Translated from the Spanish by JACK ROCKWELL
Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.
Translator’s Note
Translating several of Bellolio’s stories, but especially this one, I’ve found that the hardest part has been the beginning. By the time the text hits its stride, somewhere in the second or third pages, it has swept me along with it, and it feels almost effortless—nearly as much so as Bellolio’s painstaking craft makes her own writing seem—to bob and weave with her sentences, to bunch up and then uncoil with the tense spools of her thought. But once I wrap back around to the beginning, I read the first few sentences I’ve translated and am shocked to find what feels like a jerky, uneven mess.
Bellolio rigorously calibrates the motions of her prose, and the elegance of her language applies some serious heft to the felt necessity of her narrator’s thought. This thought, and the careful patterning that structures it, are absolutely essential to this digressive, contemplative story. In the first long paragraph of “River Landscape,” a compassionate investigation of the interior life of a murderer fleeing his crime, a series of repetitions in the text mimics the destructive return of his victim’s face to his mind’s eye. While these repetitions spread out as the story progresses, in the beginning they are stacked thickly on top of one another. Finding the right rock and sway to carry the reader through this dense opening passage took some obsessive tinkering. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but it’ll have to do for now. There was much going back and forth between alternatives, and much friendly (and incredibly patient) advice given by friends and colleagues, such as Jan Steyn, Emily Graham, Miharu Yano, and Dabin Jeong. I’m very grateful to all of them, and especially to Dabin, who introduced me to Bellolio’s work.
—Jack Rockwell
River Landscape
For Sebastián
The image came to him all the time, uncontrollably, relentlessly: a face, combining incomprehension and terror perfectly, as though they were a natural combination. Pain was almost absent from this mixture, though he was certain that there, too, must have been pain. The image came to him all the time, all the time, never stopping. As if, he said to himself in a whisper, or sometimes in silence, one sole instant could suddenly turn life irreversible. Not an act, not a consequence, but life. He had heard that many things were irreversible, but now he could see that he had never understood the true meaning of the word. Now he did understand, now his life was irreversible, and he didn’t know how to feel about it, about the irreversibility of his life and about the untimely images rushing over his mind. Would these too prove irreversible? He felt certain they would. He didn’t know what to make of all this. He walked the sidewalk in stupefaction, surprise, feeling like he had just been born. The colors of the world seemed new to him, as though brightened in tone, more yellow and saturated than before. Before getting onto the interprovincial bus he sat down for a minute, on Retiro, because the idea of his second-floor seat on the stopped bus made him feel sick. People walked by, busy, hurried, with briefcases and purses. Their movement also made him feel sick. This and the image of the face, somewhere between surprised and questioning. Everything would be colored by irreversibility from this moment on. As he drank water from a bottle, feeling the cold move down his throat, he felt infinitely surprised by the lives of the people who were walking, hurried or distracted, in front of his seat. They were not fazed by the presence of irreversibility, they couldn’t perceive it because they were concentrated on finding their platform or their bus. A question echoed in his mind: whether the character of his life, that is, his life up until this moment, could be kept up in secret, if there existed anyone at all who he could tell this to, or if he simply would have to accept that this image which came and came again over his mind would go on accumulating, always self-identical but, in some way that he didn’t understand, minimally different each time. It was creating a silt, a millimeter-thin geology in his skull, generating geological layers of images, each identical except for some minute contortion, unidentifiable, but, as everything else was now, irreversible.
