Burning Bones E-Book

Miren Agur Meabe

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 235

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

WINNER OF THE TRANSLATION PRIZE LABORAL KUTXA – ETXEPARE 2023 'Miren Agur Meabe's poetic language shades and heightens the pulse of her writing, [adding] sensuality to the wound she writes of. Her way of looking elevates her raw, sincere voice to higher ground...' – Harkaitz Cano 'Miren Agur Meabe writes with about quiet worlds with tenderness and attention to detail, in a very sensual, almost synaesthetic way.' – Anna Blasiak, The Spanish Riveter 'a riveting and immersive read.' – Rhianon Holley, Buzz In a series of short poetic narratives Burning Bones finds the writer on a remarkable journey of imagination, discovery and emotion. We watch the gardener gather kindling to prepare a bonfire. 'So many branches,' I tell Gwen. 'They look like a pile of bones... I have a feeling that's what I'm doing too, carrying a bundle of bones from place to place. And I don't just mean the bones in my body.' From a flooded river stranding a dolphin on a sandbank to a sailor afraid to venture onto land while a first kiss is cut tragically short Meabe plays with the expectations and form of stories while offering a rhapsody of reflection and reinvention. Expertly translated into English by Amaia Gabantxo – arguably the most prestigious contemporary Basque to English translator – Burning Bones is a companion piece to Miren Agur Meabe's A Glass Eye, a collection of short stories that complement the universe of Meabe's novel about absence as an engine for creation, about what we make out of the things we lose – her eye, in the author's case, or love, or the innocence of youth.

Leseprobe

Contents

About the author

Title Page

Dedication

Supporters

Epigraph

Miramar

Sunday Apples

Amour Fou

White Socks

La Recherche de l’Absolu

Lord of all Saints

My First Thanksgiving

Tesserae

Gratis et Amore

Daughter of Charity

Inventory of Dreams

The Notebook and the Rain

Letters to Nadine

Lessons

Tenebrae Factae Sunt

The Ashes of Paradise

Daily Programme

Yesterday’s Girl

Intermittent Journal

Txori Txuri

La Vita è Bella

Parthian Translations 1

Parthian Translations 2

Parthian Translations 3

Parthian Translations 4

Parthian Translations 5

Parthian Translations 6

Copyright

Miren Agur Meabe writes books for adults and children. In the course of her career she has received the Critics’ Prize twice for her poetry collections, and the Euskadi Prize for YA literature on three occasions. Her novel Kristalezko begi bat (A Glass Eye, Parthian, 2018) and the short story collection Hezurren erratura (Burning Bones, Parthian, 2022) have been warmly received by readers and critics alike. A Glass Eye has been translated into several languages and received multiple awards. In 2020, she published her fifth poetry collection, Nola gorde errautsa kolkoan (Holding Ashes Close to the Heart) – which forms a triptych with A Glass Eye and Burning Bones. It won the 2021 Spanish National Poetry Award. She's a member of the Basque Academy of Letters.

Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, singer and literary translator specialising in Basque literature – a pioneer in the field and its most prolific contributor. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Words Without Borders, The New Engagement, The Massachusetts Review and The TLS, among others. She has worked in backpackers' hostels and taught at the University of East Anglia, the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She's also a freediver.  

BURNING BONES

Miren Agur Meabe

Translated from Basque by Amaia Gabantxo 

To Joanes, for the light.

Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

This book is supported by Etxepare Basque Institute

I never travelled fast,

but I did travel,

the pain in my bones changes

every hundred metres

and no one knows the meaning of a kilometre like I do.

– Fabio Morábito

Remembering, rereading, the transformation of memory:

the alchemic gift of reinventing our past.

– Valeria Luiselli

Maybe they’re dreams too, my memories.

– Joseba Sarrionandia

Miramar

Rats have been running riot here all winter. I start to itch as soon as I see the destruction: the broken ceramic dishes on the floor and the serviettes turned to confetti. Their tiny turds everywhere, little seeds of blood.

