This Translation Tuesday, a short story about an odd couple. A husband is shrinking—physically eroded by the force of his domineering wife. In a lesser author’s hands, things would quickly turn risible: think grimacing stories of shrews and their nebbishes, or cheap, queasy raunch with betas and Amazons. But Chilean author Ana María del Río elevates the material by treating it with a disturbing, straight-faced intensity. Wife is elemental: she loves, cares, rages, panics, resents, and fucks with the same unremitting, meteorological violence. She is”thunderous” a natural disaster, yet possessed also of a brute guile for suffocation with which she strips her husband of his independence and dignity, as exhausted sentences attest.
Suddenly, I feel myself getting smaller. Little by little. I took my pants to the tailor to get the hem raised. She told me that it’s because of my shoes. In the summer people change to wearing low-tops or flats which make the pants seem longer. It isn’t that you’re getting smaller, she jokes, and tells me not to worry. She’s sweet. Her eyes are the color of roasted chestnuts. She raises the hem a bit anyway, just to humor me. She doesn’t seem to notice.
Still, I feel myself getting smaller. My wife tells me it’s nonsense.
It’s because of her. Each day she appears to get larger. More thunderous in her love. More outrageous in her furies. Larger eyes opening wider in the heat of more extreme panics. She’s on medication, but there are days when it doesn’t take. It’s because you don’t love me as you ought to, she says. And how ought I? Suddenly, I notice that I can barely get my arms around her, trembling with a violence I haven’t seen even in the most horrific withdrawals. Her muscles seem to slap against the bone. She kicks wildly. Her eyes, terrified, dart around the room, ah, that room, which is slowly becoming my prison. She knows. She bought padlocks for the closet. To protect us, she says, you should thank me. She fears they will come to kill her in the night. The tenants we evicted are murderers and drug-addicts, capable of anything, she says. It’s true we heard gunshots once or twice from down river. But it’s possible they were hunting rabbits. They were left homeless, after all. They were rude, she says. And if someone is rude to me, well, they’re in trouble. She hired a lawyer. Informed me we would split the bill. To throw them out. In the end, we did. All that’s missing is the judge’s order. When that day comes, she says, I’m gonna throw a fiesta. But who knows what fresh hell will arise that day. I’m exhausted, always a little more exhausted, waiting for days that never come and nice moments that only exist in the future. But she dreams of those moments constantly. When you realize all that I’ve done for you and return the favor. Scares the hell out of me. I don’t think we’re ever going to begin. Everything for us seems either to wither or to end completely. Or, in her case, to get larger. When the judge finally makes it official, I think we’re gonna find rats, huge ones, in the tenants’ place. But at least we’ll be able to go in—why are you always so negative that you have to wreck my dreams, she says. You don’t know how difficult it was to watch you fall off the wagon. Of course I know. She tells me all the time.
I also know that everything is my fault. Even that it’s cloudy. Or the depression she wakes up with some mornings. And her fears. And her tantrums. She bought padlocks for the entire house. For the closet, the doors, the windows. I wouldn’t know how to get out if she locked them all. She has the keys. From her desk, she watches over all my comings and goings. Especially my goings. I can see her up there, writing. A novel. About me. She’s caught me like a fly on a piece of sticky paper. Telling stories about my past. As a drug-addict. But I’m not one now, why don’t you write about things from now, I tell her.
Then, she’ll stand up on her chair and make a speech: literature is born from misery, from loneliness, from tragedy. She’s almost shrieking when she says it. I go deaf. She makes me wake up early. I don’t like lazy people, she says. I’ve planted sixty avocado trees, but to her I’m still lazy. The list of things she hates, things she doesn’t like about me is so extensive it could loop three times around the Earth. I can’t change them all. I wouldn’t have the strength to change them all. All of the seconds I have left in this life wouldn’t be enough to change them all. She’s writing a novel about me. About my life as a drug-addict. She has thirty cassettes just of me talking in my sleep. She records us making love. Hides the recorder under the bed. She makes note of everything. Very professional. Even the date. Recording from Tuesday, February 20th, 3:00pm: Cé makes love to me, she’ll say. I have no way out. I am cataloged, archived, indexed. Transmuted into history like one of the mummies of Chinchorro, only with a much more comprehensive mummification. She calls me “Cé.” Sure, my name begins with the letter cé, but there’s more to it. She never calls me by my name. Says it isn’t necessary. That I answer when she calls me Cé. And sure, I answer, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I’d rather she call me by my real name. But she doesn’t. Just Cé. Period. She loves saying that. Period. After period, nothing more can be said. She’s recorded hundreds of cassettes. And later puts a sticker with the date on every one. They are many. Spread over all that tape my life appears swollen, distended. The things that have happened to me, too. There aren’t so many. They’re horrible, but not so epic as the cassettes make it seem. She’s tireless. She has the stamina of a bull to number the recordings, listen to them, take notes on every word, every sound. She never wavers. I see her with her huge bovine eyes working at three, four in the morning. And it scares me. My life will turn out looking immense. Yet the bigger and longer it becomes, the smaller I feel. I don’t say any of this to her, of course. You’re depressed, take this, she would say, and make me swallow some suspicious, calypso-colored pill. It’ll put you right. Tachycardia four days in a row. Tension headaches. Bulging eyes. As if someone had given me an electric shock. She is a woman of 3000 volts.
