Traveller_Levin's Blog

One of These Days

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Monday dawned warm and rainless. Aurelio Escovar, a dentist without a degree, and a very early riser, opened his office at six. He took some false teeth, still mounted in their plaster mold, out of the glass case and put on the table a fistful of instruments which he arranged in size order, as if they were on display. He wore a collarless striped shirt, closed at the neck with a golden stud, and pants held up by suspenders He was erect and skinny, with a look that rarely corresponded to the situation, the way deaf people have of looking.

When he had things arranged on the table, he pulled the drill toward the dental chair and sat down to polish the false teeth. He seemed not to be thinking about what he was doing, but worked steadily, pumping the drill with his feet, even when he didn't need it.

After eight he stopped for a while to look at the sky through the window, and he saw two pensive buzzards who were drying themselves in the sun on the ridgepole of the house next door. He went on working with the idea that before lunch it would rain again. The shrill voice of his eleven year-old son interrupted his concentration.

The Circuit 

Francisco Jiménez

It was that time of year again. Ito, the strawberry share-cropper, did not smile. It was natural. The peak of the strawberry season was over, and the last few days the workers, most of them braceros (laborers), were not picking as many boxes as they had during the months of June and July.

As the last days of August disappeared, so did the number of braceros. Sunday, only one—the best picker—came to work. I liked him. Sometimes we talked during our half-hour lunch break. That is how I found out he was from Jalisco, the same state in Mexico my family was from. That Sunday was the last time I saw him. 

When the sun had tired and sunk behind the mountains, Ito signaled us that it was time to go home. “Ya esora,” (It's time") he yelled in his broken Spanish. Those were the words I waited for twelve hours a day, every day, seven days a week, week after week. And the thought of not hearing them again saddened me. 

The Cinnamon Shops

Bruno Schulz

IN THE PERIOD OF the shortest, sleepy winter days, caught on both sides, from morning and from evening, in furred, crepuscular edgings — whilst the town branched its way deeper and deeper into the labyrinths of the winter nights, to be called back and shaken to its senses by a merely fleeting dawn — my father was already lost, sold, pledged to the other sphere.

His face and head became luxuriantly and wildly overgrown in those days with a covering of grey hair, protruding irregularly in bunches, bristles, and long brushes, shooting out from his warts, his eyebrows, and his nostrils, which lent to his physiognomy the appearance of a pugnacious old fox.

His senses of smell and hearing had become inordinately sharpened; and it showed in the agitations of his tense, silent features that he remained, through the mediation of those senses, in continual contact with an invisible world of dark nooks and mouse-holes, musty empty spaces beneath the floor, and chimney ducts.

SHILOH

by Bobbie Ann Mason

Leroy Moffitt's wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals.  She lifts three-pound dumbbells to warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell.  Standing with her legs apart, she reminds Leroy of Wonder Woman.

"I'd give anything if I could just get these muscles to where they're real hard," says Norma Jean. "Feel this arm. It's not as hard as the other one."

My Aunt Gold Teeth

V. S. Naipaul

I never knew her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance. 

Even without her gold teeth my aunt would have been noticeable. She was short, scarcely five foot, and she was fat, horribly, monstrously fat. If you saw her in silhouette you would have found it difficult to know whether she was facing you or whether she was looking sideways.

She ate little and prayed much. Her family being Hindu, and her husband being a pundit, she too was an orthodox Hindu. Of Hinduism she knew little apart from the ceremonies and the taboos, and this was enough for her. Gold Teeth saw God as a Power, and religious ritual as a means of harnessing that Power for great practical good, her good.

One Hundred Percent

by Etgar Keret

I touch her hands, her face, her hair down below, her shirt. And I say to her, “Roni, please take it off, for me.” But she won’t. So I back down and we do it again, touch each other, completely naked, almost. The tag on her shirt says the material is one hundred percent cotton, it’s supposed to feel good, but it’s scratchy. Nothing is one hundred percent, that’s what she always says, just ninety-nine point nine, God willing. And then she crosses her fingers and knocks on wood. I hate that shirt. It scratches my face, it doesn’t let me feel her body heat. I can’t even tell if she’s sweating. And I say it again: “Roni, please.” My voice, a moan like the sound of someone biting himself with a closed mouth. “I’m coming, please take it off.” She won’t budge.

It’s crazy. We’ve been together six months and I still haven’t seen her naked. Six months, and my friends are still warning me not to get serious. Six months of living together and they keep on telling me stories we all know by heart. How she stood in front of the mirror and tried to cut her breasts off with a kitchen knife because she hated the shape of her body. How she ended up in the hospital more than once. And they tell me those stories about her as if she were a stranger, while they’re drinking “our” coffee from “our” mugs. They tell me to keep my distance when we’re already madly in love. I could kill them for that, but I don’t say anything. At most, I ask them to be quiet and I just sit there, hating them in my head. What can they tell me about her that I don’t already know? What can they say that would make me love her even a tiny bit less?

I try to explain it to her. That it doesn’t matter. That what we have is so strong that nothing can destroy it, I cross my fingers and knock on wood, like she wants me to. I tell her I know, I tell her I’ve already been told, I know what’s there and I couldn’t care less. But it doesn’t help, nothing helps with her. She won’t give an inch. The farthest I ever got was after a bottle of Chianti at a New Year’s party, and even then, it was only one button.

After she does the test she calls her girlfriend, who did it once, to find out what the procedure is. She doesn’t want an abortion, I can feel she doesn’t. I don’t want one either. I tell her that. I get down on my knees like in a movie and ask her to marry me: “Come on, babe,” I say, doing my best Dean Martin. “Let’s ring-a-ding-ding.” She laughs; she says no. She asks if it’s because she’s pregnant but she knows it isn’t. Five minutes later, she says okay, but on the condition that if it’s a boy, we call him Yotam. We shake on it. I try to get up, but my legs have fallen asleep.

The Embassy of Cambodia

BY ZADIE SMITH

0 – 1

Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody. Nobody could have expected it, or be expecting it. It’s a surprise, to us all. The Embassy of Cambodia!

Next door to the embassy is a health center. On the other side, a row of private residences, most of them belonging to wealthy Arabs (or so we, the people of Willesden, contend). They have Corinthian pillars on either side of their front doors, and—it’s widely believed—swimming pools out back. The embassy, by contrast, is not very grand. It is only a four- or five-bedroom North London suburban villa, built at some point in the thirties, surrounded by a red brick wall, about eight feet high. And back and forth, cresting this wall horizontally, flies a shuttlecock. They are playing badminton in the Embassy of Cambodia. Pock, smash. Pock, smash.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

By ZZ Packer

Orientation games began the day I arrived at Yale from Baltimore. In my group we played heady, frustrating games for smart people. One game appeared to be charades reinterpreted byexistentialists; another involved listening to rocks. Then a freshman counsellor made everyone play Trust. The idea was that if you had the faith to fall backward and wait for four scrawny former high-school geniuses to catch you, just before your head cracked on the slate sidewalk, then you might learn to trust your fellow-students. Russian roulette sounded like a better game.

"No way," I said. The white boys were waiting for me to fall, holding their arms out for me, sincerely, gallantly. "No fucking way."

"It's all cool, it's all cool," the counsellor said. Her hair was a shade of blond I'd seen only on Playboy covers, and she raised her hands as though backing away from a growling dog. "Sister," she said, in an I'm-down-with-the-struggle voice, "you don't have to play this game. As a person of color, you shouldn't have to fit into any white, patriarchal system."

Poor Devil

CHARLES BAXTER AUG 1 2005, 12:00 PM ET

My ex-wife and I are sitting on the floor of what was once our living room. The room is empty now except for us. This place is the site of our marital decline, and we are performing a ritual cleansing on it. I've been washing the hardwood with a soapy disinfectant solution, using a soft brush and an old mop, working toward the front window, which has a view of the street. My hands smell of soap and bleach. We're trying to freshen the place up for the new owners. The terms of sale do not require this kind of scouring, but somehow we have brought ourselves here to perform it.

We're both battered from the work: Emily fell off a kitchen stool this morning while washing the upstairs windows, and I banged my head against a drainpipe when I was cleaning under the bathroom sink. When I heard her drop to the floor, I yelled upstairs to ask if she was okay, and she yelled back down to say that she was, but I didn't run up there to check.

When my wife and I were in the process of splitting up, the house itself participated. Lamps dismounted from their tables at the slightest touch; pictures plummeted from the wall, the glass in their frames shattering, whenever anyone walked past them. Destruction abounded. You couldn't touch anything in here without breaking it. The air in the living room acquired a poisonous residue from the things we had said to each other. I sometimes thought I could discern a malignant green mist, invisible to everyone else, floating just above the coffee table. We excreted malice, the two of us. The house was haunted with pain. You felt it the minute you walked in the door.

Dreams

By Raymond Carver

My wife is in the habit of telling me her dreams.

I go downstairs to take her some coffee and juice and sit in a chair beside the bed while she wakes up and moves her hair away from her face. She has the look that people waking up have, but she also has this look in her eyes of returning from somewhere.

"Well?" I say. "What'd you dream?"