It was very early and it was cold. Dawn was breaking, the sky bursting with color. Closest to the horizon it was pink, fading to blue just as he raised his head. A lone star still shone, without conviction. He could just hardly make out fragments of this sky behind the buses.; the view of the countryside from Retiro is mediated by the rank presence of these gigantic vehicles, and by the people walking from one side to the other, dragging all kinds of luggage. He felt sick again. The platform was still dark. Flourescent lights still burned on the ceiling, but they were no longer illuminating anything. He could stare into the panorama, because a bus in front of him had just departed, leaving the view free for a few minutes. The sky grew brighter moment by moment, which also brightened the platform and stole away the refuge he had made of the darkness. He didn’t want to have to face the day with its sunlight. He would have preferred a storm, a black sky, rain. He supposed that his face, with all its layers of irreversibility accumulated, would be as pristine and transparent as the sky that day. For this reason, while he remained seated facing the gap the departed bus had just left in front of him, he thought about how much he’d have loved a day of rough weather today, a sky covered by black clouds.
Through the space left by the bus he saw the landscape contrasted with the city. Just outside the limits of the terminal were miserable, visibly unstable, sickly-looking shacks sprawling into the surrounding area. A fleeting thought passed through his mind: to take refuge here; in plain sight, yet farther than any destination to which his bus could take him. Life in one of those shacks would surely be strange, reduced to minimal necessities, to basic mechanisms. They were spread out like a small sea of orange bricks, variably tall, some with lights on, bare bulbs hanging from precarious roofs. All of this disgusted him, made him even more sick. Beyond, on the horizon in the distance, rose gigantic towers with strange forms, some pointed, irregular, complicated. They shone, as though they were sharing a little light with the shacks that were like their reversed negative, or better yet their extension, their other mode of being. These towers couldn’t exist without the shacks, but he were sure that the shacks would exist forever, that despite their apparent fragility, they would outlive all the towers of forty or fifty stories with their enormous letters shining in the sun and reflecting the river below them. He felt a moment’s relief imagining the world as it would one day be: deserted, abandoned, motionless. Then a layer of silence would cover everything, and no one would be there to see it. But the world would keep on its course, placid and indifferent. It would keep on turning around the sun, in its orbit, as calm as if nothing had happened. The stars would keep on shining in space, and their anachronistic light would keep on reaching the earth, reflected in its seas and rivers. It would be no waste, for this, too, could be considered a form of life. An uninhabited world, populated only by microorganisms which take millions of years to develop, whose lives can’t be measured by human parameters; patient and consistent, and above all silent, these organisms would come to cover all human works, and then the world would no longer be for anyone. It would exist autonomously and foreign to all will. In this scenario, the shacks seemed much more real to him than the enormous, faraway towers.
A new bus arrived, putting an end to his distraction. The illuminated patch of the world was suddenly thrust into the dark, and it returned to his head, identical: the image. The face, somewhere between surprised and terrified, with wide-open eyes and burning cheeks, mouth open in a grimace.
The landscape passed by quickly in the window. With his head leaned up against the glass, he could see nothing but the brightness of the world. Colors—green, blue, black at some points—and brightness. The bus glided softly across the highway, but it didn’t seem to leave anything behind. There was always something at its side. Cows, fields, sky. Always something. This distressed him. The effects of its speed were not intense enough to erase the landscape. He knew then that space, too, would be moving irreversibly forward. He would have to inhabit it irremediably, to occupy a portion of it, in stillness or in motion, but always be occupying it. He felt an even greater unease after this realization. His head was working as though it had no memory other than the face. He felt at once like a new arrival and like he was being denied any possibility. As though starting over did not, in reality, offer anything. Or perhaps just one thing: the duty to travel farther and farther away, into any depths that this impassive landscape might wish to grant him. He was going in search of something neutral; of something unmoving, deaf and mute, something able to stop the accumulation in his head.
So he travelled, straight north, thinking about crossing the border, making it to Brazil and then losing himself forever, confining himself to some riverside village where no one knew him, and dedicating himself to whatever would allow him to eat and sleep. This was his plan, at least. Something, however, inside his head, near the deposit where the image was cascading over itself, told him that part of the irreversibility his life had so recently acquired would make it impossible for him to ever carry out a plan of such simplicity again. That something, always, even if it were just the tenacity of the image, would endlessly disrupt any project, any daily routine.
