Permafrost E-Book

Eva Baltasar

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

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Permafrost's no-bullshit lesbian narrator is an uninhibited lover, a no-hope employee, and a some-time suicidal student of her own dislocated self. As she tries to break out of the roles set for her by a controlling, overprotective mother, a relentlessly positive sister, and a society which imposes a gut-wrenching pressure to conform, she contemplates the so-called will to live when that life is given, rather than chosen. Attempting to bridge the gap between the perennially frozen reaches of her outer shell and the tender core of her being, watching her relationships with family fracture and her many lovers come and go, the protagonist's reservations about staying alive become ever more pressing. Passionate, urgent and breathtakingly forthright, this fiction debut from Catalan poet Eva Baltasar was a word-of-mouth hit in its own language and is a gift for readers in English.

Leseprobe

This edition published in 2021 by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Originally published in Catalan as Permagel by Club Editor in 2018. © Club Editor and Eva Baltasar, 2018 All rights reserved by and controlled through Club Editor. This edition c/o SalmaiaLit, Literary Agency. Translation copyright © Julia Sanches, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. The rights of Eva Baltasar to be identified as author of this work and of Julia Sanches to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9781911508755 eBook ISBN: 9781911508748

Editors: Ana Fletcher & Stefan Tobler; Copy-editor: Larissa Melo Pienkowski; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook by 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.

The translation of this book from Catalan has been partially funded by the Consortium of the Institut Ramon Llull and partially supported by Acción Cultural Española, AC/E.

Contents

PERMAFROSTA Translator’s Afterword

To poetry, for permitting it.

To be born is to be unhappy, he said, and as long as we live we reproduce this unhappiness.

Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

‌1

It’s nice, up here. Finally. That’s the thing about heights: a hundred meters of vertical glass. The air is air at a higher degree of purity and so also seems harder, at times almost solid. There is a hovering smell of metal. A layer of noise hangs down below, soot-heavy and latent, like a fine, crisp eye of oil, a sort of shiny, black gift. Not even a bird flies by. They’ve got their own strata too, between us and our—let’s say—gods. A livable void amid the top lines of a staff. Right now, I am and I am not. Maybe I’m just putting myself out there, declaring my presence, like a mildly annoying smudge on a lens, a dark cloud over this chill expanse. I take a breath and make it mine as it courses through my animate airways. Alive, I still give off a certain warmth and am probably oh-so-soft inside. On the outside, I’m softer than I might seem, as good as a pastry, a warm thing of varnished wax as alluring as an opening line. Every cell reproduces itself, independent of me, and in doing so reproduces me, fashioning me into a proper entity. If only all these microscopic parts of me stopped working, even for a second… Indivisible entities also deserve some time off, as do I, as do all the country’s geniuses. Working with my cells, I am forced to adapt to them, to be like them, a small, anonymous goldfish inside this lovely glass enclosure. Beautifully decorative. Some restaurants place these sorts of fish on top of every table, inside tiny fishbowls. They’re decorative, for sure. Soothing. They’re very much alive, and yet some people use their homes as ashtrays. The poor little creatures perish, poisoned by the toxic chemicals in cigarette butts. But that’s all they are, right? Ornaments. Frivolous lives.

