August Read online

  “Fluently translated from the Spanish, this absorbing novel with a Holdenesque narrator delivers a raw and arresting new voice in literature.”

  —BOOKLIST (starred review)

  “Dazed with grief, a young woman pours her heart out to a beloved friend who committed suicide, in a stream of consciousness that scatters the page with the ashes of home, popular songs, horrific news items, movie plots, pets, vermin, and exes. In this pitch-perfect performance of a chilly autumn homecoming in Patagonia, Jennifer Croft conjures a millennial voice that is raw and utterly real.”

  —ESTHER ALLEN, translator of Zama

  “August is enviable in its unpretentiousness, feminism, and intelligence. I texted photos of almost every page to my friends. I wanted to live inside of August, and am now Romina Paula’s biggest fan.”

  —CHLOE CALDWELL, author of I’ll Tell You in Person

  “In Romina Paula’s August, the narrator addresses us as ‘you,’ the missing person, in an urgent, generous, often funny voice rife with confidences, reminiscent of an adolescent sharing important, whispered truths for the first time. This novel breathes with feverish life.”

  —MAXINE SWANN, author of Flower Children

  “This hyperlocal and/yet global tale of the lonely pressures of womanhood and loyalty bristles against sentimentality while insisting how much we must turn to language to realize emotion. August’s confessions are rinsed in the waters of the intellect and give a large purchase on readers’ imaginations: a book of deft fury and defter beauty.”

  —JOAN NAVIYUK KANE, author of Milk Black Carbon

  Published in 2017 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition 2017

  Copyright © 2009 by Romina Paula

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Croft

  Originally published in Spanish as Agosto by Editorial Entropía in 2009.

  All rights reserved.

  This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing April 2017

  Cover and text design by Suki Boynton

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Paula, Romina, 1979- author. | Croft, Jennifer (Translator), translator.

  Title: August / Romina Paula; translated by Jennifer Croft.

  Other titles: Augusto. English

  Description: New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016046248 (print) | LCCN 2017005001 (ebook) | ISBN 9781558614277 (ebook all)

  Subjects: LCSH: Voyages and travels--Fiction. | Female friendship--Fiction. BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PQ7798.426.A89 A913 2017 (print) | LCC PQ7798.426. A89 (ebook) | DDC 863/.7--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046248

  The girl returns with a rodent’s face, disfigured by not wanting anything to do with being young.

  —HÉCTOR VIEL TEMPERLEY,

  Hospital Británico

  CONTENTS

  PRAISE PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  EPIGRAPH

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR

  ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS

  ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

  1.

  It was something about wanting to scatter your ashes; something about wanting to scatter you.

  Your dad told me that yesterday when I met up with him, that thing about the five years. I mean, I already knew that, you know. I just hadn’t been thinking about the legal limit being up. We were drinking white wine, I don’t know why, maybe we were both in a kind of stupor. I don’t like white wine, it’s the worst. We went to one of those places with fluorescent lighting and yellow walls, just because, because it was there, and because it was heated. We weren’t getting anything to eat, we didn’t eat, it was too early for dinner and too late for coffee and snacks. And anyway we’d already committed to the wine. The white wine. So as you can imagine it hit me pretty hard. The wine, the ashes, the combo. Your dad tells me that now it’s legal to exhume the body, your body, that you can finally be exhumed and, I mean, dealt with. How since the waiting period on an exhumation has expired they can now remove you from that anonymous grave and actually deal with you, deal with your body. He says they want to take you out of there to scatter you, elsewhere, sounds like they want to scatter you from somewhere else or bury you. I don’t know, that part wasn’t super clear to me, I don’t think they know exactly, either, what to do. But that he wanted to tell me, in person this way, and invite me down to your place, that I shouldn’t worry about the cost of the trip, if I couldn’t cover it, that they would like for me to be there and that money was no object, that it’s important for me to be there. And that he wanted to involve me in it, too, in the decision, and what did I think.

  Five years, I mean, fuck, I can’t believe it’s been five years. I obviously of course have something to say about all this, or not even something but a ton of things, a ton of years without discussing it, or merely just in passing with the same couple of people, of course I have plenty to say.

