“Not back, not back!” she said.
“No, no, of course not! I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Come on, climb in.”
Eritrea said to herself, in the midst of her desperate hurry, that the best thing to do would be to climb into the vehicle that was a kind of huge, square car and that way they would arrive faster although she wasn’t very sure where or in what direction that place might be.
“This way, this way, I’m almost sure it’s this way,” she said, “that we left the clunker for the unloading.”
“I know, I know, everyone’s talking about that, it’s a big event when the paper arrives. I know where it is.”
Quickly, quickly and silently, they went toward the place. The owner of the vehicle was worried about the road, which wasn’t exactly a smooth, straight route with no obstacles but rather just the contrary. Large rocks impeded their passage and smaller, rough stones jumped when the wheels bit them. She didn’t know what it was. Maybe ruins from the last earthquake, or an abandoned road as the man with the car said. But they had to continue that way, she was sure of that.
“You can see something over there,” the man said. “A light.”
It wasn’t a light, it was only a reflection, barely the faint glow of something that rose up from the ground. Eritrea told him to hurry.
“I’m doing what I can, miss,” said the man, who jumped in his seat and set the pompoms swaying over his forehead every time they went over a rock that was larger than the others.
The light was like a wound. It looked like a wound, a brilliant gash. A wound in the earth. But all that mattered to Eritrea was that Trafalgar was lying—unconscious, it appeared—with his eyes closed, his hands slack, one foot touching the wound of light in the ground.
“Help me,” she said to the man.
They jumped down and between them, dragging him, lifting him as much as they could, they carried him to the vehicle. Getting him inside it was another thing again. It was impossible even between the two of them to lift the weight of the weak body that they couldn’t manipulate. What they did was sit him down on the ground with his back supported by the mudguards that almost completely covered the wheel. Better backrest, impossible. When Eritrea saw that Trafalgar was breathing well and trying to open his eyes and move his hands, she left him to the care of the man and ran toward the light. The man with the car yelled at her to come back but she didn’t pay any attention.
Without running now, deliberately, carefully, she approached the light in the ground and leaned over. Leaned over is saying a lot: she tried to lean over but she wasn’t able to because it flashed so brightly that it hurt her eyes. She moved her head back and then little by little, with her eyes closed and barely separating the lids, she tried to look. It was like looking at the sun. She closed her eyes again and retreated again and did that several times until she was able to see something. The sun under the ground: she wanted to laugh but the urge went away immediately because there was something there in the deep sun. Shadows, it seemed to her, they were moving in the light down below. Far below.
“It can’t be,” she said.
She picked up a stone from the ground and let it fall into the crack of light. There was a confusion below, like something boiling in which dark waves moved; no, not dark because it wasn’t possible that there be dark in that light. Waves that shone less than that which surrounded them.
The man yelled at her to come back. Trafalgar opened his eyes and said, “Eritrea?”
“Let’s go back,” she said.
She sat beside Trafalgar and the vehicle backed up (it seems like a jeep, Trafalgar said), turned around, and returned to the road.
“It’s over,” she said.
“What is?” Trafalgar wanted to know.
“What made you fall in the light. It’s passed but we have to tell them.”
“Eri, I don’t understand anything,” said Trafalgar, his voice hoarse, the words unsteady.
“Don’t worry. I do understand.”
Trafalgar turned stony. Lousy snot-nose, he thought, who does she think she is? I’m the one who’s used to explaining, practically no one ever understands anything and then I go and I explain and now along comes this kid who’s not even twenty years old and it turns out she’s the one who explains, come on. She was right, of course, but he consoled himself thinking that with the fainting (what was it that had made him lose consciousness? He remembered nothing, except feeling heat, a heat that rose up from his ankles to his neck, an unbearable heat) he was still a little dazed and couldn’t think straight.
In the palace, the Maestre and his wife and a few officials were waiting for them. Everyone had a worried face and everyone sighed with relief when they saw them arrive.
“My friend, my friend,” said the Maestre and he took Trafalgar’s hand between his own and shook it up and down and down and up.
“How are you, you sweet thing, how are you?” asked the Maestre’s wife, unable to bring herself to take Eritrea by the hand or embrace her or anything like that.
The man with the jeep and the pompoms got out with them and stayed there, close by, and as no one paid any attention to him, either to kick him out or to shake his hand, he decided not to move until he found out what was happening and why that girl was doing what she was doing.
Eritrea asked the Maestre General to gather the Council and all those who had any authority on that world. Trafalgar, sitting very tense, very serious in an armchair, witnessed the whole spectacle. The Maestre wasn’t going to pay attention just like that to a girl who asked him for such a thing, but Trafalgar was a respected person in Susakiiri-Do and people believed what he said.
“Fine,” said the Maestre, “they’re on their way.”
“The earthquakes,” said Trafalgar, “aren’t just movements of the earth. There’s something down there below.”
“But that’s just a tall tale,” protested one of the elders, “a legend for gullible old women.”
