But in a more elemental way I think translation demonstrates things about how we move through language as we engage in writing practice. In Walter Benjamin’s seedy essay The task of the Translator, language reaches out through the many languages of (wo)men and takes form in an embryonic and intensive way. The life of the literary work flowers anew and abundantly. The work flowers but the seed of language hangs inside in half-realised fits of reciprocal relations. Whether or not we want to completely take on Benjamin’s messianic notion of pure language – this is a bigger question than an introduction could take on – surely when we write we move, be it through or towards, the language in which we write and think. The translator feels this almost corporeally in the inevitable moments of confusion and speechlessness that fester in any translation project.

In Stuart Cooke’s translations, movement, or rather speed of movement, is paramount. Unwilling to get bogged down in theory gluts, he reminds us that translation is not just a question or an idea but an everyday reality and necessity. Languages are scraped together quickly and are always in conflict with some version of themselves; dialects, vernaculars, grammar. Cook stresses the importance of transformation over crystallisation, and points to political imperatives that can override the hopelessness that we often feel before a translation project.

Another way out of this equation is proposed by Susana Chávez Silverman’s work. As the daily exchange of people who live in bi and multilingual regions of the world shows, translation is both necessary and unnecessary, immediately evident and expendable. In a sense Chávez should be uncermoniously rejected from this collection, as her work aggressively refuses to translate. Her texts slip between two or more languages without parenthetical explanations, footnotes or glossaries. And if she or somebody else were to translate these pieces, it would require a double translation, or an inversion, which would create a mirror-text, leaving each version equally partial . But of course Chávez’s work suggests something about relation, the tightness of idiomatic expression and the arbitrary dexterity of thought. Where the fruit sticks too tightly to its skin, she throws us the whole thing to swallow. Though there is not translation in the composition of the piece, the process of its reading creates a cognitive translational space for the bilingual reader. For those who read only English or Spanish, the experience runs blank at times. But if there is such a thing as a kinship of languages, surely that benefits from this kind of intimacy. In the velocity of Chávez’s prose, rivulets start to edge towards each other between the two languages. Perhaps that is merely a trick of the eye and ear, but similar effects are found in Astrid Lorange’s and DJ Huppatz’s pieces.

Huppatz’s poems are also non-translations, though they are heavily indebted to the practice. The language is largely found language, from the ever-growing reservoirs of strange English found in NES countries. The birth of this language speaks of imperialism and an ongoing hegemonic homogenisation of language. But as the world is recreated in the image or language of dominant forces, that image becomes distorted and renovated. The receiving cultures thrust back a renewing force and the language of ‘mis-translations’ reterritorialises and revitalises a system which continually engenders its own use and therein its own transformation. These poems sample this language and imagine its poetry. This project runs the risk of all translation, of subsuming the Other, of pilfering from other cultures. And though it could seem like these poems make fun of this English, Huppatz seems to laugh more at himself and at us, at our monotone sameness, our lack of invention and novelty. By taking both a naïve wonder and serious avant-garde experimentalism to this task, he reminds us that we learn our language best from others.

Lorange’s work [Which will be added to the site soon - Ed.] is a homophonic translation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood. We’re still talking about velocity and proximity of language, but in this case, rather than two languages coming together, we have two works in the one language. This work is an experiment on the limits of translation. The Zukofskys, along with Melnick and others have tested the limits of translation and relation between languages through homophonic translation projects. They take the idea of tuning the receiving language to the original more literally, and create strange and foreignising translations. Lorange’s work however traces roughly over the form of Thomas’s language and subtly and cleverly rewrites it.

Translators get to say the same thing again. That may not seem like a fair exchange for poor pay, constrictive contracts and weak copyright laws, but it is a special privilege. In doing so translators can get close to language. Lorange gets close to Thomas’ language despite the fact the it was composed in her mother tongue. She respeaks it for herself. There is something of eavesdropping here, overhearing and looking-over. If she is unfair to Thomas and does his work a kind of violence, she is also utterly fair to him and treats his work extremely tenderly. The violence here is the violence of all translation, and of all writing, as with each word inscribed on the page we leave unwritten others, waiting. Here we’ve presented the work as an audio piece accompanied by Thomas’ text, though it could just as easily have been formatted as a bilingual (the bi of course being slightly problematic here) translation, as parallel texts.

