Boulder E-Book

Eva Baltasar

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 145

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can't bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn't know how to say no – and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien. With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love. Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her pre-eminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world – and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.

Leseprobe

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And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Originally published as Boulder by Club Editor in 2020 First edition in English, 2022, And Other Stories

Copyright © Eva Baltasar and Club Editor, 2020 All rights reserved by and controlled through Club Editor This edition c/o SalmaiaLit, Literary Agency Translation copyright © Julia Sanches, 2022

All rights reserved.

The rights of Eva Baltasar to be identified as the author of this work and Julia Sanches to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505387 eBook ISBN: 9781913505394

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Arabella Bosworth; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Anna Morrison.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

Love is a solitary thing.

Carson McCullersThe Ballad of the Sad Café

Contents

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Quellón. Chiloé. A night years ago. Sometime after ten. No sky, no vegetation, no ocean. Only the wind, the hand that grabs at everything. There must be a dozen of us. A dozen souls. In a place like this, at a time like now, you can call a person a soul. The wharf is small and sloped. The island surrenders to the water in concrete blocks with a number of cleats bolted to them in a row. They look like the deformed heads of the colossal nails that pin the dock to the seabed. That’s all. I’m amazed at the islanders’ stillness. They sit scattered under the rain beside large objects the size of trunks. Swaddled in windproof plastic, they eat in silence with thermoses locked between their thighs. They wait. The rain pounds down as though cursing at them, runs along their hunched backs and forms rivulets that flow into the sea, the enormous mouth that never tires of swallowing, receiving. The cold feels peculiar. It’s possible I’ve drunk some of it myself, since I can feel it thrashing and bucking under my skin, and also deeper inside, in the arches between each organ. Impenetrable islanders. I’ve been here for three months, working as a cook at a couple of summer camps for teenagers. In the evenings I would cycle to town and drink aguardiente at the hostel bar. There were barely any women. It was a workers’ ritual. Stained teeth bared in greeting. The jet-black eyes of every family tree that’s managed to grow on this salty rock speak to me from their tables. They speak to me for all of the dead.

I’m not a chef, I’m just a mess-hall cook, capable and self-taught. The thing I most enjoy about my job is handling food while it’s still whole, when some part of it still speaks of its place in the world, its point of origin, the zone of exclusion that all creatures need in order to thrive. Water, earth, lungs. The perfect conditions for silence. Food comes to us wrapped in skin, and to prepare it you need a knife. If I’ve got one skill in the kitchen, it’s carving things up. The rest is hardly an art. Seasoning, tossing things together, applying heat … Your hands end up doing it all on their own. I’ve worked at schools, nursing homes, in a prison. Each job only lasts a few weeks, they slip away from me, spots of grease that I gradually scrub off. The last boss I had before coming to Chiloé tried to give me an explanation: the problem isn’t the food, it’s you. Kitchens require team effort. I’d have to find a really small one if I wanted to work on my own and still make a living.

The ship arrives at midnight. It barrels toward us at an alarming speed. Or at least that’s how it looks, because of the light glaring in the downpour, making us blink. There’s movement behind us too; someone’s pulled up in a jeep and left the engine running. He calls us. The islanders rise. They look like enormous turtles hatched from a large egg. They plod through the rain, and as they pass me I feel like an insignificant foreigner, disease-white and sopping wet under my dark blue rain jacket. You’d need two of me to make one body as tough as theirs. But I was like them once, despite everything. I’d dug into the island with my nails and learned that the pulp of your fingers can harden, that the heart governs the body and shapes it according to its highest mandate: the will. We huddle around the driver’s door. I use my hood as a visor, rub my eyes, and try to make sense of what’s happening. Hands exchange coins, bills. From the car radio comes the sound of string music, as though in honor of the storm. I buy a ticket with pesos from my belt bag. The rest of my three months’ salary is wrapped in plastic, tucked between my undershirt and my skin.

