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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
How do we write about the singular experience of parenthood? Written in a 'state of attachment', or 'under the influence' of fatherhood, Childish Literature is an eclectic guide for novice parents, showing how the birth and growth of a child changes not only the present and the future, but also reshapes our perceptions of the past. Shifting from moving dispatches from his son's first year of existence, to a treatise on 'football sadness', to a psychedelic narrative where a man tries, mid-magic mushroom trip, to re-learn the subtle art of crawling, this latest work from Alejandro Zambra shows how children shield adults from despondency, self-absorption and the tyrannies of chronological time. At once a chronicle of fatherhood, a letter to a child and a work of fiction, Childish Literature is the latest, virtuosic addition to the oeuvre of one of the most exciting Latin American writers in recent decades.
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Seitenzahl: 281
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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‘What a rare and wonderful experience, to read a writer of such brilliance, wit and style as Alejandro Zambra on the subjects of fatherhood and childhood. I relished every page of this beautiful, surprising book.’
—Mark O’Connell, author of A Thread of Violence
‘Charming, protean, ebullient and precise, this book transforms and grows almost as much as the parents and child at the centre of the book. A wonder.’
—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
‘Hopeful, funny and full of wisdom. A meditation on fatherhood by one of our most perceptive writers.’
—Tara Westover, author of Educated
‘Whenever Alejandro Zambra brings out a new book, I’m excited to read it. The playful intelligence of his exuberant imagination, along with his sharp-eyed, poignant, poetic observations of everyday life, are unmatched. On every page there’ll be something that makes me laugh out loud, no matter if what’s being narrated is devastating or – like this new book – luminously tender. In Childish Literature, Zambra’s account of fatherhood is so generous, self-deprecating and infectious.’
—Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy
‘Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.’
—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Motheris a Witch
‘When I read Zambra I feel like someone’s shooting fireworks inside my head.’
—Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
5
CHILDISH LITERATURE
ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA
Translated by MEGAN MCDOWELL
CONTENTS
For Silvestre’s mum and Jazmina’s son
‘Ever since my childhood, I have liked to have a bird’s-eye view of my room.’
—Bruno Schulz
‘We aren’t born writers, we’re born babies.’
—Hebe Uhart
I.
CHILDISH LITERATURE
0.
With you in my arms, I see the shadow we cast together on the wall for the first time. You’ve been alive for twenty minutes.
Your mother’s eyelids lower, but she doesn’t want to sleep. She rests her eyes for just a few seconds.
‘Sometimes newborns forget to breathe,’ a friendly buzzkill of a nurse informs us.
I wonder if she says it like that every day. With the same words. With the same sad cautionary tone.
Your little body breathes, though: even in the dimly lit hospital, your breathing is visible. But I want to hear it, hear you, and my own wheezing breath won’t let me. And my noisy heart keeps me from hearing yours.
Throughout the night, every two or three minutes I hold my breath to make sure you’re breathing. It’s such a reasonable superstition, the most reasonable of all: stop breathing so your child will breathe.
1.
I walk through the hospital as though searching for cracks left by the last earthquake. I think horrible thoughts, but I still manage to imagine the scars that someday you will proudly show off towards the end of summer.
14.
Your brief fourteen-day life wears the word childhood like a roomy poncho. But I like how exaggerated it sounds. Fourteen days old – the word old looks so strange there, when you’re still so relentlessly new. 18
25.
You cry and I show up. What a rip-off. Maybe our fathers took those first rejections too much to heart.
You don’t prefer me, but you get used to my company. And I get used to sleeping when you sleep. The rhythm of intermittent naps reminds me of hundreds of long bus rides dozing on the way to grade school or university, to attend classes where I went right on dozing off. Or those delicious, furtive catnaps that allowed me to endure a working life.
Suddenly, I’m fifteen years old and it’s midnight and I’m studying something that might be chemistry or algebra or phonology and I’m out of cigarettes and it’s a problem, because I smoke a lot in my dreams. I wake up when some shy dogs start their concert of barks and a neighbour starts hammering; perhaps he’s hanging a portrait of his own son on the wall, and that’s why he doesn’t care about waking mine.
But you go on sleeping against my chest, and you seem to be even more deeply asleep, seriously asleep. I have no idea what time it is, and I don’t care. Eleven in the morning, three in the afternoon. That’s how the tired but happy days pass, alternating with the happy but tired days and the happy but happy days.
31.