The idea of erasure and trace is also apparent in my live translations of a Spanish poet, Esteban Pujals Gesalí. The translation strategies attempt to engage with a movement in language in an immediate and physical environment. I’ve also included a critical piece which, though not a direct exegesis, definitely speaks to the development of this technique and the ideas that informed it. Both the audio and text formats included here are reproductions, documentations of an event, as much a cataloguing of a translation process and movement in language as textual and audio works. This collection is a continually growing archive, and we welcome the submission of more work on this theme. I sincerely hope that for now you enjoy the work.

J.S.

To begin at the beginning:

to beg in the begging ninny.

‘Rios de Cisnes [Rivers of Swans]’ is the dramatic result of a material collision between a territory [Southern Chile], a voice who defends it, and the variety of energies on which the voice draws. Within this collision, a rich collection of materiality has accumulated to a particular intensity before bifurcating. The change in the value of d, therefore, is enormous.

Speed is of particular concern in the following poem. We are concerned with a rapid resolution of the ongoing injustices suffered by the people of whom Paulo Huirimilla speaks. In this instance, then, to achieve the highest quantity of v, to allow for the complete, positive transference of energy which generated the enormous flux of d, we will be reducing t to its smallest possible value:

Incorporeal transformation, not petrification, is the essence of language. A linguistic expression presupposes a continuum of variation between and across thresholds. Any given language is a dialect among others, in a network of power relations marked by grammatical formations standing as signposts to a site of everyday conflict. Translation adds another level of definition to an event’s dynamism. It re-invigorates it, makes it repeatable, multiplies it. I stole everything in this paragraph from Brian Massumi.

If you see a gap it’s because you’ve missed the bifurcation; the war has moved on to the next valley.

In his preface to Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben makes the claim that “one of the most urgent tasks for contemporary thought is, without a doubt, to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language” (1993, p.4). Refiguring Kant’s concept of the transcendental which omitted the question of language, the transcendental “must instead indicate an experience which is undergone only within language, an experimentum linguae in the true meaning of the words, in which what is experienced is language itself” (p.4).

To undergo an experience with something involves some kind of submission to it. “This something befalls us, strikes us, overwhelms and transforms us… the experience is not of our own making… we endure it, we suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it” (Heidegger, 1971, p.57). Language requires rendition. As well as being something to which we surrender, Heidegger claims that an experience means “to attain something by going on a way” (Heidegger, 1971, p.66). We must, therefore, make some sort of movement – a movement in language – in order to gain some knowledge of our relation to language. The task here is largely one of thinking. Not a putting of questions, but a listening for what is to be put in question (Heidegger, p.71).

But language is too close to us. We find ourselves entangled and compromised by the web of language. However, if we take notice of the “peculiar properties of thought,” and look about us in “the realm where thinking abides,” we loosen ourselves from the web somewhat (p.75). When we speak, we tend to speak of things we already understand. But what concerns us regarding our relation with language is something which evades us. We want to give language the floor. What is called for is not more talk, since “discourse cannot speak its taking place” (Agamben, 1991, p.62). In fact, it is possible that we are not able to say anything concrete about our relation to language. “There is some evidence,” Heidegger states, that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words” (1971, p.81). We may only be able to submit ourselves to an experience with it and carry on our way, somehow enriched by the experience. That silent experience is what we must carry over into our writing – and translation – practice.