I flee to the avocado trees. My children. I planted them myself, by hand. Made sure each one had its own space to grow. Like children, they differ. Some have gregarious, lime-colored leaves. Others are more muted, more opaque. It grieves me that the world can’t be more like the soil. The land is surrounded by a low fence of rusted wire. But at least out here there isn’t a ceiling. Inside she hangs a look from every beam. Permits me neither sun nor shade. I go farther out, into the shade of the willows. Step into the canal. Let the current fondle my ankles. I would let myself be taken. I would let these waters carry me to the sea. I would, but I can’t. She would fish me out with a branch and some thread. With a hook dangling from the end. Then she would sit gazing at me as I flick my tail, gasping for air. She would make me tea. At the last moment. Linden, maybe mint. To keep me alive. She wants to keep me alive. She wants to keep me. She wants to at every moment. She’s wet. How revolting. She’s always wet, always waiting, always hungry. She envelopes me and wrings out every drop of my blood. Every molecule of air. After her love, I lie like a deflated balloon. It’s then, more than ever, when I feel myself getting smaller.
Everything sets her off. She slams the plates into the rack. Bursts in with the coffee spilling everywhere, the mugs clanging against each other. Her every movement occurs within a gale of impatience and fury. I’ve had it up to here with you, she seems to say with thunderous silences. As desolate as winters. Later, without warning, she’ll return carnivorous. Famished. It terrifies me. I’m afraid she’ll swallow me whole, slurp me up like a noodle, make me disappear into her body. It’s not unprecedented. Rare these days, of course, but still. It terrifies me. Because of how small I am. I pull out from between her legs and go to water my children.
At least now she doesn’t lead me to rehab on a leash. She can’t because I finished treatment. With flying colors. This is your last chance, she told me once, slamming some spoons onto a china plate. It broke. She is destruction incarnate. A natural disaster with a conscience descending only onto me. She had to give me back the money. Because it was mine. She hates that I have money. Hates that I choose to buy things for myself. Hates that I make decisions. I make a few on the sly, without telling her, so she doesn’t get angry. But it’s useless. She gets angry anyway.
Now that you’re out of rehab you want to get rid of me, she says. But how could one possibly get rid of such a huge woman. One who occupies so much space. The house has taken her shape. The planetary bends of her hips. Her breasts cascading through the blue valley of our town. Everything assumes her shape, her smell. Sometimes, I’d like to smell something else. I’d like to travel. To Europe. See cathedrals. She’s certainly as resonant as one. I couldn’t remove her from my life even if I wanted to. Couldn’t move her anywhere. Period. She’s always in my ear asking: How are you feeling? It’s as if she has a gun to my head, forcing me to answer, “Great! Never better!” Because for so long, I wasn’t. Rehab lasted two and a half years. The whole time, she made shredded apples with honey, spoon-feeding me in bed so I could get some rest. I would get nauseous. I hate apples with honey. But I couldn’t sleep. I went so long without sleeping that I forgot how. Now, at night, I watch her sleep. Before, she would get up, put on her massive robe, and sit on my side of the bed. I could feel the mattress warp in her direction. She’s a big woman. And very strong. And very generous. My mother thinks she’s a saint. I think she encompasses several. And very unpredictable. Every morning I crack open the bedroom door and try to catch a glimpse to gauge her mood. There are good days. When she wakes sweetly. And suddenly it’s as if she weighed a little less, exerted a little less gravity, and the day is charming, light, full of soft colors, a graceful sun and a carefree, youthful moon. But on bad days, God help me. I hide. You have to. Survival instinct honed over ten-thousand years of evolution. She wakes roaring about how she has to do everything around here, that she’s up to her tits in I don’t know what. But, invariably, it has to do with me. That I’m so fragile. That I’m so weak. That I can’t even handle the lawn mower. You can’t even cut the grass, she spits, grumpily. She’s horrible when she’s grumpy. So I escape. I sit at the computer and send as many emails as possible. To whoever. A flurry of distress signals. S.O.S. Mayday. But I’ve run out of friends. I only have one left. The Bear. In Holland. But he’s too far away. He wouldn’t be able to come rescue me. Even if he could. He, too, is married to a strong woman.
