This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a short fiction from the prize-winning Argentine writer Inés Garland. The story evokes the terror endured by two sisters from an affluent Buenos Aires family, after their parents leave them in the care of a vindictive nanny at the family’s country ranch. Tense and dramatic at turns, this story is a look into a child’s psyche and how they navigate the vagaries of their world. Before reading the piece, hear from translator Richard Gwyn himself about the connotations and choices around the story’s title.
One issue stood out above all others in translating Inés Garland’s short story ‘La Penitencia,’ and it concerned the title. Penitencia—‘penance’ in English—is familiar to practising Catholics as an action one performs in the hope of making up for a sin. The particular nuances of this concept, or sacrament, might not be familiar to non-Catholic readers. ‘Penitence,’ which sounds as if it should be right, refers more specifically to a state of mind; of regret, sorrow, or remorse for a wrong committed, and it was clear from Garland’s story that the nanny, Ramona, was expecting rather more than this from her young charges. I opted for the less problematic but less precise ‘Punishment’ to cover a multitude of sins, not only those committed by Catholics.
—Richard Gwyn
That summer might have been no different from any other. We had spent Christmas in Buenos Aires and two days later, like every year, Mum and Dad took us to the country. Ramona was sitting between Clara and me, on the back seat, and was staring ahead, very quiet. She always travelled like this, with her arms crossed and back straight; occasionally she moved her lips as if she were praying and looked at Mum, at the back of Mum’s neck, with short and furtive glances.
Before reaching the dirt road, Mum and Dad announced that, this year, they wouldn’t be able to stay with us, even for one night; some friends were expecting them the next day. Clara began to cry. Ramona continued to stare straight ahead, but clenched her jaw. I decided that this time I wasn’t going to let Mum and Dad go without telling them how Ramona carried on with us when they weren’t around, but, determined as I was, I couldn’t think of a way of telling them everything without Ramona hearing me.
The solution occurred to me when I saw the overgrown field of maize, next to the house. While they were unloading the bags and opening up the house, I explained the plan to Clara, without going into details. I grabbed her by the hand and we ran into the maize field and lay on the ground, face down.
My plan was simple: Mum and Dad would have to look for us to say goodbye—I was sure of that—and when they bent down to give us a kiss, the leaves of the maize would hide them. Down there, hidden from Ramona, I would tell them everything. It seemed so easy, so perfect.
From our hiding place we heard Mum calling us. Clara looked at me with eyes wide open and I could tell she wanted to get up and run to Mum. She was five years old: she still believed that if she cried enough they wouldn’t go away. I put my arm around her shoulders and forced her to remain lying down. She was shaking like a puppy as she lay there next to me.
The noise of the car faded into the distance and I continued to lie there with my arm around Clara’s shoulders and my heart pounding until nothing more could be heard. It hadn’t occurred to me that they could leave without looking for us. When I stood up, all that remained of them was a cloud of dust, floating like jelly on the horizon.
Clara must have seen in my face that they were gone. She moaned gently and fixed me with that look that I knew off by heart: her eyes so black you couldn’t see the pupils. I realised that she thought I’d lied to her, that I’d known all along that Mum and Dad would leave without saying goodbye, and I’d robbed her of the only chance of stopping it.
Ramona was standing on the terrace, her hands resting on the back of a wicker chair. From a distance she didn’t seem angry but as we got closer I could see the sweat stain on her chest. It was always a bad sign, the stain that spread over her bosom and ended in a dagger point.
‘You showed up,’ she said, and it might have been a simple observation if she hadn’t been looking at us the way she was. ‘You won’t get away without some kind of punishment.’
Clara burst into tears. I reached for her hand. Ramona turned to go into the house and we followed her in silence. Her legs, from behind, were like bare, shiny branches, her calf muscle like a knot in the wood, a clenched fist that rose and fell as she walked. Her dress was sticking to her back.