Just as the claim I mean what I say does not circumvent the problem of the referents of language and meaning, neither does our apparent and undeniable relation with language silence the question of an experience with language. To say I speak does not resolve Agamben’s “stubbornly pursued train of thought: what is the meaning of ‘I speak’?” (1993, p.5). Speech teaches us next to nothing about language since we are only able to simply “go ahead and speak a language” precisely because language does not bring itself to language in this context but “holds back”(Heidegger, 1971, p.59). Similarly, we understand and take for granted that we breathe air constantly, but this tells us little of air and less still of our experience of it. If we have to struggle for air however, we come closer to an understanding of our need for it. We may not understand the mechanics, but in moments of asphyxiation, we understand something about our relation with it. This also holds for language.

Heidegger explains that language speaks itself as language “when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us” (1971, p.59). It is then that we “leave unspoken what we have in mind and… language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being” (p.59). This makes sense within Benjamin’s (1968) framework also, if we imagine that in that moment of aphasia, language gives up on the business of signifying this or that object, and we find ourselves engaged in a moment of intention. Oddly, it is while we mean to say something, rather than when we have assigned a word to mean something, that we are most in contact with language as language. In Heidegger’s terminology, because we are being touched by the essence of language; in Benjamin’s because we have not yet translated pure language into fallen language. For Agamben, the split that Benjamin finds in language is still relevant, however the division is not so much between pure language and languages, but rather is “a fracture inherent in human language” (Bartoloni, 2004). In the work of Agamben, this moment of the self-presentation of language occurs in the notion of infancy:¹

Infancy is an experimentum linguae of this kind, in which the limits of language are to be found not outside language, in the direction of its referent, but in an experience of language as such, in its pure self reference. (Agamben, 1993, p.5)

The relation here to translation is evident. Translation, as a form, acknowledges its own aphasia: its impossible possibility, its “devotion to ruin,” as Derrida (2001, p.181) would have it. Having language as its only referent, it then sets about a movement toward other language, to other words. Time after time it comes upon a lack of words and paradoxically moves through pleonastic turns to overcome that loss. The translator, amongst two (in)complete systems of expression, is swamped by language yet continually at a loss for words. To return to the air metaphor, it is like breathing out of the window of a speeding car. The air rushes towards us yet we struggle to inhale. The translator has two languages on which to hold but is forever slipping between them.

It is no coincidence that my interest in the strangeness and the limits of language first asserted itself while I was living abroad. For the first time in my life I had to defend myself in a language which was not my own. I quickly began to realise the peculiar enabling and limiting force of the English language² with/in which I had grown up. To deform Wittgenstein’s maxim; until then, the limits of my world had been the limits of my language. In a new world a new set of limits set in relief the limits of my language, the limits of my world. The experience is described by Octavio Paz in which the immediate emotions one feels before an unknown language quickly transform themselves into doubts about our own language, as it “loses its universality and reveals itself as a plurality of languages” [my translation]³ (1970, p.9).

In another language, we are constantly “leaving unspoken what we have in mind” (Heidegger, 1971, p.59). In our despair at the abandonment of language, we sense the magnitude – without implying in any way a perfect relational system – of language. Wittgenstein’s statement makes sense to us, that “the correct expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, albeit as expressing nothing within language, is the existence of language itself” (quoted in Agamben, 1993, p.9). Following through Wittgenstein’s line of thought, Agamben then asks what the most appropriate expression for the existence of language is. The only possible answer, Agamben concludes, is “human life, as ethos, as ethical way” (p.9-10). Moving toward each other in language. This can double as a rationale for translation. Positioned between two languages, the translator refuses to settle in one or the other, but rather remains in the interstice, sounding out the space between the two, tuning the ear to two distinct and strange ways of movement and intention, hoping to realise a new way of approach and relation in the mother tongue.

