Sebastián Martínez Daniell
trans. by Jenny Croft
Four stories
Deafening Silence
Two Sherpas peer into the abyss. Their bodies outstretched over the rocks, hands gripping the edge of the precipice: lying in wait. Their gestures span the panoply of subtleties that aim to elude both the guilt of the executioner and the indignation of the victim.
It never rains on Mount Everest, thinks the old Sherpa, who isn’t that old, nor is he properly speaking a Sherpa. They say the conditions aren’t right for it. That it can only snow. He tries to fathom it. But he considers it a limitation. The fact that it would never rain. He personally prefers a varied climate. The more varied, the better. He likes latitudes where summer is suffocating and winter is harsh. Where after light snow comes a thawing, the vortex of hurricane and swelter. Droughts and famines, floods and pandemics. Those are the places he likes. Biblical cities: Nineveh, Gomorrah, ancient Egypt, and its ten extortionary plagues . . . He might even like London, as a matter of fact, if this Englishman would make up his mind to leave this whole thing behind him, get up, turn his head, smile. Make some polite remark.
The other Sherpa is young. He shuts his eyes and doesn’t think about anything. Until the words appear. They come from someplace. Yes, he remembers now. Vividly. It’s the short speeches given by Flavius, the sure-fire prose of Shakespeare: “Home, you idle creatures, get you home!” Then he asks himself a new question: Playwright? Why not? He’s good with words. His professors never tire of saying so. He’s never written so much as a scene. It doesn’t matter. He has time.
For now, he has to concentrate on the matter at hand: on the immobility of the Englishman. This attitude keeps him clinging to the mountain. Perfectly still. As though he were a miniscule animal parasitizing a colossal rocky being . . . A quiet animal, with no aspiration other than to listen to the laconic voices of two Sherpas who are contemplating him from the heights of Mount Everest. An eternal being, dying all the time while it barely perceives, up there, the abstract plane of a cloudless sky . . .
Concentrate on the immediate, yes. Find an origin for it, a point of departure; discard the superfluous, go back, rush up the stream of time until the moment when he saw the old man turn the corner, and then the Englishman. And, for three seconds, all was rock, snow, atmosphere. Placidity and stillness. Three, two, one . . . The Englishman was gone, the old Sherpa was crawling over toward the edge, the scene taking on an unreal and unfortunate patina.
The rest was silence; if the deafening noise of the wind raveling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence.
Dragonfly
The young Sherpa remembers it vividly. It was a short-lived class, in which their teacher briefly tried to instruct them on the differences between domestic and wild animals, between mammals and amphibians, between being brave and being heedless. Does the old Sherpa have this kind of memory? Evocations of this sharpness?
That day, the young Sherpa, who was nearly ten years old, entered the school building, walked—feet of an automaton—into the classroom, sat, and waited. He was in the first row, his backpack by his side. Behind him, tumult, that juvenile mob, those slumping desks, the projection of a center aisle, floor of heavy tiles in perspective. Their teacher arrived, prompting a simulacrum of silence: no one stopped talking, but now their chats, their imprecations, their snorts were all muffled. Their teacher greeted them; she was nice, but possibly only because she knew no other variants of character. She conveyed warmth by virtue of exclusion. She looked around the room, asked if anyone was absent, turned to face the blackboard and wrote: “mammals,” “reptiles,” “birds,” “fish,” “amphibians.” The order was random, but then, what can you expect from a taxonomy?
Her students surrendered themselves to the machinery of morning somnolence. They listened from afar, distracted by very remote stimuli, some noting down individual words, most pondering life outside: the morning, the sun, the possibility of pushing one another. And, in the midst of that torpor, the call of chaos.
“A dragonfly!” a child sounded the alarm. “Where?” “Here, inside, here!” Instantly the atmosphere got choppy. The whole school day took a turn. Adrenaline and anomie. The insect bouncing off the classroom window. Bumping its head against the pane and plummeting in confusion. Flapping its little elliptical wings and lunging once more at that transparency. Screams. Not always directly linked to the insect, but always derived from its presence.
The young Sherpa—pure thoughtless instinct—felt called. He got up and faced the aisle with no one’s consent or permission. He stalked between his peers, their voices overlapping on account of that joyous advent of disorder. The dragonfly, megacephalic, was performing, in that moment, a maneuver of ascension. Gathering momentum, trying to locate a gap between the pane and the window frame. It would fail, it wouldn’t give up, and it would try again. The young Sherpa reached the spot and regarded the dragonfly. Took stock of it. He leaped and was standing with both feet atop a chair, half crushing a classmate, and in that equilibrium, in that instability, he achieved the feat: one swift motion, and he had seized the insect by its tail.
He exhibited it right away. The bug twisted in between his massive fingers. The young Sherpa felt a hint of apprehension at that vital viscosity, which in any case had no chance of competing with the prehensile pride of his phalanxes. Around him rose applause, but there was also a hint of disappointment to the group dynamic now. The certainty that the singularity had entered its declining phase. That the brief anarchic hubbub the dragonfly had introduced into the boredom and frustration of the classroom was already entering its final throes. Midway between vanity and pathos, the young Sherpa promenaded through the classroom with the dragonfly between his fingers and his eyes fixed on the blackboard. The boys renewed their curiosity and asked to pet the insect, kill it, put it in the mouths of their companions. Someone said:
“It’s disgusting—why don’t you toss it out?”
The young Sherpa nodded but continued his parade, his triumph down the aisle; haughty but with a touch of unease at the imploring buzz of the insect between his fingers. Another voice begged him:
“Don’t kill it.”
This pious invocation swayed the young Sherpa. And so he shook his head, went back to the window, opened it with his other hand and hurled the dragonfly into the outside world.
The teacher, meanwhile, was struggling with a piece of chalk. She was trying to draw gills on the summary corpus of a fish unveiled in profile to general indifference. In the wake of that gregarious overflow, all the children were continuing to watch the young Sherpa, even now that there was no longer anything to see. In reality, the dragonfly episode had maxed out his capacity for being witnessed. As a child, the young Sherpa didn’t know what to do with all those eyes on him. Would he prefer for them to ignore him, then? Not quite. The best thing, he thought at that moment, would be to be able to look at them without them realizing. Or not. The ideal, the extraordinary thing would be for them to watch him all the time, and for him not to even notice. For no one to be able to take their eyes off him.
The Snow Is the Postcard
The old Sherpa is of the belief that snow makes the mountain ugly. And grass, too, and any type of vegetation. Any living organism, really. But above all: snow. The old Sherpa would actually prefer for the mountain to be the mass accumulation of raw bare rock, exhibiting only the traces of erosion. Without grandiloquence. An alliance of chromatically similar minerals: a series of rocks that would paint upon the mountain’s slopes a gamut of grays and browns, ocher, tan, charcoal smidges sliding into the whitish ignominy of curdled milk. A stone that would look like the skin of a young rhinoceros alongside another that would recall the sun setting over a dromedary’s hump. And so on, from foot to summit, one rock after the next. Seen from a distance, a magnificent spectacle—struggle of fragments to achieve a single collective identity, one dun that would define, that would allow for nomenclature. Up close, the marvel of detail, of nuance, of difference.
And yet, thinks the old Sherpa, the snow is the postcard. When a tourist imagines the summit of Everest, the first thing that comes to mind is snow. The uniform snow, at once coarse and pretentious. With its infinite configurations applied to the futility of the flake. No two are alike, marvel simple minds. There’s no such thing as identical, the old Sherpa would like to respond. What we say of snowflakes could apply equally well to the waves in the ocean, the grains of sand in the desert, the bottles produced on a factory belt in Detroit. No two are the same… And the sky? one might inquire. Isn’t the sky always one in its variegation? Is it not the same celestial, even clouded, even at night? No, the old Sherpa would say: no. It's not the same, and it’s not anything. We can’t pretend the sky is anything as though there were an above, or the aspiration to be culminated, or a below, or an ahead. As though nature were not an aberrant uninterrupted concatenation of states of matter and energy, or, in even more perfidious cases, a random continuity of consciousness. And yet, in spite of everything, the snow stays unchanging on the postcard.
For the seasoned climber, on the other hand, the summit of Mount Everest is silence. If the maddening roar of the wind roving over the top of the highest peak on Earth can be considered silence.
Dread
The young Sherpa is going home from school. He is older; he’s begun attending high school. He has already seen the mountain. He’s walking but decides to pause. He sits down on a stone, postponing his return. From there he can see the land that surrounds his house. In the background, the mountain range. Sterile little stones everywhere. His mother exits through the back; in her arms, she holds a heavy basin. The young Sherpa sees her from the perspective of his hebetude and wants to tell her not to bother, that it will snow in the night. But she takes a couple of steps and hangs the wet clothes on the line. Using wooden pins, ligneous bamboo converted into miniature prehensiles. Above her, the elements.
Could you say the element? An element? Or is elements an indivisible? Can elements be fragmented, broken down into a sequence, a system and a pattern found? Or are they an ethereal creature that has no form or that assumes the endless form of what it colonizes? Are they something that is there, an all-encompassing entity become chaos, something that takes in everything and always, but is nonetheless fortuitous?
If the woman said, for example, “something dyed my clothes,” or “something dyed my clothes almost imperceptibly,” if the young Sherpa’s mother looked up, fixed her gaze on the lowering clouds, if she observed the fabric of the clothing against the glare and said aloud: “Something dyed my clothes red so nearly imperceptibly that only I can tell,” then we would want to know: is that red, its feeble pigmentation, the elements or shelter?
The young Sherpa’s mother finishes hanging her clothes, picks up the basin—now relieved of its weight—and disappears from the picture. The wind picks up. A gust comes from the north. A cloth (tablecloth, sheet, or tunic) is shaken, raised, and wrapped around the rope. There is something melancholy and then irreparable in that damp cloth, ever so slightly discolored, victim of twisting and distortion. It seems impossible that it will ever be unknotted now. That from now on it will be like this: clinging to a rope in a suffocating embrace, strangling itself.
The young Sherpa rises and walks home.
Sebastián Martínez Daniell was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. He has published three novels, Semana (Week, 2004), Precipitaciones aisladas (Isolated Showers, 2010), and Dos Sherpas (Two Sherpas, 2018; Charco Press, 2023). His work has also been included in anthologies such as Buenos Aires / Escala 1:1 (2007), Uno a uno (2008), Hablar de mí (2010), and Golpes: Relatos y memorias de la dictadura (2016). He is one of the co-founders of the independent publisher Entropía and is a literature lecturer at the National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires.
Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob.