HAZARDOUS MATERIALS by Angélica Gorodischer, translated by Amalia Gladhart and D. P. Snyder

Remember, sure, I can do that. Remember over and over again, I can do that, too. Observing the sun and tracking its course is the easy part. But keep in mind that the sun is always altering its trajectory. Because the Earth wobbles and, what’s more, it’s lopsided. I can remember that, too. What I cannot do is raise a hand, an open hand but with the fingers very close together, to block out the sun—that, that specific thing, is one of the things I cannot do. The leaves, oh yes, I can see them. They look dark, much darker than they are, and they remain still, their edges glowing almost haloed against the color of the air. God! I said to myself, I who have always been an atheist, God! But the universe must be just like this, all blue, all the worlds atremble, nimbused with light. And if the universe is like that, and not the way they describe it, there must be somebody in another world of this universe, somebody who’s figured out the same thing I have and who ponders the hazardous material, that substance that’s so far away and yet never leaves, never goes away for good. Only space is fooling with us; somebody is going to figure it out in the next hundred years or already discovered it two hundred years ago. Why not? Ah, the same as always, why not, and knowing that the why not is utter nonsense, barely exists, even if spoken with authority, yes, especially then. There is not—not at any place nor at any time—the possibility of no: the magniflorious universe has a time and a place for everything.

For entirely too much of everything. Let’s see, what would I have been? I was seven or eight, although sometimes I think I must have been older, I mean, because of what I felt, what I thought, what I did. So it must have been a few years later but very few; I can’t have been only seven or eight. Twelve, maybe. No, a bit less. Maybe ten. It’s true, kids especially girls—think about death a lot. They play at being dead and even stretched out in bed at night they close their eyes and hold their breath: I’m dead. I wasn’t afraid to be dead because I needed that place, the place occupied by fear, to lodge my hatred. For hatred also has its realm, and hatred is presumptuous, it wants its realm to be that favorable, silent, sullen, arid, sinuous, barren place where the shades that must not be permitted to condense into bodies glide. One doesn’t play at hate the way one plays at death. One doesn’t try to determine the shape of the universe. One only feeds it, feeds the hatred, cultivates it, and observes it as it grows.

It came from the no. More than her presence, it came from her refusal. She didn’t know how to say anything but no. No. All of her, all of Gudelia, was one big no, dry and monstrous. And bearing her no on her back and hugging it close around her, she got into my house, our house, and spread her bile—she was made of bile—everywhere. You see, sweetie, we aren’t going to have any more children, we already have you, you’re our daughter, we lost your mummy but Gude is going to be your mummy from now on. And then smiled. Not her, she didn’t smile. That is, she smiled when my father was at home but if he wasn’t there, she didn’t smile, she closed herself away in the bedroom or in what she called my study, which had been the sewing room, and did something, I never knew what.

I had hated her with all my strength, all my heart, all my desire, and she knew it and didn’t care. Not only did she not care, she was delighted. I know, I know because I kept as close and watchful an eye on her as she did on me. She wanted to make my life impossible. I wanted to kill her.

I wondered back then. I don’t wonder now because I don’t care anymore, but I used to wonder how it all began. And I had no answer. Today I’d say I inconvenienced her: I was a leftover from my father’s previous life, that life she aspired to occupy completely, without leaving even a tiny opening for anyone or anything else. I was too much. I was a stumbling block in a place where there should have been nothing. She hid away the pictures of my mother so I wouldn’t suffer over her memory. That’s what she said. She pronounced her first no when I told her to put them back where they belonged. I appealed to my father and she smiled at him and he said she only wants what’s best for you. I never mentioned it again. And we dedicated ourselves to hatred, each one to her hatred of the other. And I wanted to kill her, so I decided to do it as soon as possible: I was something she did not want, something in her way, and she was something I hated and longed to destroy.