That afternoon she made us play in our room, while she stayed in hers. We couldn’t see what she was doing but we could hear her walking up and down, making a huffing sound like tuneless whistling, an intermittent gasping that, she said, helped her to think. In our room there was a smell of whitewash and damp. It was difficult to play when she wouldn’t speak to us and huffed away like that for an entire afternoon.
We were about to go to sleep when she gave us the pendant.
‘Your mother left this for you,’ she said. ‘You don’t deserve it.’
A chain with a round, gold locket that opened up to show two photos, one of Mum and one of Dad. In the photos they had dark glasses on and were laughing. Clara began to cry and kiss the photos.
‘You have it,’ I told her.
I didn’t want it.
‘Be careful not to lose it,’ Ramona said, ‘your mum entrusted me with it specially.’
From then on, Clara always took the pendant everywhere and opened it every so often to look at the photos.
That night, as always, Ramona made us pray on our knees, side by side, with our elbows resting on the bed. While we were praying, the sound of a car’s engine exploded in the silence and all the lights came on at once. The window filled with flying beetles, knocking to get in, like rain.
‘Now I have to go out and greet the new ranch caretaker, but tomorrow we’re going to talk about what you did,’ Ramona said before leaving.
I couldn’t sleep. The generator clattered in the dark and Clara tossed and turned and talked in her sleep. Much later they turned off the engine and the silence of the countryside fell upon the house like a blanket. Every now and then a dog could be heard howling. When I slept I dreamed of wolves.
The next morning, while we were having breakfast, the caretaker came and asked after us. I would have liked to greet him—his voice sounded so cheerful—but he and Ramona stood talking outside, on the other side of the screen door. Every now and then she turned her head a little to glance at us over her shoulder. She didn’t have to say anything for us to know that she didn’t want us to get any closer. We knew how to read her body; her head of short curly hair—so small on her broad shoulders—barely moved to look at us, as if the nape of her neck and her ears could see us too.
It was the caretaker who spoke about the cesspit.
‘I haven’t finished it yet and the ground is very unstable,’ he said. ‘Do be careful.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ramona answered him.
But the first thing we did after breakfast was go to look at the cesspit. She took us and made us stand on the edge. I felt her hot, clammy hand on the back of my neck as she pushed me slightly forward.
‘You can’t see the bottom,’ she said. ‘Are you going to tell me why you hid?’
She was looking only at me, and the unexpected question, uttered in that place, took me by surprise. I tried to wriggle free, but Ramona applied a little more pressure with her fingers and I stayed still.
‘It was a game,’ I said.
‘Oh, of course, a game.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she turned to face me and looked at me, slowly, as if she had to focus to put me squarely in the centre of her gaze. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter much, does it? I’m still going to have to think of a punishment. A good punishment.’
Clara began to bite her nails.
‘Leave those fingers alone,’ Ramona told her. ‘I’ve already decided on your punishment.’
‘And not mine?’ I asked her.
‘I’m working on it,’ she said.
The bottom of the cesspit looked like night, without stars and without end.
That day we played for a while on the veranda and then we stayed in Ramona’s room with the shutters closed and she told us stories and braided our hair.
‘I don’t like it when I have to get angry’, she told Clara as she braided her hair. ‘You force me to punish you.’
She was talking and pulling Clara’s hair to adjust the braid. Clara’s eyes narrowed and filled with tears. Ramona’s tin clock ticked away in the sweet-smelling air of her room.
‘I do it for your own good,’ she said.
I asked her again about my punishment. I tried to make my voice sound indifferent. She smiled.
‘Why would I hurry when I have all the time in the world?’
Clara’s punishment was the same as always. Ramona carried around with her some little grey boxes she used to store cheap jewellery. When she wanted to punish Clara she locked her in some dark place with the little boxes and told her they were full of bugs.
‘If you move, the bugs will come out of their boxes and eat you,’ she told her.
