translation "El Hijo"

It is a powerful summer day in Misiones with all the sun, heat, and calm the season can offer. The wilderness, fully open, feels satisfied with itself.

Like the sun, the heat, and the calm of the environment, the father also opens his heart to the wilderness.

"Be careful, chiquito," he says to his son, abbreviating in this sentence all his observations, which his son understands perfectly.

"Yes, father," the child responds, while reaching for his shotgun and slipping his cartridges into the pocket of his shirt, which he closes carefully.

"Return at lunchtime," says the father, still observing.

"Yes, father," repeats the boy.

He balances the shotgun on his hand, smiles at his father, kisses him on the head and leaves.

His father follows him with his eyes for a while and then returns to his task of the day, happy with the happiness of his little one.

He knows that his son, educated from his tender infancy in the habit and precaution of danger, can manage a cannon and hunt anything; it doesn't matter what it is. Even though he is very tall for his age, he is only thirteen years old. And it would seem like he is younger, judging by the purity of his blue eyes, still fresh with childlike surprise.

It isn't necessary for the father to raise his eyes from his work to follow the path of his son with his mind: he has crossed the red trail and walks directly to the jungle across the clearing in the forest.

To hunt in the jungle - to hunt furred game - requires more patience than what the son has. After crossing the jungle's island, his son will go around the cactus boundary and to the valley in search of doves, toucans, or perhaps a pair of herons, like the ones his friend Juan had discovered some days ago.

Alone now, the father smiles at the memory of the hunting passion of the two children. They sometimes hunt a raven, a quetzal, even, and return triumphant, Juan to his ranch with the nine millimeter rifle that he had given him, and his son to the plateau with the great Saint-Etienne shotgun, of caliber 16, quadruple lock and white gunpowder.

He was the same. At thirteen years he would have given his life to possess a shotgun. His son, at that age, possesses one now; - and the father smiles.

It isn't easy, however, for a widowed father, without other faith nor hope invested in the life of his son, to educate him like he has done, free in will, sure of the small feet and hands he has had since four years of age, conscious of the immensity of certain dangers and the weakness of his own strengths.

This father had to fight strongly against what he considered his egoism. It is so easy for a small child to miscalculate, set a foot into the emptiness, and result in the loss of a son!

Danger is always present for a man no matter his age; but the threat diminishes if, from early on, he is accustomed to his own strengths.

In this way, the father has educated his son. And to succeed, he had to resist not only his heart, but also his mental torments; because this father, of weak stomach and weak eyes, suffers, starting from some time ago, hallucinations.

He has seen, concrete in his sickness' illusions, memories of a happiness that should not spring anymore from the nothingness in which it has isolated itself. The image of his own son has not escaped this torment. He has seen him one time, rolling, covered in blood, when his son was struck by a bullet in the workshop because he smoothed the buckle of his hunting belt.

Horrible things... But today, with the shining and vivid summer day, the father, whose love for his son knows no bounds, feels happy, tranquil, and sure of the future.

At that instant, not very far away, sounds a gunshot.

"The Saint-Etienne . . ." muses the father at recognizing the detonation. "At least two doves in the jungle..."

Without paying more attention to this insignificant event, the man abstracts himself anew into his chore.

The sun, already very high, continues ascending. Wherever it wants to look - the rocks, the earth, the trees, - the air, pulsing as if in an oven, vibrates with heat. A profound buzz that fills the entire being and infuses the environment as far as the eye can see concentrates all tropical life on this hour.

The father takes a quick look at his wrist: 12 o'clock. And he lifts his eyes to the jungle.

His son should already be back. In the mutual trust that they have with each other - the father of gray hair and the child of thirteen years, - they never trick one another. When his son responds: "Yes, father," he will do as he says. He said that he would return before twelve o'clock, and his father smiled at seeing him leave.

And he hasn't returned.

The man turns to his work, exerting great effort in concentrating on his chore. It is so easy, so easy to lose your notion of time in the jungle, and to sit for awhile on the ground while you rest immobile...

Suddenly, the midday light, the tropical buzz, and the father's heart stop at what his mind had just touched upon: his son resting immobile...

Time has passed; it is 12:30. The father leaves his workshop, and supporting his hand on the mechanic bench, the memory of the crash of the bullet surfaces from his inner recollections, and instantly, for the first time in three consecutive hours, he realizes that after the boom of the Saint-Etienne, he has heard nothing more. His son has not returned, and the wilderness is waiting at the border of the forest, waiting for him...

Oh! A temperate character and a blind confidence in his son's education aren't enough to escape the specter of fatality that his father, of ailing vision, sees rising from the line of the jungle. Distraction, forgetfulness, fortuitous delay: none of these insignificant motives that could slow the arrival of his son succeed in entering the father's thoughts.

One shot, only one shot has sounded, and it has done much. After it the father has not heard a sound, hasn't seen a bird, and one sole person has not crossed the clearing to announce that upon crossing a wire, a great calamity...

Head bare and without an axe, the father goes. He rushes to the clearing in the forest, enters the jungle, skirts the line of cacti without seeing a single sign of his son.

But the wilderness continues endlessly. And after the father has traveled to the well-known hunting trails and has explored the valley in vain, he perceives the dreaded assurance that, with each step he puts forward, he brings, fatal and inexorable, the cadaver of his son.

There is no reproach, lamentably. Only the cold reality, terrible and consuming: His son has died upon crossing a...

But where, and in which part! There are so many wires there, and the jungle is so, so unclean! ...Oh, so dirty! ...It is such a small act, that he is not careful when crossing the threads with a shotgun in his hand...

The father suffocates a shout. He has seen rising into the air...Oh, it is not his son, no!... And he turns to the other side, and to the other and to the other...

Nothing can compare with the color of the complexion and anguish in his eyes. The man still has not called to his son. Even though his heart clamors for him to shout, his mouth continues to be mute. He knows well that the sole act of pronouncing the name, of calling to his son in a loud voice, will be the confession of a death...

"Chiquito!" suddenly escapes from him. And if the voice of a man of character is capable of crying, then mercifully cover your ears against the piercing anguish that resonates in that voice.

No one and nothing has responded. By the red light of the sun, grown older by ten years, the father goes looking for his son, who has just died.

"Son of mine!... Chiquito mío!..." he calls in a small voice that echoes from his core.

Already before, in plenty of happiness and peace, this father has suffered the hallucination of his son, rolling, with his forehead split open by a chromium-nickel bullet. Now, in each dark corner of the forest he sees the brilliant reflections of wire; and at the foot of a post, with a discharged shotgun at his side, he sees his...

"Chiquito!... My son!..."

The strength that can enter a poor hallucinating father at the worst nightmare also has a limit. And we feel that his hallucinations escape when he suddenly sees them flowing into a side path towards his son.

For a boy thirteen years old, it is enough to see, from fifty meters away, the expression of his father without an axe inside the jungle, quickening his pace with wet eyes.

"Chiquito..." murmurs the man. And, exhausted, he lets himself fall seated in the white sand and gathers his son's legs into his arms.

The child, embraced as such, remains standing, and upon understanding the pain in his father, he caresses the bowed head slowly:

"Poor papa..."

In the end, time has passed. It is already three o'clock. Together, now, the father and the son begin their return to the house.

"Why didn't you look at the sun to figure out the time?..." murmurs the first.

"I did, father... But when I started to return home I saw Juan's herons and I followed them..."

"What you put me through, chiquito!..."

"Papi..." the boy also murmurs.

After a long silence:

"And the herons, did you kill them?" asks the father.

"No..."

An unimportant detail, after everything. Under the sky and the hot air, the soft light in the clearing of the forest, the man returns to the house with his son, whose shoulders, almost as tall as his, carry the happy arm of his father. He returns drenched in sweat, and even though his body and his soul cry out in sorrow, he smiles of happiness...

--------

He smiles of a hallucinating happiness... Well the father goes alone. He found no one, and his arm is supported by emptiness. Because behind him, at the foot of the post and with legs up high, tangled in barbed wire, his beloved son lies before the sun, dead since ten in the morning.

translation "el leve pedro" (somewhat trippy, tried to fix)

For two months he came close to death. The doctor grumbled Pedro's disease was new, there was no way to treat it, he did not know what to do ... Luckily the patient, got better on his own. He had not lost his sense of humor, his quiet provincial calm. But he was just too skinny. But when he wake up after several weeks of convalescence he felt weightless.

