Red, Yellow and Green Read online

  Biblioasis International Translation Series

  General Editor: Stephen Henighan

  Since 2007, the Biblioasis International Translation Series has been publishing exciting literature from Europe, Latin America, Africa and the minority languages of Canada. Committed to the idea that translations must come from the margins of linguistic cultures as well as from the power centres, the Biblioasis International Translation Series is dedicated to publishing world literature in English in Canada. The editors believe that translation is the lifeblood of literature, that a language that is not in touch with other linguistic traditions loses its creative vitality, and that the worldwide spread of English makes literary translation more urgent now than ever before.

  1. I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of

  Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland)

  Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

  2. Good Morning Comrades

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  3. Kahn & Engelmann

  by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)

  Translated by Jean M. Snook

  4. Dance with Snakes

  by Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador)

  Translated by Lee Paula Springer

  5. Black Alley

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Dawn M. Cornelio

  6. The Accident

  by Mihail Sebastian (Romania)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  7. Love Poems

  by Jaime Sabines (Mexico)

  Translated by Colin Carberry

  8. The End of the Story

  by Liliana Heker (Argentina)

  Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

  9. The Tuner of Silences

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  10. For as Far as the Eye Can See

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Judith Cowan

  11. Eucalyptus

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  12. Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  13. Montreal Before Spring

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald McGrath

  14. Pensativities: Essays and Provocations

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  15. Arvida

  by Samuel Archibald (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  16. The Orange Grove

  by Larry Tremblay (Quebec)

  Translated by Sheila Fischman

  17. The Party Wall

  by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

  Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

  18. Black Bread

  by Emili Teixidor (Catalonia)

  Translated by Peter Bush

  19. Boundary

  by Andrée A. Michaud (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  20. Red, Yellow, Green

  by Alejandro Saravia (Bolivia-Canada)

  Translated by María José Giménez

  RED, YELLOW, GREEN

  Alejandro Saravia

  Translated from the Spanish by María José Giménez

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ON

  Originally published as Rojo, amarillo y verde by Éditions Art-Fact Press/Ediciones de la Enana Blanca, Montreal, 2003.

  Copyright © Alejandro Saravia 2003

  Translation copyright © María José Giménez 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Saravia, Alejandro, 1962-

  [Rojo, amarillo y verde. English]

  Red, yellow, green / Alejandro Saravia ; María José Giménez, translator.

  (Biblioasis international translation series ; no. 20)

  Translation of: Rojo, amarillo y verde.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-141-7 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-142-4 (ebook)

  I. Giménez, María José, 1977-, translator II. Title. III. Title: Rojo,

  amarillo y verde. English. IV. Series: Biblioasis international translation

  series ; no. 20

  PS8587.A37656R6413 2017 C863’.64 C2017-901945-7

  C2017-901946-5

  Edited by Stephen Henighan

  Copy-edited by Jessica Faulds

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover designed by Gordon Robertson

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation. Biblioasis also acknowledges the financial support of the ­Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

  The translator acknowledges the assistance of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre at The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, and the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.

  …to live, literally, by the story: by

  a story which is nothing less than never-

  ending: a sonorous, weightless edifice

  in perpetual (de)construction…

  Juan Goytisolo: Makbara

  “I’m afraid of seeing you again and I want it so much. In my room I keep a flag that I dream of sending to you so you can display it on your balcony as a sign of victory over nostalgia—a sign of our thirst for ourselves—for my homeland, my country, the words I write, are you, your arms, the words you speak.”1

  Susana, I just finished shovelling the snow that was blocking the entrance to my house and now my back hurts. It’s snowing and on the radio the forecast is calling for twenty more centimetres of snow. It’s cold out and I don’t want to leave the house, but I think I should go to the library to read—or suffer—the latest news from Bolivia brought by the handful of newspapers in Spanish that manage to reach the island of Montreal.

  This morning as I started working on a story I was writing for you, I realized I had lost almost thirty pages by mistake—as a pretentious deus ex machina would have it. They must have decided to vanish purely out of shyness and shame, imagining your gaze upon the nakedness of their distant words. If I hadn’t lost them, I probably wouldn’t be writing this convoluted letter and thinking about you. It was the kind of mistake in which a distracted, mighty finger can erase an entire city from the m
ap, or the memory of stories yet unwritten. Susana, it’s so sad to lose words this way, especially when you’re a week away from turning thirty and for the occasion you have gathered all your hopes of being able to write something that will finally convince you that tracing an immigrant tongue on a piece of paper is somehow worth the trouble. Writing is so artificial, so unnecessary, compared to the practicalities of life, and yet it is so vital because one way or another, writing, this exercise of serpents, manages to merge the sum of our days into the river of words and memories. I think that’s how we’re born into history, a story that marks the course of our lives with a branding iron, as if Death were letting us roll the dice for a moment, just to show us how some people roll a lucky seven while others end up crucified, with their lips sewn up and their memory burning in silence. I will start over. Little by little I will rewrite the story so that you won’t forget me, so I can help you remember who you were that long-gone afternoon in the Glorieta de Obrajes when we knew nothing of all this distance.