‘Maybe because they ate salt?’ my son wonders. ‘The salt dish is empty.’

The transistor radio’s cable, the matches, the scented candles we set on the table outside during long summer evenings, the aluminium paper; they tore through everything they found. A woven basket too, upturned on the floor. I give it a little kick, fearful that one of those beasts may be hiding in it and run towards my ankles.

‘They’re not around now, Ama, they come out at night. I heard them make a hell of a racket some time ago, on the ceiling… I’ve no idea how they got in. It’s almost as if rats shape-shift their bodies into smoke when they smell food.’

‘They probably found some leftovers from the last time you ate here with your friends. You don’t even sweep up after you use the place,’ I snap at my son.

‘We should get a cat,’ he replies, pretending not to have heard me.

It smells of damp and dust, of enclosed air. Multiple spider webs, thick as shoelaces, hang from the beams. Fragments and dust shed by the bricks inside the chimney have covered everything in a thin, copperish film.

‘We shouldn’t keep the place locked up like this. If we can’t look after it between us, I’m going to have to sell it.’ Look after it between us. Who is this us. My son and I. I go on, braiding my rope of complaints.

‘Expenses and more expenses, that’s all this place is: taxes, electricity, water bills, and the maintenance it requires every year to keep it half-decent. Look at these walls, they’re all chipped again.’

It’s the saltpetre that causes them to bubble and crack; back in the day, masons used to mix concrete with beach sand.

‘Careful on the steps. One of them is broken and the nails are sticking out.’

Coming here felt different before. Every time I come now, I have to run a rake through the place. I never write here anymore. Writing in the garden – that’s a thing of the past.

‘Ama, don’t come into the bathroom.’

‘What now?’

He steps aside to show me the toilet bowl. A huge rat has drowned in the hole.

‘It must have been thirsty,’ says my son, laughing. ‘Get me something to take it out with; a piece of wood, or, better still, the shovel from the shed.’

‘No, step away. I’ll do it.’

I put rubber gloves on and grab the rat by its tail, but it slips out of my grasp and falls on the floor. It makes a sound like an oily balloon when it hits the tiles. I grab hold of it again, from the neck this time, as if it were a kitten. I throw it on top of the pile of stubble that I’ve been meaning to burn for months. My eyes and nose streaming, I retch.

My son leaves, taking the path that leads on to the street.

I stay there, looking at what used to be a vegetable garden, patches of sunlight falling on the grass. The sparrow-feeder collapsed under a mound of leaves, victim to some gale wind. It seems to be saying that unless effort and desire work hand in hand, the weeds will smother every attempt at creating beauty.

I feel a gust of wind suddenly, a presence in the air: my mother picking strawberries for her only grandson; my uncle – my godfather – a man of sparse words and soft movements, planting flowers; my father taking an axe to the withered pear tree, to the barren vine, to the relentless ivy growing fat on the masonry wall, to the palm tree’s unruly fronds.

The three silhouettes rise from the ground like threads of mist under the dirty March sky. In my head – like in ancient temples, where voices, sounds and notes swirl around cupolas – the voices of my elders mingle, saying words that were essential to them: asbestos, parsley, family, do, dimple, peas, lizards, geraniums, adze, seeds, harvest, water, everyone’s, blooms, give. I’d like to erase them from the past, but the past is unreachable and all memory can do is attempt clumsy grasps with its treacherous nails.

We’ll have to wait for more favourable winds before we build the pyre. We’ll burn all the dead foliage, weeds and other remains – with soil attached to them still – and we’ll spread the ashes of that fire over the flowerbeds and the roots of the fruit trees.

I close the door. The name of the property is spelt out on white-and-blue tiles to the right of the door: Miramar.

There are many other Miramars: the palace in Donostia, my friend’s house in Valencia, a restaurant in Artxanda and a disco in Havana, a castle in Trieste, the inn in Naguib Mahfuz’s novel Alexandria, and beaches, and cities. Homonyms, all of them. But this, only this one is my own. It’s still here. And despite that, I can’t help feeling that I belong here less and less.