He closed his eyes, hoping to sleep. But in the incomplete darkness, he could still perceive the abstract, sequential movement of the trees, or the bus’s fleeting passage under some bridge. Darkness, too, had been taken from him, irreversibly.
With his eyes closed, and his concentration set against the indefinite color inside his eyelids, strange figures began to appear, formed by pulsing nodes of light that swarmed chaotically in the darkness. Little by little, they were slowing down, fusing together. Maybe he could reach calm by rejecting his exterior, leaving the landscape outside. He remembered Oedipus, a little ingenuously. Later he rejected this image—the empty sockets, the seething blood, the freedom of putting out his vision—and then, from a distance, once again, the image. The asphyxiated face, the gaze, the eyes bursting but focused, the bewilderment.
In Iguazú he took a taxi to the national park. He had always heard of the waterfalls, but he’d never seen them. He thought that this could be his last point of contact with his own land before definitively losing himself somewhere that not even he would be able to place on a map. This is what he imagined, entrusting himself to this last touristic avatar, somewhere between ridiculous and iconic, before leaving forever. Even though, as he already knew, he’d be forever accompanied by the image, and all the space and silence that came with it.
He walked, patient and almost calm, through the paths of the park, his thoughts confused and anxious, with the intuition, perhaps even hidden to himself, that the water he was hearing in the distance would be able to disperse the persistent image in his head. To blur it until it became just slightly something else, so that the strength with which it intensified against his waking and his sleeping would diminish somewhat.
Some tracts of the paths were deserted. He took every ferry, crossed every estuary, made it as far as he could without consulting the map, as though in all this web of bridges, elevated paths over water, trails, stairs, and signs carved into wood, he was hoping to find a space for fate. A space in all this commercial infrastructure for indefinition.
He hears, in the distance, the fury of the waterfall; but the waters he is stepping over are flat, with peaceful, monotonous currents. They lead to the violent precipitation of the fall, some meters ahead, in open ignorance of the future, in a continuous and uninterrupted presence that passes by, like a vast, invisible continent, unconnected to any exterior. The life of these extensive waters, falling calmly among walls of motionless vegetation, seems admirable to him. He stays still, watching all the colors of the afternoon in the sky and the water reflecting them. Just as his life had become irreversible, he thinks that an afternoon like this one could undo it all: all the colors in just one sky, duplicated with slight distortions in the water, without consciousness, he thinks, are capable of undermining irreversibility. Then he sees, stupefied, all modulations of space, the way in which it shifts minute by minute, remaining, however, always the same. He himself being pure geography, uncountable space, despite it all.
People accumulate in groups on the balconies overlooking the falls, as is to be expected. The water, which just some meters back was moving almost imperceptibly, now hurtles furiously into a vertical, abstruse fall, destroying all coordinates, plunging everything into chaos. In vain one might watch this fall and try to apprehend the forms the water takes when it’s falling at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Before this landscape, the only sensible thing is to lose one’s perspective in the damp cloud that returns from its invisible depths; white, formless, in a constant state of rebeginning.
Lost in his observation of this chaos rising from the depths, where he imagines hundred-year-old rocks resisting the charge of this massive quantity of material, patient and silent, unfazed for centuries and centuries, he thinks without wanting to of space and its stars, its planets, its suns and the mysteries of its infinity. He thinks pleasantly about the billions of years the universe has existed, during which successive extinctions, cosmic explosions, and planetary glaciations haven’t changed the course of anything significant. He’s always wondered how this interstellar space sounds; if it’s possible to say that the death of stars, the explosions that produce new cosmic formations, or the very motion of the planets sound any determinate way, and what sound this is. Since an early age he’d been bothered by the idea of an unending extension, beyond any will, persisting through stellar explosions and births, creating and destroying planets and constellations, a dark extension populated by luminous beings that are born and die, that emit heat and travel through space without desires nor plans, but that are alive all the same. He’d even heard that the universe was expanding; more than trying to understand in what direction an infinite space could possibly expand, he was seduced by the idea that every extension could always surpass its limits, shift and move away, far from any necessity or calculation.
