by Romina Paula
We fill up the gas, get onto the coastal highway, it’s a beautiful day. I look out the window, I’m on the ocean side. I roll it down a little, being closed in makes me sicker. I realize I don’t remember anything from last night, that after falling asleep, nothing. I hate that, it makes me nauseous. We get to the bus station, very fast, it was so close by car. Juli asks me if I want him to come with me, to get my ticket, to wait, I tell him no, that I’d rather he didn’t. He takes my bag out, puts it on the sidewalk, looks at me. I feel like shit, typical distracting symptom: instead of being able to think about this goodbye, my stomach starts to cramp up, I feel like I need to get to a bathroom as soon as possible, and in this way I make everything as short and sweet as possible. He takes my hands, he looks at me, but I’m inwards, I don’t look at him that much, I don’t want to connect, he asks me to take care, he says he loved seeing me, I nod, I don’t say anything, he hugs me, I stay stiff, tense in his arms, I barely pat his shoulder, he perceives it and backs away, looks at me and says, you’re such a shit. Never more apt.
He lets go of my hands, gets into the truck, and starts it. Vapor is released from the exhaust pipe, the truck rumbles and from behind my hair I can only see the bumper, and now that bumper is moving off into the distance, exiting my field. And that’s it. I pick up my bag and hustle inside the station to look for a bathroom.
I hear water running. There’s music playing far away, although it’s loud. Ceasing to function as I’m used to doing. Not going to bus stations, going with. Not saying goodbye. Is that still water, or are people applauding? There are tiny sheets of things coming loose from my teeth, I don’t know what they are, they could be bits of bread or could be my teeth eroding; since they already were before, and now they’re just dissolving, dissolving, and now my neck starts hurting. Begins. And later not being asked a thing, anything more. Ridiculousness. Not being anywhere. Not being here or here or here or here, and doing it all the same. Like inviting someone out for dinner, someone very special, and having them not come. And having them not ask you anything: not what you’ve been up to, not what you’re planning on doing, not to mention how you plan to do it. Just nothing at all. You don’t know what all this means, do you? Do you know what it means? Kissing is nothing and everything. Having things within reach and not knowing how to ask for them, how to get to them. An image of yourself that’s out of focus. A blurring of oneself, of one’s form, an outline. Resembling only scantly your own ideal, resembling yourself so little at times. Not wanting to let go nor being able to hold on, having it slip through your hands, through your fingers, like you, like your things, like your remnants, parts of something, of a friend, too, fragments of a friend who’s not there, who doesn’t exist. Being supposed to want to converge with the closest thing to the best version of yourself, and turning around, turning around and around the thing that isn’t there, as though magnetized, as though stupefied, as though magnetically drawn and repelled at the same time, like that. Finding yourself face-to-face again against a thing you can neither detect nor avoid. Me here and on the other side you. I carry that, enormous, in my arms, and I don’t see what, and I stay holding what isn’t in this way, stuck to a nucleus of something that defines a here and another here, that can neither be seen nor touched, that’s all.
It’s only later, on a bench in the sun, on the embankment, with a mangy dog at my feet, a friendly dog, a transition dog, that I can wreck myself a little when I reach inside my pocket and come across the smelly place mat, the whale place mat in my right pocket. The whale, the dog with mange, all broken. My mangy dog licks the place mat, rips it up, eats it in shreds, blue, of whale, of fat, of animal, seeking the stain; the whale, in the dog’s mouth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR
ROMINA PAULA is an Argentine playwright, novelist, director, and actor. Her three novels, ¿Vos me querés a mí?, Agosto, and Acá todavía, have enjoyed extraordinary popularity and critical acclaim. This is her first book to be translated into English.
JENNIFER CROFT is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize.
ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS
EAT MY HEART OUT
Zoe Pilger
Half-liberated, half-drunk, Ann-Marie is twenty-three, broke, and convinced that love—sweet love!—is the answer to all of her problems. Then she meets legendary second wave feminist Stephanie Haight, who becomes obsessed with the idea that she can save Ann-Marie and her entire generation. From Little Mermaid-themed warehouse parties and ritual worship ceremonies summoning ancient goddesses to disastrous one-night stands with strikingly unsuitable men, Ann-Marie hurtles through London and life. Fiercely clever and unapologetically wild, Eat My Heart Out is the satire for our narcissistic, hedonistic, post-postfeminist era.
ZOE PILGER is an art critic for The Independent and winner of the 2011 Frieze International Writers Prize. She has appeared on BBC Newsnight’s The Review Show, Channel Four’s Sunday Brunch, and Sky News. Eat My Heart Out is her first novel. It was published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail to wide acclaim, garnering positive reviews from publications such as Marie Claire, The Daily Mail, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman.
DEPARTING AT DAWN
Gloria Lisé
Translated by Alice Weldon
When her boyfriend is brutally murdered by the Argentine military, Berta escapes to the provincial countryside. Often lyrical, Gloria Lisé describes a young woman’s life on the run and the trauma of a generation targeted by their government.
GLORIA LISÉ is an author, lawyer, professor, and accomplished musician. Lisé was 15 years old when a coup d’état overthrew Isabel Martínez de Perón’s government in 1976 and a military junta took power.
CHASING THE KING OF HEARTS
Hanna Krall
Translated by Philip Boehm
Afterword by Mariusz Szczygieł
In this canonical work of Polish reportage, Hanna Krall crafts a terse and unexpected human lesson out of a Holocaust novel and occupation-era love story. Based on a true story, the raw interplay of history and fictionalization spans the Warsaw Ghetto, the war-torn countryside, and the nightmare of Auschwitz, and won the English PEN Award and the Found in Translation Award.
HANNA KRALL was born in 1935 in Poland and survived the Second World War hiding in a cupboard. She began her writing career as a prize-winning journalist. Since the early 80s she has worked as a novelist. She has received numerous Polish and international awards, such as the underground Solidarity Prize, Polish PEN Club Prize and the German Wurth Preis for European Literature 2012. Translated into seventeen languages, her work has gained widespread recognition. In 2007, Król kier znow na wylócie (Chasing the King of Hearts) was shortlisted for the Angelus Central European Literary Award.
PHILIP BOEHM, born 1958, is an American playwright, theatre director and literary translator. Born in Texas, he was educated at Wesleyan University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland. Boehm is the founder of the Upstream Theater in St. Louis, which has become known for its productions of foreign plays. Boehm has translated more than twenty literary works from German and Polish. He has won numerous prizes for his translations, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, as well as various awards from the American Translators Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, and the Texas Institute of Letters.
ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS
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See our complete list of books at feministpress.org
ina Paula, August
