Litro142 teaser

Featuring Chloe Aridjis Natalia Toledo Daniel Krauze Samuel Noyola Sara Uribe Alvaro Enrique Luis Miguel Aquilar Ximena Escalante Aline Davidoff

Cover Art by Miguel Calderon

Guest Editor Jennifer Clement Guest Translator Diego G贸mez Pickering

April 2015

Litro Magazine 44

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Issue 142 • Mexico • April 2015

CONTRIBUTORS07 EDITOR’S LETTER11

PIGEON 13

A look at the frailty of life and brutality of death

THE CRAB’S BACK18

translation by Diego Gómez Pickering

THE NEST22

translation by Lawrence Schimel

THE STREET SELLER’S SONG27 translation by Jennifer Clement

EVERY HOUSE LEARNT HOW TO BURN28 translation by Diego Gómez Pickering

CONSTANTINOPLE’S JACKET29 CRAB32

translation by Diego Gómez Pickering

translation by Kathleen Snodgrass

FEDRA & OTHER GREEKS33

translation by Diego Gómez Pickering

THE HERRERA-HARFUCH ART COLLECTION36

translation by Sylvia Blackmore

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Contributors Litro Magazine • Issue 142 • Mexico • April 2015

Natalia Toledo

Chloe Aridjis Chloe Aridjis grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. Her debut novel Book of Clouds was awarded the French Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. She is a 2014 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Samuel Noyola

Natalia Toledo was born in Juchitán, Oaxaca, and has published several books of poetry.

She writes in both Zapotec and Spanish.

She is a member of Mexico’s presitigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

Miguel Calderón Miguel Calderón is a Mexican artist and writer. He is best known for his work titled “Aggressively Mediocre/ Mentally Challenged/Fantasy Island (circle one)” which was part of a 1998 exhibit and was bought by Wes Anderson and shown in the film The Royal Tenenbaums.

Samuel Noyola was born in Monterrey, Mexico in 1965.

His books include: Nadar sabe mi llama, Tequila con calavera, Gramática del fuego and El cuchillo y la luna. He has been missing since 2007.

Daniel Krauze Daniel Krauze is the author of the story collections Ravens (Planeta, 2007) and Fever (Planeta, 2010).

Fallas de Origen, his first novel, won the first New Lyrics award by Editorial Planeta. He is currently co-editor of the magazine Letras Libres .

Ximena Escalante

Sara Uribe Sara Uribe lives in northern Mexico. Her most recent book, Antigone Gonzalez (2nd. Edition, South +, 2013), explores strategies documentary writing, conceptual and poetic writing on issues around violence, and body language.

Luis Miguel Aquilar Luis Miguel Aguilar is a poet and essayist. His most recent book, Las cuentas de la Iliada y otras cuentas, was published in 2009

Alvaro Enrique Álvaro Enrigue is the award winning author of four novels and two books of short stories. He was awarded the prestigious Joaquín Mortiz Prize for his first novel, La muerte de un instalador (Death of an Installation Artist).

His novel Muerte súbita (Sudden Death) won the Herralde Novel Prize in 2013.

Ximena Escalante`s recent works recreate the myths of Phaedra, Electra, Andromache, Salome, Judith, Lilith.

Aline Davidoff Aline Davidoff studied literature at the New York School in New York. Her career passes between the performing arts and writing. She is currently president of PEN Mexico.

The

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FOREWORD THE POWER OF WORDS When I met Eric Akoto, a few months back, I did it through words. A letter received at the Embassy and replied the same way. From the very beginning it was fairly easy to be on the same page and within a blink of an eye we were talking words rather than writing them; words about the English and Spanish languages, about literature as an effective way to build bridges of understanding amid peoples and countries. They were words about authors and their work, British and Mexican, past and present; authors that represent the best of their cultures. So when he pointed at the possibility of dedicating a Litro Magazine edition to Mexico and its literature, both of our eyes sparkled; just like words do on novels, essays and poems.

