We are pleased to bring you an extract from the novel Brickmakers by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott, and published by Charco Press — an Edinburgh-based press that seeks to publish English language translations of the very best of contemporary Latin American literature.
Buy the book directly from the publisher here.
Pájaro Tamai and Marciano Miranda, two young men, are dying in a deserted amusement park. The story begins almost at its end, just a little after the two main characters have faced off in a knife fight: the culmination of a rivalry that has pitted them against one another since childhood. The present in Brickmakers is a state of impending death, at moments marked by oneiric visions: Marciano is visited by the ghost of his father, who was murdered when he was a teenager, a father he had sworn to avenge, in a promise he could not keep. Pájaro is also visited, in a recurring nightmare, by his abusive father who disappeared years earlier.
Selva Almada (tr. Annie McDermott)
Brickmakers
Oscar Tamai began making bricks a month after Celina came to terms with the owner of the kiln. He was a smart guy and soon got the hang of the work, though he wasn’t happy about it.
At first, and given how Celina sold him on the idea, he’d jumped at the chance. Being his own boss, working the hours he chose: these were things he’d always wanted. No one ordering him around or walking all over him. He, Oscar Tamai, master of his destiny again: it was going to be beautiful.
But once they moved to the brickworks, he realized he’d have his wife around morning, noon and night, Celina and the kids under his feet from the moment he got up to when he went to bed, and all the domestic problems. All the stuff he used to escape, with the excuse of doing odd jobs or going out to look for them; a married man’s routine, which he’d always steered clear of before.
He’d be his own boss, but Celina, he could tell, would be worse than any of the slave-drivers he’d come across in his time.
If a boss got his back up, Oscar Tamai used to quit on the spot and get the hell out. He felt on top of the world when he did it, when someone pushed him too far, biting the hand that fed him like the wily cur he was. Shouting louder than the boss, telling him to go fuck himself, and then taking his time walking out, boots coming down hard, owning every step; the other workers following the scene with their heads bowed, but, Tamai knew, congratulating him inside, saying from inside their gritted teeth: that Tamai has some fucking balls.
Then straight to the bar to tell the tale, to spread his free spirit around the others, the others who’d never have had the nerve. And from the bar, emboldened by drink, going home to empty that massive pair of balls into his wife.
Now none of that would be possible. Celina, the old trout, had sold him down the river. Every day, now, a copy of the last: back broken by wheelbarrows full of wood, bent double in the muddy pisadero, sweating like a pig over piles of burning bricks.
Although it would be a few years before he finally made up his mind, even then, a month after laying the first brick of the stable life Celina wanted for her and her children, Oscar Tamai was thinking about ditching it all. If she began her goodbyes when Pajarito was born,
he began his in the remorseless midday sun, leaning on his shovel, feet buried in the mud, back muscles on fire, eyes two hate-filled slits.
*
Some months after they became neighbours, Elvio Miranda showed up at Tamai’s brickworks – which everyone still thought of as Leyes’ brickworks, after the
last owner, who was still the owner, pah, to the tenant’s profound irritation: ‘It’s Tamai’s brickworks now,’ he’d snap testily whenever someone came by asking for Leyes. Miranda clapped his hands to make himself known, though he was already through the little wire gate that separated the property from the street.
It was getting dark, but the heat hadn’t let up a whisker. Under the awning, with no lights on so as not to attract the night-time bugs, Tamai was sitting in a beach chair.
‘Come in,’ he yelled, without getting up.
Miranda made his way over the uneven patio. Although everything was switched off, the evening glow of the sky made it easy enough to see.
‘’Scuse me,’ said the visitor.
‘Bit late for that,’ Tamai answered, leaning forward slightly.
Miranda thought he was getting up to greet him, but no. Instead he stretched out an arm for a tin cup that was on the table. He took a swig and set it down on the ground, closer to him, and wiped his mouth with his hand. The same hand then moved to stroke the head of the puppy in his lap.
He didn’t ask the visitor to sit down, or offer any pleasantries. Miranda stayed on his feet, and lit a cigarette for something to do.
‘Listen,Tamai, that dog’s mine.’
Tamai smiled and turned his full attention back to the little animal. A long-nosed greyhound, with dark stripes and ears still too big for its skull, the tail a thin snake slapping against the man’s thigh. He put a finger in its mouth, the needle-like teeth clamped down on his calloused skin and it swung its head from side to side, not letting go. Tamai smiled again and held the dog up to his face and it licked his nose. He liked that milky smell puppies had.
‘I think you’re mistaken,’ he said.
‘It’s my dog. A neighbour saw you take it.’ ‘You’re telling me I’m a thief.’
‘I’m telling you to give it back. It’s a racing dog. From Daisy’s litter. The sire and dam are champions, you hear?’ ‘This is my dog,’ he said, and leaned forward to take another swig.
‘Cut the bullshit, Tamai. Give it back.’ Tamai chuckled.
‘I don’t want any trouble, Tamai.’
‘You don’t want any trouble, but you show up at my house saying I stole one of your dogs. That’s funny. If I don’t want any trouble, I stay at home.’
‘This isn’t just any dog, ok? It’s a future champion. The best of the litter. If you want a puppy, I’ll give you another one. But not this one.’
‘I don’t want a dog. I’ve got one already.’
‘These aren’t ordinary dogs. They need special care.
Training. Understand?’
Tamai lifted the puppy with one hand and moved it this way and that in the air. It whimpered.
‘Doesn’t look so special to me. It’s a dog. Bit skinny, sure. You can tell the last owner was stingy with the food. It’s not nice to mistreat animals, don’t you agree?’
Miranda’s laugh couldn’t hide his powerlessness. ‘Fine. If the dog’s yours, I’ll buy it off you. How much d’you want?’
‘No, Miranda. This dog’s not for sale. It belongs to Sonia, my little girl. Imagine how upset she’d be if I let it go. She’s fond of it.’
Miranda lit another cigarette. His mouth was dry. He glanced up, the sky visible through the bare thatch of the awning. It was completely dark now, but there were stars. As he wondered what else he could say to change Tamai’s mind, the gate creaked open. He looked over his shoulder and saw Tamai’s wife coming in, holding the baby in one arm and the little girl by the hand.
‘Evening,’ the woman said. ‘Ma’am…’ Miranda greeted her.
The girl, just two years old, waddled towards her dad with the duck-like gait of children new to walking, and hugged the little puppy.
‘What’d I tell you,’ said Tamai, and he lifted the girl into his lap.
‘Fine,’ said Miranda, stamping out his cigarette. ‘But look after it. Take it to the vet in town, they’ll tell you how to raise it. It’s a good dog, Tamai, make the most of it.’
He turned and left the way he came.
Officially, the two men’s feud began with the stolen puppy, but it was brewing even before they were neighbours. Neither was sure how it started. One of those nights when they were hanging around in some bar till the early hours, they’d had an altercation. About what, neither could remember. The picture they had was hazy: they were at one of those big tables with the usual bunch of layabouts, talking about this or that, when one of them made some comment and the other took it wrong, then they were on their feet, chairs skidding back, and their pals all fell silent; they faced each other in the stale air, eyes bloodshot and fists ready to land.
But they were plastered and a voice of reason on each side told them to cut it out. Their pals had made them sit down and called for more drinks and calm had been restored, a veil drawn over the whole thing, putting out the spark before it became a blaze. And so the two men forgot, yes, why they’d been so angry, but they didn’t forget they had unfinished business.
Swiping the puppy was Tamai’s way of bringing that old grudge up to date. Now, with the two men neighbours, and both brickmakers, too, the gloves would well and truly come off.
Brickmakers is published by Charco Press, and is available now.
Compared to Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Sara Gallardo, Selva Almada (Entre Ríos, Argentina, 1973) is considered one of the most powerful voices of contemporary Argentinian and Latin American literature, and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals in the region. Including her debut The Wind That Lays Waste (Charco Press, 2019), and the ground-breaking work of journalistic fiction Dead Girls (Charco Press, 2020), she has published four novels, a book of short stories, and a film diary (of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama). She has been shortlisted for the Rodolfo Walsh Award and for the Tigre Juan Award (both in Spain). Brickmakers is the second instalment in Almada’s ‘trilogy of men’ preceded by The Wind That Lays Waste (Winner of the EIBF First Book Award 2019), and followed by No es un río (It is Not a River), to be published by Charco in 2023.
Annie McDermott’s translations include Mario Levrero’s Empty Words and The Luminous Novel, Feebleminded and Tender by Ariana Harwicz (co-translations with Carolina Orloff), Loop by Brenda Lozano, City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão (co-translation with Jethro Soutar), and The Rooftop by Fernanda Trías. She writes for The White Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, the Times Literary Supplement and LitHub, among others.
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