I paused, while with the fingernail of my index finger I scratched at tiny slivers of salt.
Of course he lost his parents, I went on, and he lost his childhood, his innocence, his name, his religion, his country, and even his manhood, but he saved himself, dressed as a Catholic girl for years in a monastery in the forest. He denied his Judaism and he denied his manhood and that’s how he saved himself, I said to Tamara. Or who knows, I said, maybe his Judaism and his manhood were seized from him, and that’s how he saved himself.
The only sound was the insistent scratching of my fingernail on the salt.
And that’s the way it is, no? I said to Tamara, who was staring at me harshly, almost forlorn. Everyone decides how to save themselves, I said. Perhaps with a fundamentalist doctrine, or a series of fables and allegories, or a book of rules and norms and prohibitions, or the disguise of a lumberjack or a German soldier or a Catholic girl or an Orthodox Jew, or a cowardly lie told in a dream on a plane. With whatever it takes, whatever makes the most sense to us, whatever hurts the least. Tamara stared at me, more forlorn than ever. Though the truth is that they’re lies, I said. And we all believe our own lie. We all cling to the name we believe suits us best. We all act out the role of our best disguise. But none of it matters. In the end, no one is saved.
I’d said it as if it were something definitive, or as if I knew what I was talking about, or as if I really believed it.
I fell silent, staring out into space. I felt void. But void of words. Void of emotions. Void of color. Void of all that fulfills us or that we imagine fulfills us.
Suddenly, I felt a dull ache in my left hand. I hadn’t realized that I’d been clenching it for some time, tightly, into a fist. But despite the pain, I didn’t want to unclench it. Maybe out of a desire to keep up the macho pose. Maybe out of fear that on opening it I’d find there — written between the lines of my palm in black ink — my other name, my Hebrew name: Nissim. Eight days after I was born, as per Jewish tradition, and because Eduardo isn’t a Hebrew name, my father named me Nissim. My Hebrew name, Nissim, means miracles. But seeing my clenched fist, it struck me that that name, my other name, my Jewish name, the name that my father had one day written in black ink on my tiny newborn palm, over time had also faded away.
Tamara raised a hand and held it out to me, perhaps just stretching, perhaps searching for my hand, perhaps in search of a cigarette that was no longer there, and let it drop onto my thigh. And she left her hand there. Warm, soft, immobile, palm up. As if it were any old object or as if it were not her own hand, but the hand of someone else. Another’s hand. A foreign hand. A fragile hand, dry and warm and salt-stained.
So are you saved? I didn’t understand her question. Suddenly, her voice sounded distant, hoarse, velvety. Are you saved, on the plane, from the Arab terrorists? I looked down, searching for something. Are you saved, at the end of your dream? I looked for her back, her freckled shoulders, her wide hips, her round white ass almost naked and covered in tiny translucent hairs. Her hand lay motionless on my thigh. In the distance, the mountains of Jordan stood gray and still.
About the Author
Eduardo Halfon was born in Guatemala City, moved to the United States at the age of ten, went to school in South Florida, studied Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University, and then returned to Guatemala to teach literature for eight years at Universidad Francisco Marroquín. Named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá, he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. He has published eleven previous books of fiction in Spanish. The Polish Boxer, his first book to appear in English, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection and finalist for the International Latino Book Award. Halfon currently lives in Nebraska and frequently travels to Guatemala.
The Translators
Lisa Dillman translates from Spanish and Catalan and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has translated numerous books by Spanish and Latin American writers including Andrés Barba, Christopher Domínguez Michael, Sabina Berman, and Juan Filloy.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with some forty books to his name. His translations from Portuguese, Spanish, and French include fiction from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and nonfiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. He is also the editor of the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. He lives in Brighton, England.