Read Among the Hedges online

Contents (8)

—Uxue, Un libro al día

“An original novel full of talent, an oppressive fable in which nothing is what it seems and in which its author shows herself to have some striking credentials: it is about somebody capable of creating a sophisticated nightmare using only one stroke of fine line.”

—Pablo Martínez Zarracina, Bilbao

Among the Hedges

Sara Mesa

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY MEGAN MCDOWELL

First edition, 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-948830-39-3 | ISBN-10: 1-948830-39-6

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.

Cover Design by Alban Fischer

Interior Design by Anthony Blake

Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

www.openletterbooks.org

Part One: THE PARK

Part Two: THE CAFÉ

Author’s Note

AMONG THE HEDGES

Part One

THE PARK

SHE IS SO CAUGHT OFF GUARD the first time that she jumps at the sight of him. The girl is sitting with her back against a tree and reading a magazine when she hears the approaching steps, the crunch of dry leaves, and then he’s standing right there in front of her. He’s perhaps a bit taken aback, but not shocked to find her there, hidden behind the hedges. The old man apologizes—I didn’t mean to scare you! he says—and asks her what she’s reading. Between one thing and the other—between the apology and the question—the girl has time to react. This, she replies, showing him the magazine, a women’s magazine. Maybe, she thinks, when he sees this magazine that is obviously not for little girls, he’ll think she’s older than she is and she’ll avoid the dreaded question—what are you doing here, at this time of day?—though in fact the old man merely smiles and peers tentatively at the magazine. At first it seems like he’s going to take it—his fingers hesitate, reach for it—but the gesture withers out and the hand falls, spent, to his side. The old man looks at the girl now, then back at the magazine, the girl, the tree, the little hideout in the hedges, and finally speaks, saying: What’s in the magazine? What’s it about? The girl angles away from the tree trunk, leaning forward over her bare, crossed legs. The dry grass has left impressions on her skin, little red spots from all the hours of sitting on the ground. Girl stuff, she says. Stuff about music and video games, and also movies and clothes, music gossip. Gossip about singers and actors, I mean, their lives and stuff like that. I don’t know much about all that, he says, but his tone holds no creeping reproach or scorn. I read magazines, too, he says. But mine are about birds! Birds? the girl murmurs, disconcerted, wondering if maybe, when he says birds, the old man is referring to something else, that it’s actually an innuendo. This thought makes her more suspicious and she even entertains the thought of running away, but the old man is speaking again and his words sound guileless. Not just about birds, he explains, they’re really about animals in general; magazines specifically about birds aren’t so easy to find, and plus, they’re expensive! He used to subscribe to one that doesn’t exist anymore, it was delivered to his house every week, and that was where he learned everything he knows about birds, which is a lot! The old man talks like a kid—self-absorbed and excited—and the girl looks at him curiously. In the mornings, in that park—he continues—you can easily see a hoopoe and also, more and more often, a ring-necked parakeet or even a Eurasian collared dove, hasn’t she noticed? The girl shakes her head. She doesn’t even know what a normal dove looks like, she thinks, so how could she tell the difference between that and a Eurasian one?

Among the Hedges

CONTENTS

Part One

THE PARK