OK, here’s the first few bits of my translation. Let me know what you think. The book is called Hijo de Ladrón, which translates to Son of a Burglar, or Son of a Thief. There was an English translation published as “Born Guilty” in the early sixties, but it sold poorly, and Rojas didn’t see a dime of it, and it’s now out of print and nearly impossible to find. The novel is the first of four about a young man who grows into an increasing awareness of himself and his place in society as the son of a thief, as a writer, and as a political being in the linotypists union. It’s semi-autobiographical, based partly on Rojas’ life and partly on the lives of people he knew. It includes a number of historical events, most notably the Valparaiso trolley riots which immediately precede the arrest which sets the scene for the novel. I’ll post more as I get further along.
If you have comments on the style (stilted? too many commas?) or on the content itself, please do let me know.
Son of a Thief
Manuel Rojas Sepulveda
Translation Aaron Weber
1.
How and why did I get here? In the same way, and for the same reasons
that I’ve arrived at other places. It’s a long story, and, worse,
confusing. It’s my fault: I’ve never been able to think like a ruler:
line after line, centimeter after centimeter, until it reaches a hundred
or a thousand; and my memory isn’t much better: it jumps from one event
to another, and sometimes starts with the ones that appear first,
turning back only when the others, denser or lazier, begin to bubble up in
turn from the depths of the past. I think, either before or after, I was
in prison. Nothing important, of course: robbery of a jewelry store, a
store whose existence and location I never knew and of which I remain
ignorant. Apparently I had accomplices, whom I did not know and
whose names or nicknames I knew as much as they knew mine. The only
people who knew anything were the police, although they weren’t too sure
either. Days in jail and nights sleeping on the cement floor without a
blanket; as a consequence, pneumonia; afterwards, a cough which rose
from some part of my wounded lung. When I was stood up and placed in
liberty, saved from death and from justice, my wrinkled, paint-stained
clothes hung from my body like they would from a nail. What now? There
wasn’t much I could do: at most I could die, but it’s not easy to die. I
couldn’t think of working — I’d have fallen from the ladder — and much
less steal: my injured lung kept me from breathing deeply. It wasn’t
easy to live either.
In that state and with those expectations, I walked into the street.
“You’re free to go. Sign here. Sergeant!”
Sun and wind, sea and sky.
2.
I had a friend at around that time. He was the only thing I had for a
few days, but I lost him, just like someone loses in a busy street or an
empty beach an object that he values, I lost my friend in the port. He
didn’t die, we didn’t argue; he simply left. We came to Valparaiso
planning to get on whatever boat was headed North, but we couldn’t. At
least, I couldn’t: Hundreds of individuals, police, conductors of
trains, consuls, captains or governors of ports, patrons, surcharges and
other equally frightening beings are here and there, everywhere, to stop
people from moving freely.
“I’d like to buy a departure ticket.”
“Nationality?”
“Argentinian.”
“Birth Certificate?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Have you lost it?”
“No, I never had one.”
“How did you get into Chile?”
“In a train car full of animals.”
