“Flame Trees in May” by Karla Marrufo and Allison A. deFreese [Excerpt]

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned!

And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an excerpt from Mexican author Karla Marrufo’s Flame Trees in May, translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese. Here’s a description of the book:

“There are stories that cannot help but change us forever, and Mayo, with its showers of golden rain, its flame trees on fire, its dark sun and the drips and drops that form bubbles, is one of them.”—Nidia Cuan

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

Flame Trees in May is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, Dalkey Archive Press, Bookshop.org, or wherever you get your books. 

And, as an editorial note, the layout of this novella is much closer to poetry than to prose. I’ve tried to represent it as best as possible in this post, but I highly recommend reading the physical book for a better sense of how this is supposed to appear on the page.

*

did you know there’s a word in portuguese that resembles your name?

i’ve forgotten it now, but it means mementos or memories, like remembering to send greetings to someone, to send a memo. i would remember it if only i could pet the cat, just like i would remember to take out the trash on friday and to close the refrigerator door

the door to my tears,

and all the windows before leaving the house.

so much silence here. have you noticed? that when you keep quiet, the house gets dirtier so much faster? you are such stubborn dust. you pass through doorways and come to settle in corners kept under lock and key. maybe that’s why lola can’t stand this place

the room still sweats with the warm hypocrisy from when it was a law office

and i’ll tell you why, if we keep going like this, soon we’ll be able to rent it out as a funeral parlor. that’s a profitable business. people will never stop dying

or keeping quiet

or thinking today must be friday.

come here. touch the wall. it’s covered in dark bubbles. so humid! the wood is swelling. i am swelling, and sometimes i feel myself rolling, floating, rolling—like those days when we’d go to the park and roll down the hill until we were exhausted, until we would land at the base of the hill where the grass was peaceful and green. remember? we spent so many weekends at that park! we arrived with our childish excitement, believing everything was going to be fine; we ate sandwiches and sipped fruit juice while the clowns blew up dog-shaped balloons

the dogs walking by were shaped like balloons that would later pop—

once blown up to full size and left to bloat at the side of the road, the cars never stopping.

but in those days, bubbles were clear, and everything was fine. we should return to that city again sometime, leave this flat landscape for a while.

have you noticed how tiresias looks at me? i’ve often wondered what he’s thinking when his little green eyes grow big and stare into mine. it reminds me of that movie

what was it called?

the one where they ask whether, instead of us being the ones who make animals more human, it’s not the opposite way around, that the creatures in our lives turn us into animals. later lola brought up that song again, the one about the professor who teaches puppies how to write

he was an animal lover for sure; a regular zoophile, lola said

what a silly song! it makes me laugh,

though my excitement lasts an instant

as i think about those animals

those bubbles

and how they drift through life with their broken fragments of memory.

so little time has passed, really, and yet i’ve started mixing things up; things disappear from my mind. sometimes the past is a faded beach house, condemned each day to endure the relentless caress of sand and the sting of salt swept in by the wind. lola insists i take vitamins, fish oil, seaweed capsules. she says i should sleep more

have peaceful dreams, sleep without needles pounding in my temples

for eight, ten hours

a thousand hours

to sleep forever

but a wicked sun keeps visiting me in my dreams, drawing black holes before my eyes

it wakes me—agitated—every forty minutes.

i saw it on tv. the blonde girl with the small mouth was talking about it: about the very dark spot at the center of a solar flare. you have to see it

we should talk more. a little more. you know? it’s easier to remember ordinary things that happen to us when we talk about them. that’s why names are so important

a handful of letters from the alphabet, bound to the heart our whole lifes.

mamá panchita used to repeat this ad nauseam.

she said names are very dangerous; they chart the lines that lead to our destinies.

i remember the last time, so sad, though it barely lasted a few seconds. we had bound mamá panchita’s hands with a rope, secured them to the ceiling beams, so she would stop

she was only hurting herself;

scratching open her skin as a way to remember.

her hands restless as kites,

but without the colors

and i was deeply moved by her dark skin. seeing it touched me in a way that no one else’s skin had ever moved me before. it smelled ancient, the scent of many years. doubt had left a deep crease between her eyebrows. in a corner of the room, right in front of her, the small altar to our lady of charity was laughing along with five freshly cut sunflowers and the sparkle of a few fake coins. eyes half-closed, mamá panchita squinted suspiciously as she observed the saint; her pupils glowering with the hatred of a thousand questions answered only by whispers.

