Jon Bilbao - Still the Same Man

“Goodbye, Abraham. Look after yourself.”

Joanes watched as Abraham and the monkey walked off into the distance, gradually blending into the vegetation, and eventually disappearing altogether. Not long after, he thought he heard a sort of song, a lullaby, but he couldn’t be sure. All around him was the drip-drip of raindrops falling from every leaf of every tree.

Hours later, once Joanes had erased all trace of himself as best he could and scattered a few branches over the stirred up soil, and once he’d given the place a last once-over and left for the car, leaving the clearing that had now returned to its normal calm, a magnificent specimen of a boa constrictor appeared there. It was an adult female, over six feet long, and it was looking for any baby chicks that had been pitched from their nests by the storm. It stopped in the middle of the clearing, lifted up its head, stuck out its black tongue, and writhed its body until it was half buried, as if it were trying to take a mud bath. Then it slithered toward a nearby tree, which it proceeded to scale. The track left in the mud by its powerful body looked like a sort of strange, sinuous signature. Curled up on a branch that stuck out over the clearing, it waited.

In the end, after several hours spent trying to fall asleep, Joanes got out of bed. His wife groaned and changed position. He opened the sliding door that led out onto the balcony and went outside for some air. It was a pleasant spring night. The window of the next-door room was lit up. His daughter must still be awake, probably still working away on her never-ending, nihilistic vampire novel. The manuscript consisted of a bundle of three thick notebooks tied together with elastic bands. Up to this point, she still hadn’t let her parents read any of it .

He considered knocking on her door and telling her to go to sleep, but he couldn’t face an argument at that hour. His daughter seemed stranger and stranger to him, even though Joanes also accepted that this was normal, if perhaps it had happened a little sooner than he’d expected it to. He would later tell himself that this was also normal.

He looked at his wife through the sliding door. She’d pulled off the sheets in her sleep. He couldn’t see her face, which was buried in the pillow. Looking in from there, under the orangey light of the streetlamps, the room looked different — bigger and more inviting. He felt the guilty pang of a voyeur.

A short while after, the light in his daughter’s room went off. Joanes looked out at the street, which was lined with trees and stone-façaded houses. A few days earlier, he and his wife had given up on the idea of moving to a bigger place, a dream they’d been harboring for years. Better to forget about that till things were going better. At first it had really saddened Joanes, but now he didn’t care.

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with air that was itself full of the promise of summer. He felt good. If some messenger from the future had appeared before him and announced that from there on out, things would neither get any better nor any worse for him than they were right then at that moment, he wouldn’t have had too much trouble getting used to the idea.

Jon Bilbao is a Spanish literary writer, translator and scriptwriter who lives in Bilbao. He has published the novels El hermano de las moscas, Padres, hijos y primates ( Still the Same Man ) and Shakespeare y la ballena blanca , as well as the short story collections Como una historia de terror and Bajo el influjo del cometa . He has won the Premio Asturias Joven de Narrativa, the Premio Ojo Crítico de Narrativa, the Premio Tigre Juan and the Premio Euskadi de Narrativa.

Sophie Hughes’ translations have appeared in Asymptote Journal, Words Without Borders, PEN Atlas , the Guardian and The White Review . She has also written for the Times Literary Supplement, Dazed & Confused, Music & Literature and the Literary Review. In 2015 she was awarded the British Centre for Literary Translation prose mentorship. She has also translated novels by Iván Repila, Laia Jufresa, and Rodrigo Hasbún.