Rodrigo Rey Rosa - Severina

Severina handed it over.

“What. .,” he asked, “what is this book?” He was leafing through it with his mouth slightly open. I came and looked over his shoulder, eagerly reading what I could here and there. On some of the pages there were handwritten notes in the margins. It was the mother of all books, the holy Koran.

I looked at Severina, who looked back with an invisible smile.

“I lied to you,” she said softly, but not so softly that Ahmed couldn’t hear as well. “I took this book, just this one, from Borges’s library. The notes are his. There, in the margin, he started writing one of his stories.”

“‘The Mirror of. .’? Is this possible?” said Ahmed, without taking his eyes off the book. “Are you trying to trick me?”

“You decide,” Severina said calmly.

In the end, Ahmed took the Koran and relinquished my books. After amicable discussions with my partners, I sold my share in La Entretenida at a profit. Appealing to reasons that I never fully understood, Severina convinced me that a false passport was well worth having. She prepared one for me with the skill of a professional counterfeiter. That was how I acquired the name Blanco; Severina and I became relatives. (The idea of belonging to a line of people who lived exclusively for and by books delighted me and flattered my vanity.) Shortly afterward, we took a flight to Mexico City. It was only when the plane had taken off, and the Valle de la Virgen and the volcanoes were disappearing into the distance among the patchy June clouds that she said: “See. It’s all different now.” She gave me a kiss on the ear, and I shivered. “The notes were forged, you know, though almost identical to the ones in the original.”

Ahmed, who regarded himself as an expert on the works and handwriting of Borges, had accepted the book because he was confident that sooner or later he’d find a buyer: a learned fool or a swindler, in either case, a snob. Maybe he would sell it for a fortune one day. Maybe not.

And maybe one day Severina will tear out some of her hair and scatter it over my body.

The aphorisms of Yoshida Kenko on page 14 are from Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, translated by Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). The quotation from Rubén Darío’s “Canto de esperanza” (“Song of Hope”) on page 21 is from Stories and Poems/Cuentos y poesías, translated by Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2002).

RODRIGO REY ROSA is perhaps the most prominent writer on the Guatemalan literary scene. Along with the work of writers like Roberto Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Fernando Vallejo, Rey Rosa’s fiction has been widely translated and internationally acclaimed. His books include Dust on Her Tongue, The Beggar’s Knife, and The Pelcari Project, all of which were translated into English by the late Paul Bowles. In addition to his many novels and story collections, Rey Rosa has translated books by Bowles, Norman Lewis, François Augiéras, and Paul Léautaud.

CHRIS ANDREWS was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He teaches at the University of Western Sydney. Among other works of fiction by Latin American authors, he has translated Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (New Directions, 2003) and César Aira’s Shantytown (New Directions, 2013). His book of poems Lime Green Chair (Waywiser, 2012) won the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.