Davie zepeda
10th October 2008, 18:45
El Dinero Maldito – Cursed Currency by Alberto Masferrer, trans. Christian Nagler (and cf. the translator's companion piece, Panamerica circa 1930.
Chapter 1 The Street of the Dead
This street where I live, you could call it street of bitterness, or, better yet, Street of the Dead. For six blocks, west, to the hospital, a caravan of sufferers, poor ones, the wretched – they pass by at all hours to see if they can scrounge some relief. Five blocks in the other direction, there are three state-run bars, where one drinks day and night; where the pianola, the phonograph, the cries of men and the clash of glasses and bottles deafen the hearing of passersby . . . and also their consciences, since it seems all but impossible for them, for you, to fathom the dramas that are born within.
In front of my house, one block away, is the penitentiary, where the helpless criminals live; those of them that don’t happen to have the golden key that opens the doors of justice.
Sundays, since early in the morning, and all day long, life is bound in a fateful trinity of violence, pain, and ruin. Since seven in the morning, they begin passing through, coming from the volcano, young and old campesinos. They come to enjoy themselves. They have worked all week, bent over the ground, planting, pruning, plowing, weeding, so that the corn, the rice, the beans, and the plantain cover our tables; so that the prettiest flowers rest in our vases; so that the milk and the eggs comfort and nourish us; so that life in all forms descends from on high, to revive the fading powers of those of us who suffer and sin in the city.
They’ve worked all week, these farmhands, them and the women and the children. While they weed and clear ground with machetes, the wife and older children wash, patch, and repair tools, grind and cook; they come daily to the market to sell flowers and legumes; and to get provisions and medicine; they sew petticoats and blouses; they take care of hens and pigs; attend to the sick; go to the distant, muddy river to fetch gallons of water for pots of stew. And at night, fatigued, they fall heavily onto their woven mats and sleep as if dead, if there isn’t a little child keeping them awake; they sleep until Venus, the peaceful Nixtamalera, begins to vanish before the whitening of dawn.
Such is life on the volcano; such is the week’s work. What fairer than to go down on Sunday to rest and to have fun? Well, for that purpose, they come down early in the morning, clean, dressed up in their Sunday best, resolved, swift of foot, smiling; they stroll around the city while the state bars are opening up, and when these have hardly unfurled their doormats they go in and drink. One glass after another, standing, or hardly sitting on the edges of roughly hewn benches, they drink aguardiente, they get drunk, stupefy themselves, lose feeling, and turn sullen, aggressive, brawling, brandishing knives and wounding with them. They hurt their companeros, comrades, friends, anybody in their path, anyone at all. Aguardiente, sugar cane moonshine, the most hostile of liquids in the universe, in which swims a little demon that craves struggle and blood, bewildering these men’s understanding and impelling them to quarrel and crime.
In a few short hours, the work of the week is dissipated. If the wife – by means of gentleness, or else covertly – succeeds in withholding a few coins, then there might be enough to begin the week. If not, she and the poor little ones roam the streets on Monday, anguished, trying to find just a little food please and medicine for wounds, and fees for lawyers who are inflexible in their demands for advance payment. In a few short hours, all the striving, all the toil, all the sweat of the week, is passed on, converted to accursed currency in the drawer of the cantina.
With the same impetus with which they work during the week, they gulp venom, one glass after another, until their legs weaken, the voice hoarsens, the words slur and trail off, the mind clouds, the heart becomes rough, and the fiend surges from the depths of the man, ready to tear and devour.
They drink, they drink more, always more. First, the cups they drink are simple, spaced out between laughter and conversation. A little later they are double, alternating with hugs and songs in unison and in rounds, or with promises and tears; after that comes the thirst, for aguardiente, thirst that is not quenched but instead rekindled by drinking more. And after that, all flees, all is banished: the memory, the attention, the judgment, the feeling of selfhood, the discernment of good and bad; and it is insanity, the last cup, that clears the way from man to beast, and from beast to fiend. And then the blood.