and just as i walked into the room, an unspeakable anger seized me

she was scratching open her skin

who knows what she was looking for below the surface

that’s why she had all those sores on her arms,

that long scar on her face

and her terrifying screams and outrage made me shake with anger and then grow quiet because, there at her side for the last time, i felt incapable of speaking to her

come now, mamá, everything’s going to be fine. when i look into your eyes, there you are—so very much yourself, mamá, always you, taking the little thread of your name, that’s about to break

nothing. silence. in that quiet corner of the room, i didn’t so much as dare to light the white candles around our lady of charity; we kept still, our mouths sealed

by our dark hands.

when it comes to giving me looks, even tiresias is more expressive than that. this must be why he scratches me with such determination. you see? it’s the same thing backwards. relentless caresses and reverberating silences—and this house didn’t even suffer the misfortune of having been built near the ocean. it has survived for years in mamá panchita’s absence

in the absence of your sisters, your father, you,

and me

only the bubbles and drops remain

drip, drop

of a rather thick liquid, as if flooded by disappointment, muddied by a sadness that makes everything slippery. no matter how hard i try, i can’t stop pacing between these same drops of music, these same notes, this same smell that comes, always, in may

it’s may again

that clings to the walls of memory, climbing the walls like a vine, working its way into the memories hidden in every corner, embroidered with the threads of mamá panchita’s name. she was fascinated by fancy paper napkins, by the little drawings on disposable cups, the tiny flowers on plastic cutlery—so many treasures. remember? she ate with her hands instead of touching the plastic forks, cleaned her mouth using her sleeves instead of napkins, discreetly wiped her fingertips on the edge of the tablecloth—all to preserve the beauty of disposable things.

you see, i’m still finding her trove of plastic and paper at the most unexpected moments, in the most unexpected places, and this creates a dilemma for me because i never know what to do with these disposable objects she left untouched only to be thrown out later, nobody giving them a second thought.

do you know how many things vanish without anyone so much as thinking of them? i try to do it, to think about every single thing, about every person who dies . . . but there are far too many and i am

it seems to me

much too small. maybe when you start thinking about things, the things themselves become sad too. like the melon this morning. lola brought it, and it was gigantic, a really big one, and i had to cut through the rind myself, then scoop out the seeds from each little square—the hulls of those seeds rough to the touch as I removed them; each unique and alive, and they covered my hands like homicidal blood. and there wasn’t even running water in the house

no drip, no drop

and that meant my hands were coated in the melon’s sweet round death, its juice running onto the floor until finally i cried—knife in hand—about all the times i hadn’t known how to relish the thought of death.

*

where are you going? did you know there’s a greek word . . . ?

but i took out the trash on friday and closed all the doors

all of them

though later i opened them again because i needed to let in the daylight and to breathe in the outside world. sometimes when the sun

a spot black as night

starts to scribble on the walls and furniture in my room, i force myself awake: but it’s no use. my eyes keep me anchored in sleep. my eyelids stay closed, inwardly, looking for a long time at a universe that lacks the contours drawn for us by daylight. that’s why i have to open the windows and doors, expand this space so the colors don’t stay hidden, so i, too, may draw myself for one more day. it’s strange: all of a sudden i start to imagine my own funeral, among dark bubbles, in this ridiculous heat. and i’m afraid,

of closed doors and windows

very afraid. i must be lost in the maze of cereal boxes and energy shakes. every morning the same routine, so easy to follow that in the end i get lost. it’s easy to get lost when you go about your day only pretending to be free

to have no blood at all.

and you know it. remember when we would get lost and promise each other we would never go home? never return again,

to the smoothies or fish oil or seaweed

even though the way home was a straight shot, no turns. we wanted to run away to the parks with their hills and lakes

do you remember?

to sail far away from home, balloons that rise until they touch the sky. we were happy runaways, glancing over our shoulders, feeling above it all and looking down on those small lives below . . . exactly the way life looked from the picture window at the italian restaurant. remember that place? its crystal-clear windows under the shade of a ceiba tree, where i waited for you, hidden inside, imagining the instant you would arrive? the ceilings in that space were as high as our sky. sometimes when you arrived, i would imagine you were someone else, a different fellow coming to see me. then we’d escape with our foolish fantasies that i cherish to this day

you are so silly, small woman!