  Eating Italian-inspired noodles made by Guatemalan cooks at a restaurant on Rue St-Denis, Marcelle Meyer told you with no dramatic gestures or signs of frustration, rather with an air of impassive calm, that she wanted to stop seeing you, that she had grown tired of you. You listened to her, feigning calm, and secretly regretted the absence of wine on your table, even a cheap one, to wash down that damn mouthful of potatoes that all of a sudden got stuck in your throat as if even your digestive tract was emotionally stunned by such a stabbing phrase: “Je ne veux plus te revoir, Alfredo. Il faut se quitter. Je casse.”2 Her voice glided with ease as it pushed the blade of separation between two ribs.

  The next day, knowing perfectly well that it was utopian, a bad joke no one would understand, you decided to start your absurd Quechuistic project on the metro. To defy the norm, risk a possible arrest and even a not-so-unlikely prison sentence. Maybe even a few blows, as Peruvian in verse as they are heavy upon the ribs. That’s how you started your day. Monsieur, vous dérangez affreusement!3 A thick moustache under a cap, the ­uniformed metro police. Severe blue. Everything imagined. The string of metro cars stops at Jean-Talon station. The sliding doors open, fed by the powerful pulse of electricity that runs from the rivers of the cold north of Québec down into the underground bowels of this island. Passengers on a permanent journey—from the Ogooué Basin, the ­coronilla de Cochabamba, the ruins of Pompeii, the knives of Toledo and the bazaars of Marrakesh—they board the cars of the vast metallic intestine of the Montreal metro. They go in and out, cross paths and take in each other’s eyes, coats, daytime and evening hairstyles, mouths, trousers, Turkish and Mozarabic tongues, shared air, sweat, and lotions. Shoes, sandals, winter boots. Over the bustle and noise, someone is singing the way one sings at the age of twenty.

  You board the train and instinctively seek to make contact with other passengers’ pupils. Iris to nerve, circular birds that take flight when they sense your gaze, dissolve into the absence of other faces and lose themselves in the epistemological depths of ads for creams, cigarettes, tickets for the baseball season, trips to lands of beaches and beach balls and palm trees, sunblock, and late-vintage wines from Arabized France. In the subways of the world, people don’t make eye contact. Desires without a price tag are a threat.

  Your voice attracts the attention of other metro riders. If not because of its tone, at least because of your tongue: “Chunquituy palomitay...kolila!” Even if they don’t understand the language, they can at least tell you’re calling out for someone at the top of your lungs. Someone who will never answer. From one metro car to the next, opening forbidden latches, walking through doors in a clamorous trip through de Castelneau, du Parc, Outremont stations. “Chunquituy palomitay...kolila!” Montréal est la première ville nord-américaine avec la plus grande population trilingue.4 The olive-skinned ears of Tamils who escaped from Jaffna’s ambush and shrapnel seek familiar phonemes beneath your disguised words. A Hindu thinks he hears verses in ancient Sanskrit as he drifts in a drowsy dream towards the west end of the city after washing dishes, pots, and floors at the Bombay Palace—the palace of succulent tandoori chicken and curry sauce—with soap and scrubber in his raw hands from one in the afternoon until five in the morning at a Sainte Catherine Street restaurant. “Chunku: n. Word that expresses love and tenderness.” You leaf through the dictionary, trying to unearth a tongue denied to you by your elders’ shame and last name; they, who were so comfortable speaking it to each other in the cornfields when they didn’t want to be understood by others. The Castilian Queshwa—Quechua, Wuichua, Kechua—of the forgotten Jesús Lara. The term kolila doesn’t appear in this book. Maybe it’s written with a khu or ku. Nothing. The metro keeps moving. It arrives at the next station. Doors open and close in a matter of seconds. Mechanical jaws, wooden brakes, intercourse of metal and rubber. It pulls out of Université de Montréal station. You walk through another forbidden door amidst the rattling speed of the pneumatic ride, always searching for someone to listen, someone who will understand your stubborn muttering, someone whose earnest fingers will know how to tie the umbilical laces of your migrant Andean shoes. The passengers’ eyes feign indifference as they steal glances at you. Their pupils conceal their own curiosity, or perhaps restrained reproach, disdain, perhaps racism. Est-ce que vous êtes cuzqueño, monsieur? You laugh. No, no, can’t you see I’m a dog, madame? But even mongrels have a home country, don’t they? Nooo, señora! Je suis boliviano. Boliviano...boliviano! Ah!...un otro italiano!... Ladiladaladalada... Her answer awakened in his ears the notes of an old song by the great Alfredo Domínguez, when he sang at the Radio Méndez concert hall, the notes of his guitar wafting fragrant through the speakers of the scratchy radio. The Tupizan musician had run away from home to join the circus at the age of twelve. His job was to take care of a monkey during his journey with a caravan of animals, frugal men, and hunger across the remote regions of the border between Bolivia and Argentina, regions transformed into landscapes of solitude, love and nostalgia by the exquisite strings of his guitar. Exhausted, he got off at Côte-des-Neiges station. No one had answered his plea. No one had detained him. No one had asked for explanations or accused him of breaking the rules and regulations of the public transportation service of the Greater Montreal Urban Community. As he walked towards the exit, he saw someone digging through the garbage, searching for cans of Coca-Cola or Canada Dry. An impoverished man recycling himself as a recycler. This Alfredo, Alfredo Cutipa, stood for an instant on the platform leading to the exit escalators, thinking it was best to stay in that sunless underground world—like a mineshaft in the Siglo XX mine—and realized it would be useless to expect anyone to understand the analogy, whether they spoke Quechua or not, a language to which he had no access either, despite the blood that ran through the underground tunnels beneath his skin. During the ride he had imagined the possibility of running into a paisana of his. If only to hear the sibilant speech again, the accent, the serpentine form of the Andean word. To be Bolivian. To have a wound that never heals. To hell with bolivia. Yes, like that, in lower case, minuscule letters for a minuscule country in the South, the most dramatic region in the world, the most...what? He couldn’t find the right adjective for the immensity he wished to convey. Perplexed by his linguistic limitations, Alfredo sat down on a stone bench next to people waiting for the metro. All of a sudden, he remembered the trailer of a movie. A woman closes the door as she steps out of a small apartment building. With a snug-fitting skirt and a confident gait, she walks to a café on Place de la Contrescarpe on Rue Mouffetard. Her body and her steps merge into the crowd that makes its way down the boulevard towards the old cobblestone street. Colours are bright: it’s around 11:00 on a sunny June morning, perhaps on the boulevard near Musée de Cluny. The camera rises above the pedestrians and streets in a wide-angle shot à la Nuit américaine, then stops facing the bar in a café packed with urbanites drinking and digesting hurried croissants dipped in steamy café au lait. She orders a
croque-monsieur and café au lait s’il-vous-plait. Looking into the mirror on the wall behind the bar, she notices she is being followed by the eyes and broad ­pectorals of the hero of the movie, a resolute-looking man who asks the garçon for another coffee, then turns towards her and whispers a proposition in her ear: to spend an hour together in a nearby hotel. She looks towards the audience in the theatre, her eyes wide and amazed, as if asking for advice. Someone sitting beside me almost chokes, her saliva suddenly thick and sliding down behind her Eve’s apple. The hotel receptionist’s hand offers an irresistible key towards the viewer. Room 678 at the Gordon Hotel is ready for you. Every shot pregnant with uncertainty. Will she accept his carnal proposition? The screen slowly fades to black after flashing a dramatic slanted phrase at the audience: Prochainement dans cette salle de cinéma.5 He opened his eyes after the dull moment of darkness, realizing all of a sudden that he was still at the Côte-des-Neiges metro station, sitting on the polished black bench next to the platform. He was sitting next to a woman who was making a discreet effort to read the title of the little book he held in his hand: Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, a novel about a Canadian physician responsible for the first blood transplant in the history of modern medicine right in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. At the speed of a Spanish Republican bullet, Alfredo Cutipa’s eyes caught her glancing at the title of his book. After an awkward moment of silence, she asked him point-blank: “Monsieur, est-ce que vous avez vu le film?”6 He answered in Spanish: “No, but I’m trying to read this island by reading this book.”

  At night, Marcelle Meyer’s face again, tired of the usual Tuesday-night movie date. After hundreds of movies, she is on the big screen of your dreams, dressed as a karate black-belt, waving her arms in a series of lethal moves as she explains in Cantonese that she doesn’t want to see you anymore. And to show you how final her intentions are, she lets out a high-pitched scream, and with a brutal, well-aimed chop she swiftly splits open the skull of Sigmund Freud, who just sits there in his fantastic green armchair and doesn’t even have time to say “¡ay!”