Around four in the afternoon begins the parade of return. Those I saw pass through in the morning happy, light, with fiestas in their eyes and hearts, attempt to return to the volcano tottering; taking spills, falling here and there; their eyes wandering and deadened, clothes spattered with mud, lips leaking drool and mumbling words without meaning. Some fall, heavily, and stay there, laid out end to end, turning inexpressive faces to the sky; or they are carried by their comrades, whom they insult, or are beaten by the police, who punish as if it were disrespect what is simply madness or unconsciousness.
Also there are the wounded: some come alone, their arms in slings, their sleeves red with spreading blood. Others, with their heads split, or their chests destroyed, or a shoulder hanging off, or the intestines struggling to get out, advancing slowly, as if anaesthetized, leaning on their comrades, who are also struggling to remain upright, bearing their wounded to the hospital. A thread of blood flows from these enormous rents, and where pain or stubbornness has caused one of them to linger a moment, there remains a red stain, soon to be wiped clean by stray dogs.
The wounded pass by all afternoon, and the street is speckled from one side to the other with drops and more drops, with mists, of blood. Blood that is red, potent, vigorous, that once upon a time blushed in the healthy work of the family’s plot, blushed at the kiss of the wind and the sun on the volcano, and now is mixed with the blood of the cane and is made to explode in fever and insanity in the government bar, where the skilled hands of the government bartender harvest life and reap death.
How many of those who go crawling by to the hospital leave there cured in body and soul, and, after being submerged temporarily in sadness and pain, return home to their people?
How many leave for the cemetery, useless carcasses, no longer able to give their labor in exchange for aguardiente, despised and unknown?
How many others are at least remembered by the Law, which keeps them on reserve in the penitentiary while their capable bodies rot?
Some of them do return, at last. The defense lawyer has lunched on the work of years. The house, the cow, the village, however much can be sold or pawned, is sold or pawned, to cover the legal fees.
At last they return, indebted even more to El Patron, pawned out and ruined for many years, sometimes forever: enslaved. Or, if they are rotting in jail, meanwhile, the baby of the family dies; the mother suffers and falls ill. The wife, troubled, comes and goes a thousand times to beseech the judge, to get his recommendation, abandoning the village to enter the service of the city, in order to be closer to, to visit, to console the imprisoned, and to try and speed up the lazy and avaricious work of the defense counsel. Meanwhile, up in the abandoned village, alone, is the young daughter, taking care of the little ones and the hens, who succumbs to the promises of El Patron, or is seduced by a friend of her father’s, and who soon bears a child . . . another burden on this home that has been wrung out.
Another child, who will soon be a man, and who will learn to drink and get drunk, and wound and be wounded, so that all his work, his life, in turn, will be for the purpose of enriching those hidden vaults where the producers and vendors of death store the cursed currency.
Yes, this street, where I have lived for five years, and where I have seen marching by, Sunday after Sunday, a battalion of bloody men; this street that goes from the government bar to the hospital, skirting the penitentiary, branching off on one side toward the volcano where there is work, and on the other side extending towards the city, where the armies of El Patron, at desks, in offices, are waiting to do their small, ennobled part in an enormous, invisible rape. . . this street where happiness and life descend in the morning and ascend in the afternoon changed to pain and death . . . this street that should be completely red, so much is the blood that has been ground into the dirt.
Street of the Cane, street of Death, street of Prison, street of Slaves, street of Sickness.
Yes, it should be called street of blood. Our street, yours and mine, ours. That we live and benefit by the blood that stains and reddens the ground of this street. By this blood – drained from bodies into the National Budget, where it crystallizes and congeals into the lie of Culture – by this blood we live and draw our privileges.
With this blood we go to Europe, to entertain and spoil ourselves (if we are in need of more corruption than we can find here). With this blood we pay for our diplomas in medicine and law and literature; with this blood we defray the costs of diplomatic parties and academic banquets; with this blood we cover the costs of a thousand superfluous little manufactured objects, harmful ones, stupid ones, pretty, useless; with this blood we sustain the lives of demons who help us do the work of imagining civilization and progress.
And with this blood, we, the gods of Land and Commerce and Education and the Bank; and you, the noble matrons, and cute young ladies, and hip young gentlemen; with this blood our leisure is paid for, our luxuries, our joys, our houses, our whole lives in their desires and ambitions and unseen, unexamined falsehoods – our greynesses and our outgoingnesses, fed incessantly with the cursed currency.
