Trafalgar (25 page)
“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.)
“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.
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.
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
Philip K. Dick Award finalist · Story Prize Notable Book
“Hugo-winner McHugh (
Mothers & Other Monsters
) puts a human face on global disaster in nine fierce, wry, stark, beautiful stories.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)