The birth of a child heralds a far-reaching future in which we will not fully participate. Julio Ramón Ribeyro summed it up well: ‘The tooth that comes in for them is the one that falls out for us; the inch they grow is the one that we shrink; the lights they acquire are the ones extinguished in us; what they learn, we forget; and the year added for them is the one subtracted for us.’
It’s a beautiful thought, whose turbulent side, however, 19has unhinged millions of men. I’m thinking of fathers from past generations, though it’s ridiculous to presume things have changed. I have met men who practise fatherhood with lucidity, humour and humility, but I have also seen dear friends who seemed to have their hearts well placed turn away from their children to indulge in a desperate and clichéd recovery of their youth. And there are also plenty of fathers who confront the death drive by burdening their kids with missions and commandments, with the explicit or veiled intention of using their children to further their own interrupted dreams.
What I find striking, in any case, is the almost absolute lack of a tradition. Since all human beings – I assume – have been born, it would seem natural for us to be experts in matters of child-rearing, but it turns out that we know very little, especially men, who sometimes seem like those cheerful students who show up to class blissfully unaware that there’s a test. While women passed on to their daughters the asphyxiating imperative of maternity, we grew up pampered and ineffectual and even humming along to ‘Billie Jean’. Our fathers tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men, but they never taught us to be fathers. And their fathers didn’t teach them either. And so on.
42.
During your first weeks of life I have written around a hundred poems on my phone. They’re not poems, really, but on the phone it’s easier to press Enter than to struggle with punctuation.
I write in a state of attachment, under your influence, both of us inveigled by the spell of the rocking chair, which functions like a bashful roller coaster, or like a tireless, generous horse, or like the ferry that will eventually carry us to Staten Island – or, even better, to Chiloé. 20
49.
This morning I tried to turn the fake poems into real poems, but I’m afraid I overshot and ended up guiding them towards the civilized and legible country of prose. I ruined them, but I still copied them all, just in case, into a file that I titled ‘Children’s Literature’. None of those sketches could be considered children’s literature, though all of them deal with childhood. Yours, incipient, and mine, long gone. My childhood or my idea of childhood since you arrived.
50.
The word childish is often used as an insult, although the words that aren’t insults but can fulfil the function of one are almost infinite. You just have to work on the tone a little.
I remember a very sweet little girl, the daughter of one of my best friends, who one day got angry with her favourite stuffed animal and spent about two hours yelling at it cruelly, over and over: ‘A toy! That’s all you are, a toy! You think you’re real, but you’re just a toy, that’s all!’
When I was fifteen it annoyed me when people referred to me using the phrase young man. I don’t remember if I was ever called a teenager to my face, but I would have hated it. In the strict plane of language, teenager is a perfectly accurate word, but adolescent is much more evocative.
61.
Literature has ceded to self-help nearly all the reflective space that fatherhood requires. But self-help books usually hold nothing but hackneyed and at times even humiliating advice. A few months ago, I read a voluminous manual whose brilliant recommendation for men 21was this: ‘Be sensitive!’
62.
This week you gained the same one hundred grams that I must have lost dancing with you in my arms. The son gains the weight that his father sheds. It’s the perfect diet.
83.
The expression ‘children’s literature’ is condescending and offensive and also strikes me as redundant, because all literature, at its core, is childish. Much as we try to hide it, those of us who write do so because we want to recover perceptions that were erased by the ostensible learning that so often made us unhappy. Enrique Lihn said that we surrender to our real age as though under false evidence.
Children’s literature: I like what the word childhood awakens by lurking behind those words. It makes me think of Jorge Teillier, Hebe Uhart, Bruno Schulz, Gabriela Mistral, Jacques Prévert. Well, the list of ‘children’s authors’ is endless. Baudelaire defined literature as a ‘childhood recovered at will’ – I just checked this, and found that it was actually artistic ‘genius’ that he defined that way, not literature.
Still, I’d rather stick with my recollection, wrong but less pompous, of Baudelaire’s theory – I prefer that emphasis. I like, above all, how Baudelaire compares the artist and child with a convalescent. More than remembering or relating, a writer is trying to see things as though for the first time. That is, like a child, or like a convalescent on their way back from illness and in a way from death, and who has to relearn, for example, how to walk.
Parenthood is another kind of convalescence that allows us to learn everything again. And we didn’t even know we had been gravely ill. We’ve only just found out. 22
96.