As the Ambassador of Mexico to the Court of St James´s and as a writer, I fully acknowledge the importance literature plays both in Britain and Mexico; a relevance perfectly reflected on this wonderful Litro Magazine edition dedicated to celebrate and share Mexico’s literary creativeness with British readers, editors and writers.

During the last few months, while preparing this edition of Litro, I had the opportunity to exchange points of view with poets and novelists, as well as young writers, about Mexico’s main literary assets and renewed creative vitality, about literature’s links to politics and diplomacy. For many years, diplomatic life has been linked to literature. Great Mexican minds like Alfonso Reyes, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Sergio Pitol fostered brilliant diplomatic liaisons between Mexico and the rest of the world, based on our country’s imaginative power and rich culture.

Throughout 2015, as we celebrate the “Year of Mexico in the United Kingdom” and “Year of the United Kingdom in Mexico” literature again will be at the forefront of our efforts to strengthen the ties between Mexico and Britain. On the one hand, Mexican publishing will be showcased at the London Book Fair. On the other hand, the United Kingdom will be the guest of honour at the Guadalajara Book Fair, the world’s largest Spanish

language book fair and the second largest globally.

As the famous campaign says “literature is— definitely—great”.

Literature has always been part of this longstanding relationship across the Atlantic Ocean since both countries first established diplomatic ties back in 1825. Octavio Paz, our Literature Nobel laureate, spent a year in Cambridge while Carlos Fuentes lived for over two decades in London. Through the carefully curated pages of this Litro Magazine edition you will find what lies ahead. Brilliant young novelists, playwrights and poets who represent the future of Mexico and that will undoubtedly become the new bridges that connect both of our countries through the power and beauty of their written words. Diego GómezPickering, Ambassador of Mexico to the Court of Saint James, GUEST TRANSLATOR

EDITORIAL Dear Reader, When I say or write the word Mexico, I always think that the word itself is an enchantment. It sounds beautiful, looks striking on the page and always makes me feel I should salute or kneel. The word represents the country perfectly, as Mexico has produced some of the world’s great art and literature and continues to do so.

This special Mexican issue of Litro Magazine speaks to the many voices writing on Mexico in different languages and forms. For some reason, playwrights and screenwriters are so rarely included in literary magazines. Here, however, we include a short dialogue by leading playwright Ximena Escalante. This edition also showcases Chloe Aridjis, a Mexican writer who writes in English.

Aridjis, like myself and others such as DBC Pierre or the screenwriter and director Rodrigo Garcia, is a part of a tradition that can claim the English language inside a Mexican context.

Litro #142: Mexico also represents Mexico’s indigenous world thanks to a poem by Natalia Toledo, who writes in both Spanish and Zapotec, her mother tongue. Aline Davidoff’s piece on The

Herrera-Harfuch Art Collection honours the unique bond that painters and writers have always had in Mexico. This is the very first time an article on the unique collection has appeared in print.

As a former President of PEN Mexico during the time when the killing of journalists began to escalate, and as the author of a novel on stolen girls, I care about the lost and disappeared voices of Mexico. Therefore, this issue contains an unpublished poem—unknown even in Spanish—written by Samuel Noyola, whose work was admired by many poets including Octavio Paz. Noyola disappeared in 2007 and it is presumed that he died homeless on the streets of Mexico City. The poet and journalist Alicia Quiñones gave me this poem. The cover photograph by Miguel Calderon of a vulture on a highway sign that spells Acapulco was chosen for Litro before the recent violent events in Mexico’s State of Guerrero. Now it feels prophetic.

There is such a wealth of talent among the emerging writers in Mexico that it is hard to decipher and recognize the voices that will take a place in the canon; but

Litro Magazine • Issue 142 • Mexico • April 2015

here we include the works of poet Sara Uribe and fiction writer Daniel Krauze to represent the younger, newer voices emerging in Mexico.

