{"id":442282,"date":"2023-07-31T03:58:47","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T07:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=442282"},"modified":"2023-08-02T06:56:32","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T10:56:32","slug":"flame-trees-in-may-by-karla-marrufo-and-allison-a-defreese-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2023\/07\/31\/flame-trees-in-may-by-karla-marrufo-and-allison-a-defreese-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"“Flame Trees in May” by Karla Marrufo and Allison A. deFreese [Excerpt]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers\u2014so stay tuned!<\/em><\/p>\n

And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an excerpt from Mexican author Karla Marrufo’s<\/em> Flame Trees in May,\u00a0translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese. Here’s a description of the book:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are stories that cannot help but change us forever, and Mayo, with its showers of golden rain, its flame trees on fire, its dark sun and the drips and drops that form bubbles, is one of them.\u201d\u2014Nidia Cuan<\/em><\/p>\n

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss\u2014from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula.\u00a0Mayo\u2019s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucat\u00e1n culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator\u2019s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Flame Trees in May is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, Dalkey Archive Press<\/a>, Bookshop.org<\/a>, or wherever<\/a> you get your books.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

And, as an editorial note, the layout of this novella is much closer to poetry than to prose. I’ve tried to represent it as best as possible in this post, but I highly recommend reading the physical book for a better sense of how this is supposed to appear on the page.<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

did you know there\u2019s a word in portuguese that resembles your name?<\/p>\n

i\u2019ve forgotten it now, but it means mementos or memories, like remembering to send greetings to someone, to send a memo. i would remember it if only i could pet the cat, just like i would remember to take out the trash on friday and to close the refrigerator door<\/p>\n

the door to my tears,<\/p>\n

and all the windows before leaving the house.<\/p>\n

so much silence here. have you noticed? that when you keep quiet, the house gets dirtier so much faster? you are such stubborn dust. you pass through doorways and come to settle in corners kept under lock and key. maybe that\u2019s why lola can\u2019t stand this place<\/p>\n

the room still sweats with the warm hypocrisy from when it was a law office<\/p>\n

and i\u2019ll tell you why, if we keep going like this, soon we\u2019ll be able to rent it out as a funeral parlor. that\u2019s a profitable business. people will never stop dying<\/p>\n

or keeping quiet<\/p>\n

or thinking today must be friday.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Karla Marrufo<\/p><\/div>\n

come here. touch the wall. it\u2019s covered in dark bubbles. so humid! the wood is swelling. i am swelling, and sometimes i feel myself rolling, floating, rolling\u2014like those days when we\u2019d go to the park and roll down the hill until we were exhausted, until we would land at the base of the hill where the grass was peaceful and green. remember? we spent so many weekends at that park! we arrived with our childish excitement, believing everything was going to be fine; we ate sandwiches and sipped fruit juice while the clowns blew up dog-shaped balloons<\/p>\n

the dogs walking by were shaped like balloons that would later pop\u2014<\/p>\n

once blown up to full size and left to bloat at the side of the road, the cars never stopping.<\/p>\n

but in those days, bubbles were clear, and everything was fine. we should return to that city again sometime, leave this flat landscape for a while.<\/p>\n

have you noticed how tiresias looks at me? i\u2019ve often wondered what he\u2019s thinking when his little green eyes grow big and stare into mine. it reminds me of that movie<\/p>\n

what was it called?<\/p>\n

the one where they ask whether, instead of us being the ones who make animals more human, it\u2019s not the opposite way around, that the creatures in our lives turn us into animals. later lola brought up that song again, the one about the professor who teaches puppies how to write<\/p>\n

he was an animal lover for sure; a regular zoophile, lola said<\/p>\n

what a silly song! it makes me laugh,<\/p>\n

though my excitement lasts an instant<\/p>\n

as i think about those animals<\/p>\n

those bubbles<\/p>\n

and how they drift through life with their broken fragments of memory.<\/p>\n

so little time has passed, really, and yet i\u2019ve started mixing things up; things disappear from my mind. sometimes the past is a faded beach house, condemned each day to endure the relentless caress of sand and the sting of salt swept in by the wind. lola insists i take vitamins, fish oil, seaweed capsules. she says i should sleep more<\/p>\n