The air is so pure! But not too humid, which is nice. Humidity has a nasty habit of penetrating the most vulnerable parts of our bodies. I can’t stand it. I can’t and don’t know how to live with humidity, which slips into unsuspected corners inside me like icy, fatty lava and occupies unknown spaces, making me painfully aware of them. Some body parts, like oversized furniture, are practically impossible to manage. Apparently, they’re not modular, and it would be too dangerous to remove them. Surely they must serve some purpose—someone must have stuck those pieces in there—but I just can’t cope with them and the only way to escape their influence is to ignore them. To walk down the hallway with my eyes shut and not smash into their massive heft. Walking with my eyes shut—how charming! I hadn’t thought about my eyes yet. Birds fly with their eyes open, and when they let themselves go, it’s on solid currents of air. Suspended, and segmented, like marionettes. They allow themselves to look around. But if something were to fall… when a chick falls from its nest, for example, does it fall with its eyes open? Do birds even have eyelids? Or do they have the tear ducts of a frail granny, the kind that leak nonstop? To be fair, we’re not talking about human eyelids. Maybe they’re more like Japanese screens or those retractable shades on airplane windows, and maybe they trigger them in lightning bursts, just as fast as us or even faster. Now I wonder whether I’ll open my eyes—or rather, if they’ll be opened. Mine won’t be just any fall. As in it won’t be accidental. There will be an intention, an intended resolve, a pre-written command. When the time comes, all I’ll have to do is execute it. Eyes are pioneers; they probe the world and then the body responds. What sense is there in preparing the body for death seconds before it arrives? Like love, death catches the body. So let it be caught unawares.

2

“When you grow up, you’ll understand,” Mom never tired of saying. I must not have grown enough. Even though I made a conscious effort to drink all those glasses of milk, glasses as tall and wide as an animal’s mouth, as big as my face, and that left a red tiara on my forehead where the rim of the glass had rested. They could hold so much milk that Mom always had to open another carton so she could fill the glass all the way up, practically to the brim. “Go on, pussycat, drink it all up,” she’d say. “Stick out your little tongue and lap it all up like a good pussycat.” Liters and liters of milk, and I was all white inside, coated with skins of milk inside, which clung like gooey, wet sheets to my walls and to the underside of my skin. Mom’s tanks of milk wiped me out, they made me less human, even less of a girl. It was like I was half-girl, half-milk-tank, a sort of saturated vat. Once I was done drinking, I never dared to move; I could feel the milk dancing around inside my belly. No, not dancing, but sloshing recklessly like a pail of water on a brief and frenzied journey, then rushing down like water through the neighbor’s bathroom pipes. Just like that, except inside me. I could feel the milk washing down what was left of my dinner, leaving everything with a fresh coat of paint—clean but gummy. The image was so striking that it forced me to stay very still, motionless, as my breath turned shallow. There was only one thing I could do to get through that time: read. I would sit in the only chair in my bedroom. My desk was pine with a white, childproof covering. “It’s for your homework,” Mom insisted once the carpenter was done assembling it. “No painting, no cutting, and don’t even think of using the box cutter. Where is it, anyway? Shouldn’t it be here? In the tin? With the scissors? Go find the box cutter and put it back where it belongs.” With the scissors. And I don’t understand it, I still don’t, it makes no sense.

I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home. Temporary—like any home, in fact, or like a body. I’m not on medication. Chemicals are bridles that restrict you and slow you to a harmless pace. Chemicals mean early salvation; they ward off sin, or maybe they just teach us to label as sinful the exercise of freedom attained in times of peace—before death, of course. Mom self-medicates, Dad self-medicates, my sister didn’t at first but now she does too, because she’s grown-up and understood. Self-medication is a permanent temporary solution, like the low-watt bulb hanging in the hall. Twenty years with a dimly lit hall—how little it takes to become used to seeing so little. “We had halogen bulbs installed in the whole apartment and we forgot the hall!” Laughter. “And the best part is we didn’t even realize until yesterday!” Twenty years had gone by. Twenty years of putting on lipstick three times a day, a hairbreadth away from the mirror, twenty years of fumbling blindly for the keys. I used to think it was normal—when you’re a kid, your home life determines what’s normal. And this normalcy shapes you. You grow up sheltered inside its patterns and take on its body, as does your brain, keen and malleable as clay. And then—though it takes years—the blindness cracks open under the force of a hammer striking over and over, but by then you’re trapped inside the tight nucleus that has already taken 90 percent of all that was good in you to put some holes in. Get out now, if you can! And be happy while you’re at it, like everybody else. Medication: quite the antidote. Not for me, though—best to keep moving wildly to the edge, and then decide. After a while, you’ll find that the edge gives you room to live, vertical as ever, brushing up against the void. Not only can you live on it, but there are even different ways of growing there. If surviving is what it’s all about, maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely. Now, on this edge, I feel alive, more alive than ever.

