The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen

Author:Aura Xilonen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2016-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

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[Boorish nonsense. Upright nonsense. Bedimmed nonsense. Why hadn’t the bean-counting scribblers invented something new under the sun? Instead of just words that come prepackaged in the dictionary?

So Jefe had won a few bucks betting on my ignorance with the asshole Argentine. Despite my objections, I wanted to prove to myself that I could understand some dumb vato named Góngora and another fucking güey named Quevedo. It was a bust: seems whatever I took in floated right back out again through my ears. I couldn’t understand half a strand, even after I’d already read the whole dictionary and the whole book of Spanish Golden Age Poetry, which had just made me feel leaden. Yes, I read an entire letter in the dictionary every three days, trying to become less stupid than I looked. But the stubborn poetry, cowled from head to foot, got away from me anyway—any way it could. They all seemed to be saying the same thing in different ways: “O how the plaintive muses / suffer and are afflicted / by all that distresses / faggoty-ass poets.” Or that’s how I saw it.

In midwinter Jefe asked me in front of his Argentine buddy, whom he’d started inviting to his cookouts at his house in the suburbs:

“Do you know what a hendecasyllable is, you wretched bastard?”

“Bite me, boss.”

“Did you understand anything in that book?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. Tell me what a cowl is, you benighted twerp.”

“I don’t know.”

“See, man? The boy’s got a head full of feathers,” he told the Argentine, who’d immigrated to the United States from Patagonia back in the Flintstones era. “You owe me a lot of money, dude.”

The gaucho parvenu, who rode a bit low in the stern, pulled out a wad of bills but didn’t hand them over, just said, waving them in Jefe’s face, “You’re a scrawl, che, you dim-witted son of a bitch. Let’s go double or nothing on the Copa Libertadores soccer match, all right? Qué decís?”]

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