She makes me take classes. Always more classes. I’m up to eight courses this semester. It’s the least you could do, she says. You need to get a job. Work isn’t something to play around with, it doesn’t grow on trees. Eight courses. I can barely keep up. Sometimes I even confuse the subjects. Maybe you should get a vitamin B shot, you seem distracted, she says, her bloodshot eyes themselves injected with contempt. I take all the classes I can. I go to eight a day. Eight times five. Forty hours a week. It’s like the forty thieves, only they rob me of my life, siphon off my blood. I get home on Friday night without a pulse. Pass out on the bed, only half-alive. She opens my mouth and forces down spinach pureé (disgusting) and an overly-sweet meringue. To replenish your energies, she says. She’s right. She’s always right. By the way, you need to mow the lawn tomorrow, she adds. And call the landscapers, the avocado trees need to be trimmed, and have them bring over some butane. I hate having to remind you of everything. And all the trees are drying out, are you sure you’re hitting them when you water? With her, everything is the last day of creation. An unfathomable tragedy. Her mother was horrible to her. Made her suffer since she was a girl. I seem to charm this trait out of her. Now, she’s the same as her mother. The one time I told her so she hurled a lamp at face. It was switched on. Almost electrocuted me. Never say that to me again or you’ll regret it, she said. She’s right. She’s always right. Such things aren’t said.
It’s strange, but I notice the furniture is getting bigger. The chairs have become enormous. I have to climb up like a child. As though pulling myself onto a ledge. And the lamps. Now I can’t reach to change a lightbulb. We need to buy curtains and shutters, barks that giant of a woman, lumbering past me, with her graying hair made incandescent by the light, like a huge white hat, like a second sun. Her mother also has gray hair, but I don’t say anything. I wouldn’t survive another lamp.
I turn on the news every evening. I watch obsessively. I need to know what’s happening in the world, a place from which I am entirely cut off. It’s my one portal to the land of the living. I watch reports on Pakistan, a mass shooting in the US, news about corruption in Chile, the hospital strikes. I pay special attention to financial news. Watch it on every channel. She’s oblivious. She doesn’t know anything about the economy. It happens to be my strong point. She doesn’t know that the planet is on the way to ruin. She thinks all I do is tend to my avocado trees and water the lawn, that it’s enough to scold and say “period” for the world to keep on turning and for everything to happen exactly as she wants. She has no idea that two supermassive black holes are about to collide in interstellar space. Or about the lights I saw the other night hovering over our valley. Luminous. Radiant. I ran out to the field. But they were gone. They left. Maybe they took a good look around and decided not to land here. I wouldn’t want to land here. In this house everything is so painful. So lonely. So hostile. I don’t think she even knows what a black hole is. And the asteroid that will devastate the Earth in 2137 is, of course, a myth. She’s unaware of this month’s CPI, and the salary reductions in the public sector. But I know all this stuff. I keep track of everything. All this information about the world. So that if some disaster occurs, I’ll have a memory of it, I’ll be protected from oblivion, from wandering in circles for all eternity. She watches every report with utmost skepticism. It’s all the same, she moans, it’s all such nonsense. But I put them on anyway. It’s the one moment where I’m the man of the house. I love the news.
