Categoría: Inglés

Translated by Marvin Najarro Since four o’clock in the morning, she has been at the pond washing her family’s clothes, some other women arrived at three o’clock, each one with a kerosene lamp to provide light in the darkness of the village’s grove of trees. Fortunately, there is a pavilion that provides cover from the rain when it is not windy, but when it rains heavily there is nowhere to take shelter, and they wash the clothes under the heavy downpour and end up soaked with their clothes dripping as they walk back home. If they finish before sunrise, they…

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Translated by Marvin Najarro In other times she would have bought guavas in the village for diez len (ten cents) each, big beautiful guavas the size of her hand, but instead these guavas churucas (wrinkled) of today are a sorry sight, overpriced like everything else, nowadays even the air we breathe is expensive, Toña reflects, while trying to make ends meet. She feels like drinking hibiscus punch; she always finds the two-pounds bags on the bottom shelves, near the green beans and beets. Although she usually shops quickly, today Toña wants to walk through the supermarket aisles and be disappointed by the colorless and tasteless…

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Translated by Marvin Najarro Tanita always craved a fruit smoothie, which was an unattainable dream during her childhood. The blenders were those things they talked about in the radio commercials when people tuned in to Porfirio Cadenas, “El Ojo de Vidrio”. Tanita remembers how exciting it was to listen to the rain falling on the radio, the thunders shaking the tin roof of the house, and the sound of the horse’s hooves walking on the cobblestones, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip…. She imagined that all that happened in a remote village, and her mind wandered among the main roads, the red guava trees and the…

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Translated by Marvin Najarro She comes out of the supermarket with a bag full of vegetables, she has bought a bunch of watercress to make soup, her friend Joaquín told her that for the cold days of the long American winter, watercress soup is the best. Maria used to eat watercress only in salads and in meat patties, to which she sometimes adds chard or watercress, but lately she has been mix them with tofu. She takes a handful of grapes and eats them one by one; she enjoys this fruit only in December because it reminds her of her…

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Translated by Marvin Najarro He wakes up, looks at the clock, it is twenty-two past four in the morning. He hugs the sheets and stretches out on his bed; he gets up and boils water to make coffee. He brushes his teeth, and while the water is boiling, Cecilio looks out of the window; a pitch-black darkness on the other side, soon to give way to dawn, reminds him of the last days of summer. Soon it will be time to put away the summer clothes and begin to air the winter ones, which he will keep in bags, and…

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Translated by Marvin Najarro Whenever he can, Perfecto tells anyone he comes across that his entire family lives in the United States, and that he brought them all a long time ago, got papers for all his children, and that he even has grandchildren born in the United States. But the truth is different. Perfecto’s reality is similar to that of thousands of undocumented immigrants; he is ashamed to admit that he doesn’t have papers, and the fear of deportation makes him lie consistently about his life in the country. He emigrated more than thirty years ago when he was…

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