Luis Miguel Aguilar was awarded the Ramón López Velarde Prize for poetic excellence and Chloe Aridjis received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lastly, while it is obviously impossible for a small selection of this kind to represent the diverse voices writing in Mexico today, it is interesting to note that, months after the selection for these pages was made, three writers were awarded important literary prizes. Alvaro Enrigue was given the Elena Poniatowska Prize, and

Jennifer Clement, GUEST EDITOR

PIGEON A look at the frailty of life and brutality of death

by Chloe Aridjis

She

tried to straighten her thoughts, give them some order and linearity, and when that didn’t work she tried to imagine herself elsewhere, on a mountain or coast far from the city, rather than on the Central line with its erratic movement and office-bound passengers and the prickly silence of those torn from sleep. She and her mother had been lucky to find seats; at that hour the tube was nearly full, a geometric overload of skirts and suits, and wherever she turned she saw freshly combed hair and painted faces and newspapers and briefcases all vying for space.

“You know, you could have died.” Her mother lowered her voice in the hope that none of the other passengers would hear.

“Well the point is, I didn’t.”

“You nearly did.”

“I’m cold.”

“Don’t you have a sweater in your bag?”

“I gave it away.”

“You gave it away?”

“This morning. To one of the nurses.”

With something close to nostalgia, N. thought back on the small room she’d just left behind, its itchy grey blanket and sweat-faded sheets, and the dent in the wall, courtesy of a former patient, in which her own fist had fit perfectly. Now that she’d left she found herself missing the kind female voices that roused her each morning, voices that for a few seconds invoked the promise of a new life, voices she preferred to that of her mother’s. And she thought back too on the strange dreams she’d had, dangerous and ornate, dreams unlike the ones outside. And then the wallpaper: red and white stripes connecting floor to ceiling, heaven to hell. There was a window, always locked, but as a view N. preferred the walls and the ceiling since they didn’t present any mocking beyond.

In the seat in front of her sat a boy wearing headphones. She hadn’t heard any music in five weeks, she realised, not a note. As soon as she got home she would listen to…everything.

Thousands and thousands of songs. She’d go through them all, one by one, day and night, an endless carousel of memories, welcome and unwelcome, round and round, that melodic loop of acceptances and rejections, tiny triumphs and huge disasters. In the clinic, what she’d feared the most was the loss of her memories; now, she was willing to keep them all.

“Which sweater was it?”

“Hmm?” “Which sweater?”

“Just a sweater.”

April 2015

Litro Magazine 13

THE CRAB’S BACK Tradition, betrayal and pain dance together in this poem

by Natalia Toledo translation by Diego Gómez Pickering

A

possum crosses my house’s sky His hands smell of sandals,

Describe a nocturnal gladiator That touches and smells women’s sex.

In my dream, someone on the right side Throws silver coins into a pristine bucket Oh! Childhood’s sounds.

You will dream of shit and your ancestors Will say it is good fortune, Keep that hand on your left pocket Music on the wrong side; I was born with two aspects: the written word And Zapotec’s melody, in order to love I’ve always used my two hemispheres.

I miss you and all you know Are the dark woods of ephemeralness, The click of an eye that opens to take away a piece of something Just to close again immediately, Like a shell closes down on feelings; A hot coin on your back Or laughing astride Mockery’s culture A free animal, or not, Animals oblige to their fate Repetition without a reason, The moon with its milk drawings With its rabbit looking upon disgraces Right there, where gaze at a distance seems to unite.

April 2015

Litro Magazine 18

THE NEST On the sensitivities and cruel memories of youth

by Daniel Krauze translation by Lawrence Schimel

In

the house where I was born and grew up, the final unexplored frontier, the last stronghold of the old west, the ultimate wild territory was my father’s study, a narrow annex attached to the rest of the property, with olive-coloured walls and moth-eaten furniture, that he used to sequester himself away at night and drink when we lived beneath the same roof and which, after he abandoned us to go to Cancún to work as the manager of an “all inclusive,” my mother filled with chairs, tables, sofas and bookcases, as if that chamber were a mouth she had to muzzle. Then she closed the door, locking it with a key, and didn’t speak of her husband again.