Stepfathers start from behind in the noisy battle of legitimacy. But then someone comes along and says, ‘My stepfather was my real father.’ Those are the stories I want to hear.
Perhaps all fathers are, in a way, stepfathers to our children. Biology assures us a place in their lives, but we still long to be chosen. For our children to someday say these wonderfully strange words: My father was my real father.
101.
On the way back from the bakery we go to every morning, a man says to me:
‘Doesn’t that kid have a mum?’
‘Asshole. Asshole,’ I reply.
I used to be good at comebacks, but I can only come up with that one word. The same insult, twice.
The man is more or less my age, with a fancy suit and dry green eyes. He doesn’t seem drunk.
For a second, I think about asking him to wait while I put you in your cot at home and come right back to punch his lights out. It bothers me so much to have a thought like that. It makes me sad, rather. Demoralizes me.
What kind of person would say such a thing? Why, what for?
I leave you in your mother’s arms.
In the kitchen, I eat an entire baguette while thinking up crude, savage, definitive insults.
120.
My father became a father at twenty-four years old, while I did at forty-two. I can’t stop thinking about that. It is what it is.
When you have a child, you become someone’s child 23again. But your own experience, tamed by time and shaped or channelled by idealization, discord or absence, is not enough.
You would like to remember the days and nights when you were cared for the way you now care for your child. Though maybe you weren’t cared for as much. Maybe they stuck you in the playpen and let you cry and stuffed a dummy in your mouth. And turned on the TV, and that was that.
We compare ourselves to our fathers, even though – we know – we can no longer be the same as them or essentially different from them. And since we killed them when we were twenty, we can’t kill them again now; for that very reason, sometimes we end up resurrecting them.
147.
You cry when you realize that your feet are not meant for grabbing hold of objects. But then, astonished, you start interpreting the patterns on the sheets. And the imperfections in the quilt. And the raindrops on the window. Your mother imitates thunder and I imitate lightning. All is well.
158.
There are men for whom fatherhood hits too hard. It’s as if overnight, from the mere fact of becoming fathers, they lose the ability to utter a single sentence without going into a story starring their children, who, more than their children, seem like their spiritual leaders, because for these lovestruck dads, even the blandest anecdote possesses a certain philosophical depth. That is, exactly, my case.
I can imagine what a disaster it would have been for me to have a child when I was twenty. I belong to a generation 24that put off parenthood, or ruled it out entirely, or practised it in other ways that were just as hard or harder, like adoption or step-parenthood – a word that, according to the Real Academia Español or Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, does not exist, though the Oxford English Dictionary has incorporated it.
Now, at forty-two years old, paternity has been a real party for me. As we know, even the best parties have moments when the euphoria is mixed with unease or the unpleasant reminder that tomorrow we still have to get up early and wash the dishes. But if I had to summarize these hundred-plus days in a short sentence, my telegram would say: I’m having a great time.
203.
‘So, why did you want to have a child?’
In these few months, about fifteen people have allowed themselves to ask me this question.
‘What I really want is to be a grandfather, this is just the first step,’ I might reply, for example.
Or maybe:
‘Because I’m sick of cats.’
‘Because it was time.’
‘For personal reasons.’
‘Because I’m in love.’
‘Out of curiosity.’
I particularly like this last answer, so graceful and banal. Maybe it would be better to talk about intellectual curiosity or an urge to experiment. Or to invoke the desire for adventure, the prestigious thirst for experience, or a need to understand human nature. But I like the simple, Pandora-style answer best.
After the jokes, though, I do answer, or at least I try to. I’m incapable of articulating a purely rational discourse, 25but if I just avoid the question with economical cynicism, I’ll only add to the knowledge gap, so disheartening and disturbing, that we have all felt and suffered from.
209.
For ages, literature has avoided sentimentalism like the plague. I have the impression that even today, many writers would rather be ignored than run the risk of being considered corny or mawkish. And the truth is that when it comes to writing about our children, happiness and tenderness defy our old masculine idea of the communicable. What to do, then, with the joyous and necessarily dopey satisfaction of watching a child learn to stand up or say his first words? And what kind of mirror is a child?
Literary tradition abounds with letters to my father, but letters to my son are pretty scarce. The reasons are predictable – sexism, selfishness, shame, adultcentrism, negligence, self-censorship – but maybe it would be worth adding some purely literary reasons, because those of us who have tried know that writing about your own children is quite an artistic challenge. Certainly, it’s easier to omit kids or relegate them to the sidelines, or to see them as obstacles to writing and employ them as excuses; now it turns out it’s all their fault we haven’t been able to concentrate on our arduous, imposing novel.
