Trash

Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, J. D. Pluecker

Description

• Serialization targeting BOMB, Granta, Paris Review, AGNI, New England Review, Southwest Review, Cincinnati Review, Literary Hub
• Targeted outreach to publications spotlighting translated literature: World Literature Today, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Latin American Literature Today
• Local coverage outreach to Texas Monthly, Dallas Morning News
• Promotion at/events pitched for Texas Book Festival, Dallas Literary Festival
• Events: virtual and in-person events with Texas bookstores and venues
• Promotion on the publisher’s website (deepvellum.org), Twitter feed (@deepvellum), and Facebook page (/deepvellum); publisher’s e-newsletter to booksellers, reviewers, librarians

• A remarkable novel about value and power
• Features lived experiences of trans and LGBTQ+ community members
• Author and translator are both located in Texas, with active connections to literary communities
• Persistent attention to the overlooked and undervalued lives of women in the difficult environs of violence and hyper-capitalism in Mexico
  
• From the translator, JD Pluecker: "It is urgent to have stories about the border written by people who intimately know and have lived in the borderlands, particularly writers from the Mexican side of the border."

Sujets

• LGBTQ+
• México
• Transgender
• Mexico
• LGBT
• Fiction
• Texas

Informations

• Publié par: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646052462
• Langue: English

Extrait

TRASH
Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny
Translated by JD Pluecker
DEEP VELLUM PUBLISHING
DALLAS, TEXAS
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas,Texas 75226
deepvellum .org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Translation copyright © 2022 by J. D. Pluecker
Originally published as Basura by Nitro/Press in Mexico City, Mexico, in 2018.
First US Edition, 2022
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA :
Names: Aguilar Zéleny, Sylvia, 1973- author. | Pluecker, John, 1979-
translator.
Title: Trash / Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny ; translated by JD Pluecker.
Other titles: Basura. English
Description: First US edition. | Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing,
2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022047181 | ISBN 9781646052202 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9781646052462 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PQ7298.1.G8434 B3713 2022 | DDC
863/.64--dc23/eng/20221004
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022047181
ISBN (TPB) 978-1-64605-133-5
ISBN (Ebook) 978-1-64605-134-2
Cover design by Aline Zuniga
Interior layout and typesetting by KGT
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For my son Juan,
just because,
and because I can.
Trash don’t know the meaning of use.
Just like you kids.
—Dorothy Allison
1
The house was tiny. One of those houses with a steady supply of food. With four walls. All of them sturdy. With windows, a door, and a lock. A functioning lock. It had two small beds, three chairs, a table, and a little stove. Also cups, plates, spoons, knives. The house had a lock.
I lived with her in that house.
If I close my eyes, I see her. Her face as if freshly washed. Her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her apron always atop her clothes, the pockets in the front packed with keys, coins, twenty-peso bills, a prayer card with the virgin on it, thread. A needle pierced through the thread’s bobbin.
She worked cleaning houses on the other side, over there, with gringos or for Mexicans who lived like gringos, I’m not sure. I just know she crossed the bridge downtown every day to get to gringolandia. It’s shit going back and forth, but the shit pays well, she’d tell anyone she ran into. Her apron tucked away in her bag so the migras wouldn’t think she worked over there. Sometimes she’d push a cart like the ones from the supermarket that she grabbed who-knows-where. A little cart crammed with stuff. The gringos or the Mexicans who lived like gringos would always give her food, clothes, shoes, whatnot. It was strange for her to arrive empty-handed. And it didn’t matter what she brought, it always made me happy.
Because if I close my eyes, I see myself there too, not like I am now, but how I was then: little, an idiot, a dummy, with one eye fixed on her all the time, worshipping her. Fucking idiot.
Some girls lived in one of the houses where she worked. I know because sometimes she’d come home with things just for me: shoes, toys, books, shirts with Barbie’s face on them. The girls don’t wear this anymore, the girls don’t play with this anymore, the girls don’t want this anymore, she’d tell me. They give them everything, I mean everything. Just stick out their hands, and they get whatever they want. Just look, they get rid of brand-new things, it’s like you’re the first person to wear it, Alicia, look, try this on, put these sneakers on, I’m telling you, they’re actually new.
I didn’t care too much one way or the other about the clothes, but what I loved were the books she’d bring me. And I was happy, happy because in the books there were fairies, frog princes, rabbits with clocks. I also brought toys, she’d say, look, it doesn’t look like they’ve ever even been touched. The toys weren’t toys, they were board games for two or more players, things that would make you think, puzzles practically impossible to assemble on my own. But the books, the books don’t need anyone but me. Books are read on your own.
All week long, she’d move between the houses on the other side and a house or two on this side as well, rich people’s houses. A long way off from our part of town. The two of us lived off the money she made from cleaning and then some extra things she’d do. You’re lucky, she’d tell me, at your age I was already working. Sometimes she’d come home with clothes she had to iron, to press smooth, like new. Or clothes to mend, a hem, a seam over here, lots of buttons. Whiling away her afternoons and weekends with these tasks. Sewing, ironing, and then all over again, from the beginning.
In the evenings, after laying out my school uniform and cleaning the stove, she’d sit down and ask me to rub her feet, and I’d do it happily because I loved the smell of her foot cream. I loved to squeeze out a little squirt of the cream and then slather it over her arches, then the soles of her feet, and afterwards between each toe. Pull em for me, she’d say, crack em for me. And very obediently, I’d do just that, mainly because she requested it, but also because I loved the sound, the creak and crack of each one. She’d close her eyes, smile. I felt like I was giving her some pleasure by massaging her feet. I’d do it, moving slowly, soft and tender, like with love.
I was such a fucking idiot.
I don’t know what she did with me before I went to school. It’s like my memory starts in the first year of kindergarten, her taking me by the hand and me in a blue skirt, a white blouse, and an apron with those little squares all over it. I have other images from later on: the two of us walking shoulder to shoulder. By then, I was no longer one of those little girls who dart away and run across the street without so much as a glance. Behave, study hard, pay attention, she repeated to me every day before saying goodbye. And I did it: I behaved, I studied hard, I paid attention, I raised my hand to answer questions, I turned in my work before anyone else. I read out loud better than anyone else.
It was rare she’d pick me up from school, since, like I said before, she was working. So she had a neighbor woman look after me, along with her own kids. I had to stay with them until she came to pick me up. I entertained myself watching TV with the other kids or doing homework. My stomach growled, I remember, but I didn’t have permission to eat with them and, besides, I liked eating with her, not them. Handing her a tomato, peeling off the outer layers of skin from an onion, sprinkling salt and pepper into ground beef, setting the table. Two plates, two cups, spoons, forks, just one knife that she used to cut the meat for me. I’ve never eaten a fideo like hers since. Her chile colorado with meat and potatoes. Her albóndigas.
First thing was always to burn the corn tortillas. We liked them like that. She’d slather butter on them with a little salt. I’d eat one or two before the food was done. Because there was always food. Hot home-cooked food, made fresh.
Burnt tortillas scare away hunger and cold. That’s what she’d tell me. She also said it was a lie that eating raw Maseca could hurt you. I remember I liked to help her make tortillas, mixing the warm water with the corn flour, squeezing it with my fingers. And then as she flattened out the tortillas, she’d sing a song, how’d it go? She was singing all the time, sometimes I still think I can hear her singing at night when the world quiets down. As she cooked or ironed or cleaned, she’d sing and sing. I loved her voice, the latest hit songs came out of her mouth, but they sounded different. Not better, just different.
In her favorite songs, she always repeated words like love, guilt, oblivion. There was more feeling in them when she sang, like she was the actual one feeling love and guilt and oblivion. There were songs she didn’t sing. They’d come on the radio and she’d say: turn it up, turn it up more. Her mouth said the words of the song one after the other, just without any sound. I don’t know what songs they were or who sang them, but even today, when one of them comes on the radio, I see her so clearly. That old-ass bitch, maybe I even miss her. It wasn’t that she sang well, but she sang with passion, like everything else disappeared when she gave herself over to her songs. Whenever she caught me listening to her sing, she’d turn off the radio all of a sudden and say: that’s enough wasting time, come on, go read out loud.
She’s the one who got me into the habit of reading. I’d read to her and she’d sew: a hem, a seam, buttons. Or she’d iron: a dress, a shirt, the outer seam of a pair of pants. I don’t know if I already said it, but besides cleaning and taking care of kids, she’d also work as a seamstress, all kinds of little jobs mending her clients’ clothes. Those people. The kind of people who pay other people to do everything for them. She didn’t teach me how to wash or iron or mend. You’re too small. That’s what she’d say. There’ll be time later on. It looks easy, but it’s not. You have to know how much soap, how hot the iron should be. You have to blind stitch. One of these days I’ll teach you, she repeated, because you never know when you’ll need your hands to get you out of a bind.
I don’t wash or iron or sew, but my hands sure do know how to get me out of a bind. That’s because she taught me how to scavenge. Thanks to her, I learned where the best things were, things everybody wanted, almost new stuff. High-quality trash, she called it. She’d look at her watch and say, come on, niña. Niña, that was her name for me. Let’s go hunting. There’s no one out there at this hour. Hunting, that’s what she called it.
My name for it is work.
I’m off to work, I say to nobody, right when I get out of bed.
Hunting? Other people do that. They do it for me.
Back then, we didn’t do what I do now on a daily basis. We didn’t spend the whole morning out here waiting for the garbage truck to pull up. We didn’t crowd around the truck as it em