And so he is lost, just a few minutes later, without hearing the screams nor any longer remembering the image, in this small chaos that the universe, impersonal and other, seems to have gifted him by showing him the falling of the water: this hospitable and nebulous space that seems to encode all modes of rebeginning.
Paisaje fluvial
A Sebastián
La imagen se le venía todo el tiempo, sin control, sin tregua. El rostro en el que se unían perfectamente, como una combinación natural, terror e incomprensión. Terror y sorpresa. Casi parecía ausente el dolor en esa mezcla, aunque estaba seguro de que había habido, también, ahí, dolor. Se le venía la imagen todo el tiempo, todo el tiempo, sin parar. Cómo, se decía en voz baja, o a veces en silencio, un solo instante hace que la vida de repente se vuelva irreversible. No un acto, no una consecuencia, sino la vida. Había escuchado que muchas cosas son irreversibles, pero ahora podía ver que nunca comprendió el verdadero significado de la palabra. Ahora sí lo comprendía, ahora su vida era irreversible, y no sabía qué sentir sobre todo aquello, sobre la irreversibilidad de su vida y sobre las imágenes intempestivas cayendo sobre su mente. ¿Serían ellas también irreversibles? Estaba seguro de que sí. No sabía qué deducir de todo eso. Pisaba el suelo con estupefacción, con sorpresa, como si hubiera acabado de nacer. Los colores del mundo le resultaban nuevos, como subidos de tono, más amarillos, más saturados que antes. Antes de subir al ómnibus interprovincial se quedó sentado un rato en Retiro, porque lo mareaba la idea de estar en la butaca del segundo piso de un bus detenido. La gente pasaba frente a él, agenciosa, apurada, con valijas y bolsos. Su tránsito también lo mareaba. Eso y la imagen del rostro entre sorprendido e interrogante. Todo estaría teñido de irreversibilidad de ese momento en adelante; mientras tomaba agua de una botella y sentía el frío que bajaba por su tráquea, se extrañaba infinitamente frente a la vida de las personas que pasaban, apuradas o distraídas, frente a la banca en la que estaba sentado. No se inmutaban ante la presencia de la irreversibilidad, no la podían percibir porque estaban concentrados en encontrar su plataforma o su ómnibus. En su mente resonó una pregunta, si el carácter de su vida, es decir, de su vida a partir de ahora, podría ser mantenido en secreto, si existiría alguna persona a la que podría contarle alguna vez sobre todo esto, o si simplemente tendría que conformarse con acumular la imagen que venía y venía sobre su mente, siempre igual a sí misma, pero de algún modo que no comprendía, mínimamente distinta cada vez, formando un limo, una geología milimétrica en su cabeza, generando capas geológicas de imágenes idénticas salvo por alguna ínfima torsión, inidentificable, pero, como todo ahora, irreversible.
Era muy temprano y hacía frío. Estaba amaneciendo. El cielo estallaba de colores. Más cerca del horizonte era rosa, y se iba azulando a medida que levantaba la vista. Quedaba alguna estrella brillando sin convicción. Apenas veía retazos de cielo detrás de los buses; el paisaje desde Retiro está mediado por la presencia hedionda de esos vehículos gigantes y de la gente que camina de un lado para otro arrastrando todo tipo de equipaje. Se sintió mareado otra vez. El andén permanecía oscuro aún. Las luces de neón en el techo estaban encendidas pero ya no iluminaban. Pudo mirar el panorama, porque un ómnibus que tenía al frente acababa de salir, dejándole libre por unos minutos el paisaje. El cielo se hacía más claro cada minuto, iluminando también el andén y arrebatándole, por tanto, el refugio que la oscuridad le había brindado. No quería tener que enfrentar el día con luz de sol. Hubiera preferido una tormenta, un cielo negro, lluvia. Se figuró que su rostro, con todas sus capas de irreversibilidad en acumulación, sería tan prístino y transparente como el cielo de ese día, por eso, mientras permanecía sentado frente al hueco que dejó el micro que partió unos minutos antes, pensaba en que le hubiera encantado un día de temporal, un cielo cubierto de nubes negras.