REFERENCES

• AGAMBEN, G. 1991, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Trans. Pinkus, K. E. with Hardt, Michael, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
• 1993, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, Trans. by Heron, L. Verso, London.
• BARTOLONI, P. 2004, ‘The Paradox of Translation via Benjamin and Agamben,’ CLCWEB, electronic journal in Comparative Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, June 2004, Purdue University Press, USA, http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/.
• BENJAMIN, W. 1968,  ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,’ Trans. Zorn, H. in Benjamin, W. Illuminations, 1968, Pimlico, London.
• DERRIDA, J. 2001. ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’ Trans. Venuti, L. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 2. (Winter, 2001), pp. 174-200.
• PAZ, O. 1970, Traducción: literatura y literalidad, Tusquets Editor, Barcelona

Para empezar:
Hablar es una arriesgada especie de ejercicio
y peligrosa…
…la hace su imperfección aparente-
mente más perfecta todavía…
Las palabras pueden
en cualquier momento desarticularse,
resbalarse de su segunda mano
que son, sonoridades que se quiebran
por una grieta, irregularidades
que el coleccionista valora
por la conformación
delicada de sus deformidades.
…………………….
Diremos del piano que extienden las notas
autodesafinarse haciendo al tocarlo
muy difícilmente fascinable hasta el final.

FOUR FRAGMENTS OF A POETICS

To begin:
To speak is a risky species of exercise
and dangerous…
… it makes its imperfection apparent-
ly more perfect still…
The words can
in whatever moment unjoin themselves,
slip from their second hand
that they are, sonorities that break open
at a crack, irregularities
that the collectionist values

deformities.
…………………….
We will say of the piano that the notes extend
to go out of tune, themselves
until the end.

Keep checking in; new work will be added from time to time as it comes to light.

12 July, 2005 Los Angeles, CA.
For Wim Lindeque, Melanie “Miss Mellie” Maree and Shaun Levin Para Eunice Van Wagner Chávez, in memoriam

Afrikaans words and phrases insinuate themselves into my head, my consciousness, aun sin querer. Meer en meer. Not sure I even want them in there, presies, although tengo que admitir they do stir something in me. Algo del orden de (pace Andrea Gutiérrez, your fave phrase, o al menos, one of them) la añoranza. Yebo, longing, comfort, long ago pain. Memory.

Of my self hace años, en Pretoria. Después de casi un año, holding myself apart, gingerly beginning to let the words–and those who spoke them from birth–touch me, assuage the biting loneliness. Kom ons jol! Ag, nee man. Lekker, my china.

Still not sure about–hasta ahora, desde aquí, después de todos estos años and even with all this reading, these movies, trying to prepare myself, somehow, for my return, mi iminente retorno a Sudafrica, después de 20 años–my relationship to that taal.

Hace unos días, more terrorist bombings. En Londres. Impotencia. Miedo. Ons kannie anywhere trek anymore, it seems. Last night I watched John Boorman’s film, “In My Country.” Basado en ese libro, which I haven’t found yet, but which that girl told me to read, esa niña que había estado de Study Abroad in South Africa, cuando fui a leer en la University of Redlands, invitada por mi amiga la Eva Valle. Anygüey, you know the boek I’m talking about, “The Country of my Skull” (weird title: Pierre dixit, claro, es adrede, pero it sounds pirate-y to me, not poetic) by Antjie Kroeg. The movie was sappy, a bit Manichean, pero even so, not bad.

And you know me, anygüey, for so many years the slightest reference to Suid-Afrika, just the slightest mention and I’d get teary, nostalgic, angry: I was there. I lived there. I know that place. When did that reaksie change? Was it when I began to embrace my Latinidad, con ahinco, en serio, for reals, como quien dice, my self en relación a mi Latinidad, a California, L.A., to a feeling of home, belonging, en vez de mi yo, for years siempre y siempre en relación al Africa?

Oh, why did I leave? Was it right to come back here, to come home? Is this home?

Pero anygüey, sentí una immediate–y al principio inexplicable– repugnancia atroz toward the character played by el Samuel L. Jackson. Pero luego it hit me: that was precisely how I felt and acted when I first pitched up in So. Africa. Shit, and I’m not even noire! Y bueno, antes, en la universidad, en la graduate school: oh little Miss Divestment, little Miss Anti-apartheid. Miss Marxista. Al nada más llegar, eché la culpa de 40 años de historia on poor Howard, en su familia. He never had a chance. We never had a chance!