“Oh, really?” said Eritrea. “They’re not legends. I saw them.”
And she told what she had seen.
“The firewellers exist? That’s impossible!”
“I don’t know what they’re called, but they exist,” she said.
“So, sir,” said Trafalgar, “tell us.”
“They say, ahem, ahem, uhh, well, that there are some beings, some animals—they’re not people, right?—they don’t speak nor do they dress or have tools or bury their dead, they’re animals that lived on Susakiiri-Do before we arrived and when we arrived and they realized they couldn’t get rid of us, they took refuge underground. They eat fire, that’s what they say, not that I believe it, they eat fire and they produce fire. And when the fire floods the subterranean caves, it starts to come out and that causes the earthquakes. Tall tales, like the good Maestre said.”
“Well, no,” said Trafalgar.
THE END (FOR NOW)
Eritrea told what she had seen:
“At first I thought it was hell,” she said, “but no horned devil with tail and trident came out of there, so it wasn’t that. The heat was like hell, that’s true. No, of course, I was never in hell but it was a cold heat, like swords. I know what I’m saying isn’t very coherent, but try to imagine it: an atrocious heat but not from fire, on that I agree with all of you, they eat fire and produce fire. No: it’s heat and the fire of red-hot iron at the moment it becomes steel. And it gets into your bones, like cold.”
Trafalgar was delighted, because that was exactly what he, even without leaning over as Eritrea had done, just getting very close, had felt before he lost all notion of time and space and had fallen backwards—luckily, not forward.
The Maestre General and his wife and the big men of the Council listened rapt but both Trafalgar and Eritrea saw they didn’t believe them. She, who hasn’t lived as much as Trafalgar and hasn’t yet learned to keep quiet when it is necessary to say nothing (she will probably never learn) began shouting: “But why don’t you believe u
s? Are you idiots or what? Aren’t you going to do anything?”
“Do?” said the Maestre. “But no, child, there is no need to do anything.”
Eritrea hates being called child or honey or, even worse, sweetie.
Before she could bellow that she had a name and was nobody’s sweetie or child, Trafalgar stood up, he grabbed her by the arm and told her all right, all right, our delightful hosts are right, they know more than we, there’s no need to get like that.
The girl has learned something along the way. She looked into his (black) eyes and said fine, of course, she had had a shock, she wanted to go to bed.
It was a quiet night. Eritrea lay down and pretended to sleep. And when she heard Trafalgar go into the bedroom they had assigned him next to hers, she sat up in bed and waited. Not long. She was becoming impatient but the door opened softly and closed softly and Trafalgar came in and sat on the bed.
“Well,” he said, also softly.
“These aren’t decent people,” said Eritrea.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.”
“No, seriously, they’re not decent.”
“Go on, why?”
“They know what’s down there.”
“Because they are what’s down there,” Trafalgar finished.
“You knew?”
“I suspected it just as you suspected something was happening to me. They wanted to make us believe that it’s all a lie but you and I know it’s true.”
“And the guy in the jeep who took me didn’t want to let me get close once we’d gotten you away from the edge of the crack. Also, what’s that about they came from somewhere? Weren’t they from here? Why? Do they go from world to world eating fire and destroying the place they’ve come to? And the worst of it is the matter of the library.”
“What’s the matter with the library?”
“You haven’t seen it but I have. The building is gigantic but inside there aren’t more than six or seven bookcases with a few books. Don’t you come every six months bringing paper so they can copy the books that according to them were lost in the earthquake? Well, where is all that paper if they haven’t written more than fifty or sixty books, huh?”
“They ate it,” said Trafalgar.
“Exactly. They feed the bonfire with paper. There are no trees here and even you can’t bring them. You could probably bring a few itty-bitty ones but they can’t wait for them to grow.”
They were silent for a while.
“What do they do?” she said. “Do they change form to go down to the depths of the world to feed themselves with fire?”
“Could be.”
And they were quiet again.
“We’re in danger,” said Trafalgar.
“Let’s leave now,” said Eritrea almost at the same time.
But after thinking it over, they decided to stay and see what happened. Because if they tried to escape that night, someone would surely stop them. They knew, the firewellers, that they knew. Or that they suspected. And for that reason they would have them under surveillance. In sum: that night, impossible. All the same, they worked out an escape plan for the next day, just in case, in which the main point was that they should not separate or be separated.
And the next day the Maestre General and his wife and everyone and possibly the pompom man as well, although they didn’t see him around, were more agreeable and obliging than ever. After breakfast they invited Trafalgar to an office where, they said, they were going to pay him. Trafalgar put on an astonished face.
“But I still have part of the cargo in the clunker,” he said, “the most interesting part. It’s an experimental paper, heavy and very smooth, that comes already cut into pages. It has its drawbacks, however. I could only get them to give me a small quantity because it’s still under study. It seems it burns too easily.”
As bait, it was so coarse as to be unbelievable, but Eritrea had approved the attempt: “If they are what we think they are,” she had said, “they’re going to swallow it hook, line, and sinker.”