Por el espacio que había dejado el bus se veía el escenario contrastado de la ciudad. Tras los límites de la terminal, casillas miserables e infectas, endebles incluso a la vista, se extendían en las inmediaciones. Una idea fugaz pasó por su cabeza: refugiarse ahí, a plena vista, pero más lejos que cualquier destino al que lo llevara su transporte. La vida en una de esas casillas debía ser extraña, reducida a sus mínimas necesidades, a mecanismos básicos. Se extendían como un pequeño mar de ladrillos color naranja, con alturas variables, algunas tenían la luz encendida, un foco pelado colgando de un techo precario. Todo eso lo asqueaba, lo mareaba más. Más atrás, a lo lejos, en el horizonte, se levantaban torres gigantes de formas raras, algunas en punta, irregulares, complicadas. Brillaban, como regalándoles un poco de luz a las casillas que eran como su reverso negativo, o más bien su extensión, su otro modo de ser. Esas torres no podrían existir sin las casillas, pero estaba seguro de que las casillas existirían siempre, que sobrevivirían, a pesar de su aparente fragilidad, a todas esas torres de cincuenta o cien pisos con sus enormes letras que brillan al sol y reflejan el río que tienen al frente. Sentía un momentáneo alivio al imaginar el mundo como un día sería: desierto, abandonado, inerte. Entonces una capa de silencio cubriría todo, y nadie estaría ahí para verlo. Ocurriría sin embargo, que el mundo seguiría su curso, apacible e indiferente. Seguiría rotando alrededor del sol, en su órbita, tranquilo y como si nada hubiera pasado. Las estrellas seguirían brillando en el espacio y su luz anacrónica seguiría llegando a la tierra, reflejándose en los mares y en los ríos. No sería un desperdicio, esa también podía considerarse una forma de vida. El mundo deshabitado, poblado únicamente por microorganismos que tardan millones de años en desarrollarse, cuyas vidas no pueden medirse según los parámetros humanos; pacientes y constantes, sobre todo silenciosos, esos organismos irían cubriendo todas las obras humanas, y entonces el mundo no sería para nadie, existiría de modo autónomo y ajeno a la voluntad. Las casillas en ese escenario le resultaban mucho más reales que las enormes torres a lo lejos.
Llegó un nuevo ómnibus y ahí terminó su distracción. De golpe, la porción luminosa de mundo se oscureció y a su cabeza volvió, idéntica, la imagen. El rostro entre sorprendido y aterrorizado, con los ojos muy abiertos y las mejillas encendidas, la boca abierta en una mueca.
El paisaje pasaba veloz por su ventana. Con la cabeza apoyada contra el vidrio, no veía sino la luminosidad del mundo. Colores, el verde, el azul, algún punto negro, y la luminosidad. El ómnibus se deslizaba suavemente por la carretera, pero no parecía dejar nada atrás. Siempre, a su lado, había algo. Vacas, campo, cielo. Siempre algo. Eso lo desasosegó. El efecto de la velocidad no era tan intenso como para borrar el paisaje. Supo entonces que el espacio también le sería en adelante irreversible, tendría que habitarlo irremediablemente, ocupar una porción en él, en la quietud o en el movimiento, pero siempre lo ocuparía. Sintió un desasosiego aun mayor ante esta revelación. Su cabeza funcionaba como si no tuviera recuerdo alguno, apenas el del rostro. Se sentía recién venido y a la vez negado a cualquier posibilidad. Como si comenzar de nuevo no ofreciera, en realidad, nada. O quizá sólo algo, la obligación de ir más lejos cada vez, hacia la profundidad que el paisaje impertérrito quisiera prestarle. Iba en busca de algo neutro, de algo inmóvil, mudo y sordo, capaz de detener la acumulación en su cabeza.
