A piece that will bring you face to face with the anxieties of childhood, with a dollop of the sticky sweetness of dulce de leche. It is a gorgeous treat that has been brought exclusively for Asymptote readers in translation by the Miguel Angel Asturias National Literature Prize for lifetime achievement winner, David Unger.
Finn is under the bed, perhaps the safest place in the world. The boy feels he has nothing to fear and yet, there he is, under the bed in the waning half-light. First he lies face down in back near the headboard. He finds a hair curler under the bed and spins it. He’s happy because sometimes the curler spins in a circle and other times it veers to the right or left.
There’s dust under the bed, a fine layer of dust. Finisberto imagines that his finger is a crayon and he draws the outline of a doll. He thinks it’s a good drawing. He turns on his back, counting the bed slats above him. He can hear someone calling his name from far off. It’s the calm voice of his grandmother, soft and sweet. “Fiiinnnn.” He likes the smell of his grandmother’s hands. Sometimes he grabs one of them and run it over his cheeks while watching television.
Her voice edges closer, dangerously close. Finn scrunches himself at the farthest corner under the bed and closes his eyes. He recognizes her steps on the carpet, the rhythm of her pace on the bare floor. He stifles his laughter. His grandma will think he’s lost; she’ll sit on the corner of the bed and shout out his name, pleading with God to make him appear. And then Finn will stick his hand out from under the fringes of the bedcover making believe it´s a cat´s claw hunting for his grandmother´s ankles.
This time, however, he has to be more imaginative: his grandmother already knows the cat-under-the-bed trick. This time he’ll pretend to be a spider climbing up her leg. Grandma will sit at the edge of the bed and call out to St. Kahn D. Cane, the patron of lost boys.