I didn’t just want to kill her: I wanted to make her suffer before she died. I decided to do it with poison. That makes me think maybe, yes, maybe I was only seven or eight, because poison is a very naïve choice. Poison is a dead giveaway. There is no poison that doesn’t leave a trace, and if a young, healthy woman experiences vomiting and convulsions, poison couldn’t be more evident.

So? So it would have to be something harmless that could be become lethal. The balcony, for instance. A balcony is a decoration and an amenity and a source of air and light for a home. But a person can fall from a balcony and break her neck. Something that doesn't just happen. You have to push the person you want to kill, or pick them up by the feet and tip them over the railing. Very complicated and almost impossible to manage. After that, I discarded numerous possibilities, from drowning in the lake or the bathtub, to an explosion of the boiler in the basement. And I didn’t let up until I found the manual, Hazardous Materials, by one Prof. Dr. Atty. Helmut Krump-Berlesch, a modest little book, old, almost falling apart, next to a shabby dictionary of synonyms and six pamphlets about combustion engines published by the Ford Motor Co. that were all hidden—dictionary, pamphlets, and manual—in the second row of a bookshelf in our home library. The first row, the one that displayed intact, squeaky-clean spines, was composed of respectable books of poetry and essays with a few biographies scattered among the sonnets and the analyses of international current affairs. Wonderful: the professor doctor attorney was wonderful and his manual on dangerous substances was wonderful. Wonderful: almost anything, nearly any substance can be a poison, pure or innocent as it may seem. Sugar, for example, because Gudelia was diabetic.

I sprinkled sugar over every edible thing in the house and the consequences were entirely unexpected and unpleasant. She had what could be called an attack, with a call to the paramedics and everything, and poor Indalecia, our cook, had to endure merciless questioning about sugar in the salt, the flour, the oil, the butter, the noodles, the rice, the sausages—in almost anything edible to be found in the kitchen or its vicinity. She came away unscathed, thank heavens, because she’s an excellent cook, and no one was ever able to explain what it was that had been in the household food because by the time of the explanations, the sugar had dissolved, disappeared, passed into a state of undefended anonymity that was no longer crystalline.

I consulted with the universe; excuse me, no: I consulted with the doctor professor attorney’s manual, in which there was a perfect description of something that could easily pass for cooking oil. Granted, I would have to wait for summer.

In the spring, the magnolias bloomed and the garden was suffused with their lemony fragrance. I waited. The universe kept up its rapid expansion, and worlds danced, and stardust covered hills and hearts. I waited, as instructed by the doctor professor’s manual, in which I had tripped over—that's the word for it—the NFPA Hazard Diamond of Dangerous Materials. And I needed the Gaulteria procumbus to sprout.

After that—was there an after? The little book disappeared. That is to say, I thought I made it disappear because in those days I moved with so, so much caution, trying to keep anyone from finding out what was going to happen. And no one did. Not even me.

Need I say life went on? Need I say that spring came and my father called in a landscape gardener? There were secret meetings in which I tried to take part and they wouldn't let me, go away, child, careful, that’s enough, why don’t you go to your room until the gentleman has finished with the survey of the garden, hmm? Need I say there was no Gaulteria?

No, there was none. That is, there was, but not that I saw. Now I know, but it does me no good. I watch the arc of the sun. I remember. At a certain point in the afternoon, near the end of winter, the sun falls on the cupboard doors—carved wooden doors; scrolls, knots, flowers, each one with its shadow.

I suppose she put the little booklet somewhere else, somewhere secret, far away. Then she waited. After so much remembering and tracking the sun, I conclude that she and I were sisters, sisters in our intentions, in the objective, in the planning. But I, a fistful of hatred, was a girl, almost a child, no experience, pure desire, and I did not know how to process all the information. She had the patience I lacked and a whole year passed and spring arrived, the other one, the next one, not the one I had dreamt of as my own, without her hatred emerging a single millimeter from its lair.