     "Listen," said his wife, "I feel good but I do not know! My body seems... absent. It is like my flesh is coming off leaving the naked soul.

     "Languor" replied his wife.

     "Maybe."

He continued recovering. And walked around the house, tended to the hunger of the chickens and pigs, gave a coat of green paint to the hen house and felt animated enough to chop firewood and take it to the storehouse.

As the days went by, Pedro's innards lost density. Something very strange was going to him, undermining and draining his body. He felt a feeling of a huge lack of gravity. Weightless like a spark, a bubble and a globe. He could cleanly jump the little gate, climb the stairs five by five, take the highest apple from the tree.

"You've improved so much," observed his wife, "it seems you are like a boy acrobat."

One morning Pedro was frightened. Until then he had worried about his agility, but it all happened as God intended.  It was extraordinary, but not miraculous. The miracle came that morning.

Early, he went to the pasture. He advanced content because he knew that in no time at all he would be at the barn. He rolled up his sleeves, set up a tree trunk, took the ax and struck the first blow. Then propelled by the momentum of his own swing, Pedro took off.

Axe still in hand, he stayed suspended at the ceiling height, and then slowly lowered, falling like a thistle or a soft piece of paper.

His wife came to the rescue when Pedro had descended, and with an expression of death, trembling, grabbed the trunk of a tree.

- Hebe! I nearly fell into the sky!

"Nonsense. You can not fall into the sky. No one falls into the sky. What happened?

Pedro explained the occurrence to his wife and she, not surprisingly, agreed:

"You happen to be made an acrobat. Have I not warned you. When you least expect you will fall and break your neck in one of your tricks.

- No, no! 'Said Pedro. Now it's different. I slipped. Heaven is a precipice, Hebe.

(Ok I'm bored figure the rest of los errores out yourself they're funny)

Pedro let go of the trunk that anchored but clung tightly to his wife. So once again embraced back to home.

- Man! "Said Hebe, she felt her husband's body stuck to her like a strangely young and wild animal, eager to escape. Man, stop struggling, you're dragging me.  

- Did you see, you've seen? Something horrible is threatening me, Hebe. One twist, and I begin the ascent.

That afternoon, Peter, who was lounging on the patio reading the newspaper stories, laughed convulsively, and motor propulsion that was rising like a merry Ludion as a diver removed the soles. The laughter changed into terror and Hebe went again to the voices of her husband. He managed to grab his pants and pulled him to the ground. There was no doubt. Hebe filled his pockets with big nuts, lead pipes and stones, and these weights for the time gave his body strong enough to dam the gallery and tiptoe down the stairs from his room. The challenge was undressing. When Hebe removed the iron and lead, Pedro, floating on the sheets, was intertwined with the bars of the bed and said:

- Care, Hebe! Let's do it slowly because I do not sleep on the roof.

"Tomorrow we will call the doctor.

"If I sit still I get nothing happens. Only when I do I toss Aeronaut.

With a thousand precautions could sleep and feel safe.

- Do you want to upload?

-No. I'm fine.

It said good night and turned off the light Hebe.

The next day when Hebe eyes off seeing Peter sleeping like a saint, with his face close to the ceiling.

Looked like a balloon escaped from the hands of a child.

- Pedro, Pedro! He cried in terror.

Pedro finally woke up sore from squeezing for several hours against the ceiling. What horror!He tried to jump backwards, falling up, climb down. But the roof was sucked and sucked the ground Hebe.

"You'll have to tie one leg and tie the closet until you call the doctor and see what happens.

Hebe looked for a rope and a ladder, tied a foot to her husband and began to pull all the encouragement. The body attached to the ceiling was removed as a slow blimp.

Landing.

In that slipped through the door a air correntón tilted slightly embodiment of Peter and, like a pen, blew through the open window. It happened in a second. Hebe screamed and he vanished rope, rose in the air of innocence in the morning, rose in gentle swaying like a runaway balloon color on a holiday, gone forever, traveling to infinity. There was a point and then nothing.

Translation "de barro estamos hechos"

For the full translation of "de barro estamos hechos" go to page 190 in the link below.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Xofi-Hnw-wAC&lpg=PA190&dq=of%20clay%20are%20we%20made%20isabel%20allende&pg=PA194#v=onepage&q&f=false

Translation El ahogado más hermoso del mundo

The first children who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the sea let themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or masts and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed up on the beach, they removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles, and the remains of fish and flotsam, and only then did they see that it was a drowned man. 



They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm in the village. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed that he weighed more than any dead man they had ever known, almost as much as a horse, and they said to each other that maybe he'd been floating too long and the water had got into his bones. When they laid him on the floor they said he'd been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in the house, but they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men. He had the smell of the sea about him and only his shape gave one to suppose that it was the corpse of a human being, because the skin was covered with a crust of mud and scales. 



They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desertlike cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there. 



That night they did not go out to work at sea. While the men went to find out if anyone was missing in neighboring villages, the women stayed behind to care for the drowned man. They took the mud off with grass swabs, they removed the underwater stones entangled in his hair, and they scraped the crust off with tools used for scaling fish. As they were doing that they noticed that the vegetation on him came from faraway oceans and deep water and that his clothes were in tatters, as if he had sailed through labyrinths of coral. They noticed too that he bore his death with pride, for he did not have the lonely look of other drowned men who came out of the sea or that haggard, needy look of men who drowned in rivers. But only when they finished cleaning him off did they become aware of the kind of man he was and it left them breathless. Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination. 



They could not find a bed in the village large enough to lay him on nor was there a table solid enough to use for his wake. The tallest men's holiday pants would not fit him, nor the fattest ones' Sunday shirts, nor the shoes of the one with the biggest feet. Fascinated by his huge size and his beauty, the women then decided to make him some pants from a large piece of sail and a shirt from some bridal linen so that he could continue through his death with dignity. As they sewed, sitting in a circle and gazing at the corpse between stitches, it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless as on that night and they supposed that the change had something to do with the dead man. They thought that if that magnificent man had lived in the village, his house would have had the widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his bedstead would have been made from a midship frame held together by iron bolts, and his wife would have been the happiest woman. They thought that he would have had so much authority that he could have drawn fish out of the sea simply by calling their names and that he would have put so much work into his land that springs would have burst forth from among the rocks so that he would have been able to plant flowers on the cliffs. They secretly compared hom to their own men, thinking that for all their lives theirs were incapable of doing what he could do in one night, and they ended up dismissing them deep in their hearts as the weakest, meanest and most useless creatures on earth. They were wandering through that maze of fantasy when the oldest woman, who as the oldest had looked upon the drowned man with more compassion than passion, sighed:


'He has the face of someone called Esteban.' 


It was true. Most of them had only to take another look at him to see that he could not have any other name. The more stubborn among them, who were the youngest, still lived for a few hours with the illusion that when they put his clothes on and he lay among the flowers in patent leather shoes his name might be Lautaro. But it was a vain illusion. There had not been enough canvas, the poorly cut and worse sewn pants were too tight, and the hidden strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt. After midnight the whistling of the wind died down and the sea fell into its Wednesday drowsiness. The silence put an end to any last doubts: he was Esteban. The women who had dressed him, who had combed his hair, had cut his nails and shaved him were unable to hold back a shudder of pity when they had to resign themselves to his being dragged along the ground. It was then that they understood how unhappy he must have been with that huge body since it bothered him even after death. They could see him in life, condemned to going through doors sideways, cracking his head on crossbeams, remaining on his feet during visits, not knowing what to do with his soft, pink, sea lion hands while the lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and begged him, frightened to death, sit here, Esteban, please, and he, leaning against the wall, smiling, don't bother, ma'am, I'm fine where I am, his heels raw and his back roasted from having done the same thing so many times whenever he paid a visit, don't bother, ma'am, I'm fine where I am, just to avoid the embarrassment of breaking up the chair, and never knowing perhaps that the ones who said don't go, Esteban, at least wait till the coffee's ready, were the ones who later on would whisper the big boob finally left, how nice, the handsome fool has gone. That was what the women were thinking beside the body a little before dawn. Later, when they covered his face with a handkerchief so that the light would not bother him, he looked so forever dead, so defenseless, so much like their men that the first furrows of tears opened in their hearts. It was one of the younger ones who began the weeping. The others, coming to, went from sighs to wails, and the more they sobbed the more they felt like weeping, because the drowned man was becoming all the more Esteban for them, and so they wept so much, for he was the more destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on earth, poor Esteban. So when the men returned with the news that the drowned man was not from the neighboring villages either, the women felt an opening of jubilation in the midst of their tears.




'Praise the Lord,' they sighed, 'he's ours!' 



The men thought the fuss was only womanish frivolity. Fatigued because of the difficult nighttime inquiries, all they wanted was to get rid of the bother of the newcomer once and for all before the sun grew strong on that arid, windless day. They improvised a litter with the remains of foremasts and gaffs, tying it together with rigging so that it would bear the weight of the body until they reached the cliffs. They wanted to tie the anchor from a cargo ship to him so that he would sink easily into the deepest waves, where fish are blind and divers die of nostalgia, and bad currents would not bring him back to shore, as had happened with other bodies. But the more they hurried, the more the women thought of ways to waste time. They walked about like startled hens, pecking with the sea charms on their breasts, some interfering on one side to put a scapular of the good wind on the drowned man, some on the other side to put a wrist compass on him , and after a great deal of get away from there, woman, stay out of the way, look, you almost made me fall on top of the dead man, the men began to feel mistrust in their livers and started grumbling about why so many main-altar decorations for a stranger, because no matter how many nails and holy-water jars he had on him, the sharks would chew him all the same, but the women kept piling on their junk relics, running back and forth, stumbling, while they released in sighs what they did not in tears, so that the men finally exploded with since when has there ever been such a fuss over a drifting corpse, a drowned nobody, a piece of cold Wednesday meat. One of the women, mortified by so much lack of care, then removed the handkerchief from the dead man's face and the men were left breathless too.





He was Esteban. It was not necessary to repeat it for them to recognize him. If they had been told Sir Walter Raleigh, even they might have been impressed with his gringo accent, the macaw on his shoulder, his cannibal-killing blunderbuss, but there could be only one Esteban in the world and there he was, stretched out like a sperm whale, shoeless, wearing the pants of an undersized child, and with those stony nails that had to be cut with a knife. They only had to take the handkerchief off his face to see that he was ashamed, that it was not his fault that he was so big or so heavy or so handsome, and if he had known that this was going to happen, he would have looked for a more discreet place to drown in, seriously, I even would have tied the anchor off a galleon around my nick and staggered off a cliff like someone who doesn't like things in order not to be upsetting people now with this Wednesday dead body, as you people say, in order not to be bothering anyone with this filthy piece of cold meat that doesn't have anything to do with me. There was so much truth in his manner taht even the most mistrustful men, the ones who felt the bitterness of endless nights at sea fearing that their women would tire of dreaming about them and begin to dream of drowned men, even they and others who were harder still shuddered in the marrow of their bones at Esteban's sincerity. 



That was how they came to hold the most splendid funeral they could ever conceive of for an abandoned drowned man. Some women who had gone to get flowers in the neighboring villages returned with other women who could not believe what they had been told, and those women went back for more flowers when they saw the dead man, and they brought more and more until there were so many flowers and so many people that it was hard to walk about. At the final moment it pained them to return him to the waters as an orphan and they chose a father and mother from among the best people, and aunts and uncles and cousins, so that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen. Some sailors who heard the weeping from a distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens. While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man. They let him go without an anchor so that he could come back if he wished and whenever he wished, and they all held their breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into the abyss. They did not need to look at one another to realize that they were no longer all present, that they would never be. But they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams and so that no one in the future would dare whisper the big boob finally died, too bad, the handsome fool has finally died, because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban's memory eternal and they were going to break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at dawn the passengers on great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of gardens on the high seas, and the captain would have to come down from the bridge in his dress uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and, pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen languages, look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it's gone to sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun's so bright that the sunflowers don't know which way to turn, yes, over there, that's Esteban's village.