Damned money . . . it is our life . . . it is also becoming our ruin.
Chapter 1 The Street of the Dead
This street where I live, you could call it street of bitterness, or, better yet, Street of the Dead. For six blocks, west, to the hospital, a caravan of sufferers, poor ones, the wretched – they pass by at all hours to see if they can scrounge some relief. Five blocks in the other direction, there are three state-run bars, where one drinks day and night; where the pianola, the phonograph, the cries of men and the clash of glasses and bottles deafen the hearing of passersby . . . and also their consciences, since it seems all but impossible for them, for you, to fathom the dramas that are born within.
In front of my house, one block away, is the penitentiary, where the helpless criminals live; those of them that don’t happen to have the golden key that opens the doors of justice.
Sundays, since early in the morning, and all day long, life is bound in a fateful trinity of violence, pain, and ruin. Since seven in the morning, they begin passing through, coming from the volcano, young and old campesinos. They come to enjoy themselves. They have worked all week, bent over the ground, planting, pruning, plowing, weeding, so that the corn, the rice, the beans, and the plantain cover our tables; so that the prettiest flowers rest in our vases; so that the milk and the eggs comfort and nourish us; so that life in all forms descends from on high, to revive the fading powers of those of us who suffer and sin in the city.
They’ve worked all week, these farmhands, them and the women and the children. While they weed and clear ground with machetes, the wife and older children wash, patch, and repair tools, grind and cook; they come daily to the market to sell flowers and legumes; and to get provisions and medicine; they sew petticoats and blouses; they take care of hens and pigs; attend to the sick; go to the distant, muddy river to fetch gallons of water for pots of stew. And at night, fatigued, they fall heavily onto their woven mats and sleep as if dead, if there isn’t a little child keeping them awake; they sleep until Venus, the peaceful Nixtamalera, begins to vanish before the whitening of dawn.
Such is life on the volcano; such is the week’s work. What fairer than to go down on Sunday to rest and to have fun? Well, for that purpose, they come down early in the morning, clean, dressed up in their Sunday best, resolved, swift of foot, smiling; they stroll around the city while the state bars are opening up, and when these have hardly unfurled their doormats they go in and drink. One glass after another, standing, or hardly sitting on the edges of roughly hewn benches, they drink aguardiente, they get drunk, stupefy themselves, lose feeling, and turn sullen, aggressive, brawling, brandishing knives and wounding with them. They hurt their companeros, comrades, friends, anybody in their path, anyone at all. Aguardiente, sugar cane moonshine, the most hostile of liquids in the universe, in which swims a little demon that craves struggle and blood, bewildering these men’s understanding and impelling them to quarrel and crime.
In a few short hours, the work of the week is dissipated. If the wife – by means of gentleness, or else covertly – succeeds in withholding a few coins, then there might be enough to begin the week. If not, she and the poor little ones roam the streets on Monday, anguished, trying to find just a little food please and medicine for wounds, and fees for lawyers who are inflexible in their demands for advance payment. In a few short hours, all the striving, all the toil, all the sweat of the week, is passed on, converted to accursed currency in the drawer of the cantina.
With the same impetus with which they work during the week, they gulp venom, one glass after another, until their legs weaken, the voice hoarsens, the words slur and trail off, the mind clouds, the heart becomes rough, and the fiend surges from the depths of the man, ready to tear and devour.
They drink, they drink more, always more. First, the cups they drink are simple, spaced out between laughter and conversation. A little later they are double, alternating with hugs and songs in unison and in rounds, or with promises and tears; after that comes the thirst, for aguardiente, thirst that is not quenched but instead rekindled by drinking more. And after that, all flees, all is banished: the memory, the attention, the judgment, the feeling of selfhood, the discernment of good and bad; and it is insanity, the last cup, that clears the way from man to beast, and from beast to fiend. And then the blood.
Around four in the afternoon begins the parade of return. Those I saw pass through in the morning happy, light, with fiestas in their eyes and hearts, attempt to return to the volcano tottering; taking spills, falling here and there; their eyes wandering and deadened, clothes spattered with mud, lips leaking drool and mumbling words without meaning. Some fall, heavily, and stay there, laid out end to end, turning inexpressive faces to the sky; or they are carried by their comrades, whom they insult, or are beaten by the police, who punish as if it were disrespect what is simply madness or unconsciousness.
