Translated by Marvin Najarro
Lena opens the bag and takes out what she thinks is the last piece of champurrada (traditional Guatemalan cooky), but to her surprise, a handful of smaller pieces are mixing in with the pozolero (crumbs). Astonished, she closes her eyes and looks inside the bag again, it looks like a big hollow. Urgently, she closes her eyes again, wishing not to find the big hollow when she opens them again, but it is still there, motionless. By then, Lena has fallen into a state of stupor, like when she first saw the red earth of Salamá.
Something jolts her and her breathing rhythm changes; she feels as if she is choking on her own saliva. Desperately, she tries to swallow but, there is something like a lump of salt atrancado (stuck) in her throat that crumbles when she feels a leñazo (a blow with a log) to the back of her neck, and all at once she begins to tumble down the cliffs of memory. She falls de culumbrón (on all fours) into the cheerful mornings of her childhood. There it is again, the unmistakable and incorruptible nostalgia that transports her to places hidden in the unknown recesses de los años juidos (of the years gone by).
Para qué puchicas (damn), shes says, using her anger as an excuse once again in front of her eleven sheep, so as not to admit her guilt at longing for the past. Filled with confidence, ella se pone al brinco (she becomes defiant), demanding to be searched, all that to avoid admitting out loud that, like many other souls, she too yearns from time to time. She ties her hair in a ponytail and, while preparing for the fist fight, dips the piece of champurrada in her cup of coffee, and since she has already agarrado aviada (worked up an apetite), she also pours the pozolero in the cup of coffee, and starts happily to sopear (dip) with the spoon.
An immoral thought crosses her mind: if her friends saw her sopeando champurradas in a cup of coffee, they, like Judas, would reject her. Even worse, terrified, she wonders what they would say if they knew that her real name was Magdalena.
“Magdalena?” they would exclaim in unison. “Yes, like the cake,” I would reply.
No, but there is no more of a Judas than she herself. She is the consummate two-faced of the Iscariot clique, replies again to her that immoral thought that appears in the least expected moment, like the menstruation when wearing light-colored clothes. For it is a known fact that these meddlesome thoughts sometimes put her in a tight spot with its uselessness, like those fumadas (absurd ideas) about dignity, respect y otras hierbas (and other such things). Things that only cause her discomfort, like the corners of the pinky toe nails, which sit there as the great martyrs, begging not to be squeezed into tight high heels because it hurts them. Ha, I’am the one who is hurt, Magdalena exclaims aloud, but she immediately cierra el pico (shut her trap) and starts thinking to herself again because is better that no one listen to what her memory and conscience have to say about her crazy and deranged antics.
For example, if she has already forgotten when as a child, barefoot and laying in a hammock, she listened to the cicadas sing while she sopeaba the toasted tortilla with banana in her cup of freshly ground coffee, at her grandparents’ home while her gaze was lost in the majestic Sierra de las Minas.
After the deplorable trance caused by the leñazo en la nuca, Lena comes to her senses, flushes the coffee and the champurrada down the toilet, grabs a yogurt from the fridge and heads to the gym, where she was supposed to meet her friends for a yoga class and then go for green juices at Titi’s juice bar, whose real name is, Margarita María del Carmen.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado.