It’s as if the sea itself has held out the gangway, as if the ocean has come to collect us. My backpack has me walking at an angle. I’ve got ropes in each fist and I let them lead the way. The yelling keeps us moving. As I board the ship I think it’s not actually that big, and then—silence. Human sounds are virtually imperceptible, here, beyond the reach of the elements. We walk sideways, with cautious steps, down a metal staircase. Behind a door is an empty hold. This is a freighter, not a cruise ship. We let ourselves fall inside as though we’d been adrift for years, and some of us exchange looks, possibly for the first time. The man next to me pulls out a bottle of pisco and takes a long swig. Then he passes it around. A pipe ceremony: we’ll see how it ends. I shrug off the rain jacket and my drenched sweater, then throw on a dry, dirty one I find after rooting blindly through my pack. I don’t know when we set sail. The hold rises and falls nonstop. Now and then we all slide to one side and the light bulb flickers until the sea surges again, sending us back to where we were before. An old woman passes me the bottle with a smile in each eye and a toothless grin. I take it and drink. I love this place, these narrow black eyes that neither desire me nor reject me, this fabulous freedom.

It’s what I came here looking for, true zero. I was tired of inventing résumés, of having to pretend life had a structure, as though there were a metal rod inside me keeping me upright and steady. The destination always kills the journey, and if we have to reduce life to a story, it can only be a bad one. What was I thinking, dropping everything for a three-month contract on the other side of the world? I’d just been fired from a restaurant in an industrial park. I used to hitchhike there every morning. Most of the time I was late, even though I gave myself two hours to make the trip. The best part of my day was when a car or van stopped on the side of the road, a hundred and fifty meters or so ahead, and summoned me with its blinkers. I’d run toward it like a lunatic, backpack on and jacket open, blowing out clouds of breath and cigarette smoke into the cold air. Some drivers were surprised when they saw I was a woman. Others didn’t even notice. Fifteen kilometers of peace, of being nowhere, of intruding on the commutes of kind people who had to suffer through them every single day. I often wished I could’ve jumped out of those cars while they were still moving, instead of having to say a polite goodbye and close their doors the way you might close the casket of a good friend, an inanimate body. What was I thinking, dropping everything? The devastating possibility of the same old job, of a tiny room in a suburban apartment, of lovers as fleeting as shooting stars, hot to the touch one day, a distant dream the next. The days came and went, unchanging, and every night I tossed them back one swig at a time, stretched out on my narrow bed with headphones in my ears and an ashtray on my chest. I’d gone through life fixated on an intangible conviction, tied down by the handful of things that kept me from becoming penniless, an outcast. I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a center of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me. I’d come from nothing, polluted, and yearned for windswept lands.

A hard floor and a bag for a pillow. Quiet companions. Me inside the hold, the hold inside the storm, an envelope of cash next to my stomach. This night I’ve won.

I stick around for a few years. The captain has a gambler’s face, patient and smart. They call him patrón. His skin is fine and red and rises out of his shirt collar like a second shirt clinging to his tiny features: chin, mouth, mustache, nose, forehead, all in a line, one after the other, with two hole-like eyes that drive home his every decision and order. He offered me the job because I didn’t ask for money, just room and board. I think I’ve discovered what happiness is: whistling the moment you wake up, not getting in anyone’s way, owing no explanations, and falling into bed at daybreak, body addled from exhaustion and mind free of every last trace of bitterness and dust. Everyone on board thinks I’m certifiable, that I’m the black sheep of an aristocratic family, that someone murdered my parents and siblings and I’m here lying low with an anonymous crew so that I can plan out every detail of a slow, cold-blooded revenge. I let them believe it because they’re friendly and because at the end of the day we’re more like family than if we’d shared the same mother. We all incubate here in the boat’s amniotic fluid; the boat loves and nurtures us, it invites us to take another look at ourselves. I let myself be strung along; life develops without overwhelming me, it squeezes into every minute, it implodes; I hold it in my hands. I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.

We sail back up the coast of Chile. All the way to Talcahuano, Valparaíso, Antofagasta, Iquique. I don’t usually disembark, even though now and then I get the urge—in Valparaíso, for example, a night port under the cover of gleaming cerros. I want to keep a lover there. I sit on deck, drink, smoke half a pack of cigarettes, and feel stupid. It’s been over a year since I held a woman in my arms. My body rails at me, it demands another body to touch and stimulate and use to satisfy its own monstrous hunger—until that person, her purity, her charms are used up and spat out. I’m dying to open and close a door, to pull another mouth to bed with my mouth, to parcel out desire. It was easy in Barcelona. Here, I don’t even bother. Better to just retreat to my bunk and recall everything to that concrete point between my legs while the saliva on my fingers fills me with tobacco and solitude.

This is the best job I’ve ever had. The galley is small and rusted. One oven, four burners, a countertop. The pots look like they were salvaged from the bottom of the sea. It’s a good thing I brought my own knives. I don’t even take my eyes off them at night. If I left them in a drawer, the next day I’d have to fetch them from the engine room. Still, no one steps foot in the galley when I’m there. The door stays open, and every now and then someone pokes their head in to ask for coffee. They can brew it themselves. I’ve got water on the boil around the clock, a jar of instant coffee and another of white sugar. Sometimes they sit on the stool in the corner. They relax and watch me work and tell me about their grandmothers—all experts in the kitchen, all queens of humitas and empanadas. The second mate reads out the recipe to me. Humitas are out of the question, but I develop an interest in empanadas. They’re practical and everyone likes them, even though the meat I use is tinned and the olives need more brine. I start the dough in the evenings and let it rise all night. I like to get under the covers knowing that out there another covered body lies awake, working on my behalf. In the morning I’m amazed by how much it’s risen, as if the whole thing—the soft, perfect dome of wheat and its nest-bowl of warmth—were a distant nephew who’s grown up, effortlessly and all of a sudden, in the silence of my absence. I knead the bread, dust it with flour, shape it and take its shape, and imagine I am a simpleminded god about to beget a new tribe. Anything not to feel the hips, the ass, the breasts, the perfect flesh of a woman beneath my hands.

We spend whole weeks in the Sea of Chiloé. It’s an uncomfortable body of water, like it doesn’t feel at home caught between the continent and the archipelago. The worst storms, no comparison to my first time on board. The waters get so rough we have to seek shelter in a bay. Hours of waiting, most often at night. If we’re carrying passengers, I have someone take down some sandwiches for them. The locals are thrilled. Each bite seems to enrich and fortify them, to give them more life and the strength to live it. The few tourists on board, on the other hand, are disappointed in everything. Strange, given that they’d made a point of shunning the comforts of ocean liners. They’d left home ready to turn their holiday into an expedition, a quest for some kind of inner truth. After researching freighters with room for passengers, they’d bought tickets on a stormy night, feeling more alive than ever and loving their sense of adventure more than they loved the children they already had or might go on to have. Three hours in and they’re livid; they need the bathroom. Theirs is on deck. Two staircases up from the hold, then another to the annex. The wind spits in their faces, blinding them with pellets from this austral downpour. The waves roar, they’d swallow everything if they could. I don’t understand how these people manage to keep alive. They pant violently and cling to nonexistent handrails as they make their way up. They empty themselves in the toilet. The waves are in there too, like a sea monster that surges up and slams them to the wall, then consumes them neck-first. If I ever turn out like them, I swear to God I’ll shoot myself.

I’m not sure why I start earning a salary. Nothing out of this world, except it changes my relationship with work, which doesn’t feel like it’s mine anymore but instead belongs to someone who values it and deigns to give it to me. I feel a sense of loss, though I’d been in the red for a while and needed the money. I still make the best food I can, my new owner’s invisible leash slack but present. In Chaitén, I stock up on tobacco, tampons, deodorant, and socks. Funny how socks go missing. I buy red ones so I’ll know which ones are mine. Chaitén is a regular stop and I almost always disembark, if only for a couple of hours. The streets are long and empty, as wide as airstrips. A full-bodied woman serves coffee and cake in the dining room of her small house. The best lemon cake in the world. It’s always packed in there, despite the floral drapes, the ornate dinnerware, and the rugs. She also has rooms available. Whenever we dock for more than twenty-four hours, I reserve one so that I can have a hot shower and sleep in a real bed with a wooden frame that can support my every thought and moan. On days when it rains, I feel like I’ve just come home after conquering the world. That’s where I met Samsa and where, for a few moments, I became conscious of the magma seething beneath the miracle of our oceans and continents.