a haughty position that is quickly undermined by an untouchable shoeshiner’s jovial memories of the rodents inhabiting a local cemetery. Conveyed in gruesome detail, the rats’ feast is a spectacle of awe to some (the shoeshiner) and terror for others (our narrator). One part memento mori, one part class criticism, Dueñas’s story serves as a graphic parable for nature’s indifference towards social conventions.
“Have you done this for long?” I absentmindedly ask the guy who’s giving my shoes a vertiginous shine.
The voice of an empty vessel responds:
“Oh, no! Only for about two years. For twenty I was a watchman at Dolores Cemetery. It was I who copied the death certificates. Yes, even I, in my circumstance, went to middle school and I have excellent penmanship.”
Twenty years! I look at the little man of indefinable age. At first glance, he was a young boy.
Skinny, hairless, and indistinct. With a shrunken blue-ringed eye that blinks on its own accord and a stranded pupil that despairs in a bloody broth filled to the brim of his eyelid. The left eye, though, one would think it had a different owner. His upper lip sags like the ruffle of an old blouse. His skull, divided by a dark vein that curves down around his face, resembles a sack hung by a cord.
He emits the stench of horse piss and a lasting, murky reek that disturbs even the trees.
His tiny hands are reminiscent of an iguana’s belly. Surely, there’s not a single person that would desire the caress of those hands.
But this thing talks, and what it says is even more unpleasant than the face it has to carry around the world.
“Don’t be fooled, guarding a cemetery isn’t easy. But don’t think it’s the dead that are a bother, they don’t even wheeze. If it were just for them, one would be quite bored. No. What’s interesting are the rats. There’s a gazillion of them. Really, it’s quite exciting, especially upon a new arrival. What intelligent animals they are! They can predict the exact moment a dead body will arrive. Let me tell you, as soon as that pit is covered, a murmur begins to rise as if it were hailing. You can make out the sound of them trampling over each other through the underground labyrinths. Like horses, they bolt in a hysterical race to attend a feast heralded by the fetid air. They come from all over, like people in the countryside when they know a fellow neighbor has slaughtered swine. You can hear how the ravenous creatures fight to defend their portion of stale meat. Entrails crunch in a low rumble as they’re torn apart by fangs. In just a few minutes, the rats grow comatose, but the infinite pack replenishes to continue polishing the bones just like a machine. Even though you can’t see it, you can tell that the corpse is disintegrating and that the rats are playing with its glistening tibias. They scramble up the bones and the irreparable puzzle is tragically scattered like a fistful of pebbles. In their muzzles they drag dregs of hair, heaps of skin, scraps of innards that then, sickened, they vomit.
“The gluttonous beasts, now heavy and slow, make their way to the sun. Their bellies, swollen like woolen purses stuffed with coins, wait for the rot to digest.
“These rats have no fear. Indifferent, they lie faceup, bloated with disease. Once it occurred to us we could expunge them with clubs or by stoning, but they were bursting as if all the sewers in the world suddenly spilled out into the gardens.
“They stroll through their empire, lords of the dead. Bald and malign, they mock the humans damned to serve as pasture for their eternal hunger. Their infernal pupils slide over the sleeping gravediggers with familiar gazes. They laugh at the beings who fatten up their bodies, their skin, and their blood and who can’t save themselves from the macabre pall of pointy snouts and repugnant tails.”
Making sure my fingers don’t touch his hand, I give the little man a coin and watch him leave. His height isn’t much greater than when he was seated buffing my shoes. It’s as if his thighs were missing and his knees were affixed to the box that is his body. He walks just like a wind-up monkey, dragging his feet.
I look at my hands, my perfumed hands and the skin that I care for, the skin that will also be devoured, divvied up among those livid bellies spotted with impetigo; I, whom I love so much and who shunned the touch of that wretched shoeshiner . . .
Translated from the Spanish by Yolanda Fauvet
Guadalupe Dueñas was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, in 1920 and passed away in Mexico City in 2002. Renowned for her storytelling, Dueñas was a prolific writer of essays, poetry, short stories, and television scripts, and contributed to several Mexican newspapers and magazines, including Ábside: revista de cultura mexicana and Cuadernos de Bellas Artes. In 1959, she was awarded the José María Vigil Prize for her collection of short stories, Tiene la noche un árbol (The Night Has a Tree, 1958). In 1962, Dueñas wrote her only novel, Memorias de una espera (Memories of the Long Wait), which can be found in Obras completas (Complete Works), an extensive compilation of her writings published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2017.
Yolanda Fauvet is a visual artist and literary translator born in Colorado where she earned her B.A. in religious studies and B.F.A in sculpture. Yolanda works with the English and Spanish languages, and her debut translation appeared in M12 collective’s project Campito, featured in the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale Exhibition Common Ground. Her repertoire of art-related commissions includes the Spanish translations of critical writings by independent curator Leslie Moody Castro and of The Dikeou Collection’s cell phone tour, featuring the work of over thirty contemporary artists. After moving to her mother’s hometown of Mexico City, she formalized her experience through the literary translation program at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and is currently the resident translator for Glasstire, an online art magazine based in Texas. Yolanda is a cofounding member of Falsos Amigos, a translation collective interested in exploring collaborative processes and engaging in thoughtful discussions about translation.
Source:
Cuento tomado de Obras completas, de Guadalupe Dueñas, pp. 116-117
D. R. © 2017, Fondo de Cultura Económica
Carretera Picacho Ajusco 227, 14738 Ciudad de México
https://elfondoenlinea.com/detalle.aspx?ctit=013651L
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