The Empanada Brotherhood Read Online Free PDF

glass.
    Cathy spoke to Jorge so fast I didn’t catch a word. He immediately started playing a tune that I later learned was aSevillana. Cathy liked to warm up with Sevillanas, simple folk dances that usually two women do together. Sevillanas have a brief introduction, followed by three short repeated stanzas, and a sudden finish. They all follow a similar pattern, requiring no great dexterity. Flamenco is very mathematical and for beginners there is not room for improvisation. Every move and every stroke must be learned by heart, requiring absolute precision.
    When Cathy was ready they became serious. They talked to each other and Jorge played in slow motion while she worked something out. They speeded up a little, and then they went even faster. Cathy grabbed the sides of her skirt and swished it, she gritted her teeth and frowned, concentrating furiously, and Jorge never took his eyes off her. To make it work they had to be in sync. Sometimes Cathy shouted “Otra vez!” right in the middle, and Jorge jumped back to the beginning without a hitch.
    I had never seen people working so hard to be artists.
    â€œMaybe when you publish your first book you’ll dedicate it to me,” Cathy said afterward, gasping as she pulled on some dungarees, then stripped her skirt off down and over them. “Do you think you will ever publish a book?”
    I shrugged, smiling self-consciously. “I don’t know.”
    â€œIf you
don’t know
you’re fucked,” she said. “I
know
I’m going to succeed, not just in Argentina or New York, but one day also in Spain. It’s a fact, written in my blood.”
    And abruptly they left the studio.

12. Shaken
    Walking home after that dance session I was shaken. My tenement stood four blocks south of Washington Square on the corner of West Broadway and Prince Street. The apartment cost $42.50 a month. As I climbed up to the fifth floor I thought: Nobody ever publishes a book unless they submit it to a publisher. But I was still afraid to do that.
    I sat in my wooden chair and stared at stacks of typing paper covering the floor. They comprised various drafts of my novels, also carbon copies of short stories that I sent out regularly. There was a pile of journals I had kept since high school. I did not own a filing cabinet. All told I had twenty different piles on the floor.
    I was obsessed. And I was in a hurry because I didn’t know if, or when, I would be drafted. Though the world situation was tense, I completely avoided news about the Cold War heating up. I just wanted to be a writer.
    One novel followed the last week on earth of an alcoholic Bowery bum. Another I considered my Scott Fitzgerald story, about the collapse of a Long Island robber baron family. My Carson McCullers tale unfolded in a small Vermont town during World War II. My college romance novel was almost slapstick and featured an outrageous female narrator.
    I typed at a cheap metal table painted to resemble wood. My machine was a small green Hermes Rocket that had cost forty dollars. I owned no TV or telephone or sheets for the tin bed that had come with the place when I rented it. My covers were an old army surplus sleeping bag.
    My paperback books occupied shelves beside the bed: Faulkner, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe. Every week I bought a couple more novels secondhand for a quarter each from stores over on Fourth Avenue below Union Square. If I wasn’t writing I immersed myself in literature. I really
studied
fiction, hoping to absorb its secrets.
    Yet how did you even approach a publisher?
    Picking up manuscripts, I riffled through them. Most had been started in school. The Vermont novel was in its third rewrite and still pretty rough. My robber baron epic was in its second rewrite, but too self-conscious. The Bowery bum tale lacked a complete first draft. However, the college romance had been through five incarnations and it was my favorite. Less ambitious than the others,