by Carmen Leñero
Translation from Spanish by Tyler Gebauer
Every refuge holds the temptation of becoming a prison.
Anonymity is a safe haven; hence my loathing for small villages and neighborhoods where people wave while passing by. Big cities, preferably foreign, free you from having to carry your bashful identity out in the open.
A flashy refuge is an oxymoron. But it may be the best kind.
***
End of May, 1937, Bilbao. “Wherever I am, nothing bad happens,” said my grandfather with absolute conviction, calming the group of people huddled on the lower level of an ancient department store. The old mansion, untouched, stood innocently among several tall and modern buildings that were hit and destroyed in the air raid. “Wherever I am, nothing bad happens,” I recited like a spell before my students to keep them from stampeding out of the classroom during the aftershock of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City.
***
Where to seek refuge when the plane you travel in nosedives? I’ve often wondered. Not the head between the knees. Not a fast-acting sedative. Not a navel-gazing interior. But rather a mind that turns to madness and starts to suddenly flap its wings.
***
Safe in my study, I write these lines as I listen to the news about the Russian attack on Ukraine. I keep typing, rehearsing a certain kind of autism, but suffocation dwells in my throat. I am never “safe,” especially in my study. I should know this.
***
I strive to exist
beyond the now,
to have a home.
***
How does a lunatic protect himself? The same as anyone else in their right mind: plunging into a swing-set tempo, a monotonous tic-tac, the weary rhythm of a melody.
***
The earth and the sky conceal themselves.
Everything between the trees
whispers their hideout.
***
We have two bodies, one visible, and the other invisible, environmental. When they strip us of the latter we become a new kind of animal, destitute, our flesh undone. We have no place to cry, nowhere to run.
***
Patiently, the tortoise
holds his refuge on his back;
I, my unprotectedness.
***
Who would say that observing a river from its bank erases the sensation of aging?
***
Every activity: distraction from the wait.
***
He didn’t like going to bed. That’s why it took him so long to fall asleep after they sent him to his room. […] When the lines of light filtering through the blinds disappeared, and he finally heard his parents close their bedroom door—then he could breathe easy. He waited a while for the silence to be complete and then carried out his miraculous technique for falling asleep: he set his blankets to one side, stood up on the mattress and, with an imaginary hammer and nails, built a white shelter around his bed. It was a shelter able to withstand all evil, which none of the horrors of the world could penetrate, none of the worries of the day, or fierce animals, or hurricane winds, or even the smallest malignant bacteria. Once his invisible shelter was finished, he lay down again. He imagined that “out there” a grotesque jungle with monsters of every kind held sway, the worst possible weather, erupting volcanoes, tempestuous seas, savage peoples. But he was safe in his hideout, and he nestled into himself as if inside a sacred egg, as if submerging himself little by little… gently… pleasantly… into the softest of dreams. [1]
***
If, with the passing of years and the wearing down of my brain, I no longer remember who I am, what will be my hideaway?
***
The smell of the orange tree, my vices,
my poor body, accustomed to
letting itself dissolve.
***
When a person finally becomes immune to everything, their soul ends up abandoning them!
***
In his wagon with wine
medicine and stories,
the Spanish refugee goes forth.
***
Oblivion is a life raft, so long as it does not turn into a sea. A Hindu proverb says you only possess that which you can save from a shipwreck.
***
Made for exile,
we now seek
another home in the galaxy.
***
I, who resisted bed-time even as a baby, was quick to fall asleep when things got ugly. For example, halfway across a rickety wooden bridge, in the middle of a wild storm, traveling through the fog in an old Fiat, and my young, flustered parents insisting that we carry on.
***
One of my obsessions is imagining what would transform this miserable corner of the refuge I inhabit into a world. (Not only does space expand, it multiplies inwards).
***
Everything lies in wait:
Light, water,
insects in bark.
***
To avoid Franco’s police it was necessary to leave that very night and board a freight ship with a makeshift passport in which the identity of my mother (who accompanied her father) was limited to mere mention: “and a girl.”
***
In her stories of exile,
she gives me the red key,
devoid of any lock.
***
My drowsy companion looks at me in the half-light while I consider how her wild way of being protects me, from what I am and from the world. All the world’s a shell where I sometimes hide away, to become once more, for a moment, that expectant and gentle thing I know so little of.
***
Soul is an opening that I cultivate
for God to take refuge in
if he still exists.
