Sebastián Martínez Daniell

Trans. by Jennifer Croft

DEAFENING SILENCE

Two Sherpas peer into the abyss. Their bodies outstretched over the rocks, hands gripping the edge of the precipice: lying in wait. Their gestures span the panoply of subtleties that aim to elude both the guilt of the executioner and the indignation of the victim.

It never rains on Mount Everest, thinks the old Sherpa, who isn’t that old, nor is he properly speaking a Sherpa. They say the conditions aren’t right for it. That it can only snow. He tries to fathom it. But he considers it a limitation. The fact that it would never rain. He personally prefers a varied climate. The more varied, the better. He likes latitudes where summer is suffocating and winter is harsh. Where after light snow comes a thawing, the vortex of hurricane and swelter. Droughts and famines, floods and pandemics. Those are the places he likes. Biblical cities: Nineveh, Gomorrah, ancient Egypt, and its ten extortionary plagues . . . He might even like London, as a matter of fact, if this Englishman would make up his mind to leave this whole thing behind him, get up, turn his head, smile. Make some polite remark.

The other Sherpa is young. He shuts his eyes and doesn’t think about anything. Until the words appear. They come from someplace. Yes, he remembers now. Vividly. It’s the short speeches given by Flavius, the sure-fire prose of Shakespeare: “Home, you idle creatures, get you home!” Then he asks himself a new question: Playwright? Why not? He’s good with words. His professors never tire of saying so. He’s never written so much as a scene. It doesn’t matter. He has time.

For now, he has to concentrate on the matter at hand: on the immobility of the Englishman. This attitude keeps him clinging to the mountain. Perfectly still. As though he were a miniscule animal parasitizing a colossal rocky being . . . A quiet animal, with no aspiration other than to listen to the laconic voices of two Sherpas who are contemplating him from the heights of Mount Everest. An eternal being, dying all the time while it barely perceives, up there, the abstract plane of a cloudless sky . . .

Concentrate on the immediate, yes. Find an origin for it, a point of departure; discard the superfluous, go back, rush up the stream of time until the moment when he saw the old man turn the corner, and then the Englishman. And, for three seconds, all was rock, snow, atmosphere. Placidity and stillness. Three, two, one . . . The Englishman was gone, the old Sherpa was crawling over toward the edge, the scene taking on an unreal and unfortunate patina.

The rest was silence; if the deafening noise of the wind raveling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence.

Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob.

Sebastián Martínez Daniell was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. He has published three novels, Semana (Week, 2004), Precipitaciones aisladas (Isolated Showers, 2010), and Dos Sherpas (Two Sherpas, 2018; Charco Press, 2023). His work has also been included in anthologies such as Buenos Aires / Escala 1:1 (2007), Uno a uno (2008), Hablar de mí (2010), and Golpes: Relatos y memorias de la dictadura (2016). He is one of the co-founders of the independent publisher Entropía and is a literature lecturer at the National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires.