THREE NONFICTION PIECES by Ana Cecilia Blum, translated from the Spanish by Alexis Levitin

THE TEMPORARY HOUSE

Grandmother and I moved for several months to a house that was in the center of town. She had bought it for next to nothing from a family that needed money to leave the country in a hurry. She was fixing it up, little by little, in order to resell it and make a bit of money.

Grandfather had committed another one of his unforgiveable acts, appearing drunk one sticky, rainy morning, half naked, stinking, and smeared all over with red lipstick.

Disgusted, fed up with her husband, she packed her things and, telling me to do the same, she went out to the street to find a truck and, in the blink of an eye, tables, beds, the stove, the refrigerator, and other household items were all sent off.

We stayed in that house for quite some time. Grandmother set up a beauty salon, a business she had learned years before; she even had two apprentices who drifted in and came every day to work for free, in exchange for learning the art of dyeing and styling hair.

Grandmother was very content during those months, free from having to worry about “that man’s fly.” Satisfied with herself and with the world, she would slam the door in his face whenever he showed up with his woebegone look.

Until one day, after much pleading, repentance, and civil and ecclesiastical intervention, Grandmother, deciding to surrender to usage and custom, forgave Grandfather and returned to our dwelling in the desert.

And hell began again.

THE KITE BOY

The Kite Boy was passing by one day and he saw me in the doorway trying to make a kite with cane splints, papier-mache, and a pair of hands inadequate for the motor skills the task required. He stopped in front of me, smiled at me, and, without a word, bent over and began to put it all together.

He made a cross with the sticks, tied them together in the middle, joined the edges together with the same twine that would later hold the kite aloft, glued together the paper with tiny balls of muyuyo, a plant that grew wild in the ditches; he pulled the two little blue ribbons from my pig tails and tied them on as tails to the kite. “Here you go, it won’t last long, beautiful things get damaged quickly, but in the meantime, enjoy it.”

The kite rose with a smile in the air, the Kite Boy watched it sail away like a bird, and I watched him, it was a fleeting exchange I would later recognize as poetic.

We were almost the same age, he was wearing frayed short pants that once were long pants and which a pair of scissors had recycled. His face bore marks of hardship and he looked tired, not from walking a long way but from living.

Looking at him standing there alone beneath the open sky, murmuring something that sounded like a poem, I imagined he was a perpetual orphan, someone from whom life had from an early age taken too much, or it had given everything to him that one ought not to give a child and which had left him broken forever (we, the broken ones, know all about that).

He was my friend for one afternoon. I never saw him again out there in El Puerto, but after many years, called together by who knows what mysterious and arbitrary demiurge, we would meet again, making other kites this time, those glued together with syllables to lift their wings in the latitudes of the page.

He had been crowned the “the poet maudit of our land” and it was with that ominous title that he would die, crushed by the brutal harshness of the very streets of El Puerto that had spawned him long ago.

THE BARBIES

Once again Grandfather took me to the big city, but this visit was going to be for a whole month, since it was time for me to join in the daily life of my Brother, my Sister, my Father, and that Harpy, the Step-Mother.

They lived in one of the better parts of town and in their house everything seemed to be brand-new. Brother was only two years old and he loved to kick; Sister was seven and quite stand-offish.

When Father brought me to Sister’s room, where they had set up a makeshift cot for me next to her elegant bed, my attention was drawn to a collection of Barbies displayed on a shelf: blonds, redheads, brunettes, dressed in formal attire or bathing suits, as brides or athletes. I did a quick count, there were sixteen of them.

It seemed to me that time had entered into another time, a magical one, inhabited by those dolls that I adored, with their perfect little bodies, their lovely little hands. Exquisite dolls of which I only possessed one in the sandy room of my Puerto.

Nothing else interested me during the rest of the month that I was there. Nothing mattered, neither the dictatorial caprices of the Brother nor the disdainful grimaces of the Sister. The only thing I was interested in was playing with the Barbies all day and waking up again and again at night in order to contemplate them under the moon’s polished light.

When I left, I cried many tears and everyone thought it was because I was going to miss the family. I knew who I was crying for.

Every year during vacation time I returned and the same spellbound reunion would repeat itself, until one year I didn’t find them there, they were simply gone. I asked my Sister about them and she said they had grown old and had been thrown out with the trash.

From that time on, there was a gulf between me and that proud little girl who so strangely carried my blood and bore my name.

She had had all the Barbies in the world, and threw them out, while I had only one, one which, covered with sand, I still hold onto today.

Author and translator bios:

Ana Cecilia Blum (Guayaquil, 1972) is an Ecuadorian poet whose work, developed over more than three decades, has rooted a distinct and powerful voice within contemporary Latin American literature. Author of over a dozen poetry books, she explores memory, the body, and the quiet territories of diaspora. She co‑anthologized Poetas de la Mitad del Mundo(2013), a landmark collection highlighting Ecuadorian women poets, and is the author of El Puerto (2024), winner of the Latino Book Awards. She translates children’s poetry and short fiction, directs the literary gazette Metaforología, and collaborates with cultural magazines across the continent. A survivor of poliomyelitis, her writing is marked by resilience, vulnerability, and an intimate, ritualistic attention to the inner life.

Alexis Levitin translates works from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His fifty books include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. From Portugal, he has published an additional thirteen volumes of poetry by Eugenio de Andrade, including the posthumously released Furrows of Thirst (Diálogos Books, 2022). From Brazil, in addition to Lispector, he has published five collections of poetry by Salgado Maranhão, the leading Afro-Brazilian poet of our era, including Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012) as well as three volumes of poetry by the Amazonian environmentalist Astrid Cabral, Cage, Gazing into Water, and Spotlight on the Word (World Poetry Books, 2026). From Ecuador, he co-translated, with Fernando Iturburu, Tapestry of the Sun: An Anthology of Ecuadorian Poetry (Coimbra Editions, 2009). He has gone on to publish translations of four individual poets from Ecuador: Destruction in the Afternoon by Santiago Vizcaino (Diálogos Books, 2008), Tobacco Dogs by Ana Minga (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), Outrage by Carmen Vascones (White Dwarf Editions, 2018) and Last Return to Eden and Other Poems by Sonia Manzano (Diálogos Books, 2026). He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships and has served as a Fulbright Lecturer in Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Florianopolis, Brazil. In addition, he has received translation residencies in Banff, Canada, Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

© Ana Cecilia Blum. Translation © by Alexis Levitin. All rights reserved.

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