3

Safety precautions all over the place. More than people. More than rats. Precautions enacted without rhyme or reason. Safety precautions in the form of guardrails, bulletproof windows, no-trespassing signs, seat belts, helmets, alarm buttons, and blockades. Precautions that are active or passive, whatever. Knee pads, for example, or foam floor tiles, zippers, condoms, riot police, and football. Unemployment benefits and medication. Precautions that are subtle or obvious. Electromagnetic brakes, prisons, banners, social integration initiatives, scaffolding, valves, fireproof cladding, harnesses, and carabiners. And again, medication, hard hats, 2% milk. Medication, medication, and medication. A successful suicide, these days, is heroic. The world is full of unscrupulous people certified in first aid; they’re everywhere, gray and unassuming like female pigeons but aggressive like mothers. They foil death with cardiac massages and careful Heimlich maneuvers. They’re a pack of thieves. You can’t even ram an olive pit down the wrong tube without them forcing you to spit it out, even if they break ribs or puncture lungs in the process. And there you are, covered in dry-martini puke, the olive pit hurled like a trophy at a corner of the room. I wouldn’t mind dying in a corner. It should be possible to rent corners for dying in peace, without interference or self-activated oxygen tanks dropping down on you at the very last moment, corners where safety precautions guarantee—where they assure you—a proper death.

In reality, safety precautions are defenses against the outside world, the Supreme Torturer. The world unloads its toxicity into my core daily and assimilates me with its infiltration. But I can’t allow it, I won’t let myself partake. Lousy medication. Red and yellow pills lure me like flowers, a nectar for a bad life, a nourishing concoction. Who am I to refuse? My sister claims she is happy. Happy! That word had been gathering moss by the time I was born. When my sister says the word “happy”—“I’m very happy,” she says—she bares her teeth. Her teeth gawk at me like eyes, yellowish like the whites of old people’s eyes. And mind you, she quit smoking and drinking coffee before she hit her twenties. But rooibos and yoga are also addictive—they’re acidifying, aging, and addictive. Healthy things kill you much more slowly. They begin by convincing you of their love and making you bow to their withering intensity. For decades, we’re forced into a state of colorlessness, and in one of these decades we’re inclined to reproduce. A stroke of genius! This reckless imposition of childhood can only be a side effect of medication. To enter life, you have to be as soft as stuffing, every new child swaddled from head to toe in the silk of fear—a castrating mother by nature, an unconditional cheerleader. The power of fear is in the sum of every small dream reduced to dust. Let’s snort it, then—looks like that’s the only way left to live. To conceal nudity by shutting it away in the shower, and peace at last. God bless sedation.

4

Railway tracks at an unmonitored location. Trains still bear witness to a certain metaphysics of habit—an observation that has nothing to do with schedules. Everything needs explaining. I only understood this on the day of my appointment at the unmonitored location. It was a thoroughly predictable straight line. Anybody else might have preferred a curve, but an incoming curve attracts too much attention—there’s a subtle slowdown, an instant in which the body shifts its weight from one foot to the other, or perhaps gulps down saliva in an unusually conscious act. This straight line is perfect, and I am camouflaged by my surroundings. Mediterranean aridity mottled with sickly yet unyielding shrubs. The sound of something approaching, displacing cubic tons of suspended particles. I take a step forward. I sense the distantly booming mass, vibrations that could be insects and yet aren’t, because insects are more elegantly metallic. The tracks shudder like rattlesnakes, and I take another step forward. My body is a parabola hungering for fear. The heart is large and conquers the mind. The train is now pure, barking mercury, a surging thing, a name. It’s here now. It has reached me, its red tape, its finish line. No, not today. This train’s too long, far too long, and it pitches my body violently backward. I decide not to yield. Like a shrub, I think. Deep roots support moments of courage such as this one. Still, the train is endless. There is too much steel for too long and maybe the body deserves a chance to speak after all—that thing about last words. Maybe I should keep my name, maybe I should die a conventional death with easily identifiable spoils and nice remains. The truth is, I never pictured myself caring about these sorts of details. I find myself caught up in a surprising metaphysics. If I were a believer, I might believe someone wanted me to reconsider things. How does it go again? “Thank God I’m an atheist.”