  I try to talk, seek a position I can take, knocking back my wine for courage, a big gulp of the Chablis to your pops and all his kindness, him looking out the window, saying he has all the time in the world, and he’s relaxed, and right then is when I start to feel it, hard, an irrepressible despair, and I don’t want to cry in front of your father, just when he’s got it together, I’d hate to go and cry on him. I don’t know if it’s the white wine that makes it happen or what, I mean my shaking, because I’ve been able to say your name for a while now without losing my composure, even been able to talk about what happened, about what happened to you, to say after the death of rather than after the thing with, which, as we know, tends to lead to confusion. Or which in any case does not name it, that, the utter vacuum. You know? Even now I can say, name, write it all down without getting too worked up about it, but just right then, I don’t know, your poor dad. Maybe it was the element of surprise of it too, beca
use of course I was happy I was going to meet up with him, I wasn’t really prepared for anything sad, or excessively sad, so it kind of took me by surprise. And the wine, I never drink white wine. So he tells me the thing about cremation and asks me what I think, that he wants to know my thoughts on it, and, you know, I make an effort, I try and pull myself together, keep control of my mouth and my jaw. I say, I’m not sure how, that I agree, that whatever they decide is fine by me, because ultimately all these rituals that have to do with death are more for the people left behind than they are for the deceased. And that if that’s what they thought would be best, if cemeteries had no particular meaning for them, as a place to go and visit, as a point of reference, that they should do it, that it was fine by me and that it actually seemed like a good way to get closure, considering how it had been five years. I said something in that vein, adamantly, I think, I guess because of the wine, I spoke with conviction because I wanted so badly for my sadness not to show. I just hope I didn’t overdo it. We did a toast, and I was trying to go back over Six Feet Under in my head, back over the way they were able to naturalize it, death as an everyday thing, kind of to try and get myself to chill, calm down. But it was hard, for some reason I couldn’t quite make it to that ordinariness the Fishers were able to have. After that we talked about other stuff, and I did hold it together until it was time to go. When your dad gave me a hug my knees started shaking and almost gave out on me, like they did that day. I was overwhelmed, and he noticed; it was a lot for him, as well.

  First, and I don’t know in what order, I’m watering a yard—this is in Esquel, it’s the yard from our house in Esquel, or a blend of my dad’s house with your place in the country. I water the trees around the edges of the property. I remember what order those went in, which came after which, and the sensation of traveling from one shadow to the next, and where there was grass growing and where there wasn’t. The eucalyptus, the oak, the pine, the pine tree with its fruit that comes in little flowers, pine flowers, brown, wooden, like wooden flowers; the space for the gate, with no trees, the vegetable patch, the succinct patch of raspberries, which doesn’t produce much, that tree with the symmetrical branches, parallel to the ground, easy to climb, and its sticky orange and yellow fruit—are those its flowers?—and then the fir tree, like the pine but blue, which couldn’t be climbed and therefore made less of an impression, had less personality, to those of us who sized up trees in terms of practicality. Everything is very dry, and it’s hard for me to control the hose, because it’s big, wide, and the water pressure is high. Was it yellow?

  Then I’m in college, at school, and somebody taps the tip of one of my teeth, one of my front teeth, a little piece that seemed like it was loose, and that’s how they all fall apart, the whole front part of my mouth shatters into little pieces like my teeth are made of glass. The leftover shards remain in my mouth, spiky and sharp, like rodent teeth but broken. Surprise and pain.

  2.

  I hear mouse sounds all the time. Which translates into: I would like to move, get out of here. Ramiro doesn’t feel that way. Ramiro thinks it’s stupid. He maintains that any city will be full of mice, let’s just thank our lucky stars it’s not a rat and that we can resolve it by not keeping things in the pantry anymore. Yet meanwhile, every time I come across another package of something that you can tell has been nibbled on by the tiny teeth of vermin, I feel like throwing up. And like leaving, moving. Ramiro says every time there’s a problem, no matter how small, instead of thinking how I might be able to fix it, I just want to run away. That may be. But I can’t think of any real solution here. And besides, it’s not the only one. The only problem, I mean. Besides, what he calls running away is probably just my instinct for self-preservation. So for me ultimately the mouse invasion confirms the state of total disrepair we have the house in now, how disconnected we are (me at least) from where we live in order for another thing to take up residence, another being. And if it’s not that, then how do you explain why it never happened before? I can hardly think it’s a coincidence. Or maybe it is—or maybe what it is is an accumulation of coincidences that in turn form a sort of mouse grid. I have a dream about rodent teeth, and then one night, standing at the corner where our place is, I look up and see a mouse running along the wires like they’re pathways, with that determination, that certainty. A few days later I come upon another one, another mouse in another neighborhood. Frozen. Tense. Close to a cable. I put two and two together, understand it got electrocuted and fell, splat, onto the sidewalk. And then, from the bus, I see rats—these are rats, these ones are enormous—and I see them circulate, emerge from an abandoned building, and head for a mound of trash bags, absconding with something, absconding with things, food, coming and going, real fast, lightning fast, one with a piece of bread. I can see them multiply before my very eyes, there are more of them each second, forcing me to think about the rodent, about our rodent. Is there just one of them or are there more of them? Maybe it’s a family. Making themselves at home, I mean turning our pantry into their home. I’m resigned, I want to leave the mouse the house, I don’t want to kill it, I don’t want to poison it; if it winds up dying in the kitchen I’ll still want to leave. It’s so revolting, it’s done now, the havoc has been wreaked: the mouse is there, we’ve seen each other now, we’ve looked each other in the eyes, now I can neither kill it nor have it killed, even less so live with it. So I surrender the kitchen. I’m thinking, now, about—was it in Bleu or Rouge where the girl comes across a mouse, or maybe even a mother mouse with baby mice in the pantry or the laundry room (I can’t remember exactly what it was), and it completely freaks her out? At the time, as I was watching it, I didn’t get why it was such a big deal, why she would make such a big deal out of a few little mice. Then I think she borrows a neighbor’s cat and goes and shuts it in the room with the mice for it to do its thing, and I remember that she really freaked out when she did that, I guess because she had kind of made this mental association between the mother mouse and herself. That was definitely Bleu. Although if it were Rouge it would be the same, I mean identifying with the mouse, so many tragic women, girls who suffer, all of them tragic.

