Un cuento de Bajas pasiones,
traducido por Rebecca Liloy
Nocturnal
It happens three times each night.
The first, when I go to bed. They check that my pijamas are on correctly, they
instruct me to the bathroom to pee, and they tuck me in between the blankets.
Then they turn off the lights and they stand together by the door, religiously
waiting for me to fall asleep.
Since I am not sleepy, and to not
make them wait, I pretend: for the first time at night I act asleep.
Then they turn around and walk
slowly, as if postponing the arrival to the room they share. I look forward to
a delightful night. I close my eyes and mentally draw my bedroom with the view
as seen from my bed, I then open my them, overlap the memory with reality and
find there is no difference. I smile and begin thinking of frivolous ideas
while the time for my parents’ second check comes.
They arrive in different ways:
sometimes just one of them, sometimes both of them: defeated by sleepiness;
rarely, agitated and even sweaty, as if they just returned from a quick jog around
the block.
So, I try to position myself into a
careless pose, close my eyes and relax my breathing, making it almost
indiscernible. They are happy to see that I am asleep and return to their room
and their things.
Alone again I try to remember what I
was thinking of before the interruption and, if I can remember what it was, I
go along with it, oscillating in absolute liberty, between childish fantasies
and the deepest philosophical questions. It makes no difference if I am not
able to remember the last thought from before the interruption; simply with a
distracted mind, I arrive at something, any thing, every thing works, I think
of it, and a short time after arrive at ideas that have no apparent relation
with the original thought. Like this until sunrise.
Then they arrive for the third time,
they look at the alarm clock, they make sure that the moments that follow will
not go awry, and again they leave me alone until it's time to prepare myself to
go to school.
While I wait for the alarm to go off,
I think about the day before me, of the things that I must do, of my classes
and the games to be played at recess. Sometimes I have enough time to review my
lessons. Finally, I get up, I shower, I get dressed, eat breakfast, and I’m on
my way to school.
This happens every night. The times
of their visits are almost always the same and I have little difficulty in
pretending to be asleep. But such routine is exhausting. I think my parents are
ready for the news and I only wait for the right moment to relieve them of their
worrisome nightly ritual of checking up on my sleep. They’ll be happy to learn
that I never sleep.
By Gustavo Arango, Translated from Spanish by Rebecca Liloy
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