Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson

Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson are the recipients of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Grant for their translation of Jaime Saenz's The Night (Princeton University Press, 2007).

1.

   The night, its feelers twitching in the distance

    the night locked into a box swallowed by the night in the dresser in the nook

    while my eyes and especially that space between my eyes and nostrils stretches out like a two-story gutter

    startled and unnerved, I’m suddenly aware—there’s a tubular cocoon, spun from eye to eye, through which I see only the night, fractured and phantasmagoric

    thanks to a force from who knows where the space of my dream has been split by a wall

    on this side sleep is not possible and on the other it’s perfectly possible but nevertheless thoroughly impossible

    the wall, in fact, is not a wall but a living force that writhes and throbs and this wall is me

    with an inconceivable transparency that allows me to see the night’s other side

    and places you might sleep in an overcoat of aches and interminable sighs and grief-belching terrors which home in on your bones

    the other side of night is a night without night, without earth, without shelter, without rooms, without furniture, unpeopled

    there is absolutely nothing on the other side of night

    it’s a world utterly without world, and to possess it, you must never arrive there

    —it’s the dock at the very side of your body
   
    and, at the same time, it’s inconceivably remote.



3.

  Who is that, the one with the bull’s neck and lion’s mane?

  He appears from nowhere in the doorway, this gatekeeper of the threshold, blocking those who would pass through.

  There is sunlight, and water, and air heavy with breathing, 

  and there are people.

  The air hums with the fluttering and fluttering and fluttering of beings.

  And this humming, which resounds in every realm, rising to a roar,

  is nevertheless a silence more profound than pure silence.

  There are two worlds, there are two lives, there are two deaths,

  —whatever they call the One and Absolute doesn’t exist.

  There are two faces, two edges, two abysses.


The gatekeeper waries.

The sun has gotten to him, and with glowering eyes he cuts down those who clamor to come in and see me.

Facundo, the good carpenter, lends him a straw fedora. Señora Anselma offers him a glass of water.

A man with a grim brow gives him a cigarette and whispers in his ear.

The gatekeeper, like a dreamer, half-closes his eyes and folds his arms defiantly across his chest,

  and every so often consults his pocket watch,

  and then stares at the sky.

  But in the middle of this casual regime he shrieks and stiffens.

  For a night moth has suddenly appeared,

  black as night,

  in the middle of the day in clear sun,

  with a fringe of purple on its enormous wings, flapping with a weird torpor,

  tracing a spiral that slowly descends;

  and it settles on the brow of the terrified gatekeeper,

  and there it stays, beyond memory,

  as if stamped in cloth, or forged by fire into the shield of a mythical knight. 




6.

Over the years, all your furniture and possessions wear down and fine away.

Many things disappear on break, while others meet odd fates, as if they were human.

A crystal inkwell I adored wound up with the cops, under totally bizarre circumstances;

an automatic pistol sat pawned in a whorehouse for ages, until Forito Cisneros redeemed it to kill himself.

Thanks to a magnifying glass ten centimeters in diameter which, on a misguided lark, I lent to an academic, a series of bloody atrocities were committed.

Some high-energy apparatuses, which triggered resplendent violet rays, and which were in pawn to an apothecary shop, were redeemed, with my authorization, by an acquaintance who undertook to fool around with said apparatuses in such a manner that he was electrocuted stone-dead. Presently they are pawned to a tailor shop, and I have no intention of redeeming them.

The Complete Works of Nietzsche, in twelve volumes, left my room one night, never to return. For we pawned them on a whim to a cab driver, and in our exuberance, forgot to ask his name or take down the license number.

The exact same thing happened with a portable typewriter, the apple of my eye.

To ledger the fate of my belongings would be endless.

What irks me is that the fate they suffered, and what irks me no less is the fate to be suffered by all the stuff I still keep around.

I’m alarmed by the way the designs carved into the seats of my chair are rubbed out.

That calamitous state of my armchair, which, moreover, must be pushing a hundred years.

The appearance of my writing desk wounds me, all pocked and cigarette-burned, though still solid and noble.

Bequeathed to me by grandmother, a bedside table, older than my soul, now bleached out, clutching its dignity, the survivor of toe-stubs, bumps, kicks, and drunken falls.

Nevertheless, the table, made in Vienna, petite and glass-covered, handed down from mother, is in decent shape save for a few nicks.

The tall, skinny bookcase, made of rosewood, with a door and delicate pyrography, a gift from Aunt Esther, stands in its place; and if anything fascinates me, it’s the neglect it has suffered.

Apart from these, there is a whole world of things.

A wheeled table with double leaves, gone rickety; a walnut armoire in ruins; more furniture full of history, and mystery, appallingly antique.

What’s it all worth? I ask myself.

Well, in truth, not much, and even under the best circumstances, not enough to buy a ranga-ranga.

They’re all sad pieces of junk, rickety wrecks, long out of style

—and, precisely for that reason, they are indivisible from life, and it’s murder to let them go.



4.

What is the night?—you ask now and forever.

The night, a revelation still veiled.

Perhaps a deathform, tenacious and flexed,

perhaps a body lost to the night itself.

Truly, a chasm, a space unimaginable.

A subtle, lightless realm, not unlike the body dwelling in you,

Which hides, surely, many clues to the night.

*

When I consider the night’s mystery, I imagine the mystery of your body.

which is only one of the forms of night’s being;

I know beyond doubt the body that inhabits you is nothing more than the darkness of your body;

and this darkness is diffused under the night’s sign.

In the countless concavities of your body there are multiple kingdoms of darkness;

and this is something worth reflection.

This body, closed, secret, and forbidden; this body, other and fearsome,

neither foretold nor foreseen.

And it is like a resplendence or like a shadow:

it only allows itself to be sensed from afar, from the indeterminate, charged with excessive loneliness which has nothing to do with you.

And it only allows itself to be sensed feelingly, through temperature, and through a sorrow that has nothing to do with you.

If anything fills me with awe, it is the image that imagines me from afar;

a breathing heard at my core. The body breathes at my core.

Darkness rivets me—the body’s night rivets me.

The body of the night and the death of the body rivet my mind.

*

And I ask myself:

What is your body? I don’t know whether you’ve even asked yourself.

It’s a gambit, grave and adverse.

One time I came close to my body;

and realizing I had never seen it, even though I bore it with me,

I asked it who it was;

And a voice, in the silence, said to me:


I am the body who inhabits you, and I am here in the darkness, and I suffer you, and live you, and die you.

But I am not your body. I am the night.  

Excerpted from The Night, by Jaime Saenz (Princeton University Press, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson; reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.