Así iba, rumbo al norte, pensando en cruzar la frontera, llegar a Brasil y luego perderse para siempre, internarse en algún pueblo fluvial donde nadie lo conociera y dedicarse a cualquier cosa que le permitiera comer y dormir. Ese era, al menos, su plan. Algo, sin embargo, dentro de su cabeza, cercano al depósito en el que la imagen se precipitaba sobre sí misma, le decía que parte de la irreversibilidad que hace tan poco había adquirido su vida, le haría imposible volver a ejecutar un plan de una simplicidad tal. Que algo, siempre, así fuera apenas la tenacidad de la imagen, perturbaría sin fin cualquier proyecto, cualquier cotidianidad.
Cerraba los ojos con la esperanza de dormir. Percibía, sin embargo, en esa oscuridad incompleta, el movimiento abstracto y secuencial de los árboles, o el paso fugaz del ómnibus por debajo de algún puente. La oscuridad también se le había sustraído irreversiblemente.
Con los ojos cerrados, y con la concentración puesta sobre ese color indefinido de la parte interna de sus párpados, figuras extrañas, formadas por nódulos brillantes que revoloteaban sin orden en la oscuridad y que poco a poco se apaciguaban y se aglutinaban, empezaban a aparecer. Quizá el sosiego vendría del rechazo de lo exterior, de dejar afuera el paisaje. Recordó, un poco ingenuamente, a Edipo. Luego rechazó esa imagen –las cuencas vacías, la sangre a borbotones, la libertad tras el destierro de la visióny entonces, desde alguna lejanía, otra vez, la imagen. El rostro asfixiado, la mirada desorbitada pero fija, el desconcierto.
En Iguazú tomó un taxi hacia el parque nacional. Siempre había escuchado de las cataratas pero nunca las había conocido. Pensó que podría ser ese el último contacto con su tierra, antes de perderse definitivamente en latitudes que ni siquiera él sería capaz de ubicar en un mapa. Pensó así, en entregarse a ese último avatar turístico, entre ridículo y emblemático, antes de partir para siempre. Aunque siempre, ya lo sabía, lo escoltaría la imagen y todo el espacio y el silencio que la acompañaban.
Caminó, paciente y casi tranquilo, por los senderos del parque, con los pensamientos confusos pero expectantes, con la intuición, quizá incluso oculta para sí mismo, de que el agua que se escuchaba a lo lejos podría dispersar la imagen pertinaz en su cabeza; difuminarla hasta tornarla levemente otra, para que la fuerza con la que arreciaba contra su vigilia y contra su sueño decreciera de algún modo.
Algunas zonas de los senderos estaban desiertas. Tomó cada lancha, cruzó cada estuario, avanzó todo lo que pudo sin consultar mapas ni circuitos, como si en todo ese entramado de puentes, caminos elevados sobre el agua, senderos, escaleras y letreros tallados en madera, él esperara encontrar un espacio para el azar. Un tramo en todo ese aparataje comercial para la indefinición.
Se escucha, a lo lejos, la furia de la catarata. Sin embargo, él camina sobre aguas tranquilas, planas, de corriente pacífica y monótona, que se dirigen hacia la precipitación violenta de la caída, algunos metros más allá, en abierta ignorancia del futuro, en un presente continuo e ininterrumpido que transcurre, como un amplio continente invisible, ajeno al exterior. La vida de esas aguas extensas que bajan tranquilas entre paredes de vegetación inmóvil le resulta ejemplar. Se queda quieto, contemplando todos los colores de la tarde en el cielo y en el agua que lo refleja. Así como su vida se había tornado irreversible, piensa que una tarde como esa podría borrarlo todo: todos los colores en un solo cielo, duplicados con distorsiones ínfimas por el agua sin conciencia, son capaces, piensa, de subvertir la irreversibilidad. Observa entonces, con estupor, cada modulación del espacio, el modo en que va mutando minuto a minuto, quedando sin embargo, siempre, igual. Siendo él mismo, geografía pura, espacio innumerable, a pesar de todo.
