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Mercedes Rosende

Translated by Tim Gutteridge

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Oh gloomy rose exuding musk

and seer of Libyan reveilles,

to Gonk-Gonk you offered warm entrails

and hearts of panthers dark as dusk.

You called forth spirits of the rains

and sang of dead debaucheries

’mid tepid bones and mortuaries

and captive fair-haired damsels’ manes.

Thunder roared. To dying spates

of fire and blood in mystic hush

the addled idols did abate…

The rain fell sharp in crackling files

and in the distance softly sighed

the languid tears of crocodiles.

julio herrera y reissig

(1875 – 1910)

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The women arrive, tired from their early start, the journey, the queue. Leaving the humiliation of the police search behind them, they enter and look to either side and then at each other with an air of futile defiance, of bewilderment and poverty, of hatred. In the visiting shed, plastic tables and chairs have been set out in groups and the visitors break these up and reorganize them, dragging chairs to and fro, lifting and dropping them with a clatter. The shed is big, some fifty yards by twenty, with a corrugated iron roof that leaks at the slightest hint of rain, a bare floor, walls scrawled with names and prayers and songs, daubed with drawings of hearts and crucifixes and genitals. The only window looks onto a cement yard and a dirty grey sky: there seems to be no horizon between the two. The bathrooms are on the north side. The door of the men’s cubicle has come off its hinges and is propped against the frame, barely concealing half the toilet bowl. There is a dense odour in the air.