(It wasn’t a lie. It was the train conductor’s fault: our condition,
instead of provoking piety in him, made him angry; he ignored the pleas
we directed at him — how could it hurt him if we five poor bastards were
to travel hanging from the cars of the cargo train? — and it was useless
when one of us, after displaying his destroyed shoes, broke into sobs
and swore that he’d been walking for twenty days, that his feet were a
single open wound, and that if the conductor didn’t let him continue on
the train, that he’d die, for godssake, of cold and hunger in the
desolate Valley of Uspallata. Nothing. Despite the fact that our comrade
used his best sobs, we got no result at all. The train conductor, more
entertained than moved by the crying man, and urged on by the train’s
whistles, showed us his teeth a final time, hissed, and disappeared into
the darkness, followed by his lantern. The train left. As soon as it
had, the man with the destroyed shoes cleaned off his tears and snot,
raised his fist in the direction of the conductor and ran after the
wagons. We all went that way: it was two or three in the morning, the
wind was peeling the skin from our ears and we were many kilometers from
the Chilean border. Only a weakling could be afraid of the conductor’s
threats. The train resumed its accustomed movement and for awhile I held myself
up on the ladder, holding onto one of the rungs with one hand and onto
my bags with the other. Then, I began to realize that I couldn’t stay
like that all night: an invincible weariness and a profound desire for
sleep began to take control of me, and although I knew that falling
asleep or even being sleepy meant a fall onto the tracks and
death, I felt two or three times that my muscles from my eyeballs to
my feet were abandoning themselves to sleep. The train had appeared while we lay like rocks on the ground, sleeping after a journey of forty-some kilometers entirely on foot. We hadn’t
even eaten; we were simply too tired. Moving by touch, knocking our
heads together in the darkness — we slept close together — we collected
our clothes and ran towards the cars; I was last, the happy owner of one
damn suitcase whose clasps I had to open and close each time I wanted to
put something in or take something out. Looking up you could see the
profile of the mountains; to the sides, darkness and maybe one or two
patches of snow; and up and down and from every direction was a frozen
mountain wind of early Spring, coming in through our pants and sleeves
and collars, numbing our hands, filling our eyes with dirt and cinders
and tossing us around like rags. I had to choose between dying and
staying awake, but I wasn’t conscious enough to decide. The noise of the
train seemed to soothe me, and when for a few seconds I fixed my half-
closed eyes on the rails shining below me, I felt that with
their soft slipping along they also pulled me towards sleep and death. For a
moment, I felt that I would fall onto the line and die; the ground was
calling to me: it was hard, yes, but there at least I could rest. I
burst into profanities. “What’s up?” asked the man with the ruined
shoes, who was hanging from the front ladder of the next car, and whose
back brushed against mine each time the train lost speed, knocking the
ends of the cars together. I didn’t answer; I climbed the the ladder,
pulled myself onto the roof, and from there, forcing a vent open with my
suitcase, slipped inside the car. There I would not be hanging from
anything, and above all I would not risk encountering the soulless
conductor. I had no idea what awaited me: when I fell in among the animals it
seemed that a lion, rather than a man, had fallen. There was a teremor
and the animals began to run in circles in a dull rumble of hooves. I
was no longer sleepy or cold or even hungry: I had to run among them,
taking advantage of the space they left me, taken by surprise when they
moved backwards, press my back against the walls of the car, reach out
and hold myself against the rear of a cow, holding it back, keeping it
from crushing me. After a few turns the animals relaxed and I could
breathe. The next curve of the line put them back in motion. The sobbing
man, who had moved over to the ladder I’d left, sobbed again, this time
from laughter. The floor of the car, covered with fresh manure, was like
the floor of a skating rink, and I, suitcase in hand, that damn suitcase
that I could not let go of if I didn’t want to see it turned into a
tortilla, dancing among the cattle, was the perfect example of a tiny
lost soul….
That was how I came into Chile. Why would I need a birth certificate?)
3.
“Sir, I need a certificate to prove that I am Argentinian.”
“Ah, but who will certify to me that you are? Do you have your birth
certificate?”
“No, sir.”
“And so?”
“And so?”
“I need that document. I have to get on the boat. I don’t have work.”
“Write and ask for your papers. Don’t you have relatives in Argentina?”
“Yes, but…”
“It’s the only way: you bring me your papers and I’ll give you the
document you need. Certificate for certificate. Where were you born?”
(Well, I was born in Buenos Aires, but that fact had no value at all;
what was valuable was the certificate; it had never helped me to say so
and the people to whom I said it never showed enthusiasm or sympathy in
their functionary faces; I didn’t have the certificate; the worst were
my own countrymen: in addition to not caring that I was from Buenos
Aires, they didn’t believe it, demanding, in order to believe it, a
certificate. What strange people! They didn’t believe me, but they would
have believed the paper, which could be false, although my birth could
never be anything but true. It’s not difficult to manufacture a
certificate that assures, with stamps and seals, that you are turkish;
but it is not at all easy to be born in Turkey. And my accent was
unmistakable: no matter how I did it, loudly or softly, I was an
Argentinian, not just that, but from Buenos Aires, which could not be
confused with Peruvian or Cuban or even with someone from the
Argentinian provinces, even though the specific tone of my accent,
because I was a descendent of Spaniards, was soft, without the
stridence of a descendent of Italians. But all of this was
worthless, and thanks to that I became convinced that it would have been
the same to be born in the Brazilian jungle or the mountains of Tibet,
and if I kept insisting, naively, my bonairense citizenship, it was
because it was simpler than insisting that I had been born in Mato
Grosso or The-Far-Off-Country-Of-Men-With-Red-Faces.