5

It’s a quarter past four in the morning and somebody has dialed my number. I’m not asleep, but my landline’s disconnected and my cell phone is off. So what? It’s how I stay human. And again at half past seven, ten to eight, eight to eight, and eight on the dot, followed by more failed attempts up until ten o’clock—all of it recorded in voice messages that I delete without listening to them. No doubt a consequence of ditching the meds. Considering I have no real reason to cause alarm, at ten I hook up both phones and answer the call. I activate chummy-voice mode. My sister horns in: “I’m pregnant again!” I dedicate my first thought to a forgotten mountain of spare tires. This news might be the incentive I need to clear out once and for fucking all. My second thought gets ready to endlessly dissect my sister’s tone—the poor thing is wingless and naive and has no choice but to run, hefting her barefoot words. Her name is Cristina, and I still can’t tell if Cristina is happy or upset. “Come again? I can’t hear you.” I ask questions and tell lies, tell lies and ask questions: that’s how I roll. She says, without missing a beat: “I’m pregnant again! Two months in.” She’s happy—of course she’s happy—and I’m a fool. “I’m so happy! We’ve been trying for ages.” I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to bash in my skull with the phone. A terrible idea—phones are partial to murder by tumor, to long-distance deaths. “Congratulations,” I say. “Are you happy?” she asks. I lie with an emphatic yes, so happy. “You’re going to be an auntie again!” she exclaims. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to detect a single emotion capable of shaking loose my interior bedrock of family relations. “That’s great,” I say. Then I talk. I rattle on for a minute straight, hoping to shortcut any attempts to plumb my emotional compost pile. “That’s great really great oh my god it’s so amazing to be an aunt twice over it’s like being a full-fledged aunt like going from wearing a monocle to wearing a pair of glasses or from riding a tricycle to riding a bicycle I finally feel like I’ve got my life as an auntie under control hell you left me hanging for so long but suddenly here it is this little person who’s decided to charge right into the wonderful business of living and it couldn’t have hoped for better parents parents with stable jobs and a gorgeous house with a bedroom just for her or for him because of course two months in you don’t have any way of knowing yet whether it’ll be a boy or a girl though I don’t actually know why I’m talking about it in the future since it’s already a boy or a girl it already exists inside your belly oh it must be amazing to be pregnant and feel life growing inside you I’m sure this pregnancy will be as terrific as the first one and that everything will be great just great and it’s so sweet of you to share this news with me you’ve made my morning this is the kind of news that makes a person feel like it’s all worth it and besides when the family gets together for Christmas there won’t be thirteen of us anymore which people say is bad luck but one more little girl or boy and that’s just terrific.” A colossal effort that leaves me dead tired. Seriously, this is the sort of behavior that drives people to medicate.

6

“Do you think I should marry him?” My aunt, some fifteen years ago. “It’s just that sometimes on the metro, I can’t help staring at other women’s breasts. It’s like they’ve been put there for me to stare at. And I wonder whether, maybe, before tying the knot, I should try and—” I’d always known the whole aunt thing didn’t suit her. I let it slide, assuming she’d only asked because she knew I was gay. My mom still didn’t know, but my aunt did. It had been six months since she’d let me crash at her bachelorette pad near my university. This saved me a three-hour daily commute, time I instead spent reading and meeting other lesbians. “I don’t know,” I began. Of course you shouldn’t marry a dude when you’d just as well bury your face in some random woman’s tits! “Maybe you should give it a shot. You know, just to make sure.” “Maybe you’re right. Lesbians are so ugly, though!” Thanks very much. She never caught on. There’s nothing more blinding than blood. As expected, she decided it would be more sensible not