Also there are the wounded: some come alone, their arms in slings, their sleeves red with spreading blood. Others, with their heads split, or their chests destroyed, or a shoulder hanging off, or the intestines struggling to get out, advancing slowly, as if anaesthetized, leaning on their comrades, who are also struggling to remain upright, bearing their wounded to the hospital. A thread of blood flows from these enormous rents, and where pain or stubbornness has caused one of them to linger a moment, there remains a red stain, soon to be wiped clean by stray dogs.
The wounded pass by all afternoon, and the street is speckled from one side to the other with drops and more drops, with mists, of blood. Blood that is red, potent, vigorous, that once upon a time blushed in the healthy work of the family’s plot, blushed at the kiss of the wind and the sun on the volcano, and now is mixed with the blood of the cane and is made to explode in fever and insanity in the government bar, where the skilled hands of the government bartender harvest life and reap death.
How many of those who go crawling by to the hospital leave there cured in body and soul, and, after being submerged temporarily in sadness and pain, return home to their people?
How many leave for the cemetery, useless carcasses, no longer able to give their labor in exchange for aguardiente, despised and unknown?
How many others are at least remembered by the Law, which keeps them on reserve in the penitentiary while their capable bodies rot?
Some of them do return, at last. The defense lawyer has lunched on the work of years. The house, the cow, the village, however much can be sold or pawned, is sold or pawned, to cover the legal fees.
At last they return, indebted even more to El Patron, pawned out and ruined for many years, sometimes forever: enslaved. Or, if they are rotting in jail, meanwhile, the baby of the family dies; the mother suffers and falls ill. The wife, troubled, comes and goes a thousand times to beseech the judge, to get his recommendation, abandoning the village to enter the service of the city, in order to be closer to, to visit, to console the imprisoned, and to try and speed up the lazy and avaricious work of the defense counsel. Meanwhile, up in the abandoned village, alone, is the young daughter, taking care of the little ones and the hens, who succumbs to the promises of El Patron, or is seduced by a friend of her father’s, and who soon bears a child . . . another burden on this home that has been wrung out.
Another child, who will soon be a man, and who will learn to drink and get drunk, and wound and be wounded, so that all his work, his life, in turn, will be for the purpose of enriching those hidden vaults where the producers and vendors of death store the cursed currency.
Yes, this street, where I have lived for five years, and where I have seen marching by, Sunday after Sunday, a battalion of bloody men; this street that goes from the government bar to the hospital, skirting the penitentiary, branching off on one side toward the volcano where there is work, and on the other side extending towards the city, where the armies of El Patron, at desks, in offices, are waiting to do their small, ennobled part in an enormous, invisible rape. . . this street where happiness and life descend in the morning and ascend in the afternoon changed to pain and death . . . this street that should be completely red, so much is the blood that has been ground into the dirt.
Street of the Cane, street of Death, street of Prison, street of Slaves, street of Sickness.
Yes, it should be called street of blood. Our street, yours and mine, ours. That we live and benefit by the blood that stains and reddens the ground of this street. By this blood – drained from bodies into the National Budget, where it crystallizes and congeals into the lie of Culture – by this blood we live and draw our privileges.
With this blood we go to Europe, to entertain and spoil ourselves (if we are in need of more corruption than we can find here). With this blood we pay for our diplomas in medicine and law and literature; with this blood we defray the costs of diplomatic parties and academic banquets; with this blood we cover the costs of a thousand superfluous little manufactured objects, harmful ones, stupid ones, pretty, useless; with this blood we sustain the lives of demons who help us do the work of imagining civilization and progress.
And with this blood, we, the gods of Land and Commerce and Education and the Bank; and you, the noble matrons, and cute young ladies, and hip young gentlemen; with this blood our leisure is paid for, our luxuries, our joys, our houses, our whole lives in their desires and ambitions and unseen, unexamined falsehoods – our greynesses and our outgoingnesses, fed incessantly with the cursed currency.
Damned money . . . it is our life . . . it is also becoming our ruin.