This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s experimental novel Y la muerte no tendrá dominio, translated into English for the first time by Honora Spicer. In surreal and brutal fragments, Guerrero recounts the death of her mother in a state hospital, the two women alienated from each other not only by the physical process of death itself, but by the mediating force of medical bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Guerrero is pursued by thoughts of her pet rabbit, whose “half-dead brood” have similarly consumed her, the process of grief expanding even to overwhelm nonhuman life. Yet even at its most grim, Guerrero remains clinically attentive to the social and political forces that determine embodied experience, her oscillation between passion and restraint serving to heighten the eeriness of her prose. Read on!
7
Ever since she was admitted to the Emergency Room, I kept a sort of diary. I kept note of everything the attendants baldly said. Under duress, they barely opened their mouths to say, “I’m not the one in charge.”
From that day on, death buckles and becomes something nasty, dramatic, dreadful, defining. I thought about that whole troop in white, green, or plum scrubs who disconnected patients by night, failing to give medications on time, falling asleep or going to drink. About those messengers of mortal death who instead of preparing a smooth way, impose the stoniest. They made it all the more difficult: an emotional test, a test of lucidity and endurance.
To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.
Then there was the platoon of doctors whose task it was to read the report, “translate” it, even though I never understood anything. I asked doctor Gálvez to give me permission to enter in the mornings, since I couldn’t always come during visiting hours.[1] The ICU had very strict visiting hours. “Family members get in the way,” he said.[2]
Then the bureaucratic formalities. Death was transactions, signatures here and there. Also cash, even chocolates and gifts, whatever it took to soften the handling of machinery on bedbound bodies. That I came to understand, as I talked in the waiting room with the husband of my mother’s bed-neighbor. Money made everything easier. The poet was ignorant of that language. She didn’t know how to talk about it; its methods, its prices. I left that for my father to do. I impelled him. Now I gag just thinking about it.
8
In The Loneliness of the Dying, Norbert Elias advocates for a less ashamed death, with more company and less hygiene, more emotional. “In the intensive care unit of a modern hospital, dying people can be cared for in accordance with the latest bio-physical specialist knowledge, but often neutrally as regards feeling; they may die in total isolation.”[3] In sum: if they must die, let it be from the bacteria we transmit to our own through a kiss. Perhaps I killed my mother in each of those moments when I could see her. Perhaps I am her assassin. Perhaps my father or her sisters also did their part.
9
The rabbit had lost a baby girl at seven months pregnant; she was born dead. So, we both mourned at the same time, but she was maddened, and I was silent, which was a form of madness, but without its menace.
—Will you always come to visit me?
—I live here now. I lead a modest life.
—Papa wants me to go live with him.
—Will you?
—No, when I go, I just spend time sleeping and dreaming of rabbits and dead girls.
—You always liked your grandfather’s house better. There were rabbits there, do you remember?
—That house is now dead too.
I named the rabbit: Celadora, The Keeper. I couldn’t leave that apartment without her permission. It was almost impossible. Her red eyes saw everything. She was cruel like the girl she piggybacked. She was dry, but every so often the damned cried, that’s to say, the baby. Sometimes the mother, too. Her wail paralyzed me, above all, when the man from the apartment would call on the phone. The girl seemed to sense it and became more furious than usual. When everything was silent, the only racket was from the dry baby. Sometimes the dead are like that, they stomp from the beyond. The girl howled for Celadora. It was logical, rabbits don’t scream, or do they? But the whole time she was demanding food and shitting incessantly. Celadora also ate and shat, and ceaselessly surveilled through my kitchen window. That was her Struggle. When she was in the room, she would also appear through the window. That apartment had too many windows, or was there more than one Keeper and I hadn’t noticed?
Could be.
10
When the rain passes, I’ll head out, bugger off to the East. If the rabbit wants, she can come, but she has to give up that piecemeal girl or they won’t let us in.
11
The daughter of the damned rabbit sometimes lifts a finger and tries to scrawl on the walls of that apartment, but I don’t let her. If I let her, the man who lives in this apartment will raise his voice until she bursts. The rabbit doesn’t understand this. She is lost in the world. The rabbit doesn’t know how to go to the hair salon and calm herself down. She has no calm; the whole day is lurking and stalking prey. It’s her Struggle. Through the window I’ve seen her hunt some animals; sometimes, at night, she bites Germans who walk along drugged or drunk. If anything, she’d seize a finger, a hand, a foot, an eye, an ear. That way she can feed her half-dead brood. Death feeding death. The Keeper, my keeper, has become a carnivorous creature.