Obviously this only happened with that sort of people. With others, with
people in my condition, those who rarely have papers or who have papers
of several nationalities, it was the opposite: it was enough to say that
I was from Buenos Aires for them to accept it as an article of faith.
People like me believed in people, the others believed only in papers,
and I remember still the surprise that I experienced when a tall, thin
man with a large aquiline nose grey eyes and an Adam’s Apple that made
an excellent pair with his nose — it was like a replica — and whom I
found watching, with a strange expression, the small fish in the
fountain of a public square in Mendoza, and after eating several bunches
of grapes from a vine that I was carrying, that he was a Basque. Basque!
If that man, instead of saying that, had taken a baby crocodile or
ostrich out of his pockets, I would not have been more surpised and
delighted. I knew many Basques, there in my far-off Buenos Aires, but
they, milk-men, with baggy pants and bandanas at their collars,
disappeared along with my childhood and had nothing to do with this one,
found in a public square. This Basque was mine. After encouraging him to
eat, more calmly now, a couple more bunches of grapes, I asked him
everything a man who has saved another’s life, and, finally, while we
smoked some disgusting cigarettes offered by one of the vagabonds that I
knew in Mendoza and who had arrived there, like us, to eat the grapes
there, I asked him to speak a few words of his native language; that
man, who without a doubt had intended to disillusion me, did more: he
sang. I didn’t understand, of course, a single word: dun-dun-dun-ga-si-
banyole; but regardless, although I did not understand and although
the song and its words could have been Czech or Lapp instead of Basque I did not commit for an instant the insolence of suspecting that
they were anything else. Why and to what end would he try to trick me?
That Basque, together with all the others, disappeared in the midst of
the days of my youth. He was a boat pilot. What was he doing in Mendoza,
so far from the sea? He answered with a gesture that could as much have
meant shipwreck as arrest for smuggling. I didn’t see him again.
Regardless, if two days later someone were to come up to me and say that
he was not Basque but Catalan, and the songs had not been Basqe Zorcicos but
Catalan Sardanas, that person would certainly have had a rough time.
4
Write? To whom? It would be less absurd to find a camel passing through the eye of a needle than to find some relative of mine in one or another of their preferred cities on the southern Atlantic coast. My relatives were nomads, not steppe nomads, herders of reindeer or donkeys, but urban nomads, moving from city to city and nation to nation. They belonged to the tribes who preferred livestock to horticulture, the sea to tiles and tables, and whose members still resist with varying success the eight hour workday, the rationalization of labor and the regulations of international travel, choosing jobs — some simple, others complicated or dangerous — which let them maintain their customary wandering through all three hundred sixty degrees of the compass; migratory individuals generally unloved and often cursed, to whom the world, jealous of their liberty, slowly closes off roads…
Even so, our father lead a sedentary life, if you can call it sedentary to change addresses almost as often as shoes during the infancy and adolescence of a child. Like migratory birds, my parents would have preferred to stay in the same place until their offspring could fend for themselves, but the economic strategy of my family on one side, and the justice system on the other, prevented that: my father had a job that was both complicated and dangerous. My brothers and I did not know, at first, what that profession was, and the same thing happened to our mother in the first few months of marriage: my father had said he was a tobacco trader, although the only thing he had to do with tobacco was smoking, but shortly after the marriage my mother said to him, somewhere between ironically and curiously, that she had never known a tobacco trader who never went out during the day, almost always went out at night, and didn’t return home until dawn. My father, chagrined and smiling beneath his chestnut mustache, confessed that he was not a trader, but a gambler, and at gambler they left it, but not for long: a month or two later, the presumed cardsharp having left the night before, did not come home in the morning, as he usually did, to sleep, nor did he come the next day, nor the next, and my mother was at the point of abandoning herself to walk the unfamiliar streets of Rio de Janeiro when a man appeared who seemed not to walk so much as slide, and who seemed not to cross doorways so much as to pass through them. From the mixture of Spanish and Portuguese the individual muttered my mother learned that her husband had sent for her. Surprised, allowing herself to be guided by this shadow who made himself even shadowy as he passed near a cop, she arrivted at a somber building; there, the shadow, looking like he had ben born behind those walls, said, stretching a long finger,
“Go in and say you’re looking for The Basque.”
