The Boy of Clay – Chapter 1

I’ve translated a good deal of my great-granduncle Evaristo’s poetic collections. I got a powerful urge to continue the literary exploration, but wanted to work on his prose instead. El Niño de Arcilla (The Boy of Clay) is an autobiographical work written about Evaristo’s childhood. Every word is a revelation, a new portal to that time and mindset. I hope I can do it justice.
 
Here goes. He starts with a small preface…
 

On every street, in every home, in every hallway, in every corner, in every cobweb and in every particle of dust a heart finds its fingerprint; and if my sadness falls as a teardrop, trickles through cracks in familiar walls or slips from the moss of rooftops, whose parapets reflect the shadows of my childhood…
 
A shred of my dreams hang from nails in the wall of night.

Chapter 1
 
I lean over my hometown, and I look young. Yes; I look young. I look like a tiny shadow by the spokes of a wheel, in whose center shines the star of my destiny. The spokes of the wheel are the way by which the tiny shadow multiplies: what I was when I was growing up…  The spokes, which are numerous, shine as the center of the wheel; and the shadow, traversing those spokes, borders a light equal to the star of my destiny.
 
This vision is consistent with my life. My life is fulfilled in this way: a birth from the center of a wheel whose circumference, restricting me, by what fate I did not know, impeding my progress and the satisfaction of my desire for the infinite… By unfortunate luck, which I thought unchangeable, I was forced to traverse back towards the converging spokes of the wheel. All of the wheel’s spokes incite me towards movement. Through all of the wheel’s spokes I go along. More, from the center to the periphery and from the periphery to the center, my feet–the feet of my shadow–do nothing but gather footprints… The circumference of the wheel stops me.
 
What lies beyond that line that, closing into a circular form, perhaps repeating itself forever, does not permit my progress or the fulfillment of my desire for the infinite, denying me freedom, locking my wings from flight.
 
My tiny shadow, all in distress, bleeding, diminished by centuries, suffering the burden of bad things, weakened by inevitable opposition…
 
A wing without direction; a stone that, launched without purpose, was to fall into the abyss; an uprooted plant, orphaned from the sap of Mother Earth. So I was. So I am.
 
Tiny shadow by the spokes of the wheel; tiny shadow, back and forth through the spokes of the wheel, but haloed in light; restless shadow in its smallness, charging against all boundaries, eager to break its prison, to circumvent its enclosure, to cut off the head of the reptile that wraps around the neck and strangles; a shadow with a hunger for clarity, elevation; a shadow that wants to encompass distances, to transpose horizons, to defeat the heavens. So I was. So I am.
 
That shadow, goaded by all evil, sweetened by all hope, from which the memories emerge. 
 
In the same way that, when the night comes, the vampires shake off their lethargy and abandon their caskets to carry out their work of destruction and death, sucking the blood of their victims, so do the memories stick to my burning flesh, infinitely burned by the fire of the most atrocious delusions…
 
I was born on the night of Carnival, a long time ago, in one of the houses in the old city of San Juan. The house in which I was born, that had belonged to my grandfather, today, in mockery of the star of my destiny, serves as a grocery store. But it is there, on the street of the Moon, with its everlasting facade, with the same number from that time, with its walls of yesterday, those walls that became wet from my first cry.
 
Why not say who my parents were? I will write history. In Palma de Mallorca, Maurice Bizet, a rich and nobel Frenchmen, married Inés Ibarra, a wealthy lady of high society in the Balearic Islands. Inés Ibarra and Maurice Bizet were gifted with three beautiful creatures: Rosa, Emilia and Mercedes. Mercedes was chosen, before she had turned fifteen, by the Spanish gentleman Joaquîn de Souto, who made her his wife. And I solicited them both for entry into this world. And into this world I entered, but with hard luck. 
 
How was the night of my birth? Inside, in the master bedroom of the house on the street of the Moon, a marriage bed covered by white linen sheets; in the marriage bed, a woman–youth and beauty entwined throughout her body–her womb revealing the roundness of the world. Pink and white flesh, twinging with pain, distended at the transcendental hour of childbirth. It was a seed that would germinate and vigorously announce, at a time both fertile and pleading, motherhood. Outside, the Carnival of that time: lunatics with brooms sweeping the streets; red Vegigante dresses, horned costumes and ornamented cow bladders on sticks; eggshells from hens, full of water of smells and marinas covered with red ochre, half-naked men throwing cans of water onto stoops; masks, laughter, cries, and passing crowds, ringing their bells, throwing jokes right and left with mocking voices. The drowning screams of the parturient mother are confused, fittingly, with the demented shrieks of the carnivalesque farce; in this way, I came into the world: on one side, the misery of labor, on the other, the painted grimace of the mob in the widespread obscenity of urban chaos… 
 
In this difficult and dangerous tableau, my mother was assisted by a midwife who helped aid the births of all the women of the family; her name was Margara Juarbe; she was very old and nearsighted; the star of my destiny had so willed it. The midwife, tremulous and decrepit, received me in her bony hands; And, after cutting the cord and bathing me, she fitted a band around my waist, dusted me with talcum powder, and put me in the cradle, surprised at my stunted flesh.
 
All the bystanders, however, observed my vivacity. Perhaps, because of this vivacity, I shook too much in my crib, in which my diminished humanity was lost between the froth of diapers and thread. But, my goodness, I must repeat: I entered this world with hard luck…
 
In spite of my physical smallness, my mother was exhausted from a great loss of blood during the delivery. My grandmother, whose family nickname was Mamina, did not watch over either of us–my mother or myself–throughout the evening. But in the dead of that night, she thought to check on me, and found my diaper warm and damp; as she approached my crib with a silver candelabra,in which spermaceti candles were burning, she noticed that I was bleeding. Not wanting to alarm my mother, she said that the band around my waist was loose, and that the midwife was going to remedy the error, nothing to worry about. Accompanied by Juliana, a young maid at the house, they searched for Margara, who would soon arrive in a frenzied rush; when she saw the puddle of blood that had formed underneath my crib, she opened her mouth and let out a toothless howl… The diaper, just recently white, was suddenly an intense red. The dramatic purple of the luckless surrounded me from the very instant of my birth.  After fixing the band, the old midwife stated that if they had taken two hours to warn her of my condition, I would have been found dead in my crib… Death came for me on the night of my birth, but the providential hand (a hand that has always been there in the moments of greatest danger) prevented my return to the world from which I had just been thrown; I had to purge my sins–my old sins–in this other world of thorns and shadows.
 
They say of my grandfather, that he was a comedian, and taking note of the fine subtlety of my body, he exclaimed: "Looks like a balín (a pellet)." And this was my family nickname; in this novel, I will only respond to the nickname of Balín.