have peaceful dreams, sleep without needles pounding in my temples<\/p>\n

for eight, ten hours<\/p>\n

a thousand hours<\/p>\n

to sleep forever<\/p>\n

but a wicked sun keeps visiting me in my dreams, drawing black holes before my eyes<\/p>\n

it wakes me\u2014agitated\u2014every forty minutes.<\/p>\n

i saw it on tv. the blonde girl with the small mouth was talking about it: about the very dark spot at the center of a solar flare. you have to see it<\/p>\n

we should talk more. a little more. you know? it\u2019s easier to remember ordinary things that happen to us when we talk about them. that\u2019s why names are so important<\/p>\n

a handful of letters from the alphabet, bound to the heart our whole lifes.<\/p>\n

mam\u00e1 panchita used to repeat this ad nauseam.<\/p>\n

she said names are very dangerous; they chart the lines that lead to our destinies.<\/p>\n

i remember the last time, so sad, though it barely lasted a few seconds. we had bound mam\u00e1 panchita\u2019s hands with a rope, secured them to the ceiling beams, so she would stop<\/p>\n

she was only hurting herself;<\/p>\n

scratching open her skin as a way to remember.<\/p>\n

her hands restless as kites,<\/p>\n

but without the colors<\/p>\n

and i was deeply moved by her dark skin. seeing it touched me in a way that no one else\u2019s skin had ever moved me before. it smelled ancient, the scent of many years. doubt had left a deep crease between her eyebrows. in a corner of the room, right in front of her, the small altar to our lady of charity was laughing along with five freshly cut sunflowers and the sparkle of a few fake coins. eyes half-closed, mam\u00e1 panchita squinted suspiciously as she observed the saint; her pupils glowering with the hatred of a thousand questions answered only by whispers.<\/p>\n

and just as i walked into the room, an unspeakable anger seized me<\/p>\n

she was scratching open her skin<\/p>\n

who knows what she was looking for below the surface<\/p>\n

that\u2019s why she had all those sores on her arms,<\/p>\n

that long scar on her face<\/p>\n

and her terrifying screams and outrage made me shake with anger and then grow quiet because, there at her side for the last time, i felt incapable of speaking to her<\/p>\n

come now, mam\u00e1, everything\u2019s going to be fine. when i look into your eyes, there you are\u2014so very much yourself, mam\u00e1, always you, taking the little thread of your name, that\u2019s about to break<\/p>\n

nothing. silence. in that quiet corner of the room, i didn\u2019t so much as dare to light the white candles around our lady of charity; we kept still, our mouths sealed<\/p>\n

by our dark hands.<\/p>\n

when it comes to giving me looks, even tiresias is more expressive than that. this must be why he scratches me with such determination. you see? it\u2019s the same thing backwards. relentless caresses and reverberating silences\u2014and this house didn\u2019t even suffer the misfortune of having been built near the ocean. it has survived for years in mam\u00e1 panchita\u2019s absence<\/p>\n

in the absence of your sisters, your father, you,<\/p>\n

and me<\/p>\n

only the bubbles and drops remain<\/p>\n

drip, drop<\/p>\n

of a rather thick liquid, as if flooded by disappointment, muddied by a sadness that makes everything slippery. no matter how hard i try, i can\u2019t stop pacing between these same drops of music, these same notes, this same smell that comes, always, in may<\/p>\n

it\u2019s may again<\/p>\n

that clings to the walls of memory, climbing the walls like a vine, working its way into the memories hidden in every corner, embroidered with the threads of mam\u00e1 panchita\u2019s name. she was fascinated by fancy paper napkins, by the little drawings on disposable cups, the tiny flowers on plastic cutlery\u2014so many treasures. remember? she ate with her hands instead of touching the plastic forks, cleaned her mouth using her sleeves instead of napkins, discreetly wiped her fingertips on the edge of the tablecloth\u2014all to preserve the beauty of disposable things.<\/p>\n

you see, i\u2019m still finding her trove of plastic and paper at the most unexpected moments, in the most unexpected places, and this creates a dilemma for me because i never know what to do with these disposable objects she left untouched only to be thrown out later, nobody giving them a second thought.<\/p>\n

