Nest in the Bones Read online

  Copyright © Luz Di Benedetto, 2011

  Copyright © Adriana Hidalgo editora S.A., 2013

  English translation copyright © Martina Broner, 2017

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Cuentos completos by Antonio Di Benedetto first published by Adriana Hidalgo editora S.A., 2006

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street, #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Title: Nest in the bones : stories / by Antonio Di Benedetto; translated from the Spanish by Martina Broner and Adrian West.

  LCCN 2017001393 | ISBN 9780914671725 (paperback)

  LCC PQ7797.B4343 A2 2017 | DDC 863/ .64–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017001393

  Ebook ISBN 9780914671732

  Cover art: Xul Solar

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Archipelago Books gratefully acknowledges the generous support from the Lannan Foundation, the SUR program, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

  Archipelago Books would also like to thank Adrian West for his generous involvement with the book.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  from Animal World (1953) Nest in the Bones

  Reduced

  We Fly

  Purity Saved

  from Clear Stories (1957) Huddled

  No

  from Decline and Angel (1958) Abandonment and Passivity

  from The Affection of Dimwits (1961) The Horse in the Salt Flats

  The Affection of Dimwits

  from The Absurd Ones (1978) Aballay

  Fish

  Obstinate Observer

  Italo in Italy

  from Stories from Exile (1983) Tropics

  The Impossibility of Sleep

  Lazarillo of Hermosilla

  Orthopterans

  Uncollected Stories Hands in the Night

  Premature Wait

  Paternal Epistle to Fabia

  Very Early Morning in the Cemetery

  from Animal World (1953)

  Nest in the Bones

  I’m not the monkey. My ideas are different, even if we did end up in the same position, at least at first.

  My father brought him here, same as the palm tree. He’s got too much land, too much money. He planted that little palm tree, and he liked it too, as long as it stayed young and dainty. But when it started growing and growing, he got tired of it, because it was ungainly and bristly, it wasn’t adapting, he says. He quit paying it attention, I suppose because he’s not the type to look up into the sky, at least not over there, where the palm tree stood. Instead he looks toward the mouth of the river, where storms gather, since for better or for worse, the harvest depends on the rains.

  He didn’t realize the monkey would never adapt, not just on account of the climate, but also because there was no way it would take to the family; and that’s what he wanted, for it to be like a member of the family. He wasn’t all wrong, maybe, since the monkey did take advantage of odd moments of consideration – when my father would show a bit of insight – to try and earn the place he’d been promised. But in the end, his place was the palm tree. My father wasn’t much for festivity, nourishment, or petting: in general, he barely fed the thing, and didn’t take much care to train it right. The monkey ran off, taking refuge in the palm tree, like a son returning to his mother. He only came down to scrounge or eat whatever food some kindly soul laid out at the foot of his dwelling. He lived alone, alone the way the withered treetop looked up there in the heights. He turned reclusive, meditative, no good for anything save the procurement of sustenance. Maybe because of his ill humor – because the greenhouse he’d envisioned never wound up getting built – my father cleared all the vegetation from the zone where the palm tree stretched slowly upward, like a heartsick sigh. The tree fell, the monkey fell, and the monkey took cover among the crates and trunks until, riled up by the blood from a decapitated chicken walking around in its death throes, the dogs leapt at him, and no one stopped them.

  I’m not the monkey, but in my childhood days, my father also ordered me kept away from the table for one minor infraction or another. I don’t have a palm tree, but I made one out of my house; or not my house exactly, but the rooms, the parcels of land, a walk, a book, a friend. My palm tree had many branches, and maybe that’s why I came to think I wasn’t like the monkey. Maybe it all depended, like with the monkey and the palm tree, on my birthplace and the inadequate destiny that followed. I don’t know. Maybe I should have been born in another country, or maybe that’s not it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been born in this era. I don’t mean to say I ought to have been born into the Middle Ages or in the same year as Dostoyevsky. No. Maybe I should have been born in the twentieth or twenty-first century. Not because I think life will be easier then, though it’s possible that it will be. But since I can’t be born a century from now, I’ve tried to make it easier, as much as possible, by finding some use for myself.

  When I figured out the monkey had been useless, I was able to get a grasp of what I considered a useful destiny, if only for the sake of others. His hollow head gave me ideas about what I could do with my own. I wanted – and it was easy to do so – to turn it into a bird’s nest. Willing and exultant, my head filled to bursting with birds, for my sake and for theirs as well. I reveled in it, in the happiness of that sturdy, secure, and sheltering nest I was able to give them, and I reveled in other ways too. Like that time at my mother’s tea benefit, when I stepped into the half-light, interrupting what was not quite revelry, my scheme both calculated and anxious, and she asked me, defiant and dismayed, how I could do such a thing, whistling in the middle of a gathering of ladies. And I said, my lips pried from my mouth by a smile of suffering at her ignorance, that it wasn’t I who was whistling, and I provoked in her the innocent astonishment of a person witnessing the transit of a musical, tangible, and perishing god.