I had a nightmare.

There was a swarm of squeaking rats under my bed, trying to climb up my sheets: their tails all tangled up, stuck together with some viscous substance. Packed into a swirl under the mattress, they bit and scratched the wooden frame incessantly, desperate to get out.

In Victor Hugo’s The Tower of Rats, a whole village, turned into a pack of rats, kills Archbishop Hatto. In that instance, the rats represent a revengeful act against crimes committed by a tyrant; in mine, they represent disquiet. I hate them: back when we were kids we played in the rubbish dump and rats would always eat the pigeons we used to raise in the fort we built.

Like our fishermen like to say, rats live in their ships nahizu-nahizu, doing whatever they like. I heard one describe how, when he was a cabin boy, a sudden weight on his chest woke him in his bunk one night and, before he was able to open his eyes fully, a rat had bit him on the face. He got really sick, and when he started pissing blood the captain gave the order to head back to land.

According to Advance, a book containing naval surgeon Elisha Kent Kane’s memoirs, rats became a grave threat to their ship when they found themselves trapped in the Arctic ice. The crew lit a fire in the bilge hoping the rats would suffocate with the smoke, but only a few died. They kept producing litter after litter, all of them hungry, as hungry as the fishermen themselves. The captain ordered the ship’s fiercest dog be released into the hold, but it was all for nothing: the rats devoured its legs in no time. The crew had to cover up their ears to block out the dog’s terrifying yelps. In the end some sailors managed to hunt down a fox and that worked, the fox cleaned up the relentless rodents.

At the ironmonger’s they tell me that rat traps won’t achieve anything, that I need to feed my visitors poison.

‘It’s more expensive, but it won’t fail. If they eat it, they’ll be finished within a couple of days. And don’t worry, you won’t even see them with their legs up and their bellies burst. They hide when they’re about to die.’

The blue pellets that will bring this miracle about have the consistency of pork scratchings. I buy a bag and place them here and there, some on the ground floor and others in the room upstairs. I do it quickly.

I notice the crack on the ground as I walk out into the terrace; it gets bigger every year. The palm tree’s roots are breaking through the paved area.

Damned palm tree, Dad used to say, it’s only because I can’t do it on my own: if I could I’d chop it down right now.

Grandpa planted it in the late fifties as a request from the owners. The land belonged to a rich family who used to visit in the summers to enjoy nature and the sea air. My grandparents looked after their garden plot in exchange for half of the harvest and the eggs the chickens lay. The sea-view is gone now; they built some apartments in front of it.

When I was a child the palm tree was as tall as me. I used to bring my friends over so they could admire it, because there were only half a dozen palm trees in the village. All of them planted by sailors.

When the heirs put the plot of land with the little house and garden up for sale my uncle decided to buy it; he wanted our family’s bond to that land to endure. My godfather was a sensitive man. He had a set of shelves built in the upstairs room to host his collection of Caja de Ahorros Vizcaína books. He left the little estate to me. But I don’t really have the will to restore this hundred-plus year-old house.

In the end Dad was right: the palm tree grew like a mindless giant, and now it shakes its arms savagely when the wind blows. It scares me – what if they push roof tiles out of place, or damage the attic.

I need my little cosmos to be in good order. Bags, coats, keys – they can’t just be anywhere. Each thing needs its place, be it a wardrobe, a cupboard or a box. I ask Adela to help me clean. She has been looking after another elderly man since Dad died, but she comes over often for a cup of tea and a chat. I’ve just moved to the house my parents used to live in.

‘The changes are very noticeable, the house is not as full as it used to be,’ she tells me. ‘You’ve removed a lot of trinkets.’

‘The Bilbao Athletic cups, the Basque ikurrina flags and the outdated encyclopaedias…’

‘Old people like to keep everything… I miss your dad. Did you know that he’d get up in the middle of the night sometimes and come to my room? He would stand by the door, singing. I’d tell him off from the bed: ‘Be quiet! The neighbours may hear you!’ He would shrug his shoulders and say: ‘So what, Adelita!’ And he’d go back to bed in his usual cheery mood.’