“Who is The Basque?” my mother asked, surprised.
“He’s your husband,” whispered the almost imponderable man, surprised as well.
And he disappeared into the clear hot air of Rio as he said it; it was the jail, and there, behind a grate, my mother found her husband, but not the one she had known until two days before, the clean, calm, Cuban Jose del Real y Antequera, as he had said he was and was named (as he had said, or maybe “which he had said he was and was named, but the dirty and excited Aniceto Hevia, a.k.a. The Basque, famous thief. Taking hold of the dividing grill, her fingers barely fitting around its bars, my mother launched into sobs, and The Basque told her, reaching his yellow-stained fingers through the bars and caressing her hands, “don’t cry, Rosalia, this won’t last long; bring me clothes and cigarettes.” She brought him clothes and her husband, clean again, presented the same face as before, although behind a screen. Regardless, one day the money ran out, but at evening on that same day, the landlady, very excited, came to announce to her that a senhor colonel asked for her. ‘Could it be…’ she wondered, recalling the nearly imponderable individual, who could scarcely resemble a coronel, or even a sergeant. It wasn’t him; as much as the first man had seemed to be dissipating, the one who introduced himself now appeared to be recently made: his pink skin recently made, his blonde mustache, his blue eyes, his clothes, his shoes. “I am Nicholas” he said, with a voice that sounded like it was being used for the first time, “a compatriot of yours; I am a friend of your husband and have been his partner. Soon he will go free; don’t worry,” and left, and put on the table a little bundle of bank notes, clean, unwrinkled, like him, and, perhaps like him, newly made. My mother was left dazzled by that individual, and although she never saw him again except behind a row of bars and a strong wire screen, she lived dazzled by his memory; his appearance, so unexpected at that moment, his posture, his cleanliness, his delicacy, his generosity, converted him in her eyes into some sort of archangel; because of that, when my father told her several years later that Nicolas needed her help, she said in a voice that indicated she would go anywhere, “where is he?” The archangel wasn’t far; my father, setting down the wax mold he was working on and letting a mouthful of smoke through his now greying mustache, answered “In the penitentiary. You remember those bills he gave you in Brazil? Twenty-five years in Ushuaia.” My mother took me with her: there was Nicolas, recently made, his pink skin recently made, his blond mustache, his blue eyes, his prisoner’s cap and uniform; even the number seemed recently printed on the rough cloth. They spoke animatedly in low voices, while I, holding on to my mother’s skirt, looked at the people around us: prisoners, guards, crying women, men who swore or remained silent as though their minds were wandering free, and sad children who sucked candies or cried in unison with their mothers. Nicolas, with the help of a long wire, passed my mother a large bill, not clean and unwrinkled like the ones from Rio, but crushed and flaccid, as though someone had carried it folded up for years hidden in the sole of their shoe. Nevertheless, neither that bill nor my mother’s efforts were any use: after two escape attempts, in one of which his comrades had to pull him semi-asphyxiated from the sewer tubes of the penitentiary, Nicolas was sent to another prison in the south, from where, after another escape attempt, frustrated by the cry of pain he let out after falling to the ground on foot from a height of several meters, he was transferred to Tierra del Fuego, where, finally, fleeing through the rainy woods, he died, surely just as he had always lived: recently made; but, despite what he assured, my father did not go free soon: the judges, individuals without imagination, needed many days to convince themselves, although surely only slightly, that Aniceto Hevia was not, as the opposition legally opined, an evil-doer but, as the lawyer assured them, also legally, a doer of good in society…
Secretly Ironic 