Childhood lives on in us as an intermittent enigma, usually only borne witness to by photo albums, ‘transitional’ teddy bears, or handfuls of agates collected one day at the beach. No one wrote the story of our childhoods, and maybe we regret that lack of a record, but also, in a way, we are grateful for it, because it allows us to breathe, change, rebel. To imagine that our children will read our own work is, likewise, as exhilarating as it is overwhelming. To narrate the world that a child will 26forget – to become our children’s correspondents – is an enormous challenge.
As I write, I myself feel the temptation of silence. And yet I know that even if I locked myself in to draft a novel about magnetic fields or to ad-lib an essay about the word word, I would end up talking about my son.
210.
‘Don’t write about your dreams, please, and don’t even think about mentioning children or pets,’ a prize-winning writer told a friend of mine who wanted to write a novel about her dreams and about her daughter and about her cat. I tend to think it would be better to take on every one of those challenges.
221.
I’m proud to say that the first word my son uttered, five days ago, was, against all statistical probability, the word dada. Now he says it all the time. He still has trouble, though, articulating the voiced alveolar plosive d, and for now he replaces it with the voiced bilabial nasal m.
226.
Every person who has raised a child knows that there are many occasions when the word happiness inexplicably rhymes with pain, as in lower back pain.
235.
‘Zambra, when you guys come to Chile, I want to be the first to meet your son, even though you’ve never shown the slightest interest in meeting my kids.’
That’s what a dear Chilean friend says to me. It’s a joke. It’s true that I haven’t met any of his three children, but the youngest of them has just turned forty. Besides, we talk 27about them all the time, and I keep up with what’s going on in their lives. I know, for example, that the oldest didn’t want to be a mother, and the younger two think becoming a father would be madness.
Suddenly I realize how meaningful those long conversations with my friend have been for me. And I thank him. ‘Laying it on a little thick, huh?’ he replies.
‘I don’t want to die without being a grandfather,’ he tells me later.
‘Laying it on a little thick, huh?’ I reply.
247.
Since I am not immune to optimism, I tend to think that, these days, we accept that even our own children don’t belong to us and are destined to understand the world according to categories that we couldn’t even conceive of. ‘Always at the door waiting for them without ever asking them to return,’ Massimo Recalcati says luminously in his stupendous book The Son’s Secret.
251.
I can hear ‘Praying for Time’, George Michael’s beautiful song, playing in the distance. I remember when I used to listen to that song and try to decipher its devastating lyrics using a tiny English–Spanish dictionary. I’m grateful to my neighbour for this involuntary trip back to turbulent youth. Now you are sleeping soundly to the beat of ‘Freedom!’
I don’t ever complain about loud music. I’d rather start dancing. Or remembering. Or praying. I’m more inclined to complain about the noise of motorcycles, but they go by so fast.
I can’t understand why anyone would complain about a child’s crying. People who gripe about crying children 28should be grounded – no dessert, no TV and no break.
I was going to end it at the aphorism, but I want to leave a record of the lady who came over this morning to knock at the door because you’d been crying for two whole minutes. Three sharp blows with an open palm. What a fine person.
258.
Our idea of upward mobility is a house with two bathrooms.
262.
‘You chose the wrong genre,’ an Italian editor told me once. We were speaking Spanish, which uses the same word for genre and for gender, so for a second I thought she was paying me an innovative compliment. But I realized she was talking about literary genre, because she had invited me to dinner with the intention of convincing me to write books for children.
I had spent the whole day walking around Rome immersed in a joy that was precisely childlike – I was like a kid gazing for the first time upon carousels, Ferris wheels and improbable slides lowered from clouds. By eight or nine that night, though, an excellent Nebbiolo had lulled me towards sleep, and maybe that’s why the editor felt she had to amp up her argument, which was by no means flattering: Children’s literature is a better fit for your style. As I see it, your novels are childish. Your books are picture books but they don’t have illustrations, and we should fix that. I don’t like your novels. Your children’s books would be much, much better. Why write for adults when you should be writing for children?