So righteous, tan superior porque nunca había tenido una empleada doméstica. Never had a maid (a meid). If you get right down to it, rompí con Howard porque no podía bregar con la gran culpabilidad que sentí. It overwhelmed me como una ola: sudden, nauseating.

From the minute my feet hit the tarmac at Jan Smuts International airport, en agosto del ’82, it hit me: el peso de la culpabilidad, of whiteness, y de todo lo que ese whiteness implicaba en Sudafrica. Porque that’s the way I was read there: como blanca. En la paranoia taxonómica del apartheid, no había modo de leer a una Chicana. And besides, bueno, let’s face it: casi nunca me reconocen como Raza, not even in the USA. Anygüey, ni modo. La cosa es que I couldn’t get out from under it.

Pero, vaya arrogancia. What assumptions. Ag, I feel such retroactive self-loathing now, después de ver ese film, for the way I was then: intransigente, smug. Seeing myself now in Samuel Jackson’s periodista. A white-skinned, Jewish brown girl whose skin could not be read “properly” en ese país and so, para que los Afrikaners no me pensaran uno de ellos I kept myself apart: insular yet achingly lonely, angry, accusatory and aloof. My own private apartheid del corazón.

It was only my innate, insatiable linguistic curiosidad–y el que mi amigo negro, Mmome Neppe Selabe, who worked in the photocopying department at UNISA, me dijera, “oh come on Suzi, you’ve got to learn their language, girl. To understand therm. To understand all of us!”—que finalmente me indujo hacia el deshielo. To begin, grudgingly, tentative, to thaw. To listen. To speak.

Oh Wim, you helped me melt then, learn to laugh, live. You who grew up entre Engels and Afrikaner, me enseñaste a negociar con las posibilidades–and the limitations–de lo que podíamos hacer. Om te speel, even! Entonces. Oh Father (you, un cura católico ahora: adiós Mr. Polisie, tot siens bifeliz party boytjie, hey?), forgive me now. Bless me. Ayúdame a perdonarme…

Ah, but I did learn (didn’t I?). Ese learning que sólo viene de vivir en un lugar. Conocer. Living in and among. Los pactos, la rabia e impotencia y el júbilo diarios. Seeing. Writing.

Such shame and anger, de repente, at myself. De nuevo. Just like 20 years ago and just from a movie! Ay, cómo eres susceptible. Pierre me dijo: no te odies tanto. You need your own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, niña.

Hot tears spill down; I cringe, al escuchar los (after all only) skin-deep, righteous, outraged pronouncements del suddenly so glaringly American Sam Jackson, as the African American reportero del Washington Post at the TRC. Mientras tanto los otros, los non-hyphenated africanos– Africans a secas, South Africans black and white– try to explain to him, to show him, to make him understand ubuntu: forgiveness. Interconnectedness.

Ay, sha sé que it’s only a movie. Pero still, there’s a knot inside me, este nudo a need to be there again. Ahora, nou-nou, hot tears spilling onto the tarmac, onto that red rooi roja tierra. I want to apologize (por mi presencia? Por mi ausencia?) Quiero agradecer.

I know so much less now, a veces pienso. And yet, I feel even more, si cabe (yet so much more ambiguously) than ever before.

Mi Agüela Eunice, tras un fulminante debate entre life and death, falleció hace dos días. Mi hijo Etienne está lejos. Oh, I want to fuzz his hair, look into his almond-shaped dark eyes, see them, see me seeing him in them, ojalá fueran sus ojos no nublados de rabia, resentimiento. What I miss isn’t here any more. Isn’t him any more. (Bueno OB-vio). Oh my god, parezco esa canción “Los recuerdos no abrazan”, bien sappy y completely oxymoronic de Luciano “El Pibe de Luján” Pereyra.

That’s what I want. Estar…allí, de nuevo. Or, patrás al futuro. Hoping we can be…algo, juntos. Saam. Again.

