The Regal Lemon Tree - Tapa blanda

Saer, Juan José

 
9781948830270: The Regal Lemon Tree
Tapa blanda
ISBN 10: 1948830272 ISBN 13: 9781948830270
Editorial: Open Letter, 2020

Sinopsis

One of the late Juan Jose Saer''s most beloved novels, The Regal Lemon Tree shows a master stylist at his best. Set during the day and night of New Year''s Eve - building up a barbecue that takes on ritual significance - the novel focuses on a couple in the north of Argentina who lost their only son six years prior. Wenceslao spends the day with his extended family and his memories while his wife - truly paralysed by grief - refuses to leave their island, which is home to an almost magical lemon tree that blossoms at all times of the year.

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Acerca del autor

Juan José Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event. Six of his novels are available from Open Letter Books.

Sergio Waisman has translated sever books of Latin American literature, including The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia, for which he received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award in 2000. His first novel, Leaving, was published in the U.S. in 2004 and in 2010 as Irse in Argentina. His latest translations are Target in the Night by Piglia, The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, and An Anthology of Spanish-American Modernismo.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

DAWN BREAKS

AND HIS EYES ARE ALREADY OPEN

He doesn’t seem to hear the barking of the dogs, or the long, piercing crowing of the roosters, or the singing of the birds gathered on the Chinaberry tree out front, sounding endless and rich; nor does he seem to hear the dogs, El Negro and El Chiquito, pacing restlessly back and forth out in the yard, wagging their tails, excited by dawn, responding to the distant and intermittent, sharp and isolated barks of other dogs on the other side of the river. The crowing of the roosters comes from multiple directions. His eyes open, lying on his back, his hands folded loosely across his gut, Wenceslao doesn’t hear anything but the dark turmoil of the dream retreating from his mind like a black cloud gliding across the sky, revealing the bright circle of the moon. He doesn’t hear anything because after thirty years of hearing the sounds of the roosters and the dogs and the birds and the horses at the break of dawn, he is unable to hear now, in the present, anything but silence.

As he bends his right leg and rests the bottom of his foot on the bed, the sheet rises and drags the edge down, uncovering a bit of his shirtless chest and of her shoulder. Lying face down next to him, also awake, but with her eyes closed. She moans, almost inaudibly. As soon as he opens his eyes, Wenceslao knows she is awake—apparently, for those thirty years, she has always awoken a fraction of a second before him—although she does not say anything, or move, or make any sound at all. She sighs later, when he sits up and gets out of bed. But while he is lying down, moving an arm or a leg, starting to wake up, she either pretends to be asleep, or wants to believe she is still asleep. Perhaps she believes that she is in fact still asleep, and that she has not woken up yet, and that she will not wake up until he gets out of bed.

The springs of the old iron and bronze bed creak, and the iron slots where the springs connect to the backrest squeak when he bends his leg. At this point, only the largest objects are visible in the small house: the dresser and its oval mirror, tall and frail, and the large chest next to the bed, against the adobe wall, just below the small, wooden window full of vertical cracks through which the first gray light of dawn enters the room. The rest fades into a gray semi-darkness, denser and darker toward the corners and above, in the ridge of the pitched, straw roof. It is there, in that darkness, where Wenceslao looks every morning at daybreak when he opens his eyes: the darkness from outside confirming that the darkness inside has retreated, and that he is in fact awake.