La gente, como es de esperar, se aglutina en los balcones que dan a la catarata. El agua que unos metros atrás se movía casi imperceptiblemente, ahora se arroja furiosamente en una caída vertical y abstrusa, destruyendo las coordenadas, sumiendo todo en el caos. Es vano mirar esa caída e intentar aprehender las formas del agua cuando está cayendo a cientos de kilómetros por hora. Ante ese paisaje, lo único sensato es perder la perspectiva en la niebla húmeda que renace del fondo invisible de la catarata, blanca, informe, en constante recomienzo.
Perdido en la observación del caos que se levanta del fondo, donde imagina piedras centenarias resistiendo el embiste de toda esa cantidad de materia, pacientes y mudas, impertérritas por siglos y siglos, piensa sin querer en el espacio y sus estrellas, sus planetas, sus soles y el misterio de su infinitud. Piensa, complacido, en los billones de años que el universo lleva existiendo sin que las sucesivas extinciones, estallidos cósmicos y glaciaciones planetarias hayan cambiado el rumbo de nada significativo. Siempre se había preguntado cómo suena el espacio sideral. Si es posible decir que la muerte de las estrellas, o las explosiones que producen nuevas formaciones cósmicas, el rumbo mismo de los planetas, suenan de un modo determinado, y qué sonido es ese. Lo había inquietado desde temprana edad la idea de una extensión sin fin, ajena a las voluntades, persistiendo en explosiones y nacimientos estelares, creando y destruyendo planetas y constelaciones, una extensión oscura poblada de entes brillantes que nacen y mueren, que emiten calor y viajan por el espacio sin deseos ni proyectos, pero vivos de todos modos. Había escuchado decir, además, que el universo se expande; más que intentar comprender hacia dónde pueda expandirse un espacio que es infinito, lo seducía la idea de que toda extensión puede siempre trasponer sus límites, moverse y alejarse, ajena a la necesidad y al cálculo.
El universo expandiéndose sin fin, proliferando el silencio de su carrera sin meta ni sentido, propagando su oscuridad sobre el territorio incognoscible e impensable del afuera más remoto, poblando de partículas fulgurantes un desierto por siempre deshabitado. Qué es el sonido, qué es la luz, se pregunta, en un lugar así.
Así se pierde, pocos minutos después, sin reparar en los gritos ni recordar más la imagen, en el pequeño caos que el universo, impersonal y ajeno, parece haberle regalado al mostrarle la caída de las aguas, ese espacio hospitalario y nebuloso que parece cifrar todos los modos del recomienzo.
Daniela Alcívar Bellolio was born in Guayaquil in 1982. She is a writer, researcher, literary critic, university professor, and editor. She holds a doctorate in literature from the University of Buenos Aires, and has been the recipient of grants from CONICET and the Fondo Nacional de las Artes in Argentina. She is a member of the editorial committee of the journal Sycorax and the managing editor at Editorial Turbina in Quito. She is the author of the essay collections Pararrayos. Paisajes, lecturas, memorias and El silencio de las imágenes, the short story collection Para esta mañana diáfana, and the novels Lo que fue el future and Siberia, which won the Joaquín Gallegos prize. She lived in Buenos Aires from 2005 to 2017 and is currently the director of the Centro Cultural Benjamín Carrión in Quito.
Jack Rockwell is a literary translator, writer, and editor. He is the co-translator of Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized. Other work has appeared in The Paris Review, North American Review, The Chicago Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, and is the web editor at Circumference.