‘I have a question, don’t you have a relative who clears forest floors?’

‘My cousin, Nikolas.’

‘Could he come to the garden house? I need to ask him a question about the palm tree. Tell him to call me, please?’

When Adela left I sat at my desk to organise some papers. I’m surrounded by Mum’s porcelain dinner set, my uncle’s stamp and coin collections, the ivory pieces Dad brought back from Africa. I feel overwhelmed by my worries. But I’ll face them, one by one. The phone rings. The voice at the other end pierces my ear.

‘Water is pouring down from your flat.’

It’s one of my neighbours from my city apartment, the woman who lives downstairs. I change out of my pyjamas and then set out toward Solokoetxe, my neighbourhood in Bilbao.

The disaster happened in the bathroom. I feel as if I were made of plastic, a rigid, weightless material that can’t stand up straight. Everything has taken on a brownish colour. How long must all that faecal water have been dripping through my house to reach the ceiling of the flat below. The stain is not that big, but it’s definitely there. The putrid flow comes from above, apparently. The upstairs neighbours know nothing, there’s nothing to see in their bathroom, there must be a crack in the sewage pipes. I clean my bathroom and open every window in the house. The stench won’t let me sleep.

Rats are silent animals, nocturnal, scavengers, parasitic. Good jumpers. Quick, capable of climbing up straight walls. They can just as easily munch their way through cheese as through lead. They can swim for hundreds of metres and, when cornered, fight animals much bigger than themselves.

We are familiar with cockfights, but few know that there used to be rat fights too. Which rat came out the winner? The strongest, or the more thoroughly trained? And how did they train those rats?

They say cannibalism is common amongst rats: we too are capable of pushing through and leapfrogging over blood ties, moral reasons, common humanity and honour to ensure a win in our individual conflicts.

I kick the little house’s door open. May the light get in and frighten those hairy fuckers. Even though they’ve eaten the poison some of them are still around, the floor is littered with their elongated little shits that look like oat seeds.

My son calls.

‘How’s the plague progressing?’

‘Ever onward to victory… How are you, will you be coming over this weekend?’

While we’re on the phone, I see two men approach through the door in the wall of the vegetable garden. I always leave that door half-open.

Nikolas and his boss are looking at the palm tree.

‘What should we do?’

‘It won’t be easy to axe it down. We can’t get a crane in here, there’s no way into the plot. But we could do it with a scaffolding ladder and a chainsaw. We would have to chop the trunk down one slice at a time; it’ll require a lot of patience. Palm wood is very, very hard, so much so it’s almost impossible to burn. Afterwards we’d have to load the pieces into the van, and get rid of them in the authorised disposal centre… Many hours of work, señora. And we’ll need special clothing too: palm fronds are very heavy and have these huge thorns in their undersides…’

‘I don’t want to axe it down,’ I interrupt Nikolas’ boss, ‘but I don’t want it to fall on the roof either.’

I don’t know what to do.

‘Take your time to think about it. We can prune it for now, clean up the trunk, get rid of moss and parasites. We’re here to earn money, of course, but it’s obvious that the little house and the palm tree make a beautiful pair. They were made for each other.’

He’s right. Taking the palm tree from the house or a crown from a saint amounts to the same thing.

Nikolas rests a ladder against the trunk. He puts on a harness and goggles too. The boss leaves with a friendly ‘see you later.’ I start removing dead snails from my flowerpots.

‘All these soft bits are rotten, it’s better to remove them,’ says Nikolas digging a hook into the trunk’s fibres.

Sawdust falls off the trunk in a little downpour of soft, golden hailstones.

‘Look, a blackbird’s nest – but it’s empty, it must be last year’s.’

I’m not going to engage in conversation. I don’t like people to prattle on while they’re working.

