Jaguars' Tomb by Angélica Gorodischer

Author:Angélica Gorodischer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2020-12-09T16:08:26+00:00

Emergence

But at times. At times she felt she was not, herself, not entirely within her body, her own body, her limits of flesh and of humors, ashes promised to the final shadow. Then she forced herself into some physical task, an effort, something that would give her hands and her leg muscles something to do, something to feel the rush of her blood; or she made herself sleep. A little bit of sleepiness, just barely, drooping eyelids, one arm under the sofa cushion, or under the pillow on the bed, the other folded, hand supporting the opposite shoulder, comfortable. Ten minutes, she thought, and those were ten minutes of darkness, of distraction.

It wasn’t hard for her to sleep. It hadn’t been in the city, and it wasn’t in the land of the great rivers. Celina claimed her sometimes and it was then she paid no attention to her hands or her eyelids. She went, she just went, as if to the future, as if to the rescue, and she sat down at the unpolished wooden table and no longer heard the noises of the house, the breath of the kitchen, the races around the water pump, that which all together was the heart of the ground under her feet, the disordered throbbing of La Preciada. Only one time, only once did she have trouble falling asleep and that was because she had had to mediate in a conflict among the men who wrapped the bales. To sleep. To sleep without dreams the way she slept, to straighten the sails of the shallow-bellied ships, take up the pace of the lizards over the sand, count words, let herself be, minimal chasm, scarcely buried, immobile, in a time one is finally able to leave outside of oneself, like a sour wine.

She knew Osmán would call her if something happened out there and she slept without dreams, protected and distant.

Around the house, many things might have been happening: the blond sand is never a fully inert mineral, the curús writhe in the damp cracks under the wood; the deceptive wind carries the scent of guano, of rotten fruits fallen from the trees, of bodies grateful to the shade that dries their sweat, of multiflora leaves, of peat, of the fury of a swift animal that throws itself onto its prey; the water roiled, trying to change course, and she slept, far from all that, unaware, pure. Dreaming is like a leap, it passes over events unharmed, wrapped in that germinal sac that is its own silence; and when it is about to fall at last on the other side of the chasm, there it is awaited by characters and events, words constructed of disparate letters, syllables that do not correspond to one another, one face instead of the other, and above all the absence of paths. What happens when one is in a place, but not the expected place or, worse, not the one which should inevitably follow after what had happened? What

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