Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club Read Online Free PDF

I stopped writing.
    And then I stopped going to Javier’s apartment. I just stopped. It had been months. Winter had returned.
    One evening in December I got a phone call from Magda. “Come,” she said.
    I felt something in my heart. “Have they found him?”
    “No,” she said. “You have to stop hoping.”
    I nodded into the receiver.
    “Sofia and I have something for you.”
    I walked from my apartment to the bridge. I took a cab to Sofia and Magda’s house. Sofia offered me a glass of wine.
    I took the glass. Magda offered me a cigarette. “No,” I said. “It doesn’t help.”
    “I’m happy you loved him so much.”
    “I’m not,” I said. “What does love do except make you sad?”
    “Without it, we would be even sadder.”
    Sofia took something out from her purse. I could see what it was. Javier’s watch. The watch his father had given him. He never took it off.
    “Where did you find it?”
    “Some people talked to us.”
    “Who? Who talked to you? Who?”
    “It doesn’t matter who, Carlos.”
    “It does matter.”
    “You have to leave this alone, Carlos.”
    “Why?”
    “You know why.”
    I nodded.
    “They led us to where he was.”
    “You should have taken me.”
    “We went at night. It wasn’t safe.”
    “So he’s—”
    “He has gone to be with the women. With all the nameless women who have been buried in the desert.”
    I nodded and thought, He has gone to be with his mother.
    She handed me the watch.
    I found that I was kissing it. How banal. To sit and kiss a lover’s watch.
    16.
    I don’t remember leaving Magda and Sofia’s house.
    I vaguely remember walking down some half-familiar streets.
    I walked for a long time.
    I found myself sitting at the bar in the Kentucky Club.
    I had a drink and then another—and then another.
    I stared at Javier’s watch.
    I don’t know how long I sat there at the bar, drinking, trying not to think. Trying not to hate. Trying not to feel anything.
    And then I just wanted to go home. But where was home?

THE ART OF TRANSLATION
    There were moments when I sensed my mother and father at my side, staring at me as if they were trying to sift through the wreckage of a storm, trying to find my remains. My mother would touch me, hold my hand, whisper words to me, words I couldn’t understand. I felt as if I was no longer in control of my own voice, my own body. When my mother looked into my eyes and kissed my forehead, I stared back into her almost familiar face. I could see the hurt in her eyes as she whispered my name and I felt as if I had become a wound, the source of all her hurt.
    My brothers and sisters came to visit. I looked at all of them as though they were perfect strangers. I stared into their eyes, listened to their voices. I felt as if they must have all been hiding somewhere in my memory. I would look at my fingers and whisper their names and count them when I was lying in bed in the dark: Cecilia, Angela, Monica, Alfredo, Ricardo. One, two, three, four, five. And then I would repeat the names again and again and again. And count one, two, three, four, five . I must have loved them once, and I tried to remember that love but there was nothing there. Only their names remained and their expectant faces. Angela kept repeating , How could they have done this? How could they do this to you ? Butdidn’t she know? She was eight years older. How could she not know how cruel the world was? No, not the world, the world was neither cruel nor kind. But the boys in the world—it was the boys that were cruel—that’s how they translated the world, with fists, with rage, with violence. And what good did it do to think about all these things, to ask why when there was no answer?
    And wasn’t their last name Guerra? And didn’t that name mean war? And didn’t that mean that they were born to fight? But being born to fight did not mean that they were born to win the battles they fought. As I repeated the names of my brothers and sisters and felt