Meals together are a waking nightmare. I’m never hungry. I think about my classes and lose my appetite. She lays out two red placemats on the table in frozen silence. As if to say, I dare you to make one comment about the food. The puree she serves is as cold as the silence. Every day she gives me a bigger portion. Furious that afterward she has to clean the plates. We agreed that if I drive, she’ll cook and take care of the dishes. I don’t work for you, she hisses. Now it’s getting difficult for me to bring in the silverware. Not to mention reach the pedals in the car. My calves cramp from the effort. Every day we travel 120 kilometers. Since I bought the truck, we’ve traveled the length of Chile six times over. The truck is my little kingdom. She rides along quietly and, for once, seems a little smaller. Still, she floods the cabin with her silence, stagnant and pungent like a swamp. Talk to me while I drive, I say, as I watch the road and the lights of oncoming cars shooting past me. The brights hurt my eyes. Every night they appear larger, more luminous. Put on your seatbelt and don’t go over 120. It’s the limit, she says. What is permitted and what is not permitted matters to her a great deal. She seems to know by heart everything that is not permitted. We can’t say we’ve used less electricity when we’ve actually used more, for example, when I want to lie about the kilowatts on the reader. So that we can avoid a soul-crushing electric bill. Because she’s afraid of the dark and sleeps with all the lights on. Even the TV. I wake up to the television flashing frenetic signals into the night. To no one. For some reason, we always need a bigger TV. But I don’t say anything. Don’t be ridiculous, she’d say. Still, it always seems bigger. The doors, too. And the locks seem higher. The door of the gate always a little farther away. I didn’t tell her, but I started using a cushion in the car. She snorted with disdain the first time she saw it. Why didn’t you give me one? Don’t you remember that I have a hernia? You are the epitome of selfishness. You think only about yourself. So I gave her one, but her head hit the ceiling. She looked so absurdly tall that she ended up taking it out herself. I can’t see the road, she said. It doesn’t change anything. You’re still a selfish ass.
Sometimes I make love to her. Each time with more dread. Immense, in heat, she reels me in, places me between her legs. Her nipples harden and extend like fingers. I gaze up as from the bottom of a canyon. Of a dark and humid valley with walls of streaked stone closing in on me. With me she has orgasms. She never had them with anyone else. This is why she imprisons me. I will never let you go, she says, her voice hoarse from love. But that scares me. It sounds like a lock clicking shut. After making love, I’m completely empty, exhausted. Just like after my forty hours of class. She caresses my hair, twirls it around her finger. My little boy, she whispers. And it’s true. Every day I’m getting a little shorter. The other day we went to a wedding. She put on heels. After standing next to me, she took them off. Maybe she noticed. I think I only come up to your elbow, I said. Don’t be ridiculous, I already took off my heels. One way or another, we are going to this wedding. Don’t try to manipulate me. She learned that word, manipulate, when I was in rehab. Now she uses it all the time. But I’m sure she noticed that I had gotten shorter. Now I have to jump when I brush my teeth or comb my hair. I can’t see myself in the mirror. I’ll get it lowered. I’m going to make a full-length mirror for the bathroom, I announce. Framed with oak. Then I’ll put in some curtains. I’ll ask for an advance on my salary. You asked for an advance, she asks. How much? She looks over my shoulder while I read my bank statement.
This morning, I heard her yelling, calling for me. But I was right next to her in bed, like always. She must have gone blind, I thought. She once told me that in moments of intense anxiety she gets struck with temporary blindness. But this wasn’t anxiety. It was anger. The pure red rage of a giant woman. It was the biggest I had yet seen her. Her thighs like marble columns. Her arms reaching out like tree branches.
She threw off the sheets and I almost went flying. I waved my arms like a madman. Here I am, my love. The psychiatrist told me to be gentle with her. Deep down, she’s just a scared little girl. She seemed anything but a scared little girl. It must be unbelievably deep down. Under all that woman, all that fire. I watched her run through the house, raiding the rooms, yelling into each one with greater ferocity. You achieve nothing by hiding. You have to go to your classes. Vacation hasn’t started yet, she screams, out of control. Where are you, smashing the plates, the china. Everything. Teacups. Ceramic platters. Then she takes the mop and starts to swipe violently underneath the furniture, screaming my name.
I felt inhuman terror. I slipped through the latticework on the window. I fit perfectly. Luckily, I’m thinner and not so hungry, I thought, as I lost myself in the lawn of an infinite garden. I hid myself among the blades of grass. How long would it take me to reach the truck from here, I wondered, giving up before even starting. How long would it take to climb up to get in? I really should have taken vitamins like she said. She was right. She’s always right.
Translated from the Spanish by Justin Sergi
Ana María del Río (Santiago de Chile, b. 1948) is a Chilean writer, novelist, and professor of Spanish literature. Described by critic Mariano Aguirre as “the most haunting storyteller” of her generation, she made her literary debut in 1985 with the short story collection Entreparéntesis. She has been honored with several of Chile’s major literary prizes including the Santiago Municipal Award for her 1995 novel Tiempo que ladra, and the Maria Luisa Bombal award for Óxido del Carmen, widely considered a seminal work of Latin-American feminist fiction. Her work has been published in Chile, Spain, Argentina and the United States.
Justin Sergi (b. 1990) is a writer and translator living in Oak Park, IL. After several years working in digital media, he is pursuing an MS in Translation from NYU. His work has appeared in Asymptote.
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