I had tried a thousand times to convince Clara that there were no bugs inside the boxes. Once I had even explained to her that no bug that could fit inside so small a box would be able to eat a girl of her size. But she never doubted Ramona’s words.
That afternoon, without crying out, she allowed himself to be locked in a wooden shack that had once served as a bathroom and that nobody used anymore. In her hand she clutched the pendant.
‘And you can stay there’, Ramona told me, pointing to the step that led to the kitchen. ‘You’d better not go anywhere near your sister.’
She went into the house and I sat on the step. The shack that concealed Clara trembled in the heat of the siesta hour. Every now and then I could hear her sobbing, very softly, as if she were too scared even to cry. The buzzing of a bumblebee boring into a roof-beam filled the air. From the hole in the wood came a drizzle of sawdust, which floated on the sunlight. It seemed as if time had stopped forever.
I don’t remember what I was thinking when I got up and ran towards the shack. I know that I opened the door and lifted the lid on two of the boxes.
‘Now do you see there’s nothing inside?’ I yelled, and I pulled Clara out of there.
She stood on the dry grass, unable to take her eyes off the uncovered boxes. Around her neck hung the open pendant with the smiling faces of Mum and Dad. I took it off. I still had it in my hand when I felt a very strong tug: Ramona, who had me by the hair and forced me to turn around. I saw her forehead covered in transparent pearls. Large beads of sweat began to trickle down her face. They slipped down and she let them fall, meeting at the tip of her nose, on her upper lip, on her chin; she let them travel down her neck towards her cleavage, without wiping them dry, as if she didn’t feel them. She didn’t move. And the stain on her bosom lengthened until it ended in a point like a map of the southern cone. Her eyes had narrowed and were now two slits of black hatred staring straight at me.
‘Who do you think you are?’ she said.
And she dragged me off, her fingers digging into my arm. I tried to free myself and she slapped me. Clara was behind her, screaming, but she didn’t seem to hear her. She insulted me with a hoarse voice, the deranged voice of someone who knew there was no one around to see her like this. She dragged me to the very edge of the cesspit.
‘Do you see it has no bottom? Do you see that from down there, you don’t get out?’
She had released my arm and was pushing my head forward. I felt the palm of her wet hand on the back of my neck.
‘Is that what you want?’
Instinctively I stretched out my arm and held the pendant over the mouth of the cesspit. Ramona stood staring at it. I held it by its chain in my clenched fist. The two photos in their golden cradle were swinging like a pendulum. She let go of my arm and tried to grab it from me. I opened my hand and dropped it. She clawed at the air in desperation and the loose earth gave way beneath her feet. She clung to the edge of the pit with one hand for an instant. I don’t know if she screamed as she fell.
Sometimes I dream of Ramona. It’s always hot and I wipe away her sweat with the palm of my hand. We are standing, face to face, and I look her in the eyes. I try to guess what she is going to say to me. In these dreams I am about to find out, finally, what my punishment is.
Translated from the Argentine Spanish by Richard Gwyn
Inés Garland is an Argentine writer and translator, based in Buenos Aires. She is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels, El rey de los centauros, Piedra, papel o tijera, and Una vida más verdadera. Garland is the first Latin American writer to have received the Deutscher Jungerliteraturpreis 2014 for her novel Piedra, papel o tijera. Her books have been translated into German, French, Dutch, and Italian, among other languages. In 2018 she won the Looren scholarship for translators, and in 2021 the Premio de Literatura Juvenil Alandar.
Richard Gwyn is a Welsh writer and translator, whose novels include The Colour of a Dog Running Away, The Blue Tent, and The Vagabond’s Breakfast, which won a Wales Book of the Year award in 2012. His anthology of contemporary Latin American poetry, The Other Tiger, was described by Edith Grossman as ‘beautiful . . . a book that belongs in every library,’ and his translations of Darío Jaramillo’s Impossible Loves was shortlisted for the 2021 Premio Valle-Inclán.
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