‘And who used to do these jobs for you before?’

‘The men of the family,’ I answer dryly.

My boyfriend used to help before, too. He was an expert handler of the telescopic scythe. He carried out difficult jobs like these for me many times. But that’s all over now.

‘Okay, now for the worst part, the crown. See those orange bunches that look like sprigs of wheat? Let’s get rid of them, that way we’ll hinder the palm’s growth. Do you know that in some places they make honey and wine out of dates? That’s a different kind of palm tree, though. Could you pass me the chainsaw?’

‘Of course.’

‘And move a bit further. These fronds are so heavy! Would you like to keep some? If you let them dry out we could place them on top of that iron structure you have over there and create a nice shady spot. What used to be there before, a vine?’

Bingo.

The chainsaw roars and the first frond falls. A second one follows. Then another. And another. And suddenly a stream of blood spurts from the crown. Bits of flesh and entrails splatter across the façade of the house. Nikolas leaps off the ladder.

A mob of rats escapes down the trunk of the palm tree, coming towards me. Others jump directly from the crown to the attic and enter the little house through the power lines. They know their way in.

I scream with my eyes closed, paralysed by terror. Nikolas approaches and, holding my arms, shakes me to calm me down. After a while, when I see that there’s nothing writhing or trembling in agony at my feet, my screams turn into sobs.

Sunday Apples

I’d like to let children speak and not push them out of the way,

but instead of doing that I exploit them, empty their pockets out…

– Stanislaw Lem

I remember the double-leaf iron gate in our hallway, the sandstone tiles and the wooden balustrade that went all the way up to the attics. We lived in an old house that my grandparents rented from some rich people in the village and this was why we had the privilege of a bathtub. With the economic prosperity that reached the town in the seventies, many homes soon displayed fancier bathrooms than our own.

Ama used to enjoy mentioning that.

‘I used to bring my friends to look at the bathtub when I was a child,’ my mother would say to highlight the poshness of our grand home.

We hardly ever used it, however. I was bathed every Saturday in the kitchen, in a brass basin that had been heated up on the stove plate. It was my godfather who started the habit of using the bathtub. At first the porcelain knobs squeaked and a thin, twisted stream of water flowed obliquely from the faucet, but a few turns of the pliers left it ready for service. When I grew too big to fit into the basin, I too found pleasure in that bathroom covered in pearly, hydraulic ceramic tiles decorated with geometric patterns.

‘Come on, darling, you’re using up all the gas,’ Mum would say to get me to hurry up.

‘You need to buy the kind of soap that makes a lot of bubbles, so I can bathe like they do in the movie Sissi.’

‘But you’re hardly dirty my love.’

Back then, my father worked as a mechanic in trawlers, going away for three or four weeks at a time in the fishing grounds of Gran Sol. Every time he returned from the sea, Mum would prepare his favourite foods and go to the hairdresser even if it was a week day. She had fine, greasy hair – which I inherited – and Dad teased her about it. I’m sure my mother also had plenty of reasons to look down on my father but mostly they liked each other very much.

Something happened, however, that sparked Dad’s distrust. I had something to do with that, unfortunately, yet what I learned on that occasion may have helped me become a little smarter about what I hide and what I reveal.

One summer Sunday, my mother and I found a man in the square selling apples in the shade of the plane trees. She looked good in a green dress with white polka dots that complemented her tan.

‘Would you like some apples, little lady?’

The apple-seller looked old to me, because of his grey hair.

‘I can deliver them if you buy a whole box.’

‘Should we buy some for Aitita?’ Mum asked. ‘Apples are good for people with diabetes; they’re low on sugar.’

I nodded: little girls don’t doubt their mother’s wisdom when it comes to assessing the businesses they get into. So the man – let’s call him Lucio – began to bring his apples home every Sunday. He’d knock on our door about four o’clock. My mother would leave the dishes in the sink, take off her apron, check herself quickly in the hallway mirror, and open the door. Lucio would drop the box in our storage room and leave after Mum handed over a bank note.