do you know how many things vanish without anyone so much as thinking of them? i try to do it, to think about every single thing, about every person who dies . . . but there are far too many and i am<\/p>\n

it seems to me<\/p>\n

much too small. maybe when you start thinking about things, the things themselves become sad too. like the melon this morning. lola brought it, and it was gigantic, a really big one, and i had to cut through the rind myself, then scoop out the seeds from each little square\u2014the hulls of those seeds rough to the touch as I removed them; each unique and alive, and they covered my hands like homicidal blood. and there wasn\u2019t even running water in the house<\/p>\n

no drip, no drop<\/p>\n

and that meant my hands were coated in the melon\u2019s sweet round death, its juice running onto the floor until finally i cried\u2014knife in hand\u2014about all the times i hadn\u2019t known how to relish the thought of death.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

where are you going? did you know there\u2019s a greek word . . . ?<\/p>\n

but i took out the trash on friday and closed all the doors<\/p>\n

all of them<\/p>\n

though later i opened them again because i needed to let in the daylight and to breathe in the outside world. sometimes when the sun<\/p>\n

a spot black as night<\/p>\n

starts to scribble on the walls and furniture in my room, i force myself awake: but it\u2019s no use. my eyes keep me anchored in sleep. my eyelids stay closed, inwardly, looking for a long time at a universe that lacks the contours drawn for us by daylight. that\u2019s why i have to open the windows and doors, expand this space so the colors don\u2019t stay hidden, so i, too, may draw myself for one more day. it\u2019s strange: all of a sudden i start to imagine my own funeral, among dark bubbles, in this ridiculous heat. and i\u2019m afraid,<\/p>\n

of closed doors and windows<\/p>\n

very afraid. i must be lost in the maze of cereal boxes and energy shakes. every morning the same routine, so easy to follow that in the end i get lost. it\u2019s easy to get lost when you go about your day only pretending to be free<\/p>\n

to have no blood at all.<\/p>\n

and you know it. remember when we would get lost and promise each other we would never go home? never return again,<\/p>\n

to the smoothies or fish oil or seaweed<\/p>\n

even though the way home was a straight shot, no turns. we wanted to run away to the parks with their hills and lakes<\/p>\n

do you remember?<\/p>\n

\"\"

Allison A. deFreese<\/p><\/div>\n

to sail far away from home, balloons that rise until they touch the sky. we were happy runaways, glancing over our shoulders, feeling above it all and looking down on those small lives below . . . exactly the way life looked from the picture window at the italian restaurant. remember that place? its crystal-clear windows under the shade of a ceiba tree, where i waited for you, hidden inside, imagining the instant you would arrive? the ceilings in that space were as high as our sky. sometimes when you arrived, i would imagine you were someone else, a different fellow coming to see me. then we\u2019d escape with our foolish fantasies that i cherish to this day<\/p>\n

you are so silly, small woman!<\/p>\n

you ramble on and on, you can\u2019t hold your tongue; with a warm, sweet venom in your saliva<\/p>\n

i am quite small for being such a silly woman<\/p>\n

with the eagerness of a schoolgirl and a trembling desire to see you again, i loved waiting for you. and when you triumphantly entered the restaurant, you grinned, confirmed what you suspected, and then kept playing our game, hiding a rose behind your back<\/p>\n

a forbidden caress<\/p>\n

fixing your gaze on my body<\/p>\n

later putting the flower in my hands without a word<\/p>\n

what a lovely couple<\/p>\n

yes, mam\u00e1, we make such a lovely couple, though tiresias may condemn us<\/p>\n

with his intense green gaze and his claws on our skin.<\/p>\n

yes, it sounds so pretty, but neither of us were destined to be martyrs, nor would our deaths be foreshadowed by ripping open our consciousness, little by little each day, in an italian restaurant<\/p>\n

or by having someone read of a very long will and testament:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0the one who dies first, dies best<\/p>\n

we didn\u2019t think about death back then, even though in those days we knew already that neither words nor names would ever be on our side. remember the letters we wrote each other, the tongue twisters, all the wordplay?<\/p>\n

paradise bird white angel cloud heaven dream blood<\/p>\n

and what does blood have in common with dreams?<\/p>\n

they are connected in the same way that paradise is full of birds and angels: you must fly to reach paradise, just as there must be blood for a dream to end<\/p>\n