The next day she called me at the hotel because she’d woken up with the sense that she’d said too much. I told 29her she hadn’t. ‘But I’m sure I said some stupid things,’ she insisted, in a voice that was sluggish from the hangover. ‘Your novels are extraordinary,’ she told me, and although I knew she was lying, I assured her that her words would give me the energy to keep going. She asked if I would actually be interested in writing for kids. I replied that I still didn’t quite feel ready for my debut in children’s literature.
It was an odd, funny situation. Now, as I think about those words, childlike, childish, children’s, I remember that editor and consider the possibility that she was right, that she is right. During my university years, while I wrote my essays driven by the sole desire to impress my professors, I started to sense the risk of forever losing the possibility of connecting with the people I really loved. From there, the rudiments of a style arose. More than addressing actual people, when I wrote I pictured a sort of non-existent younger brother with whom I was eager to communicate. I wouldn’t say that I have a style, because my idea of style has changed and will go on changing, but if I did have to play that game, the truth is that I would happily subscribe to something like a children’s style, a childish style.
269.
Your light body competes with the wind, prevails in the halted hammock.
270.
The sky is full of warblers and red flycatchers. We find a gigantic papaya tree and a flamingo that curses tentative boats.
We celebrate your first words like sports reporters swollen with patriotic euphoria. We eat fried bananas, green pozole and coconut ice cream. 30
On the way home you vomit all over the Oaxacan guayabera I was given for Father’s Day in your name.
271.
At night, the mourning geckos fornicate on the roof, lit by the fires of the bay.
Today you learned to imitate the bread seller’s call.
279.
A curator whom I have met a total of five times in my life but who considers me his close friend called at two in the morning to tell me he was thinking about having a child. ‘I want my life to change,’ the mezcal said through him.
Maybe he is my friend, I thought. And it’s true that I do like him. I care about him. The first proof of my affection is that instead of telling him to go to hell, I reacted with caution. The second is that I’ve chosen to give him a different profession in case he ever reads this (he’s not a curator, though maybe he should be: he’d be good at it).
Just as it is profoundly naive to have a child presuming that life will continue on unaltered, becoming a parent with the sole intention of inducing change is colossally stupid. I didn’t put it like that to the curator, precisely because I care about him. But I did tell him. And he understood. Then I offered to let him do some field research: I invited him over for lunch so we could spend the whole afternoon with my son.
Men construct a particular idea of camaraderie that’s based on memorable alcoholic binges that lead to an exhilarating blind alley of confessions and complicities. But we get to know each other more intensely when we spend an entire afternoon with a friend who is now a father and is delighted to have us over and who talks about all kinds of things, not necessarily fatherhood, but who no longer 31looks us in the eye, because his gaze is fixed on the kid, who at any moment could start walking and fall on his ass.
280.
Just as I expected, the curator never showed up. He called several hours later to apologize. He said he’d had a lot of work to do and that I shouldn’t worry, because he had got past his crisis: he was single now. I didn’t know how to respond. ‘Congratulations,’ I finally said.
292.
I change the lyrics and melodies of the best lullabies while I wash the dishes with a new technique.
302.
‘You can’t bring liquids in,’ said a man at the Educal bookshop at the National Museum of Popular Cultures, in Coyoacán.
‘What do you think is in this bottle-mamila-mamadera-biberón?’ I replied, with you asleep in the sling. ‘Mezcal? Absinthe? Anisette? Pisco, rum, gin, sake, tequila, bacanora, aguardiente, vodka? Rubbing alcohol?’
That’s not true, I only mentioned mezcal. I’m perfecting my answer now as I write. The thing about referring to the bottle with a variety of words from different countries is something I really do, out of nervousness. Faced with the possibility of making a mistake, I give all the options.
‘It doesn’t matter what’s in it.’
‘It’s water!’
‘That’s what I mean, water is a liquid.’
‘What if it were breast milk?’
‘As I understand it, breast milk is also a liquid.’
It was hard not to snipe. As I understand it, breast milk is also a liquid. I would like to make a movie just so that, in a 32very minor scene, a character could sport a T-shirt with that motto.
I was mad, but I also thought the situation was funny. And you were soundly and warmly asleep. I asked to speak with the manager, like they do in films. And, like in films, the manager appeared immediately. He confirmed the bookshop’s policies. He said we couldn’t come in with containers of liquids, ‘no matter their nature.’ I asked him if he meant the nature of the containers or of the liquids. He didn’t answer.