***
When the disaster at Chernobyl happened, I was in Louvain-la-Neuve, wasting my time and my soul. A group of young pranksters decided to sell brown paper bags meant to protect against radiation in the event of nuclear attack or disaster. The bags had clearly printed instructions: “Place head inside of bag, turning away from the explosion, preferably looking towards the cemetery” (which Louvain did not actually have). Everything in that campus—the modern version of a reservation for third-world students—was laughable and shady.
***
A ladybug found
its favorite hiding spot
among pistils.
***
I curled up against her stomach, my former home, to protect myself from her now imminent death. Lying on her back, she caressed my head silently.
***
The wetnurse tree
Groans very softly:
Ah! My deep refuge!
***
A basic mattress folded in half, like a camping tent, should protect a two-year-old girl and her brother from bomb strikes. “If the explosion sounds far away, that means it didn’t hit you,” said the older one. The unsettling part was, of course, the whistle.
***
A child’s terror can be soothed with simple songs sung quietly.
***
I find on a web page certain key instructions: “An underground bunker requires a lot of hard work and planning, but it provides the peace of mind of having a place to protect your family, or certainly when [sic], civilization as we know it implodes [sic].” I’m as unenthused with this idea as the brown paper bags they sold in Louvain.
***
Children love shelters, in particular those built out of nothing: sand, sheets, cardboard. Then, almost always, they get bored and kick them down.
***
And now what? they ask themselves, each one in turn, while waiting at Immigration. The same evil neighbor, another merciless climate, hunger, fear and prodigious cursing. Why walk such distances towards other lands… if the ground remains at your feet, and from there it swallows you whole and eats you up?
***
Solitude, kindly refuge, matte and portable, until it extends in all directions like an enormous jellyfish.
***
That others have died before is little consolation. Even less that others should die, though it may be in less painful situations. Whatever the case, our lives continue to take on water.
***
They are waiting for me inside.
Home of letters.
Refuge of voices.
***
Seeking safety in an oracle is idiotic. Neither faith nor doubt protect us. Least of all conjecture.
***
Since you cannot carpet all the paths of the earth, cover the soles of your sandals, says the Buddhist.
***
Foresight and panic are inherited. Several communities in the Basque Country survived during the Civil War thanks to the garbanzo beans that wealthy farmers sent from Monterrey. That’s all my grandmother got for dodging bullets. A few days before the bombing of Baghdad, in January of ‘91, I found myself buying some giant cans of peas at a supermarket in Mixcoac—there were no garbanzo beans. “Hunger that awaits satiety,” my grandmother used to say, “isn’t hunger; it’s appetite.” I, too, am laughable.
***
If the future frightens you and the past embarrasses you, barricade yourself in the present, that impossible place where consciousness vanishes.
***
So many things can be preserved in an empty suitcase.
***
To strike up friendship with the wave that knocks you over, with the roof that comes crashing down, the bullet that pierces you, the fog that blinds you, the flood that drowns you, the pain that dismembers you, the terror that paralyzes you, the breath that strangles you, the jaws that tear you apart, the blade that flays you… We do not know, still, how to endure.
***
We were nomads in holy times. Now we are just dispossessed.
***
I also used the present to run away, to forget my secret sign, to pay no mind to time and my mortal nature. My accomplices were the shifting light and an intense physical pain that came in waves.
***
To turn into wood,
To rest between the cracks,
To breathe through the wound.
***
Around the poem, its high density, there is a vacuum. That is our home, our refuge.
Mexico City, March 6th 2022
***
[1] An excerpt from my book Emilio and the Trip Without Treasure, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 2009.
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“The Red Key” originally appeared in Spanish in Luvina, the literary journal of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, and the English translation is provided here with the permission of the author and the journal.
Carmen Leñero is an author, poet, translator, and musician from Mexico City. Her creative works include poetry chapbooks, novels, and albums of original music compositions. Among her most well-known works are Birlibirloque, a collection of feminist aphoristic poems, and the young adult novel Emilio y el viaje sin tesoro (Emilio and the Treasureless Journey). She currently works as professor of literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, where she holds the distinction of being a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas.
Tyler is a literary translator from Minneapolis, U.S.A., whose translations have been published in Packingtown Review, The Southern Review and SORTES, among others. You can read his other translations at: https://www.tgtranslation.com/