I slipped my shoes on again and hurried to catch up with Walter and Miseria.
We were outside, hanging on the shoulder.
Plenty of buses stopped around there and it wasn’t late yet.
“Whatever comes first,” my brother said, and we were all right with that.
We saw bus lights in the distance.
“Flag it down?” I asked.
Miseria smiled and shrugged like what do I know. But as the bus rolled closer, she raised her arm.
The bus stopped. We climbed in. It was practically empty. There was an old man asleep in his seat and, by the door, a couple making out. Nobody in the back. I pulled out three tickets, even though I didn’t know where we were headed.
Walter and Miseria sat in the back, by the exit.
“I need the window seat,” I said to Miseria.
She looked at me. I had the feeling she might make fun. But seeing how serious I was, she got up and moved over.
We were off.
Me at the window, Walter in the seat next to me, and Miseria sprawled with her head on my brother’s shoulder.
The bus turned a corner, and I looked back at everything we were leaving behind us. There wasn’t a soul around, and everything looked darker where we were going.
I thought to myself that I was alone, heading into a new place. The night kept some of it hidden and the lights revealed it little by little. I felt for the earth in my pocket. It wasn’t much. The bus rattled over the pitted road. I put the earth in my mouth. I had nothing to wash it down with, but that was okay. I wanted to feel it.
I rested my head on the window, closed my eyes, and heard a voice lulling me to sleep.
“Eartheater, the place you learned to read the earth no longer exists.”
A familiar-looking place gradually emerged in my head. My eyes adjusted, as though somebody had lit a candle. Walter, Miseria, and me sat on the sofa of the suite. We looked tired. Sad. We were older. A small boy darted around and I tried to track him with my eyes. He tripped. The doorway to my brother’s room was walled over. The kid laid his hand on the bare bricks. The boy and the bricks were equally new and strange to me. Walter called the little tyke over, and he came running toward him and clambered onto him.
There were bottles in the suite, heaps of them.
“Eartheater, the place you learned to read the earth no longer exists,” said the voice again, and I got angry.
My cell rang. I tried to answer but couldn’t. I couldn’t see the keypad or read anything. I thought that it might be Ezequiel, and felt nervous.
“They’re waiting for you,” Señorita Ana said, full of rage. “You’ve got work to do. It doesn’t matter that the house is gone and only the suite is left. They’re putting someone else in the earth.”
I opened my eyes.
I thought of the day before, when Ezequiel went with me to Mamá’s grave. I thought of the grave beside hers, of what it said on the tombstone. There was a bunch of stuff written on it. Mamá’s had only a name and two dates.
I don’t know who’d arranged for Mamá’s gravestone. It hadn’t been me. Nor Walter.
Gravestones, letters written to our dead.
Ana never got one.
Mamá got a name and two dates.
I glanced over. My brother held Miseria by the shoulders. They were both asleep.
I was thirsty for beer. The taste of earth still in my mouth, I took a deep breath but kept my eyes open. Through the bus window, I stared square into the night. I breathed out slow, thinking again of my old lady’s grave, of the one next to it, of Ezequiel and me hitting the bottle like it was the end of the world.
“Ezequiel,” I said. I thought of how I also wanted to have a name. Out there. One all my own.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Selva Almada and Julián López, for their excellent teaching.
To Marcelo Carnero and Victoria Schcolnik, who gave me Enjambre and in whose company I found that space to write for the first time. To all of my colleagues at the writing workshop and clinic, my first readers.
To Vera Giaconi, who helped me see even farther, and to write what I saw.
Thank you to my children, Ashanti, Ezequiel, Reina, Eva, Valentín, Ariadna, and Benja, for all the time we’ve had together.
About the Author
DOLORES REYES was born in Buenos Aires in 1978. She is a teacher, feminist, activist, and the mother of seven children. She studied classical literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Eartheater is her first novel.
