Dos Palabras (‘Two Words’) by Isabel Allende – English Translation - Page One
She had the name Belisa Crepusculario, but not by baptismal
certificate and certainly not by her mother, but because she herself looked up
names until she found one and used it for herself. Her job was to sell words.
She travelled the country, from the highest and coldest of regions to the hottest
of shores, setting herself up in fairs and in markets, where she constructed
four poles with a linen tent, which would shelter her from the sun and the rain
so she could tend to her clients. She didn’t need to announce her market stall,
because so many would walk past here and there, everyone knew her. There were those who would wait an entire year
for her, and when she arrived at the small village with a bundle under her arm
they would queue in front of her stall. Her prices were fair. For five centavos [1] she recounted poems off by heart, for seven she improved the quality of dreams,
for nine she wrote love letters, for twelve she thought up insults for irreconcilable
enemies.
She would also sell tales, but these weren’t tales about
fantasy, but lengthy and real stories which she would recite constantly without
missing any details. Like that the stories would travel from one village to
another. People paid her to add one or two lines: a boy was born, so-and-so
died, our children have married, the harvest burned. In every place she was
joined by a small group who gathered around to hear her when she spoke and like
this, the residents found out about the lives of others, of distant relatives,
of details about the Civil War. And to those who would give her fifty centavos,
she would gift a secret word to scare away their melancholy. It was not the
same for everyone, of course, because this would have been a collective trick.
Everyone received their own word with the promise that no-one else knew it even
after the universe ended.
Belisa Crepusculario was born in a family so miserable that
the children didn’t even have names. She came into the world and grew up in the
most unfavourable region, where for some years the clouds created an avalanche
of water, and in other years not even a drop would fall from the sky, the sun
grew to take up the entire horizon and the world turned into a desert. Until her
twelfth birthday she didn’t have another worry nor capability apart from
surviving the hunger and century-long fatigue. During a never-ending drought she
had to bury her four younger brothers and when she realised that her time had
arrived, she decided to begin walking across the plains towards the sea, to see
if she could cheat death during the journey. The earth was eroding, split by deep
cracks, sown with stones, fossils of trees, and thorny bushes, skeletons of
animals bleached by the heat.
Every so often, she came across families who, like herself,
were going south following the mirage of the water. Some had begun the journey carrying
their belongings on their shoulder or in wheelbarrows, but they could hardly move
their own body and to properly walk they had to abandon their things. They crawled
on with difficulty, with their skin becoming that of a lizard and their eyes
burnt by the reflection of the light. Belisa greeted them with a gesture on
passing, but they didn’t stop, because they couldn’t use up their energy doing
acts of compassion. Many fell during the walk, but she was so stubborn that she
continued across the hellhole and finally reached the first water springs, fine
trickles of water, practically invisible, which fed undernourished plants, and
which further up became streams and swamps.
[1] A small monetary unit used in many Latin American countries.
https://www.bbns.org/uploaded/PDFs/Upper_School/Summer_Reading_2019/AP_Spanish-_Isabel_Allende.pdf?1560446283370
Comments
Post a Comment