They swallowed it.
“Come help me,” Trafalgar said to Eritrea.
And off the two of them went, feeling that their backs prickled and the hair on the nape of their necks stood up stiff like a cat’s when it gets angry, almost sure they were going to pounce on them any minute and drag them to the depths of the small, happy, peaceful, cultured world of Susakiiri-Do where they were going to burn as if in hell, or worse, where they were going to become firewellers and they, too, were going to feed on fire and they were going to live forever in the underground of a world of earthquakes and monsters.
I am happy to be able to say that nothing happened. Gazed upon by the placid and smiling faces of Susakiiri-Do’s notables, they got into the clunker, closed the hatches, started it up, and they left. The Maestre General and his people watched them while they lifted off and kept watching them long after, so long they almost broke their necks trying to see how the clunker became a little black dot in the blue sky.
Eritrea, who kept her eye on them, said: “Might we have been mistaken?”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Trafalgar.
THE END, END
“You won’t have taken her along again on any other trips,” I said.
“Why not?” he said. “Sometimes when I know nothing is going to happen to us, she comes with me. So long, of course, as it’s not the season for planting or pruning or germinating or what do I know, or for taking care of the strelitzias. She has a bunch of clients in the neighborhood.”
I told him I was happy, although I like lagerstroemias better, especially the purple ones, and gypsophila is always nice to make a bouquet shine. And as far as knowing what’s going to happen, I told him no one ever knows what’s going to happen to them or what isn’t going to happen. That, for example, Eritrea is going to introduce a boyfriend one of these days. . . and I stopped talking because I saw his face.
“Don’t tell me,” I reacted. “What’s the guy like?”
“An idiot,” he said. “A useless fool who doesn’t smoke or drink wine or know how to prepare a barbecue, who works out and studies dentistry and doesn’t play chess. The worst.”
“Trafalgar, you don’t play chess.”
“Fine, but the guy is an idiot. And to top it off, he’s a Ñuls man. Can you imagine me with a leper son-in-law? And if she comes and tells me she’s going to marry same, I’ll kick her out of the house.”
I laughed for a good long time.
“She’s going to have several—many, I hope—before marrying the one she chooses. Don’t worry. Perhaps he’ll be a riffraff die-hard and not a leper.”[1]
“I hope so.”
“And may she give you a bunch of grandchildren.”
“Grandchildren? Me, grandchildren?”
“I hope they’re granddaughters,” I said.
What he answered is irreproducible, but what do I care?
[1] The riffraff are Rosario Central. Leprosy is Ñuls. Riffraff and lepers are, of course, irreconcilable. (Author’s note.)
Trafalgar and I
“Because there are things that can’t be told,” said Trafalgar on that stormy day. “How do you say them? What name do you give them? What verbs do you use? Is there a suitable language for that? Not richer, not more flowery, but that takes into account other things? I was on a world without a name, covered with forests and swamps, full of monstrous animals that didn’t take any notice of me, and in a clearing in the forest, in a white wooden house with metal screens in the windows and a weathervane on the ridge, there was a man sitting at a table in the gallery drinking tea. I sat down with him and he served tea for me. Afterwards I came home. That’s all.”
It started to rain. A beetle crawled under a magnolia leaf and a cold drop hit me on the forehead.
About the Author
Angélica Gorodischer, daughter of the writer Angélica de Arcal, was born in 1929 in Buenos Aires and has lived most of her life in Rosario, Argentina. From her
first book of stories, she has displayed a mastery of science-fiction themes, handled with her own personal slant, and exemplary of the South American fantasy tradition. Her more than twenty books include Kalpa Imperial, Prodigios, and Tumba de jaguares. She has received many awards for her work, including most recently the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.
About the Translator
Amalia Gladhart (amaliagladhart.com) is the translator of two novels by Ecuadorian novelist Alicia Yánez Cossío, The Potbellied Virgin (2006) and Beyond the Islands (2011). Her chapbook Detours won the 2011 Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Iowa Review, Bellingham Review, Stone Canoe, and elsewhere. She is Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon.
World Fantasy Award winner.
Shirley Jackson and Locus Awards shortlist · Story Prize Notable Books
“One of the most accomplished and most adroit fiction writers in America.”—Brooks Landon, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Beautifully written & subtly discomforting stories.”
—Nancy Pearl, Seattle Times
“The title piece has that wonderful power we hope for in all fiction we read, the surprising imaginative leap that takes us to recognize the marvelous in the everyday.”—Alan Cheuse, NPR
“Johnson’s language is beautiful, her descriptions of setting visceral, and her characters compellingly drawn. These 18 tales, most collected from Johnson’s magazine publications, are sometimes off-putting, sometimes funny, and always thought provoking.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Best Books of 2012
Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of 2011 · Shirley Jackson Award winner · NPR Best Books of 2012
io9 Best SF&F Books of the Year · Tiptree Award Honor List
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