Around the same time, there was a terrible night of which I have no memory. I haven't looked her in the eyes since, which she doesn’t even notice because there's nothing to see where I am. The house is her kingdom, the shining sphere in which she moves without anyone or anything to stand in the way of her smallest step, word, or desire. She lives—lives! She lives, walks, lifts a hand to block the sun, speaks; she doesn’t fully live, it’s true, because I have not yet died. But, me? No. I do not live, I do not speak, talk, take a step, I do not even feel, I do not notice when the nurse comes to clean me, to bathe the remains of my mute organism. But it’s true, I am no longer in her way. In anyone’s way, because it’s hard for my father: he only looks in and checks that the drops of serum and nourishment are flowing from the apparatus into my body. I think about Krump-Berlesch, I think about him, bent over his desk, writing his observations and his conclusions about hazardous materials. And for what? So that years and years later someone, I, would come across it and think I could use all that to kill the enemy. For what? So that the enemy would at last be the victim, me. That's what for. So life might speak in its most nocturnal voice and above all so the victim might tell herself that the echo of the primordial Fall would day by day, slowly become the arc of the sun across the sky, so that the ancient voice would say, come death, so obscure that I cannot sense your approach, because the pleasure of death, oh, the pleasure of death, Teresa, ahh, the pleasure that is nowhere in sight and will not set me free. It has come to within a step of me and there it has stayed, observing me as I track the movement of the sun. And it seems as if I live, but I do not, and neither do I die.

Author and Translators Bios

Angélica Gorodischer, daughter of the poet Angélica de Arcal, was born in Buenos Aires in 1928 and lived most of her life in Rosario, where she died in 2022. A great admirer of authors such as Virginia Woolf, Argentinean writers Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, and Ursula K. Le Guin, with whom she shared a mutual admiration, she also admitted to finding Arthur C. Clarke “dull.” As Gorodischer said: “I am not interested in real life. There are authors who have done wonders with real life. I am not interested in it. I am interested in the inexplicable, the ineffable, what cannot be said.”

Gorodischer studied at the Escuela Normal de Profesoras nº 2 in Rosario and the then- Universidad Nacional del Litoral (now Universidad Nacional de Rosario) but did not complete a degree. She was the recipient of numerous awards, nationally and internationally, for her over thirty books and countless publications. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Northern Colorado (1991) and received a Fulbright Fellowship for the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa (1988). She delivered numerous lectures in Argentina and abroad and coordinated writing groups in Rosario. She organized three international meetings of women writers, the Encuentros Internacionales de Escritoras, held in Rosario in 1998, 2000, and 2002. Four of Gorodischer's books have appeared in English translation.

Amalia Gladhart’s published translations include two novels by Alicia Yánez Cossío (Ecuador), The Potbellied Virgin (University of Texas Press, 2006) and Beyond the Islands (University of New Orleans Press, 2011), and two by Angélica Gorodischer (Argentina), Trafalgar (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Jaguars’ Tomb (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021). Her translation of Jaguars’ Tomb was supported by a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize. Her short fiction appears in journals including The Common, Cordella Magazine, Saranac Review, and Portland Review. Detours, a sequence of prose poems, was published by Burnside Review Press. She is a Professor Emerita of Spanish at the University of Oregon.

D. P. Snyder’s translations include Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín (Katakana Editores, 2021); 33 Dreams, poetry by Juan Carlos Garvayo (IBS International, 2022); Arrhythmias by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (Literal Publishing, 2022); and Scary Story by Alberto Chimal (Pamenar Press, 2023). Her translations of fiction and poetry from Spanish have appeared in Ploughshares, Two Lines Press, The Massachusetts Review, Latin American Literature Today, World Literature Today, The Southern Review, and elsewhere and have been widely anthologized. Her original short fiction and essays have been published in Spanish and English in WLT, Luvina, The Sewanee Review, El Confabulario, and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, among others. She is an alumna of the Under the Volcano writing community in Tepoztlán, México, a fellow at the Hermitage Retreat, and an adjunct professor of literary translation at the NYU School of Professional Studies.

© Estate of Angélica Gorodischer. Translation © by Amalia Gladhart and D. P. Snyder. All rights reserved.

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