Sebastián Martínez Daniell

Trans. by Jennifer Croft

DRAGONFLY

The young Sherpa remembers it vividly. It was a short-lived class, in which their teacher briefly tried to instruct them on the differences between domestic and wild animals, between mammals and amphibians, between being brave and being heedless. Does the old Sherpa have this kind of memory? Evocations of this sharpness?

That day, the young Sherpa, who was nearly ten years old, entered the school building, walked—feet of an automaton—into the classroom, sat, and waited. He was in the first row, his backpack by his side. Behind him, tumult, that juvenile mob, those slumping desks, the projection of a center aisle, floor of heavy tiles in perspective. Their teacher arrived, prompting a simulacrum of silence: no one stopped talking, but now their chats, their imprecations, their snorts were all muffled. Their teacher greeted them; she was nice, but possibly only because she knew no other variants of character. She conveyed warmth by virtue of exclusion. She looked around the room, asked if anyone was absent, turned to face the blackboard and wrote: “mammals,” “reptiles,” “birds,” “fish,” “amphibians.” The order was random, but then, what can you expect from a taxonomy?

Her students surrendered themselves to the machinery of morning somnolence. They listened from afar, distracted by very remote stimuli, some noting down individual words, most pondering life outside: the morning, the sun, the possibility of pushing one another. And, in the midst of that torpor, the call of chaos.

“A dragonfly!” a child sounded the alarm. “Where?” “Here, inside, here!” Instantly the atmosphere got choppy. The whole school day took a turn. Adrenaline and anomie. The insect bouncing off the classroom window. Bumping its head against the pane and plummeting in confusion. Flapping its little elliptical wings and lunging once more at that transparency. Screams. Not always directly linked to the insect, but always derived from its presence.

The young Sherpa—pure thoughtless instinct—felt called. He got up and faced the aisle with no one’s consent or permission. He stalked between his peers, their voices overlapping on account of that joyous advent of disorder. The dragonfly, megacephalic, was performing, in that moment, a maneuver of ascension. Gathering momentum, trying to locate a gap between the pane and the window frame. It would fail, it wouldn’t give up, and it would try again. The young Sherpa reached the spot and regarded the dragonfly. Took stock of it. He leaped and was standing with both feet atop a chair, half crushing a classmate, and in that equilibrium, in that instability, he achieved the feat: one swift motion, and he had seized the insect by its tail.

He exhibited it right away. The bug twisted in between his massive fingers. The young Sherpa felt a hint of apprehension at that vital viscosity, which in any case had no chance of competing with the prehensile pride of his phalanxes. Around him rose applause, but there was also a hint of disappointment to the group dynamic now. The certainty that the singularity had entered its declining phase. That the brief anarchic hubbub the dragonfly had introduced into the boredom and frustration of the classroom was already entering its final throes. Midway between vanity and pathos, the young Sherpa promenaded through the classroom with the dragonfly between his fingers and his eyes fixed on the blackboard. The boys renewed their curiosity and asked to pet the insect, kill it, put it in the mouths of their companions. Someone said:

“It’s disgusting—why don’t you toss it out?”

The young Sherpa nodded but continued his parade, his triumph down the aisle; haughty but with a touch of unease at the imploring buzz of the insect between his fingers. Another voice begged him:

“Don’t kill it.”

This pious invocation swayed the young Sherpa. And so he shook his head, went back to the window, opened it with his other hand and hurled the dragonfly into the outside world.

The teacher, meanwhile, was struggling with a piece of chalk. She was trying to draw gills on the summary corpus of a fish unveiled in profile to general indifference. In the wake of that gregarious overflow, all the children were continuing to watch the young Sherpa, even now that there was no longer anything to see. In reality, the dragonfly episode had maxed out his capacity for being witnessed. As a child, the young Sherpa didn’t know what to do with all those eyes on him. Would he prefer for them to ignore him, then? Not quite. The best thing, he thought at that moment, would be to be able to look at them without them realizing. Or not. The ideal, the extraordinary thing would be for them to watch him all the time, and for him not to even notice. For no one to be able to take their eyes off him.

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.