you ramble on and on, you can’t hold your tongue; with a warm, sweet venom in your saliva

i am quite small for being such a silly woman

with the eagerness of a schoolgirl and a trembling desire to see you again, i loved waiting for you. and when you triumphantly entered the restaurant, you grinned, confirmed what you suspected, and then kept playing our game, hiding a rose behind your back

a forbidden caress

fixing your gaze on my body

later putting the flower in my hands without a word

what a lovely couple

yes, mamá, we make such a lovely couple, though tiresias may condemn us

with his intense green gaze and his claws on our skin.

yes, it sounds so pretty, but neither of us were destined to be martyrs, nor would our deaths be foreshadowed by ripping open our consciousness, little by little each day, in an italian restaurant

or by having someone read of a very long will and testament:

                                                     the one who dies first, dies best

we didn’t think about death back then, even though in those days we knew already that neither words nor names would ever be on our side. remember the letters we wrote each other, the tongue twisters, all the wordplay?

paradise bird white angel cloud heaven dream blood

and what does blood have in common with dreams?

they are connected in the same way that paradise is full of birds and angels: you must fly to reach paradise, just as there must be blood for a dream to end

and i laughed then, though i never understood a thing. because to me, you were as bright as the look of hope in a street dog’s eyes.

wait! you would have loved it in the city center yesterday, everyone was there. i walked and walked, past all the shops, among people and pigeons. it was fascinating. it was strange, getting lost in a crowd again. a thousand colors overlapping, dust in the air, the excitable sounds of people in a hurry, with their purchases and their sniveling kids holding melting ice creams, sad from the heat. and a man looked at me like no man has looked at me for many years.

i felt paralyzed and dry, a scarecrow of a woman. except that i can’t scare anything, not even pigeons. i couldn’t return his look, because i could tell he was someone who refused to be intimidated. i felt trapped like the queen in a game of chess, alone and vulnerable at the moment of defeat. i would like to learn to play chess

to find my way out of mazes

to fill myself with the power of knives

but no one will tell me how it’s done. i never learned to return a look. i know nothing about revenge. that must be why everything around me ends up dying or getting killed. you know, tiresias spent the night in the carport again. i’m afraid i will forget him, that he’ll forget about me. i am very afraid that one day we will both forget about each other—that i’ll drive out of the carport and he won’t move; and after that, he’ll never run away or come to me again; that later i’ll have to wipe up his blood and gently remove his little red collar from his neck, and place the drop that was his body

dark as a bubble

in a trash bag that i won’t forget to take out on friday. maybe after that, i’ll close the doors forever.

go on then. you can leave if you want. there’s nothing here anymore. that’s why we are so backward and rustic, so broken down—at a standstill. we lack the words to communicate, even those words that conspire against us, that aren’t on our side.

sometimes, i have the feeling a man is watching us, staring, lewd and hateful, and what no one realizes is that we are actually alone in this world, and no one can form the shapes of our eyes

of our skin, of our memories

as if not one beautiful thing remained, and only a little of the bad, the exact size and shape of our hearts

which become a little less small every day,

gets embedded in our hands and feet

did i tell you? tiresias killed a hummingbird

angel bird heaven paradise

and is tearing it apart now, licking it, dropping it at my feet as an offering of sacrifice. he’s a hunter because he can kill, because that swift flutter of wings makes no difference to him, nor does he care if a shooting pain stabs the heart as his little whiskered mouth shreds the warm body and throbbing heartbeat of a bird that was about to take flight. i also know how to heal wounds just like those, death wounds.

tiresias has killed another hummingbird. nothing ever changes! it’s like he fills his mouth with death so as not to hiss at our sins. we should play again

another paradise another crow another angel another cat another pair of wings

but without the terror of these days that now keep us apart. if we stay quiet, if we speak very quietly and tell each other new secrets, things could be like they were before. look closely . . . if you can just ignore my slurred speech and the way i drag my s’s in every phrase—such an effort to form that sound— everything will be exactly the same as it has always been. you only need to make me repeat it over and over again

she sells seashells she sells seashells she sells seashells

and everything

everything

will be the same again.

---

Available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, Dalkey Archive Press, Bookshop.org, or wherever you get your books.

The large image associated with this post is copyrighted by Joegoauk Goa.