There was no shortage of compotes, cakes and jams at home. We appreciated the taste of Lucio’s apples, their speckled skin and crunchiness.

One rainy Sunday, Ama offered Lucio a cup of coffee so he’d pause his deliveries while the deluge pelted the village. Lucio and Mum sat in the living room chatting with my grandparents about farm work and things like that.

When Ama walked him to the door, he whispered in her ear:

‘It’s such a shame for a woman like you to have a husband at sea.’

My mother frowned and closed the door on him without saying goodbye.

That afternoon she used the bathtub for the first time.

I had gone to the movies, but came back before the film was over because a boy in the row behind me put chewing gum in my pigtail, and my hair, ribbon and hairpins were plastered with it.

When I opened the bathroom door I saw my mother lying in the bathtub, in the dark. The light coming through the courtyard lit up her face with golden tones. Her eyes were closed, and apples floated around her, looking like bronze fists. She was muttering something I didn’t understand: it’s impossible for little girls to discern the meaning of certain words no matter how close they are when they hear them.

The cups trembled when my father kicked the sideboard. I’d rather forget it. Anyway, I want to make it clear that that outburst of anger didn’t come out of nowhere.

He had just praised the latest tray of roasted apples, saying they were melt-in-the-mouth good.

‘Out of this world.’

Looking at him sideways, I added:

‘Of course they are, because last Sunday Amatxu bathed with them.’

My father’s eyes suddenly looked like dark spiders. He kicked the sideboard and went out into the street muttering something.

At night, in bed already, I heard the key in the lock and my mother’s whimpers – she was apologising, I think.

The effect my comment had distressed me, but I think I made the accusation without malice. Or maybe not: maybe I needed to somehow expel the worm that the apple-man had lodged into my thoughts.

The next morning, Dad got up early to go to sea, like he always did. Mum looked sad, but they must have made peace because despite looking somewhat distant, he allowed her to give him a quick kiss.

As soon as he left, my mother filled the bathtub with ice-cold water, made me kneel and, pulling me by the hair, pushed my head into it. She pushed and pulled with gusto for quite some time.

Amour Fou

My mother must have been about fifty in that photo. She was smiling with her lips closed. She wore a blue blouse with satin stripes – a garment of discreet elegance, in line with her character. That photo had sailed with my father from cabin to cabin during his years of sea voyages, through countless stopovers in Durban, Rotterdam and many other ports.

He never disembarked, not even to take a taxi ride and get a panoramic tour of the city.

‘I’m not interested,’ he’d say. ‘If you walk away, you may get lost.’

It puzzled me that a grown man might be afraid of getting lost because, as we’d been taught in school, even in the remotest of foreign places, asking directions would get you anywhere. I couldn’t imagine what he meant. Apparently, some crewmembers frequented nightclubs while the ship was at port, and sometimes they had no choice but to ask the merchant company for an advance on future wages so that they could send some money home after squandering their most recent pay being entertained.

‘My salary is paid in full every month, isn’t it?’

Ama showed her gratitude by stroking his bald head.

I imagine my father lying on his cot next to a hatch that lets the cries of seagulls and the murmur of cranes through, his transistor radio’s headphones on. The fan running. His wife’s photograph on his chest. Knowing him, I’m sure that contemplating her image gave him the fortitude to stick to his vows. Every time he returned from a journey, the photograph spent the holidays on his bedside table, its glass misted over by remnants of kisses.

Shortly after my father retired, my mother underwent spinal surgery. For a whole month he stayed in her hospital room.

‘I look at it as if I were doing time at sea. I don’t care about the world beyond this ship.’

He took a toiletry bag to the hospital, which contained a razor. He ate all his meals there. In the afternoons, whenever I went to visit Mum’s bedside after work, I’d bring over clean shirts and underwear for Dad. I often tried to persuade him to go home to sleep without making it obvious that Ama was beginning to feel uncomfortable having him constantly by her side.