Dos Palabras (‘Two Words’) by Isabel Allende – English Translation - Page Two

 

Belisa Crepusculario saved her own live and also discovered by accident writing. On arriving to a small village near the coast, the wind blew a sheet of newspaper to her feet. She took that fragile yellow paper and spent a long time observing it without knowing its use, until her curiosity overcame her shyness. She approached a man who was washing a horse in the same puddle which she had used to quench her thirst. ‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘The sports page of the newspaper,’ the man replied without showing shock over her ignorance. His response left the girl astonished, but she didn’t want to seem rude and stopped herself from asking about the meaning of the little fly legs drawn all over the paper.

‘They are words, child. Here it says that Fulgencio Barba knocked out Nero Tiznao in the third round.’

From this day Belisa Crepusculario understood that words walk free without an owner and that anyone with a little skill could take control of them in order to do business. She considered her situation and concluded that unless she prostituted herself or became employed in the kitchens of the wealthy, there were few jobs open to her. Selling words seemed like a good alternative. From this moment forward, she practised this profession and no other job interested her. At the beginning she offered her goods without knowing that words could also be written outside of newspapers. When she discovered this, she thought of the infinite possibilities of her business. With her savings she paid twenty pesos for a priest to teach her how to read and write and with the three which were left over she brought a dictionary. She revised it from A to Z and later threw it in the sea, because it was not her intention to scam her clients with packaged words. Several years later, on an August morning, Belisa Crepusculario could be found in the centre of a square, seated under her tent selling law arguments to an old man who had been requesting his pension for 17 years.

It was a market day and there was a lot of noise surrounding her. Fast gallops and shouts were heard, she raised her eyes from the piece of writing and at first saw a cloud of dust and then a group of cavalrymen which had stormed into the place. They were the men belonging to the Colonel, who was under the authority of Mulato, a giant known throughout the area for the speed of his knife and his loyalty towards his boss. Both, the Colonel and Mulato, had spent their lives occupied with the Civil War and their names were irretrievably linked to havoc and disaster. The warriors entered the village like a stampeding herd, enveloped in noise, covered in sweat and leaving at their step fear of a hurricane. They left the chickens flying, shooting to get rid of the dogs, ran around women with their children and didn’t leave another living soul in the market apart from Belisa Crepusculario, who had never seen Mulato and for the same reason was surprised that they would run to her.

By Katie-may Bridges

Reference Text:

https://www.bbns.org/uploaded/PDFs/Upper_School/Summer_Reading_2019/AP_Spanish-_Isabel_Allende.pdf?1560446283370