  It wasn’t always like that; a few years, maybe only a few months. With the change, I’ve come to doubt as to whether making a bird happy will make all the families in the coming centuries happy, too. If we all put our heads to the service of general happiness, maybe it could work. But our heads, not just our feelings.

  I did it with mine, and it held blissful sparrows, canaries, and partridges. Now the vultures have nested in it, too. But I can’t do it anymore. They’re unaccountably voracious and have sharpened their beaks to devour the last bit of my brain. They go on pecking past the bare bone, I wouldn’t say with rage, but as if at the behest of an obligation. And even if their pecks were affectionate and playful, they could never be tender. They hurt dreadfully, they hurt down to the bone, and make of my pain and torture a constant flow of grief, rent and hysterical. I can’t do anything about them, nor can anyone, because no one can see them, just as nobody saw the birds that chirped before. And here I am, my nest bursting with opportunistic, insidious, and ever-present vultures, and with every peck of every one of their thousand beaks, they crunch every bone of every part of my entire skeleton. Here I am, hidden among the trunks, waiting for one of those people who formerly fed the monkey to take pity on this captive and free the hounds.

  But please, may no one who hears my story let the horror overwhelm them; may they ri
se to the occasion and not give in, if my words should embolden them to the good purpose of populating their head with birds.

  Reduced

  From the moment he showed up in my dreams he was already, in a certain way, my dog. Since I don’t have a dog in the daytime, but I do have numerous adversities, it’s a good thing to recover with a nocturnal puppy, the kind that doesn’t even make you leave the bed. All you have to do is fall asleep with the longing, which it would be pointless to explain, for those hours of diversion – frivolous and childish, I admit – and then he appears, ready to play or even, with his superior canine comprehension, just to tamely keep me company.

  If you asked me, I wouldn’t know how to tell you what he’s like. But in dreams I could pick him out unfailingly from a pack of identical siblings. Even if, from the beginning, he was evidently and indisputably a dog, when I think of him, something gives me the sense that he’s different, because his arrival was slow, as though he only gradually came into being. That’s why his name, Reduced, feels contradictory to me, though it does make sense with relation to his physical dimensions. It’s not that he’s shrunk, even less that he is dwindling as we speak. But I also wouldn’t say – and this too is important – that he is growing, even a bit, no matter how much I watch him, despite how we say, if with slight exaggeration, that young dogs evolve almost by the day. And so he has a touch of the immutable that doesn’t exactly put me at ease. If Reduced, my Reduced, this little pup, so blissful, so good, such a dear friend, in other words, is unchanging, it is because he has the fixity of dreams, of dreams and nothing but. Hence my Reduced is like a stubborn nightmare that always recurs, ever the same, ever torturous; and though he cannot in the least be considered a nightmare, and if he were, he would be a nice one, still, he makes my heart quiver the way nightmares do, not when he vanishes, but during the day, in light of the not-at-all remote probability that at night he will not return.

  It is for this reason, admitting he is a dream, that I need him to move into my waking life. If he is one, then I will have a dream in this miserable life of mine, sunless even as the sun shines over it. If he is one, I won’t have to fear that one of these nights he will disappear forever, for even if he’s done nothing to justify this conclusion, still, he might grow fickle and pass over, with his shadow-steps, into the dreams of one of my neighbors. If he lives, on the earth, it is indisputable that he could die. But I will think of his death the way I think of my own: as something that doesn’t come, even if you long for it, so long as you don’t go looking for it.

  I’ve talked this over with Reduced. Outright, I confessed my misgivings, which he might have had some sense of before, because he’s very perceptive, very alert. I asked him to give up the night and to come. He asked me not to demand an answer until last night. His reply didn’t correspond precisely to my request. He said he liked being my dog, and we could spend more time together; but he proposed something in turn that obliges me to delay my response until I have thought it over well.

  I should answer him tonight. There aren’t many hours left, and I have to come to a resolution, hard as it is to decide on Reduced’s request. Because Reduced has asked for me to accompany him, to accompany him in dreams.

  We Fly

  As if standing before a tranquil, inoffensive mystery, which it may well be, and yearning, unlike me, to talk, she tells me about her cat.

  He is one. Of course he is, but…To start with, he’s an orphan, taken in out of compassion, no one knows his ancestry. He’s a cat, and he likes water. What he likes about ditches isn’t the muck, but the cloudy current. He huffs as he hurls himself in, he lands hard, splashes; he sinks in his maw and makes like he’s drinking, but he isn’t drinking, it is a pure act of gluttony. You could think he was a dog and not a cat. Then there’s the matter of his indifference to other cats. But won’t look at dogs, either, except from a distance, and not even a street fight will rile him up. When he opens his mouth, his voice is hoarse and horribly off-key, so you can’t tell whether he’s mewing or barking.