I asked if that meant that this bookshop, which belonged to the state of Mexico, forbade the entrance of ten-month-old children. He told me that ten-month-olds and children of all ages were welcome in this and all bookshops of the United States of Mexico, and that was precisely why there was a section of books for infants (he used that word, infants).
I asked whether the bookshop had water dispensers or anything of the sort. He said no. I told him that in my country, it was normal to drink tap water, but in Mexico everyone advised against it. He made no comment.
I asked if he drank tap water. I asked if he had kids. He replied that those questions were too personal.
The employee looked at his boss as though drawing happy conclusions.
Then, in a fit of inspiration, it occurred to me to treat this big cheese the way people treat leading men in films when they act like jerks: in one swift, glorious movement, I opened your bottle and dumped the liquid right onto that character’s gleaming bald spot – no, son, of course I didn’t do that. Not that I didn’t long to, but my urgent thirst for revenge mattered much less to me than your thirst for water. 33
321.
‘What’s past is prologue.’ I don’t know if I agree with that character in The Tempest. Well, I guess I do. I rewrite that prologue, then, to the infectious beat of the rocking chair.
352.
You wake up on my chest and try to smooth my hair with both hands.
364.
A son and his father share the lounge chair and invent some less serious clouds.
365.
You cried for four seconds and got lost right away, with beautiful solemnity, in your mother’s eyes.
You were a ship at sea, and you recognized the approaching shore as a return.
I know people don’t remember their own first birthdays. But we will remember yours.
To look at you now is to realize, in astonished humility, that there was a time when we didn’t know how to walk, when we didn’t know how to talk.
To look at you now is to accept, sombrely, that there was a long time when you didn’t exist.
Your existence changes the place of the sacred. Your arrival forever changes the word courage, and the meanings of all the words.
JENNIFER ZAMBRA
If I had been a girl, my parents would have named me Jennifer Zambra. It was decided. That was practically the first thing I told your mother, flirting in a Prospect Heights diner. Actually, we started out talking about trees and migraines. And we mourned the death of Oliver Sacks as if he were a family member or a mutual friend.
Like shy ambassadors from exotic countries, or like team captains in the centre of the pitch, we exchanged books by Emmanuel Bove and Tamara Kamenszain. For the first few minutes we were fighting our nerves, so we pored over the menus passionately; we must have looked like we were searching for typos. And then we talked shit about other people’s confused love affairs, which were perhaps our own.
Until at last we looked straight into each other’s eyes without too much precaution. It was a noisy whole minute of old-fashioned heterosexual silence. Then the sudden confessions rolled in, and the satisfying lists of likes and dislikes. And those ambiguous phrases that sound so much like promises.
I don’t know where I got the idea to ask your mother what she would have been called if she’d been born a boy. There was some context, but I don’t remember what it was. It was a bad move, now that I think about it, maybe the worst. Luckily, your mum didn’t think it was such a weird question. I remember she unnecessarily smoothed her hair behind her ears, seeming to draw on a smile with the movement.
‘You first,’ she said wisely.
So I suddenly found myself talking about Jennifer 35Zambra. There’d been a time during my childhood when I had fuelled my resentment with thoughts of that name, inspired by who knows what famous actress, and which back then had seemed so foreign. My parents hadn’t given a thought to the fact that the name would have doomed me to endless ridicule.
But eventually I grew fond of the scene of my parents in a Villa Portales apartment, quickly seduced by the splendid tinkling of that fantastical name. Maybe my sister, who was two years old then, had even managed to utter the name of her hypothetical successor.
Last names are prose, first names are poetry. There are people who spend their whole lives reading the inescapable novel of their own surname. But first names contain latent whims, intentions, prejudices, possibilities, emotions. And they’re nearly always the only text that the mother and father write together.
And so, for their potential male child, my parents wrote a conventional poem, one that would neither shine nor grow dull in any anthology, while for their possible daughter they wrote a more daring one, groundbreaking and polemical. A name that toyed with boundaries.
In my adolescent years I used to think about Jennifer Zambra’s difficult or solitary or scandalous life. I even dreamed about her. I’d see her bouncing a ball off a wall in the playground of an empty school. Or bored to tears at Midnight Mass. Or hiding away from the world to triumphantly plait her stunning raven hair in solitude.
I spent hours deciding which of my buddies Jennifer Zambra would sleep with and which she would rather be just friends with. I even tried to fall doubly in love – in fantasy and nonfiction – with one of my classmates. And maybe I succeeded. 36
