Horacio Castellanos Moya

Acclaimed Salvadoran author Moya's astounding debut in English has a peculiarly lighthearted, and in fact comic air even as it is tormented by the violence of history ("El Pais").

Senselessness

Macy HB

It was senseless also for me to fervently chant the sentence, Wounded yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful, for that belonged to the sorrow of an indigenous woman who had survived a massacre not to a copy editor who was jogging precisely to avoid being left either wounded or dead.

Planet Earth doesn’t want to know anything nor does she understand what the comet tells her, for she is happy in her orbit and hates to be disturbed by someone who appears only everyone in a while from who knows where.

For always the dreams they are there still, I said as a kind of amen when Johnny finished his story, which created a certain discomfort among those present, especially the birthday boy, who perhaps thought my words were part of some foreign ritual he wasn’t familiar with. For always the dreams they are still there, I repeated, a splendid sentence that had lit up my afternoon at the archbishop’s palace, its sonority, its impeccable structure, which spread itself out into eternity without skipping over the moment, its use of adverb to wring the neck of time, a sentence spoken in the testimony of an old indigenous woman from who knows which ethnic group and that could have been referring to the massacre whose bones the team of forensic anthropologists, of which Johnny was a member, were digging up, a sentence both luminous (due to its suggestion of possible meanings) and terrible (because it was in fact about the nightmare of terror and death). For always the dreams they are there still, I proclaimed for the third time, my eyebrows raised, on the verge of enthusiasm, so that they would understand once and for all its transcendence.

Senselessness quotes

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