Sometimes I am the Keeper of the rabbit. I imagine her in a gurney, as I pull out the fetus. I pull it out and the rabbit keeps screeching, giving off infernal howls, and I march off with a smile. I leave the apartment and take the metro; I get off at her house and stick the baby in a trash can. And I’m happy! I stay happy with her screaming and wailing and the dying rabbit. Sometimes I ask myself if the Social Security personnel feel the same, if a smile paints itself across their faces every time someone dies or if they enjoy our wails, our misery in begging and pleading for our own. That power, that little power that can determine on which side you stand.
Which side were you on?
The rabbits say that they symbolically executed their parents in May of ’68. They purged their past. I wonder about the boundary between a father and a son, between a mother and her daughter, about the boundary lines of love, of ethics, of politics. If you have an assassin father, does that make you an accomplice? On which side to stand? A society that constantly fights its fascist fathers, but rears rabbits with dead babies; a society with museums to exercise memory, with communes of civil resistance even, but which gets infuriated if the metro is five minutes late; with unbreakable rules and guys who throw themselves under trains or ruminate their loneliness in the loneliness of a pinch of heroine. They too can kill you.
Which side was I on? I am and am not on my mother’s side.
I’ll tell the man who lives here to kill the rabbit.
I’ll watch the baby agonize and I’ll carry her away in my lap.
Maybe that’s what I’ll do.
12
“Death is a problem of the living.”[4] What good do books—quotations—do me? My mother was alone on that gurney. One day she entered through Emergency and left through the basement. They said she’s “in a bad way” when they called my father: “in a bad way” is the euphemism that they use for “dead.” I arrived at 4:45am. I was the first. My mother was a lump. She lay wrapped in a white sheet. I didn’t dare look at her face. I dreaded confirming a horrible rictus in it, the evidence of suffering. My mother’s lucidity in the previous days poisoned me. She never liked ugliness, poverty, she avoided them like a pest. That day I didn’t want to see her complexion. Her arms with bruises against her translucent skin, the blood in her face, all that would make me see that someone else had touched her as one touches something unloved.
—I didn’t want to look at you. I didn’t see you.
—Poet and coward.
When I entered the unit, a couple of cell phones were charging in the plugs where there had been a machine taking her pulse, her heartbeats, her respiration. Now, beside my mother’s cadaver, on what had been her bedside table, lay two phones belonging to the rank and file.[5] Every dawn it must have been the same. It was part of the landscape. A corpse a day.
Death is a problem of the living. Now it’s my problem. I should take it up.
[1] In the Intensive Care Unit, visiting hours are only 4 to 5pm, one family member at a time, such that one exits and the next enters.
[2] Author’s note from Saturday, March 19.
[3] Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York, The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001, p.95.
[4] Ibid., p.3.
[5] On the third day of my visits to Emergency, as I wrote a text message, a doctor came up to me to say that the use of cell phones “is prohibited” because they could interfere with the apparatus used in that unit (Note from March 16).
Translated from the Spanish by Honora Spicer
Victoria Guerrero Peirano (Lima, Peru, 1971) is an author, researcher, academic and feminist activist. Her recent publications include Y la muerte no tendrá dominio (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2019), Diario de una costurera proletaria (Máquina Purísima, 2019), Berlin (España: Esto no es Berlín – Pequeño Pato Salvaje, 2019), En un mundo de abdicaciones (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016), Un golpe de dados: novelita sentimental pequeño burguesa (Ceques Editores 2016), and a poetry collection, Documentos de Barbarie (Paracaídas Editores, 2013). Guerrero holds a PhD in Hispano-American Literature from the University of Boston and a MA in Gender Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Her work has been translated to German, English, French, Portuguese and Finnish. She has participated in numerous poetry festivals, including the World Village Festival de Helsinski, the Feria del Libro de Bogotá, the London Parnassus Festival and the Latinale in Berlin.
Honora Spicer is a writer and experiential educator. With her sister, Anastatia Spicer, she has translated Victoria Guerrero’s Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress, which has been excerpted in The Academy of American Poets, Poesía en Acción (Action Books), Asymptote, and the anthology Temporary Archives: Poems by Women of Latin America. Her most recent translation is Tilsa Otta’s And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing (Cardboard House Press, 2023). Her poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in Jacket2, Tripwire, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is based in Providence, RI and is writing a Ph.D. in History at Harvard University. Her website can be found here.