  I pretend I’m surprised. But I don’t open my mouth, because if I asked a question or made a comment, she’d ask me why I think that and I’d have to explain and then I’d get trapped in a conversation. Anyway, she’s not talking to me any longer: she’s talking to herself. She repeats what she already knows, and she tries to learn more from it.

  He’s a cat and he likes water. That’s not enough to conclude that he’s a dog. The question’s not even whether he’s a cat or a dog, because neither of the two fly, and this little creature flies, he started flying a few days back.

  I expect her to ask me if I think it’s some kind of witchcraft. But no; to all appearances, she doesn’t believe in witchcraft. I don’t, either, though it did cross my mind. Or, rather, I thought it would cross her mind. But no.

  “Aren’t you amazed?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m amazed. Of course. I’m amazed.”

  I could be amazed, of course. But I’m not. I could be amazed because a cat-dog is flying. But I don’t just talk. I think. I think she imagines I must be amazed because what she believed was a cat might be a dog or what might be a cat or dog could be a bird or some other flying animal. I should be amazed because the thing isn’t what it’s thought to be. But I can’t be. Am I amazed that you aren’t what your husband thinks you are? Am I amazed that I’m not what my wife thinks I am? Your little animal is a cynic, that’s all. A seasoned cynic.

  Purity Saved

  Anyway, I should have stopped reading long ago. I should control myself, to keep from wasting too much light; I should control myself and sleep the right number of hours and not be a despicable sleepyhead when I go to work tomorrow.

  The feverish cats, beings whose love is bellicose and essentially nocturnal, have taken the book from my hand. Beneath the moon, I believe, love can be more idyllic and more beastly. Maybe, in a relationship, it is the candor of the sun that nurtures those disclosures that lead to tedium and disenchantment.

  My own little cat, my Fuci, must dwell among those cats; whether idyllic or beastly I do not know, but certainly unrecognizable. Unrecognizable for me as well, though I watch over his development and even see him in my dreams, when I dream that he is a leopard. I see him as a leopard, like an ordinary father whose son has surpassed his aspirations and taken on the proportions of a giant. A normal father, unable to stifle an inner voice that calls him, simply, son.

  Thus I call my Fuci-leopard Fuci, nothing more. Fuci, I say to him, as a greeting and show of affection, when I visit him in the field in the park where he reenacts an old custom of his from his days as a cat. Back then, curled up and drowsing, he would sidle up next to any saucepan that smelled good. Now that he’s a leopard, he drowses in the field where three hens are pecking, waiting, I suppose, for their death, so he can eat them without lapsing into flagrant criminality. While he waits, needs have arisen which, though they don’t make him forget his longing, relegate it to the condition of a possibly ruined hope, and have imposed another life on him and another situation. His present state is that of a head of household. He lives, with his cubs and his chosen one – who puts me in mind of a hyena, and may even be one – in an abandoned oven, where the field’s verdure goes dead, unable to make inroads into the salt earth. My Fuci-leopard lets no one approach him, save for me, though the presence of his wife, who doesn’t care for me at all, disrupts our communication a bit. At those times, I limit myself to standing at a distance from the oven and looking, just looking; and while I look, I utter the name Fuci, as in a one-sided conversation, for all that intimate and caring. Because now I see in Fuci’s visage, sad and tenuously severe, the burden of obligations, and I think, no matter how much a leopard he is, deep down he’s just a cat, and they can’t weigh a cat down with so much responsibility. I know this well, from my personal experience, as a man.

  If he returns now, from the roofs and his allotment of love, he will find in me, beyond the customary protectiveness shown by man to
cat, the solidarity of those whose problems have gotten the best of them.

  It must be him, and tonight he must be a leopard, judging by his strength and ungainliness as he opens my door.

  No.

  It’s not him. It’s a man, a man whose presence is perplexing. I have a second to see he doesn’t need a knife or gun to kill me, and neither is in view; and a second to see that, if he weren’t there, the sky could be beautiful, revealed through the open door.

  Fortunately, I’m a boy and still have many years left.

  But how will I free my Fuci from that lawbreaker?

  from Clear Stories (1957)

  Huddled

  In the house, now bereft of the mother, the boy moves softly from room to room. He looks through them slowly, as if discovering their contents or the height of the walls anew.

  His aunt doesn’t interest him for those few hours she stays there, taking care of the kitchen and the washing. Silence reigns between them like oblivion.

  He only trusts his father, he takes refuge in him, during his midday break from work and at night, which he always hopes will be long.

  Unusually, his father stays home one weekday afternoon. The boy is happy. But some men come, and they take the furnishings from the dining room and leave them on the curb. His father is giving them orders. The boy goes to the kitchen, and the father observes him, without speaking, from what may be a natural diffidence, accentuated by events. Then the men walk into the kitchen, saying “Now it’s time for the kitchen,” because they need to take away the cupboard and the table. The boy can tell, and he slips off to the lonely courtyard, where there’s nothing but a few crates of rubbish, and he hides behind the crates. His father watches him, comparing him glumly to a frightened little mouse.