  I don’t want to live here anymore. Ramiro says we should do that, just bring a cat in. That if I feel sorry for the mouse like an idiot and refuse to kill it or poison it, then I should at least let nature do its thing, let the cat do its job, and we won’t even see it, we won’t even know, and anyway, says Ramiro, it probably won’t even happen because the mouse probably won’t even come back if it smells cat. That could be. Ramiro reminded me of how when somebody broke into our house, back in Esquel, it was basically the same thing in the sense that back then, too, I kept on saying we should move. I had forgotten, but that’s true, that was a long time ago. Indeed, the sense of intrusion was horrible for me, not because of the things themselves, I don’t even remember what they took, but indeed, it did take me a long time to get over it, the fact that they came into our house while we were sleeping, while we were there, all three of us, because there were still just three of us when that happened, Dad hadn’t gotten married again yet. I not only couldn’t sleep the night after the robbery but also for many, many nights afterwards. It’s not that I wasn’t sleeping, I guess, so much as that I kept waking up at the same time really early every morning. I would go to the VCR in the living room that had the time on it in big green letters, they hadn’t taken that, I guess they’d heard some noise or something that had stopped them before they got to it or whatever, in any case they hadn’t taken it. Anyway, I kept waking up at the same time, like by some internal alarm, always in a kind of panic, and I would get up and go down the hall and into the living room, where we had the TV and the VCR. I would look to see if the green light that the VCR gave off was still the same, if the trajectory of the light of the numbers was the same as before, if I could recognize it or if there was anything obstructing it. If it was okay, then that was a sign that we were going to be okay, at least for that night.
If not, if there was something obstructing the light, or if it just wasn’t there, then we’d been hit again. It was like that night after night, while my dad and my brother just went on sleeping, unaware that I was roving around, that there was someone ranging around the house, that there was a person watching over them and looking out for them while they were sleeping. I don’t remember exactly how long that lasted. Obviously I didn’t mention my nocturnal meanderings, I never told them anything, but I did insist for a while that we move. For me at that time that home had reached the end of its cycle: that was where my mom had run away from, that was where she hadn’t wanted to live with us anymore (not there or anywhere else, now I know that, but back then I didn’t quite yet have that clarity), and as if that wasn’t enough we’d started to be vulnerable to the outside, too, to external threats. And that was more than enough for me to deem it cursed. Deem the duplex. The cursed duplex. But Dad’s reasoning was always a lot more levelheaded and concrete than mine: Where the hell did I think we ought to move to? Conclusive. And he reversed the theory on me: our house was actually now safer than any other, than all the other homes we could ever possibly reside in, because the chances we’d get broken into again were one in a thousand, one in a million. I don’t know, this argument didn’t really work on me, but at the time I had no option other than to go along with it. And then, I don’t know when, but at some point I stopped waking up at three in the morning, and then that was it: I was over it. Dad still lives there. My reasons for having to leave were probably the same as his reasons for staying. At the same time I think he really believed in his probabilities argument. And now Ramiro reminds me about that, about that other time that I insisted that we leave, and how then I just got over it, how then it sort of simply fizzled out. It’s true, and besides, there’s not much I can do without him being on board. I can’t live alone. And I can’t live with Manuel. So I’ll probably take your parents up on their invitation. A few days down south might do me good. Meanwhile the cat can do its thing. I personally prefer not to be around.