When she opened the refrigerator and the white pearl lit up the rectangle-the green floor, the marble worktop, the faucet, and all the other things that stood silently like grazing cattle seen in the distance-she saw a dark form on one of the blue wall tiles. It purred its confusion, demanding breakfast from between her legs, and she almost tripped over it. The cat appeared behind her and arched its back as if its stomach were about to shoot off an arrow toward the center of the earth. Her senses were divorced from her body and she found it hard to make her way. She thought it must be about three, maybe four in the morning because she was emerging from a dense fog of disconnection. She didn’t have her lenses in and everything was a confused blur, shadows within shadows. Before going back to bed, she went to the kitchen for water. But she wasn’t yet used to being alone in that big house and was easily frightened. One night she was woken by a noise coming from one of the living room windows. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo (2020), by the Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and runner-up for the UK Society of Authors TA First Translation Prize. She is the author of two previous novels: The Toss of a Lemon, shortlisted for the Pen Center USA Fiction Prize, and The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, a finalist for Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her most recent book is Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime. Padma Viswanathan is a writer, playwright, translator, and journalist. She won the São Paulo de Literatura Prize for best novel of the year in 2018 for her novel Assim na terra como embaixo da terra and in 2019 for Enterre seus mortos. Her novel A guerra dos bastardos (2007) won praise in Germany as among the best foreign detective fiction. It’s time to go out for some sun, look at the sky, and wait for the day to end.Īna Paula Maia (Brazil, 1977) is an author and scriptwriter and has published several novels, including O habitante das falhas subterrâneas (2003), De gados e homens (2013), and the trilogy A saga dos brudos, comprising Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos (2009), O trabalho sujo dos outros (2009) and Carvão animal (2011). Locked up, Selene carries the whole world in her hands, tracing an imaginary line that crosses borders and takes her everywhere. Her pointer finger travels along the delicate, meandering lines dividing countries and continents. She even gets lunch leftovers when she cleans the kitchen.Īs she peruses the world map, she wonders what exists beyond the small, miserable places she’s seen. Still, she has the best bed in the cell, complete with a daily strand of sun. She knows what’s good and what’s bad inside her. Could be karma or genetics-doesn’t matter. Selene knows that one of her boys is already doomed, just like her, to be no good. The family thinks that raising the boys far away from their mother means they won’t be influenced. ![]() She doesn’t tell them apart by how they look, but by what they’re like. She hasn’t heard anything about them since she was arrested. She’s rough: in her soul, in how she talks, in how she walks, in how she eats. If it weren’t for the dark purple lipstick on her lips and the big silver earrings, you’d say she didn’t care about her looks at all. ![]() Walking is hard, just as breathing takes effort when she gets bronchitis. ![]() The extra pounds concentrated in her belly and flanks leave her arms dangling on her body. Because this is how Selene does everything in life. She cleans the kitchen every day after lunch, scrubbing the walls and floor hard. At times, she can be seen crying discreetly. Since her arrest, her husband, mother, siblings, none of them has come to see her. Using an old world map that some prior inmate left behind in the cell, she started learning by heart the names of countries and capitals. She’s collected cigarette butts from the courtyard and halls. Selene has already counted how many times her heart beats in an hour. The torture of being jailed is compounded by the torture of emptiness, the total absence of anything to do. Over forty minutes, it shifts, millimeter by imperceptible millimeter, from Selene’s face to the wall before vanishing.Įverything happens slowly when you’re behind bars. Every day, she waits for this sunbeam, which, on blue-sky days, arrives punctually through a barred window measuring just thirty by thirty centimeters, into the cell shared with three other women. It’s in the morning that the sun comes around the massive guava tree, above the electric fence, and, as a narrow beam of light, touches Selene’s face as she lies in bed with the tips of her toes against the top bunk.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |