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Four Short Short Stories from Lost Causes by José Leandro Urbina

Portrait of a Lady

In the light of dawn that filtered timidly through the window, she smoothed her dress carefully. One of her fingernails cleaned the others. She moistened her fingertips with saliva and smoothed her eyebrows. As she finished arranging her hair, she heard the jailers coming along the passage- way. In front of the interrogation room, remembering the pain, her legs trembled. Then they put a hood on her and she crossed the threshold. Inside was the same voice as the day before. The same footsteps as the day before came over to her chair, bringing the damp voice right up her ear.
–Where were we yesterday, Miss Jimenez?
–We were saying that you should remember you’re dealing with a lady, she said.
A blow smashed into her face. She felt her jawbone crack.
–Where were we, Miss Jimenez?
–We were saying that you should remember you’re dealing with a lady, she said.

Relationships

He told me I was an alarmist and I told him he was blind. He told me that if that’s really how things were the government would know what to do and there was no cause for concern. I told him his position was typical of people who think all problems will be solved from above and I thought it was extremely irresponsible. He told me it was more irresponsible to go around mudslinging and spreading dissension. I told him it was despicable to lead people to slaughter with the white lie of an ideological project that was no longer valid. He told me that attitudes like mine would lead to catastrophe and one day we would be judged. I told him, finally, to go to hell. We never spoke to each other again. Yesterday I found out he was in the cell next to mine, and this morning I saw him when they let us out into the yard. We didn’t say hello, but I know he was looking at me. I looked at him, too, out of the comer of my eye. He appears to be in poor health, just like me.

Questioning

In November, after more than two months away from home, I have decided to risk a visit. It is early afternoon, the sun is shining, and there is almost no one in the streets. My mother opens the door and I enter quickly. The big house is empty; my father and brothers are still in prison. My mother has been alone all this time, and three days a week she goes to ask for news of them. As we cross the patio toward the kitchen she tells me she hopes they will be released in time for Christmas. Before stepping across the threshold she stops, takes my hand and asks me: Do you believe there is a God, my boy? I look at her, smaller and older now, and I think that this woman who looks at me with anxious eyes as if my answer were some kind of verdict, this woman, my mother, has gone to church every Sunday and religious holiday for over forty-five years. Then, seeing her like this, I who haven’t cried for a long, long time, embrace her without answering and cry shamelessly.

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

While the sergeant was interrogating his mother and sister, the captain took the child by the hand to the other room.

–Where is your father? he asked.
–He’s in heaven, whispered the boy.
–What’s that? Is he dead? asked the captain, surprised.
–No, said the child. Every night he comes down from heaven to eat with us.
The captain raised his eyes and discovered the little door in the ceiling

These brief stories by José Leandro Urbina come from his first collection, titled Las Malas Juntas in Spanish and, somewhat more pessimistically, Lost Causes in English. All of the stories in Lost Causes are set in a Chile suffering the repression that followed the assassination of Salvador Allende in the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet and the crack-down against Allende’s supporters. They are soaked in a spirit of fear and violence leavened with the grim sense of humor shown in the last above.

“These stories are set and developed in the initial days and months after the coup,” wrote fellow Chilean writer Beatriz García-Huidobro. “They are all of great power; It is evident that they were written in raw flesh, in painful absence and still without the nostalgia of the calming time, but still with the head cold enough to print them literary quality without falling into stereotypes or lamentations.” As Chilean editor Paulo Slachevsky told García-Huidobro, “It should be compulsory reading in our schools.”

Urbina was born in Santiago, Chile and studied at the National Institute and the University of Chile. After the General’s coup in 1974, he went into exile, first in Buenos Aires and then in Canada. He returned to Chile in 2005 but still refers to himself as a permanent exile.

Lost Causes, by José Leandro Urbina, translated by Christina Shantz
Frederick, MD: Cormorant Books, 1987

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