Tengo miedo. Stomach a knot of apprehension, nausea, no puedo comer, duermo pésimo. What will you be like? What will we all be like, together again? Pero I’m dreaming about you, Wimmie en Mellie. My skatties, so far away pero ever closer. Pronto, pronto. Julle en Afrika, my Afrika, every night. Goeie naand.

8 January, 2008
Somewhere en el Evil, oops, Inland Imperio de Califas

For Laura Gutiérrez, Elaine S. Brooks, Raphael Kadushin y Florence Moorhead-Rosenberg,Tauruses all, con amor y sangre

Well, mi colega y amigo el José C-2 accompanied me to the hospie yesterday for a biopsy. It was extremely unpleasant, to say the least, and, as could be predicted, my BP was off the radar, que digamos Richter (more el upper que el lower numerito, pero I forget which way is more dire, lo cual me hace stress out even more, OB-vio…) en los momentos just before the “procedure”. I am trying not to be too alarmed about THAT, since the arribas and abajos of my BP are intimately related to my emo state, and I’ve been faithfully using my new Resperate machine, que te hace una especie de biofeedback pa’ aletargarte la breathing. Plus, he seguido con el estúpido sécate-toda diuretic, los health walks, y bla bla (ay, todo tan boring).

Anygüey, I won’t go into detalle about el procedimiento mismo: it was unnerving, demoralising and mega-estresante, even bajo los efectos del Xanax and local lidocane (the installation of which was maybe even casi casi lo PEOR). Por suerte, the pathologist who performed the stereotactic biopsy era un puertorriqueño who appreciated the bizarre humor I was somehow able to muster cuando, mientras yacía, boca abajo, en ese heartlessly cold metal table (images of la parrilla–como le decían al torture table que usaban durante la dictadura en Argentina—kept popping into my admittedly paranoid and hyperbolic imaginación), le pregunté, apropos of a teensy titanium CLIP (?) they inserted into my buhto—AND LEFT THERE—supuestamente at the precise site of the microcalcificaciones, if I was now officially some sort of Sci Fi Alien. El tipo, cool as a pepino, hasta me hizo un little quip patrás, “why, are you an unofficial alien now?”

Actually, it is the thought of having that tiny “clip” inside me, in such an intimate locus of my geografía interior, that I find most unsettling and yet (bueno, you know how genuinely STRANGE I am)… also somehow intriguing. En la X-ray que me mostró el médico, it looks a bit like a tiny (we’re talking, about the size of a pen point) antenna, or a blue ribbon (as the Chicana nurse, Melissa, cheerfully prompted me to appreciate). To me, it looks most like the glyph for the astrological sign Taurus, el signo de varios de mis MAXimos carnales. And so, I will hold on to the idea of this semaphor. Me reconforta, de alguna manera, la idea de shevarlo a Uds. tan close to my too-excitable heart, entangled con mis entrañas…and in imminent danger (aunque el patólogo assured me this would not happen!) of setting off los detectores de metal en los aeropuertos.

Can you imagine? First my 24 South African bracelets—que eventualmente tuve que dejar de llevar, por el tema del beefed-up security en los aeropuertos, post 9/11, después de más de 20 años, so much jingle jangle and weight on that left side; I even gave birth in them, coño!–and now un Taurean titanium clip, marking off the site of former microcalcificaciones busteriles.

Mientras me hacían la jodida biopsia, the nurse had to call in una über-enfermera, porque aparentemente, there was a blood vessel too close to the site of the little chips de calcio, and they had to do this most uncomfy manipulating operación to get it (la vesícula) out of the way.

Bueno, al regresar a casa entré al cobalt blue guest bath, abajo. I took in the fantastic, little-girl-lost Camille Rose García prints, the beautiful caldera-colored mosaic-tiled counter, the gorgeously Goth, black, drippy-looking wrought iron light fixture, worthy of the Addams Family manse, installed by Pierre en las últimas refacciones del 2006. I took off my ancient (according to fashion’s ever-fickle seasons) black Prada ski jacket (second-hand regalo de mi hermana Wiggue, before I went to Buenos Aires for the first time, en el ‘99—y creo que estaba past-season even then!). In that penumbral, Alice in Wonderland a lo Chicana luz, I saw three sort of beautiful pero definitely crimson spots flowering on my chest, left side. I wriggled out of the left side of my grey American Apparel raglan-sleeved, tissueweight cotton sweatshirt, cupped my breast instinctively and my hand came away filled with blood.