The house belongs to my mother. She inherited it and she decorated it, with the compulsive attention of the unemployed, choosing identical sheets for our beds, the same tapestry wallpaper for all the walls, and baskets full of plastic fruit for the kitchen, the living room, and the dining room. If my brother or I took just one of those fruits and moved it from its position, my mother noticed in less time than the blink of an eye and took us to task. Where did you put my peach? What have you done with my lemons?

That melon goes upside down. The pineapple goes in the other basket.

My father left without taking anything with him. I always imagined his flight in fast motion, as if it were part of a caricature, leaving a cloud of dust behind him. A few months after abandoning us, he sent a letter in which he asked our forgiveness for not having said goodbye, assuring us that this new work opportunity would benefit all of us and promising to visit us in February, the off season. Months later we received another letter, congratulating us because soon we would have a little sibling. He had just met his new wife, he told us. Come and visit. You’ll like her, you’ll see.

My mother didn’t touch this subject, but my aunt Elda lost no time in offering her opinion. First he goes off with that slut from work, he knocks her up, and then invites you to Cancún, is that right, Sergio? she asked me, as if I knew what she was talking about and had also drunk four tequilas. Those are chingaderas, my boy. On your heads if you go to see that cynic.

We didn’t go to see him, nor did we talk about the matter between us. My brother began to sleep in my mother’s room, on the carpet on one side of the bed, whereas every afternoon I snuck into the study through the window and, more than delving into the things my father left behind, I inhabited that space as if it were mine. I kept comics, my homework notebooks and sweets in my knapsack, and tried to entertain myself there, among the mountains of furniture and appliances.

I never managed to last more than ten minutes before running back home. At twelve, I was certain that something malignant dwelled in there and that the only way to face it was to have an accomplice who accompanied me.

I convinced my brother to venture in there with me during a family meal one Sunday afternoon, while my mother and my aunts played cards and drank in the living room.

April 2015

Litro Magazine 22

THE STREET SELLER’S SONG What can you buy on a street? A song of surprise

by Samuel Noyola translation by Jennifer Clement

Forget the shameless clocks Return the contortionist fish to the sea Romp on a mattress of wild leaves Inhale with the mind in an indigo zero Deposit silence in a ballot box Congregate a circle of holy water Step on the grapes of your wine Accustom yourself to fly with crutches To cover the rough weather of her eyes To descend a mineshaft Become friends with a panther in heat Awaken as a witch on the weekend Create a moneybox for sleep Donate your fingers to domestic fire Fast on language in the middle of a fast Dance barefoot in the dark Spell out your sins aloud April 2015

Litro Magazine 27

EVERY HOUSE LEARNT HOW TO BURN A poem/dialogue on possibility and impossibility

by Sara Uribe translation by Diego Gómez Pickering

One

: Is it possible that I once..? That I? That before?

Two: Yes, it is possible that your name.

One: Two: It is possible the bodies.

One: Two: It is possible that your name and the bodies. That you once. That before.

One: And the isles? The conversations? The delay?

Two: One: The houses we abandoned? All those patios?

Two: One: Did we leave the lights on? Did we leave the doors unlocked?

Two: One: Were we the ones that on escaping…?

Two: Yes, it’s possible we were the ones. It’s possible; all the patios and all the doors, and all those abandoned houses with the lights on. The delay and the conversations; but not the isles. Those belong to fiction and asylum.

One: Let’s say, was there ever an isle bearing your name? Was there a before? Was there an I? Two: Yes, there was a name and there were the bodies; a before and an us.

One: There was an I, then. Isles.

Two: It’s also possible that I was lying and that the isles, and the I, and the could have.

One: Two: It’s also possible that I wasn’t lying and that in present tense there are no hurries and no escapes.

No nothing.

One: Two: One: Is the isle of us possible?

Two: Yes, it is possible. The journey and the delay. Yes. One: Two: One: Two: One: But, is it also possible you are lying?

Two: Yes, it is possible; the name, the I, the isles.

April 2015

Litro Magazine 28

CONSTANTINOPLE’S JACKET An ironic and brutal look at corporate life

by Álvaro Enrigue translation by Diego Gómez Pickering

It’s

the type of business where those with a PhD are the unprepared ones; they had to go to school and waste their time while the rest embraced universal culture without aides and from an early age. Frankly, there are assistants who are quite simple and accountants with mental retardation but overall employees have a terrific intellectual calibre.

The best are those who didn’t even finished High School. As an example there is this one who wanted to become a professional football player. He had some success at a youngster’s league team but his father, an engineer, prevented him going further. He then read every book, admired every painting and listened to every record he bumped into; just to contravene his dad. He ended up incapable of joining any other sort of industry. There is this other one, who retired yesterday in a hurry, who is able to translate in six different languages; she’s invented two perfumes and during her free time she writes advisory papers for the development of Brazilian aerospace programs.

There is a Chilean who sees series of figures in action where for the rest of us there’s only a bicycle, for example. He asks: what is the basic ingredient in your bike’s alienation; titanium or aluminium? One responds: Aluminium, why? He looks up, closing his left eye, and adds: 28.3 kilometres an hour without considering slopes; not bad. He’s spent his life turning cultural entrepreneurs into millionaires; by visiting their shops and studying the relevant yellow pages he is able to advise on investments since he already knows how much will be sold during their first year. However his true speciality, in which he never fails, is Thomism; he discusses Councils as if discussing restaurants and he’s a Jew. There’s a physicist who invents motors at his own place. He can distinguish errata just by looking at a document and left the movie industry at 20 after concluding Godard, for whom he worked doing research, was Maoist not out of conviction but stupidity.

It was on all those people’s computer screens that the decisive email inviting the entire personnel to attend the Second Evaluation Meeting on ISO 9000 advancements appeared. In the company all of us understood the partners’ upsetting fixation with our way of getting things done and the sad confusion of the Director General, recently arrived from his MBA and Milky Way’s rotation; so we were polite but condescending and foolish at the same time. Nobody spoke on time to stop the Certification process, maybe it was never possible to do so since the Director had learnt through his private university ministerial teachers those communication strategies of the revolutionary General type that sometimes are mixed up with political ability. When we realized it, the several thousand dollar contract was a reality; a deal with the most unlikely basic group of hustlers on Earth. We had nurtured the monster with a funny attendance at the Total Quality workshops and when we were called to attend the First Evaluation Meeting many amongst us had something else to do. Only the accountants, the secretaries, the April 2015

Litro Magazine 29

CRAB On fortune, reading, and love of the other

by Luis Miguel Aguilar translation by Kathleen Snodgrass

When

the crab advances towards the moon

The sea of love crashes into mirrors And there are readers filled with fortune.

Filled with fortune, the readers Arrive at the love of mirrors When the moon falls towards the crab.

The moon falls. The sea crashes. Mirrors Are dying of love for the crab That risks its life for the moon.

Then the moon fills up. Readers, Before the moon, are like the crab: They fall, they rise, towards mirror love.

May you have crab, readers, and moon.

May you find yourselves in the sea of mirrors; May you be filled with the sea and with fortune.

May you crash into new seas, may you be crabs In mirrors of moon and readings.

And love in excess, filled with mirrors.

Let’s fall towards the sea of crabs: There the seas overflow with love, There begins the reading of the moon.

April 2015

Litro Magazine 32

FEDRA AND OTHER GREEKS An original take on Greek tragedy in this extract from a longer work

by Ximena Escalante translation by Diego Gómez Pickering PARENTHESIS NAXOS” BAR. A FASHIONABLE BAR IN TOWN. CHARACTERS ARIADNA MAN MAN: Hello ARIADNA: …

MAN: Do you smoke?

ARIADNA: …

MAN: Do you come here very often?

ARIADNA: …

MAN: Don’t you speak?

ARIADNA: What do you want?

MAN: I can make you happy, you know.

ARIADNA: You? MAN: Yes, come with me.

ARIADNA: To your bed…

MAN: …Well…If you put it that way…

ARIADNA: How am I supposed to put it?

MAN: You look lonely. I can keep you company.

ARIADNA: Between the sheets.

MAN: …I love the way you say it…Yes, I can make you have a wonderful night.

ARIADNA: I hate nights.

MAN: Let’s wait for sunrise.

ARIADNA: I hate sunrises.

MAN: Why don’t we have a drink, we laugh and have fun?

ARIADNA: Your way of conceiving fun bores me.

MAN: What’s your name?

ARIADNA: I couldn’t care less about all names in this world.

April 2015

Litro Magazine 33

April 2015

Litro Magazine 35

THE HERRERA-HARFUCH ART COLLECTION On the synaesthesia of aroma and art in the Herrera-Harfuch collection

by Aline Davidoff translation by Sylvia Blackmore

Every

time I visit the Herrera-Harfuch art collection, every time I’ve gone up— because there is an ascent, never as dangerous as the descent, even though, often, during the climb one is filled with a glass or two of wine or some other intoxicant, a couple of tequilas or whiskies on winter nights—every time I am under the impression that I have seen only a small fragment of the collection’s great body of work. A slice of an enormous landscape wisely folded into the furrows of the collection’s archives. These wines and spirits consumed before going up accompany the greatest delicacies of Polish cuisine found in Mexico. Everyone knows what their favourite dish is—perhaps a few juicy slices of duck in a sweet-and-sour sauce, fish cooked just right to retain its tenderness and not lose the vigour of the sea, or minced meat wrapped in cabbage leaves drenched in the most delicious red sauce that is orange, really, due to the way the mix of tomatoes and paprika gel during the process of cooking. This is served on white dishes with colourful puréed roots that are so much a part of survival in northern Europe. But back to Mexico City, the Condesa neighbourhood to be exact, where you can eat on the terrace almost year-round. The caloric impact of the delicacies served by Gabriel Herrera take on other dimensions, and I’m not speaking only of the shapes of the diners’ bodies, but of what happens to the perceptions and the minds of those of us who dine here.

I had moved only a few metres, but found myself as if in another world—the home where the collection lives.

The door opens and one puts one foot after the other into a territory whose first effect is the sensation of having flown a thousand miles away from the Condesa. Simultaneously, one realizes that what has taken place is that one has landed in the very entrails of the neighbourhood. In a place where one can see the pictorial interior of the artists that inhabit the span between the second half of the 20th and into the 21st century. And also the visual touch and flow of a man and of Consuelo, his wife, who have lovingly put together the ripest fruit of these artists.

Collecting, let us not forget, is a term that originates from the harvest and also from the time before humans harvested; it is a term derived from the foraging for food in forests, near rivers, in lakes and seas. In what the world was then, in the bounty of the earth.

Behind the door there are works on every centimetre of wall, provided there is space enough for the eye to see. There is art in every nook and cranny, pieces in every corner—to surmise, there are pictures and objects everywhere.

Basically, the collection brings together artists born after 1950, with the exception of Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Pedro Friedeberg, Jose Luis Cuevas, Brian Nissen and Arturo The first time (and I don’t know why each time Rivera. Each of these older painters can be seems to be the first) I passed through a tiny seen as an important tributary of a great alley next to the restaurant kitchen and went river that will be discovered in decades to up under the light of the stairs’ bare bulb, come. These four artists had already started a light that undresses the eye in preparation to produce work and gain recognition while for what lies behind the apartment door. the younger generation was being formed under their influence.

April 2015

Litro Magazine 36

1–27 June 2015

Join the Kingston Writing School and the British Council at our third annual International Creative Writing Summer School, this year in Athens and Thessaloniki. www.britishcouncil.gr/events/international-creative-writing-summer-school-2015 www.kingston.ac.uk/writing/

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1000 m 2 and two levels of exhibition space dedicated to the showcasing of modern and contemporary art 62, rue du faubourg Saint-HonorĂŠ 75008 Paris - T. +33 (0)1 42 96 39 00 - paris@operagallery.com - www.operagallery.com Open Monday to Saturday from 10 am to 7:30 pm, Sunday 11 am - 7 pm