Rocío Ágreda Piérola
TRANS. BY Jessica Sequeira
sunlight will win
“Literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.” —Franz Wright
* * *
It doesn’t happen in any place. It’s not a story. I don’t know what it is. It was dictated to me, or maybe I’m inventing it right now. I’m in a hospital, everything is white disinfection and all I remember is a horse’s neigh. I give thanks that it’s the only thing that fills my memory, save for the harmless structure of my language.
I don’t know what language I speak, but I feel I’m fluent in it, as one is fluent in a vision that spans an unlimited spectrum of microvisions. Let me explain myself. It’s as if my language were a material that molded itself perfectly to my thought, with no tension, no need for agony. I can speak exactly what I think, as fast as I want to say it, if I do want to say it. I don’t remember a thing, and think that just by having the potential ability for speech, I must somehow possess the keys to hell. If I have to create metaphors, all that’s needed is to open my mouth.
* * *
I must not be a coward.
I need to tell something first. The boy I met on the way to the cemetery was called Xllul. He was brown, he had big eyes and a small, hawk nose. He had cold hands and a trickster’s eyes. I’m not happy about this way of describing. It’s too imprecise, it adds no extra dimension to my tale. Maybe if I could at least lend a hand to time. You are Xllul. You are time. You are the first and last little boy I met and will meet, I’ve evoked you in all others. This isn’t completely true. It is not.
The problem is that I have no inner world, or it’s stuck. How poor of spirit I have been, and am. Suffering shrinks one. And how.
* * *
And this is how I could continue the tale, if only breathing had given me Ágreda piérola / sequeira something to tell. I’ve had no friends, this time hasn’t left me a thing. I owe and owe and owe. I’m an illiterate man. My sentimental education has tyrannized the time. I’m out of time. I plow this desert. I cultivate the onions of silence. The world is one more appendix. I’ll surrender these pages to the fire. I won’t live long. I have neither faith nor desire. I don’t know the true blaze, from myself I hoped to extract a spurious shine, a tinsel of perishable tendernesses brief but alluring as fraud.
* * *
(I won’t give myself easily. I have to forget you. I’ll cross the ocean, will take an exit every time I drive down the highway. I refuse to look at this spectacle of dinosaurs anymore, this circus of the subconscious.
I’m a very shy man, I won’t show you my face. Make no mistake. I must remove everything and cure myself of your vacuum. Great, immense, monstrous and at the same time nothing, a few vulgar words and expectations. This is how a universe collapses. Blue, nebulous, an impossible universe. The last, and now nothing. Go on and break, I crush you against the rocks like a mollusk, all mouth and apologies, all excuses and I squeeze just one blue chlorophyll drop from you, the blood of greed.)
* * *
I’ve just taken communion and am in ecstasy. I’m beyond myself. I’ve just taken communion and balance outside myself. I don’t want. I don’t want. Heart, arrhythmic, come, stop despite everything. Come. Overcome everything and come, in pursuit of something, a deserted word. Quench my thirst; early on this morning the birds chirp and peck at rice. Before the deluge, come, to contain my ecstasy. Come. I won’t wake. I won’t wake. I won’t wake. Go, it’s late and I’m dead.
Malina Bach
It seems that we knew something about art when we felt the meaning of the word “solitude.”
Maurice Blanchot
* * *
I hug a tree. My friends are drunk, scattered by cold. Now I’m going to learn to write. I’ll copy out a story for you and transform it as it happens. I’ll see colors that I’m unable to see. I’ll paint a desert for you. I’ll tell you an atrocious story one day, to heal. To cure myself of you I must spit out a book. A beautiful book and my saliva will be the star with five points . . . I’ll write with light and life. And a little rage. I’ll tell you an atrocious story in the most gorgeous way. A redheaded woman. She devoured my heart like a bird of prey. She flew through airs and in the middle of her siren song, I saw the ugliness smooth on her beautiful face.
* * *
To write about the book that Xllul wanted to search for. To make him a character. Sehnsucht: to start from an error. To write about such a structured topic, about characters. A woman obsessed with the sign and with H. The recurring dreams are Sehnsucht, the real episodes. To take care of a junkie. In hindsight. Coppelius. Defenestration. A female writer who doesn’t write. A blind poet. To investigate: the political?, poetry or madness. Investigative style. Delirious fragments.
* * *
I don’t have time. I must fragment it with the aim of reconstructing and vanquishing it. I’ve got twenty years to my name sir, and a woman like a song. Of sirens. I have to fragment time to reconstruct it down to its smallest parts, lapse, duration, experience, breath. My life is spent on this, and my verses. What must I do now. I have no order assimilated, my thought runs in pursuit of nineteen different directions at least. I possess a certain rhythm, rhythm has given me harmony. I must lie to you. My country is unreason. Dionysian pessimism. Love, because I must lie to you, I write. So that you return. So that you’ve never left. Language is a danger to temporality. The tragic situation in which the latest events have submerged me makes me laugh. I don’t forget, I don’t forget you, the habit of loving and taking care of a stranger. I’ll never hurt from the time lost. But at a certain age, one must be a little more sparing with time, if one wishes to do something with it. Precious solitude, the absence you’ve imposed on me is priceless, my love. How will I repay you?
* * *
Hector Viel I read you day and night with my two eyes with my two hands.
My nature: to be born at 33.
All I must do is channel my novel, I have time, I have it, I have it. I have time. I remember, I hear attentively, from the depths of language, a certain intelligence speaks. A certain meaning, a certain order that I’ve lost. I must listen, write, breathe, keep breathing, assimilate myself in my hearing to that murky depth, from which the chaos speaks that isn’t me. I am not what happens, so then what am I. Am I the system? I must begin again, I must breathe, I must write and give an account of something. That there’s nothing behind this mask? It might be a shortcut. But what matters isn’t arrival but the journey, to weave, knit time or unknit it. Somehow one arrives. Somehow I must make even language arrive. There are zones in it that repel me. Not to speak of certain things? One must speak of them, then. Precisely of that which one cannot speak. That’s the only thing that interests me. To speak. Of what one cannot.
Rocío Ágreda Piérola (Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) studied philosophy and literature. Her work has appeared in anthologies in Peru and Chile, and she contributed as an editor to the Bolivian publishing projects Género aburrido and Lenguanegra. In 2017, she published the poetry collection Detritus (Maki Naria Ediciones), and currently she is working on a manuscript called Quetiapina 400mg.
Jessica Sequeira has published the novel A Furious Oyster, the story collection Rhombus and Oval, the essay collection Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age, and the hybrid work A Luminous History of the Palm. She has translated many books by Latin American authors and in 2019 was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán. Currently, she lives between Chile and the UK, where she is based at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.