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A Note From the Translator
Eartheater is as much about story and character as it is about the language that shapes them—a mix of gritty, turf-bound slang and mysticism. The characters that populate these pages have a whiff of the Lost Boys and of the kids in Lord of the Flies. Either abandoned or let down by the grown-ups who were meant to protect them, they’ve been left to fend for themselves. They’re also at odds with the other authority figures in the barrio, the cops—variously called yokes, cuffs, and pigs in this translation, adapted from the existing Spanish terms yuta, ratis, and cana—who have also let them down.
Out of this neglect rises our slovenly heroine, Eartheater, who will help solve the murders and missing persons cases that plague her community. Eartheater herself is terse and introverted, and there is a staccato rhythm to her no-nonsense worldview. She is hardboiled detective and bruja all rolled into one; tetchy teenager and wise seer wrapped in a single, waifish body. When she isn’t busy reaching through darkness and time for the person she’s seeking, she eats, listens to music, plays video games, drinks beer, hangs out with her brother, and fucks (a term she would use) her yuta boyfriend with relish.
Much like its heroine, Eartheater has also risen out of a particular moment and as a response to a particular neglect. Femicides remain widespread throughout Latin America and women have banded together in protest. (Eartheater is dedicated to two victims of femicide from the barrio where Dolores Reyes works as an activist and teacher.) Women authors continue to be overlooked on a national scale, and have joined forces to demand they be seen. We may have been aware of these things for a long time, but they are finally being addressed; even language is being righteously shaken and molded to make room for those it has long excluded.
In a way, the phrase awante les pibis serves as a snapshot of this groundswell. And though it occurs only once, I spent a good deal of time wrestling with it. In Argentina, pibe and piba mean “boy” and “girl,” respectively; their plural forms are pibes and pibas. As is the case in many Romance languages, the masculine plural in Spanish is always used except when the grouping in question is entirely female (outrageous, we know). What’s interesting about pibis is that it is gendered neither as male nor as female, but other. Meanwhile, awante is a distortion of the word aguantar (“wa” standing in for “gua”), which can mean to “endure” or “put up with” or “withstand,” among other things, and is often used colloquially. A person who has aguante, for example, is someone with stamina. It is a phrase that in essence upends gendered grammar, both colloquially and off-handedly.
As it’s used here—scrawled in Liquid Paper on the cover of a binder—Awante les pibis serves as an all-inclusive cry for solidarity. It’s innocent, after a fashion, and yet illustrative of a deep desire for change on the part of the young people in the narrative. When translating this particular phrase, I tried to reach for something beyond the words that was both form-appropriate—Liquid Paper, binder—and context-appropriate—the kind of phrase you might see scrawled in a bathroom stall with a Sharpie. A phrase that perhaps once stood for something powerful. “Power 2 Youth” fit the bill. As best it could, anyway.
Something has been lost in this translation. Or rather, it was never there to begin with. English is not gendered in the same way as Spanish. On top of which, there is no English-language equivalent of the hyperlocal variant of Spanish in which Eartheater was originall
y written: early twenty-first-century Argentinian Spanish from the outskirts of Buenos Aires. There is in fact no English-speaking Argentina, much less an English-speaking outskirts of an English-speaking place called Buenos Aires (“Good Airs”?). On the surface of things, this task—convincing you, the reader, that the work you have in your hands could have, in an alternate universe, been written in English by an English-speaking woman named Dolores Reyes (“Pains Kings”?)—may seem impossible. But the aim of literary translation is to convince you to suspend your disbelief, at least just long enough to make the impossible feel eminently plausible.
Julia Sanches
Here ends Dolores Reyes’s
Eartheater.
The first edition of this book was printed and
bound at LSC Communications in
Harrisonburg, Virginia, August 2020.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this novel was set in Granjon, an old-style typeface designed by George W. Jones in the 1920s. Jones, a British printer, drew inspiration from sixteenth-century French punch-cutter and type designer Claude Garamond’s roman types and his contemporary Robert Granjon’s italics to create this elegant, serif typeface. Granjon became popular, as its delicate yet sure lines show up even on smaller point sizes.
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Copyright
EARTHEATER. Copyright © 2020 by Dolores Reyes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as Cometierra in Argentina in 2019 by Sigilo Editorial.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-298774-7
Version 09042020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-298773-0
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