Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández

Author:Claudia Hernández
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary fiction;literary fiction;novel;translation;translated fiction;history;El Salvador;Central America;Latin America;drama;love story;realism;women’s literary fiction;rite of passage;metoo;sexual misconduct;women’s rights;gender roles;book prize;Roxane Gay;Bogota 39;Hay Festival;Alejandro Zambra;Álvaro Enrigue;Andrés Neuman;Daniel Alarcón;Eduardo Halfon;Guadalupe Nettel;Juan Gabriel Vásquez;Junot Díaz;Alia Trabucco Zeran
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2020-08-25T15:20:53+00:00

21

She wants nothing more than to help her ex-compañera-in-arms and -in-demobilization. She’d have liked to swear an oath to her like the ones friends swore in combat, to tell her that she could rest easy, that she’d take care of her daughter. But she can’t: she has to lend a hand to the girl who made her a grandmother at an age when others are just becoming mothers: her own girl, who’d gotten pregnant at the same age she did. Her daughter’s always saying she can’t complain, that she wasn’t there to give her guidance. She’s never dreamed of demanding explanations. Nor has she asked who the father is. The truth is, she doesn’t care. She hears the grandmother say she suspects a schoolmate or some kids from the adjoining street. She can’t say which because the little girl still looks like any one of their and all the world’s girls. She hopes that, in a few years, her features will betray the guilty party. It’s not like she’s keeping track of what she spends on the girl and plans to send him a bill when she finds out who he is, but she’d like to protest the lack of character he showed by deciding not to look after her daughter, not even trying.

She doesn’t much care about that, though. At most, she’d like to know what sorts of illnesses the girl might inherit. Now there was no immediate danger of dying on the battlefront, these sorts of things mattered. You could contemplate a future with fewer imperfections. You could ask after your partner’s genetic makeup so your kids would have no problems other than those that life brought them. She and her daughter’s father, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to. It wasn’t the right time for that sort of thing. When they’d decided to be together, they hadn’t thought whether their relationship might last or whether it would stop working once their characters changed, or whether it was legal for a man to fraternize with an underage girl. All they knew was that, right then and there, either one of them might die. And that they might both die. In wartime, the future didn’t exist, pairing off was no big deal, and expecting a daughter was a way to survive, to perpetuate yourself, even though some thought that all this, and the speed at which it happened, were the marks of a weaker breed.

Something of them would remain on earth. His nose and her eyes would go about every day, even if nobody could tell. When the war ended, some part of each of them would remain, either for those who’d survived or for their families. The grandmother understood this. Which is why there’d been no sermons or commotion, but instead hugs and gratitude, when she had returned to the city with news of her pregnancy. A constant excitement and fighting for the girl to stay with her rather than being sent to a safe house where

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