Wenceslao lifts the sheet and gets out of bed. His loose-fitting, white underwear, which comes down to his knees, is held up by his slightly distended gut, just below his navel. Wenceslao dresses quickly. Meanwhile, still in bed, she sighs, snorts softly, and moves, pretending not to have just woken up, but to have been about to do so, as if she did not also know that for thirty years she has been waking up every morning at the break of dawn, a fraction of a second before him. The light sneaking through the vertical cracks in the small window is no longer gray, but has brightened into glinting sunlight. Wenceslao puts on his shirt—a dull, faded shirt that has lost all color—and then his pants: he lifts his left leg first, and then the right, in a playful balancing act, which for a moment forces him to jump forward on one leg, when the trouser sleeve gets stuck for a second on the heel of his other foot. He walks into his sandals, and keeps walking until he is on the other side of the simple, cretonne curtain that separates the bedroom from the adjoining room—constituting, along with the bedroom, the entirety of the small house. They refer to this part of the house as the “dining room,” although they never eat there, but out in the yard if it is hot, or in the little hut built next to the house, which they call “the kitchen.” The two rooms inside are divided by a thin, adobe partition, which does not reach all the way up to the straw roof, but separates three quarters of the space. There is nothing beyond the edge of the partition except for the curtain, which sways behind Wenceslao as he crosses into the dining room in his sandals. Reddish, glinting sunlight sneaks through the vertical and right-angled crevices in the cracks of the wooden door that leads out to the yard, as uneven as those in the small window in the bedroom. In the dining room there is a vast rectangular table and four wooden chairs, yellow with wicker seats. Wenceslao coughs, opens the door by lifting the wooden latch, and goes out to the yard, shutting the door behind him. As if emerging from the great reddish splash of the eastern horizon, El Negro and El Chiquito circle around Wenceslao, wagging their tails, without barking. El Negro is so tall that Wenceslao does not need to lean down to pat his back: in addition to his height, also impressive is his black, smooth, glossy fur, and his black, bulging eyes, beaming as his pink tongue hangs long and jittery to one side of his open snout, reavealing his thick, pink gums and white teeth. Wenceslao repeats “Good morning” two or three times—he says “goodish morningish,” as if he were talking to a child, using a tone that corresponds to inferior minds, demonstrating that inferior minds have the superiority required to reduce superior minds to their level—and moves forward. El Chiquito cuts him off repeatedly, wagging his tail, trying to jump and lick his face. “Okay, okay, get out of here,” Wenceslao says, feigning an angry voice, mixed with a short laugh. Finally, he crouches down in the middle of the front yard and pets El Chiquito’s back while the dog stands still, his legs wide and his head raised, looking straight at him. Wenceslao pets El Chiquito’s white fur, speckled with black patches, some of which are small, while others are larger, including the one that cover the dog’s head and blends into its black snout. It looks as if someone had thrown a bucketful of tar on the dog, a bucketful which for the most part only managed to splash parts of it. El Negro has put his front paws on one of Wenceslao’s thighs, and is also looking at him. Wenceslao stays still for a moment, sitting back on his heels, as if held there by the black eyes of one dog and the golden eyes of the other, one hand resting motionless on El Chiquito’s spotted fur, the other on El Negro’s head. He is facing the sun, the top semicircle of which has risen entirely above the horizon, staining the sky around it red. There is no wind. In the middle of the front yard, the Chinaberry tree is full of jumping, singing birds. It casts no shade as of yet, but at its very top a few leaves are haloed by a golden radiance, as if the light sprouted from there instead of the sun. One unexpected ray of light, which also looks as if it were sprouting from the tree itself instead of from the sun, glimmers in the middle of the foliage. Soon the tree will cast a large stretch of shade, suddenly shading the table resting against its trunk. The shade will decrease gradually until noon, disappear for a moment, and reappear at once on the opposite side of the table, stretching slowly and gradually away until the sun fades, leaving nothing but shade behind. For Wenceslao and for her, it is, in effect, like this: “the table” is where they eat lunch and dinner from October to March, unless it is raining or the wind is blowing from the North. At those times they eat at “the small table,” beside the house, in the room they call the kitchen. They call the wooden table surrounded by the yellow chairs “the other table.” They have never eaten there, except when he died, and they did so because it was sprinkling, and a lot of people stayed to eat, and they would not all have fit in the kitchen or around the “small table.”

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Editorial
Open Letter
Año de publicación
2020
Idioma
Inglés
ISBN 10 
1948830272
ISBN 13 
9781948830270
Encuadernación
Tapa blanda
Número de páginas
240
Contacto del fabricante
no disponible
Persona responsable
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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