{"id":37036,"date":"2024-09-23T11:23:16","date_gmt":"2024-09-23T17:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2024\/09\/fog-at-noon-translated-by-andrea-rosenberg\/"},"modified":"2024-09-25T22:32:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T04:32:17","slug":"fog-at-noon-translated-by-andrea-rosenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2024\/09\/fog-at-noon-translated-by-andrea-rosenberg\/","title":{"rendered":"Fog at Noon, translated by Andrea Rosenberg"},"content":{"rendered":"

What happens when a person goes missing? Told from alternating perspectives, <\/span>Fog at Noon<\/span><\/i> offers readers the chance to decipher the story of Julia. A conceited \u201cninny,\u201d somewhat gifted poet, ravishing temptress, and thorny friend, Julia shapeshifts in the blinding light of conflicting narrative. Her raconteurs? A frequently fishy chorus of acquaintances, lovers, sisters-in-law, and friends. And from behind the veil, Julia speaks for herself.<\/span>Tom\u00e1s Gonz\u00e1lez writes of the passionate origins of an affair and its precipitous conclusion, of untraceable debts and the liminal realms between the living and the dead, of New York in a blizzard and the Colombian mountain chains cloaked in fog. Andrea Rosenberg\u2019s translation gleams in every line.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ra\u00fal<\/b><\/p>\n

The mountain where Ra\u00fal\u2019s and Julia\u2019s ranches are located is ever-changing. The climate is chilly rather than mild, and it\u2019s perpetually damp. Throughout the day, periods of rain, fog, and sun follow one after the other. Julia bought hers a long time ago, drawn by the area\u2019s lush vegetation, she said, and by the beauty of those rains and suns. He bought his just four years back, drawn by her. They got married in a picturesque colonial town three hours from Bogot\u00e1, and after two and a half years Julia left him, married another man in that same town some time later, and, seven months ago now, disappeared without a trace.<\/span><\/p>\n

The vegetation is lush there because water abounds. Those who warn of a desertifying world have never visited those parts. There, the world will end in water. It falls everywhere, wells up everywhere, floats. Washed-out roads and mudslides are the biggest concern. Ra\u00fal\u2019s third of a hectare contains three springs; a stream known as El Raizal, which rushes noisily past about ten meters from the house; and, some thousand meters away, tumbling over large boulders down the mountainside, the Lapas River, which has been torrential of late. Winter\u2014the rainy season\u2014is hard going everywhere, but especially in this region, which is already so wet. Over the past three months, there\u2019s been as much rain here as usually falls in an entire year.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sun, not so much.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sitting out on the porch, Ra\u00fal is listening to the stream and the downpour and the river all in a chorus. His chair is made of cowhide with a very straight back. To avoid the tedious labor of building the wrap-around porch out of bamboo, he instead has installed a railing made of macana palm wood and a ceiling paneled with interlaced bamboo, each stem two centimeters in diameter. Ra\u00fal likes what he does. He never studied architecture; he learned from foremen and books and by keeping his eyes open. He graduated with an engineering degree a million years ago, worked in the field for two years, and got bored. He learned to work with bamboo and knows how to use it in his constructions without ruining the view. <\/span>Bambusa guadua<\/span><\/i>. Books about his work are published in sumptuous coffee-table editions, with spectacular photos and drab texts that nobody reads. Julia wrote four poems for one of them, and Ra\u00fal found them just as drab as the texts but told her he liked them. And since she was fairly renowned herself, the editors agreed to include them in the volume\u2014or maybe they actually liked them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Plenty of people admired her poems. The intellectuals who awarded her the occasional prize deemed them good, of course. Sometimes Ra\u00fal goes back and rereads them, trying to understand what everybody saw in them, but Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s gypsy ballads are more his speed, and C\u00e9sar Vallejo\u2019s poems, especially the two or three you can actually make any sense of. He hasn\u2019t read much poetry beyond that and doesn\u2019t consider himself qualified to pass judgments on the subject. When he told Julia how he felt about Garc\u00eda Lorca, she\u2019d said, \u201cOnly a shit-for-brains could find <\/span>Poet in New York<\/span><\/i> dull,\u201d and Ra\u00fal went ballistic. Afterward, Julia was always talking about his rages this and his rages that. She came to see him as an angry man.<\/span><\/p>\n

