Translating Life

Nostalgia; anguish; disillusionment; awakening. Woven through the cuentos in David Unger's latest book, Ni chicha, Ni limonada (Neither caterpillar, Nor butterfly), mixed feelings accompany the protagonists of these stories as they are thrown into a quest to escape limbo and become someone, belong somewhere. Inexorably, it is a winding road laden with bumps and hesitant turns, where every lesson learned comes with a price. The book waves between reality and fiction in a smooth, seamless thread.

In "La Casita" and "El inmigrante," the pain and confusion of leaving home to start anew in an extraneous culture are reflected in the simplest things. When his family has to flee Guatemala and seek refuge in the US for political reasons, little Davico sums it all up in the sentence, "Olvidar el español— eso es lo que venir a los Estados Unidos significa para mí" ("To forget Spanish—this is what moving to the US means to me"). Along with his mother tongue, he has to leave behind a chunk of his childhood—the black beans with yucca, the lobsters he likes to watch in a tank in the kitchen, the volcanoes—and instead console himself with Coca-Cola, Three Musketeers, a flat landscape, and people that speak to him in a strange language. Seen from a little child's perspective, the concept of home becomes something sacred and irreplaceable that, once lost, leaves a blank that cannot be filled by any surrogates—be it nice flight attendants that walk around on "flying machines" or a safe dwelling unmarred by shootouts. The wait for a bus that does not stop to pick them up transforms the boy and his father into two quixotic figures on a hopeless pursuit in an unknown land where even the achievement of most basic tasks eludes them. Unger paints a candid, unassuming picture of innocence and emotional displacement, while trapping the reader in a poignant remolino de emociones.

Even in stories that seem guileless, such as "Canillas de leche" and "Muffin Man," Unger manages to hold the reader by the heartstrings. A stream of bittersweet longing underlies all the scuffling, bickering, and bullying that is common among kids (especially siblings and cousins). There is a grandfather that surprises us with a beating that turns into a pained embrace; there is a young boy who wonders almost philosophically about the meaning of things as he is bullied and humiliated.

It's a book of adventures; we follow Danny in "Al bate" as he tries to prove himself in a baseball game—his life hangs on the trajectory of the ball during a moment that stretches endlessly, obliterating his family, the Cuban missiles, JFK's assassins, and everything else going on in the real world. We scoff at Uncle Abie as he punishes his young nephews for falling prey to the same vices he indulges in, in "Shabbat Shalom," meet him again in "El Intocable," full of greed and deceit, and watch him descend to the bottom and be spurned by his family, including one of those very same nephews he lectured before, who greets him with bitterness at the other end of a phone on the eve of Passover ("La víspera de passover").

There is also room for sexual awakenings of different sorts: a young man who is talked into visiting a brothel ("La noche en el shanghai"), a woman that tearfully confesses to finding true love outside of her proper Jewish marriage ("Floating free"), a lonely man of means—"El padrino"—who leads a married man to destruction. The language oscillates between rawness and poetry, lending lyricism to commonplace acts, and crudeness to delicate emotions. It is just that, this mélange of sympathy, repulsion, and rebellion, that keeps the reader wanting to spit at some characters, laugh with others, or pat them on the back as they discover a new truth (and by "they" I mean both characters and readers). "El Éxodo es una gran historia de estrategia, sufrimiento, magia, destrucción, rebelión y salvación...