Como en una película de horror, like in “Carrie,” la sangre saturaba el petite round ice pack que las enfermeras me habían insertado en el sexy yet sort of stern black Olga bra (my good-luck corpiño). Todavía pathetically clutching my breast, con la bahtante menos eficaz diestra, I stripped off the top, y el bra; los tiré al sink con ese crimson icepack, les eché agua fría encima and watched it bloom scarlet. Just like ese Easter egg dye que nos preparaba mamá, musité. El espejo me devolvió una imagen espectral, oddly placid. Blood covered the left side of my torso. How could so much blood emerge from a tiny nick, pensé, y luego, immediately, pensé en ese famoso cuadro de Frida Kahlo, “Unos cuantos piquetitos.” Can you imagine? Typical me: there I am, dripping, pulsing, coursing sangre, pensando en la moda, en películas, paintings.

I unzipped my grey-green Levi pinwale stretch cords; I was intensely conscious I would drip blood all over the floor; me preocupaban las gatas, Esmeralda y Alejandra, que ya maullaban, worried (bueno OK, also hungry, a decir verdad…). I remembered about pressure. Aplicar presión. I held my breast more insistently, con la mano derecha, pero somehow, I couldn’t believe that only that would staunch the flow. Llamé a Pierre al trabajo, porque conoce un chingo de First Aid, pero to my horror, he was barely even conscious himself, having been stricken con un fast-moving stomach flu. Apenitas tenía la fuerza, as it turned out, to drive himself home.

Para cuando llegó, I’d already spoken to the enfermera, y al mere mere Puerto Rican pathologist, quien me dijo que (natuurlik) lo que me pasó was “unusual,” pero that there can always be some little artery or vesícula “in the way,” invisible. A fount of unexpected blood. He told me, bien matter of fact, que hasta en el peor de los casos (cutting “a major artery”, dijo, creo) if you apply pressure “for about an hour”, it will stop.

Bueno gente, apreté like there was no tomorrow; I set the little red, retro timer en la blood-red, PoMo, retro cocina, and pressed, 20 minutos, como si fuera uno de los trials de Hércules.

It stopped.

By the time it stopped, había blood spatters on the made-in-Argentina (it’s true, el downstairs floor tile hasta se shama “Pampa”), faux-Spanish–or faux-Mexican—Saltillo tile; blood had soaked through the rolled up paper tower I was clutching; it caked my hand, la axila, streaked my torso y hasta trickled down into my chonies. El full-length espejo en el living, donde generalmente chequeo mi look antes de salir al mundo, me devolvió una imagen espeluznante. Somehow ghoulish y compellingly erotic a la vez.

OK, OK, sha sé. Leave it to me.

Y bueno, it’s Kaiser Permanente. It’s an HMO mundo we inhabit (digo, those of us even lucky enough to have healthcare coverage), so I won’t know anything for up to 10 days, can you believe it? Y eso que sólo me van a llamar para hacer una cita for me to return, again, to that rasquache Kaiser Permanente hospital in the heart of the Evil, qiue digamos Inland Empire, en Fontana, Califas, para que me den los resultados in person. Me dijeron: whether the news is good or bad, they have to give it to you in person. Es la ley.

So now, a esperar. Tic tac tic tac. Um, not something my grand trine in Fuego personality excels at, pero you already know that. Y… qué remedio, no?

So, les escribo esto, Tauruses, seeking comfort, seeking…que sé sho, connection. Sigh. As usual. My words looking for your words, wishing it were your eyes, your mouth I could see talking, reassuring, laughing with me. Pero for now, heme aquí, a la espera. This is it.