As far as money goes, Ra\u00fal has neither too much nor too little, and he isn\u2019t stingy when it comes to investing in his property, which he keeps meticulously maintained. The pickup he uses to haul supplies isn\u2019t new, but it runs well. He doesn\u2019t regret selling the ranch he used to own near Cucunun\u00e1, which was lovely but very dry, to buy this one. He\u2019s rented out the Bogot\u00e1 apartment where he lived and worked for so long, and that serves as another source of income. He\u2019d stopped using it after a while, preferring to stay \u201choled up on his ranch,\u201d as his friends say and as Julia used to say, accusing him of being a recluse. If Ra\u00fal ever went to Bogot\u00e1, it was for her and her alone. Recluses spend their lives within the hundred-square-meter confines of an apartment, Ra\u00fal thinks, or the fifty square centimeters of a car seat, yet it\u2019s him, the one who spends much of his day with no roof but clouds above his head, who\u2019s supposedly the shut-in. His business has one full-time employee, him, and a manager, him. He designed the logo\u2014bamboo sprouting out of the soil like a huge asparagus\u2014and painted it himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

People invite him to come more than he wants to go, ringing him from all over the country. He also gives lectures on bamboo, and he\u2019s even traveled to Japan. He prefers designing whole houses rather than specific elements, though that has its charms too\u2014ceilings, for example, almost always with a combination of Guadua bamboo and reeds, which look great together if you know what you\u2019re doing. He charges a bundle to ensure that people don\u2019t bother him much. He prefers blue-leafed reeds, which have thicker, shinier stems than regular reeds, which are slender with a strawlike texture that works well in folding screens and room dividers. He also uses papyrus, rushes, and palm fronds. When he gets to thinking about rushes and bamboos and reeds, the hours fly by as he contemplates possible combinations of textures and colors. Colombia is a paradise in terms of materials. Right by the turnoff to Bogot\u00e1, there\u2019s a group of artisans who weave dried banana bark to make wicker furniture. The pieces are a little rustic, but the texture has its appeal. Ra\u00fal is planning to go by the workshop this week to speak with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was this infatuation with his work\u2014\u201cinfatuation\u201d was his sister Raquel\u2019s term\u2014that saved him when Julia left him. Raquel hated her so much by the end! Ra\u00fal is still her baby brother, even though he\u2019s in his fifties and she\u2019s only got two years on him. If it hadn\u2019t been for his work, Ra\u00fal would have wasted away, or gone mad. He looked a fright.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Julia<\/b><\/p>\n

I married five times, and every time I came out of it free and independent and unburdened by a husband complicating my life. No, six. I was never anybody\u2019s shadow. The locals used to say that when I got tired of my husbands, I threw them in the lake with rocks tied to their feet\u2014how ironic\u2014or buried them in the coffee grove, or went out and sold them. Well, that\u2019s what they said about the first four, who, unlike Ra\u00fal, went away and never came back. Jorge, the father of my two girls, died of leukemia, and Marcelo bled out in the hands of negligent paramedics after a car accident. I used to talk to the other two on the phone from time to time, or meet up for coffee in Bogot\u00e1 if I happened to run into them. If a while went by without hearing from them, I\u2019d call to find out how they were doing. But they couldn\u2019t claim I\u2019d buried Ra\u00fal in the coffee grove because they used to see him on his ranch, which became increasingly overgrown\u2014I obviously hadn\u2019t sold him off yet, ha. He put all his energy into his bamboo and his other obsessions, and grew more retiring and antisocial than ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since I got a late start in my writing career\u2014after I split up with my first husband\u2014I had to give it my all, and I had no patience for people like Ra\u00fal, who demand too much attention with their quirks and obsessions. I love the beauty of simplicity. People probably say I was intolerant, but nothing could be further from the truth. I was more tolerant with him than with any of the others, because Ra\u00fal is an extraordinary person\u2014I\u2019m the first to acknowledge it\u2014an artist in his own way, and I was actually really worried when I broke things off with him because I knew how much he loved me and I wasn\u2019t sure he could bear it. When I told him we needed to end it, that my love for him had died, I wrote a poem on my blog where I said that a person isn\u2019t in command of their own heart and that emotions should flow like rainwater, never standing stagnant. I wept as I had few times before. The poem was included in an anthology of Latin American women poets published in Buenos Aires at the end of that year. People appreciated it for the depth of its sensitivity and for my boldness in expressing what I was experiencing, without pussyfooting or hypocrisy. My poems touched my readers\u2019 souls. I was uncensored. People who read or heard them were moved; they felt something of themselves or of the world through my words, and something magical happened. Something unpredictable and powerful.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rain is so beautiful! It was incredible the way it hammered down on everything. I wrote a poem about precisely that, and there was this metaphor about it drumming on the banana leaves on Ra\u00fal\u2019s ranch and about the water flowing to join the larger current of the Lapas River, which never ever stopped noisily rushing. \u201cHey, where\u2019s the off switch for that thing so we can get some sleep?\u201d Humberto Fajardo asked me the first time he visited. The guy was a real jokester\u2014who would have guessed he\u2019d turn out to be so violent? And a total city slicker. He was astonished to see so much water everywhere, like in that poem I wrote about trees, how they look like jellyfish. How from my terrace, the mountains looked like the sea. They were the sea. Humberto liked my poems a lot, even if he didn\u2019t really understand them, because the waters I plied were deep and elemental. Above all, I am a lyrical person, a poet. He\u2019s into marketing\u2014business, in other words\u2014and extreme sports. This place where I am now is like a hammock. So much peace. Lovely.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ra\u00fal<\/b><\/p>\n

