La Tercera by Gina Apostol

Author:Gina Apostol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

A Translator is a Traitor

“Un tra[duc]tor = a tra[i]tor.”

Paz Tilanuday y Hua-Zhu

Trans. Calista Catalogo, Giporlos, Samar

On the Street

I saw her on my way from buying milk and fruit at D’Agostino’s, and she accosted me at the corner of Bethune. I was used to these people on my street, models and others wearing nearby Maison Margiela for daily wear, and I avoid looking at them in general because I prefer not to give them their due. I pretend my resistance is a virtue—ignoring even those people of ambiguous ethnicity whom I think should be my allies, kind of francoafrican with mesoamerican inflections and that straight black hair I used to take for granted, this one dressed in antisexual armor usually designed by my favorite antisocial people, the Japanese. I was looking at the folds of her skirt, though, the way there is magic to certain kinds of pleating, a crossbias cut that challenges gravity.

Elvis Oras used to tell me, I have the heart of a costurera.

I hate the people who can afford those clothes, they are usually scum of the capitalist earth, but I love the art.

I did not hear her when she called out to me because there are also a few crazy people in the West Village that I ignore. My downstairs neighbor Begonia, for instance, a seventyish chapbook poet with dementia, whose husband, Günter, a retired mortician, used to greet me happily on the street, cuddling his neurotic dog, until it occurred to Begonia, for some reason, that I was out to steal her new poetic manuscripts, lurking to pounce on her from the roof deck. And now the pained look in her husband’s eyes when he sees me going down the street, his demented Begonia at his side, makes me grieve for his sorry life. I made sure I never looked people in the eye, and I screened sounds from my earscape. I have a knack for alienation. It turns out it’s not genetic. It’s historical. I walked past the girl in the Yohji clothes.

She was facing me.

And then I heard that long-unheard name.

Only someone from my childhood would call me by that name, and so of course I did not believe I heard it as I turned on Bethune.

That’s when she accosted me and repeated it—the nickname my mother called me.

I was dragging my Zuri bag of geometric African prints, a mark of righteous yet still annoying consumerism, bulging with tangerines and a seven-dollar gallon of milk. She tapped me on my Tracy-Anderson-online-toned arms as I swung my virtuous cloth shopping bag. I bring out these arch-bourgeois tropes of late-capitalist tendencies only to point out that, as a modern Filipino presenting an anticolonial history none of you want to hear about, I’m not into misery.

I work out, and I vent my frustrations by going to Sephora. The only nurses in my family are extremely rich people exploiting fellow workers by owning lousy retirement homes in Maryland. I live in the West Village because the old white people, though crabby, some nuts, are quiet; also, the walls in my prewar building are solid.

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