Translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones
Published by Charco Press, 2023, 134 pages. Original version published in 2002.

“Life is an absurd wound”
(from La Última Curda by Cátulo Castillo and Aníbal Triolo)

Nora García, a cellist, drives to a village in Mexico for the funeral of her ex-husband Juan, a renowned composer and pianist. As she sits by his coffin in the house they once shared, she remembers their lives together, the music that she and Juan played, and the stories that Juan, a good raconteur, would tell.

Nora uses her memories to help her come to terms with his death, trying to understand her own feelings about him all these years later. Through her memories, we learn about Juan and their marriage. He comes across as a dominating man, a man who was used to being listened to. At the funeral, she waits for someone to offer her condolences—after all, she is his widow, but most people do not seem to remember her.

Almost the only person at the funeral to whom Nora talks is María, a tall woman whom she once knew but barely remembers. María was there with Juan throughout his illness, and she tells Nora about Juan’s last days, what he went through and how his heart gave out. María wanders off, only to pick up the conversation later, repeating over and over again the details of Juan’s death.

This style of writing echoes a piece of music, a piece like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, with repeating themes: death, the heart, classical music and the castrati,[1] themes that Nora keeps coming back to throughout the funeral. The text repeats and loops in on itself, like the words from a song, from a tango, La Última Curda by Cátulo Castillo and Aníbal Triolo, which form an epigram and recur throughout the book.

The book is written as a stream of consciousness, without any chapters, moving from the present to the past and then to the future and back again, encompassing music, art, literature, life and death. The sentences are often long, containing digressions within digressions, parentheses within parentheses.

I love the way Margo Glantz uses language. Nora remembers a painting of a concert by Caravaggio, and Glantz describes it so vividly that it comes alive: “the mouths of the figures in the painting open to blow into the mouthpiece of a tranverse flute, a trumpet or an oboe, and as the characters play—all of them young, that era of vitality frozen at the precise, stubborn moment in which they are playing their instrument—you can see the slight tremble in their faces, the flicker of eyelashes, that incipient expression (the beginning of silent ecstasy?), an absorbed but glowing look, the look, the flicker of eyelashes, the tremble accompanying each performer’s movements…”

Ellen Jones has done justice to the book in her translation. I love the cadences of the language and the way Glantz captures the joy that comes from music. It is lyrical, thoughtful, and erudite.

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[1] A castrato was a young boy who was castrated to preserve his voice, giving him a much higher range than other men and a more flexible voice. The castrati existed from the mid 16th century to mid-19th century, when the practice was forbidden. The last castrato died in 1913.