Ra\u00fal\u2019s bamboo plants are for looking at\u2014he never cuts them. At a lumberyard in Bogot\u00e1 he buys bamboo from Quind\u00edo, already treated for termites, the Castilla biotype, larger in diameter than the varieties that grow in this region. He built columns using the fattest ones, which are nearly thirty centimeters in diameter and strong enough to hold up the Chrysler Building. He also buys reeds and rushes so he doesn\u2019t have to harvest his own. He created a grove of bamboo with a clearing in the middle where he placed two large, lichen-covered boulders that had to be brought in with a backhoe; they later became overgrown with ferns, some of them tiny and absolutely perfect. When it comes to ferns, they\u2019re either perfect or absolutely perfect. Regular bamboo forests are kind of pansy compared to the local ones, Ra\u00fal thinks. Though he does like the carpet of leaves they form. \u201cMore coals for Newcastle, eh, Don Ra\u00fal?\u201d the truck drivers tease when they show up to deliver supplies.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s stopped raining. When that happens the fog creeps in, as it\u2019s doing now, and, without asking permission, slips into the house and leaves the furniture dripping. Or the sun comes out. Or there\u2019s fog and rain on one part of the mountain and sunshine and rain on another.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ra\u00fal works because he enjoys it. True wealth, he thinks, is not needing much. Julia always insinuated that was false modesty on his part, a clich\u00e9, only a pretense of humility or even saintliness\u2014in other words, hypocrisy. Ra\u00fal recalls the emerald dealer who offered him a ton of money to design him a house in the village of Pacho, near the Muzo mines. He was short and stout, very affable, and he had no neck. \u201cEverything, absolutely everything of bamboo,\u201d the emerald dealer effused. Floors, walls, doors, stairs, railings, balconies, downspouts, gutters all made of bamboo. The stove and toilet would be the only things made of another material\u2014though, with some effort, those could be bamboo too. The whole idea was a nightmare, so Ra\u00fal resisted any temptation to go after the money and turned down the job. The man was nice about it. He loved bamboo even more than Ra\u00fal did.<\/span><\/p>\n

They offer him what he doesn\u2019t want to build; they tear down what he has built. He\u2019d been so fond of the little chapel he erected in a town in Caldas, the most beautiful thing he\u2019d ever made. Seeking to finally purge his grief over Julia, he\u2019d poured his soul into it. Yes, they\u2019d warned him the chapel would be temporary while the real church was being built, but a person doesn\u2019t build things thinking they\u2019re going to be torn down, so he hadn\u2019t asked what they meant by temporary. Bamboo arches and semiarches, walls made of mud and rush mats, sometimes exposed, sometimes plastered with mud and horse dung and painted ochre and colonial red. Palm thatch roof. The pulpit was made of wattle and daub, also painted colonial red, and above it Ra\u00fal placed a simple cross made of macana palm wood, thick and practically black. Great richness in the parts and simplicity in the whole. You might almost think Ra\u00fal believed in God. Beautiful. Then the first thing a new parish priest did was tear it down, because we are not ants, he said, and should not build the house of the Lord out of manure and garbage.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Andrea Rosenberg<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fog at Noon<\/span><\/i> is out now from <\/span>Archipelago Books<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/h6>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCOMPRA LOS LIBROS DESTACADOS EN ESTE N\u00daMERO EN NUESTRA P\u00c1GINA DE BOOKSHOP<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

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