and i laughed then, though i never understood a thing. because to me, you were as bright as the look of hope in a street dog\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n

wait! you would have loved it in the city center yesterday, everyone was there. i walked and walked, past all the shops, among people and pigeons. it was fascinating. it was strange, getting lost in a crowd again. a thousand colors overlapping, dust in the air, the excitable sounds of people in a hurry, with their purchases and their sniveling kids holding melting ice creams, sad from the heat. and a man looked at me like no man has looked at me for many years.<\/p>\n

i felt paralyzed and dry, a scarecrow of a woman. except that i can\u2019t scare anything, not even pigeons. i couldn\u2019t return his look, because i could tell he was someone who refused to be intimidated. i felt trapped like the queen in a game of chess, alone and vulnerable at the moment of defeat. i would like to learn to play chess<\/p>\n

to find my way out of mazes<\/p>\n

to fill myself with the power of knives<\/p>\n

but no one will tell me how it\u2019s done. i never learned to return a look. i know nothing about revenge. that must be why everything around me ends up dying or getting killed. you know, tiresias spent the night in the carport again. i\u2019m afraid i will forget him, that he\u2019ll forget about me. i am very afraid that one day we will both forget about each other\u2014that i\u2019ll drive out of the carport and he won\u2019t move; and after that, he\u2019ll never run away or come to me again; that later i\u2019ll have to wipe up his blood and gently remove his little red collar from his neck, and place the drop that was his body<\/p>\n

dark as a bubble<\/p>\n

in a trash bag that i won\u2019t forget to take out on friday. maybe after that, i\u2019ll close the doors forever.<\/p>\n

go on then. you can leave if you want. there\u2019s nothing here anymore. that\u2019s why we are so backward and rustic, so broken down\u2014at a standstill. we lack the words to communicate, even those words that conspire against us, that aren\u2019t on our side.<\/p>\n

sometimes, i have the feeling a man is watching us, staring, lewd and hateful, and what no one realizes is that we are actually alone in this world, and no one can form the shapes of our eyes<\/p>\n

of our skin, of our memories<\/p>\n

as if not one beautiful thing remained, and only a little of the bad, the exact size and shape of our hearts<\/p>\n

which become a little less small every day,<\/p>\n

gets embedded in our hands and feet<\/p>\n

did i tell you? tiresias killed a hummingbird<\/p>\n

angel bird heaven paradise<\/p>\n

and is tearing it apart now, licking it, dropping it at my feet as an offering of sacrifice. he\u2019s a hunter because he can kill, because that swift flutter of wings makes no difference to him, nor does he care if a shooting pain stabs the heart as his little whiskered mouth shreds the warm body and throbbing heartbeat of a bird that was about to take flight. i also know how to heal wounds just like those, death wounds.<\/p>\n

tiresias has killed another hummingbird. nothing ever changes! it\u2019s like he fills his mouth with death so as not to hiss at our sins. we should play again<\/p>\n

another paradise another crow another angel another cat another pair of wings<\/p>\n

but without the terror of these days that now keep us apart. if we stay quiet, if we speak very quietly and tell each other new secrets, things could be like they were before. look closely . . . if you can just ignore my slurred speech and the way i drag my s\u2019s <\/i>in every phrase\u2014such an effort to form that sound\u2014 everything will be exactly the same as it has always been. you only need to make me repeat it over and over again<\/p>\n

she sells seashells she sells seashells she sells seashells <\/i><\/p>\n

and everything<\/p>\n

everything<\/p>\n

will be the same again.<\/p>\n

\n

Available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, Dalkey Archive Press<\/a>, Bookshop.org<\/a>, or wherever<\/a> you get your books.<\/p>\n

The large image<\/a> associated with this post is copyrighted by Joegoauk Goa<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers\u2014so stay tuned! And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an excerpt from Mexican author Karla […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":442292,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486,71892],"tags":[72172,72162,72182,2756,6516,72192],"class_list":["post-442282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-excerpts","tag-allison-defreese","tag-flame-trees-in-may","tag-karla-marrufo","tag-mexican-literature","tag-spanish-literature","tag-witmonth"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":442332,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442282\/revisions\/442332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}