Such Small Hands Read online

  First came an almost inaudible whisper. Then the voice rose up sweetly in the darkness. And it was as if we were hearing the song for the first time, as if it had just reached us for the first time, that song, never before sung by anyone.

  Minne Minnehaha went to see her Papa,

  Papa died, Minne cried,

  Minne had a newborn baby,

  Stuck it in the bathtub to see if it could swim.

  Yes, and then we knew exactly where the doll’s body was, there where the darkness and the sound met.

  Now she was still, waiting. For the first time she left herself open, her face open to our curiosity. Her little eyebrows. Her open eyes. The tender seclusion of her lips. The fine hairs, like peach fuzz, on the nape of her neck. Her hair, darker now, softer. The fascination of her fine hair, the fascination of imagining Marina’s hair like a microscopic forest that we could enter if we were the size of a mosquito. The fascination of our secrets, the secrets we were about to tell her because she was so close now, and she loved us. We saw up close now what we’d admired from afar for so many months: the curve of her ear; the slight shine on the flesh of her eyelid; her nostrils; the smooth skin on her neck that sloped and became rougher as it reached her shoulder; the contour of her shoulder bones.

  “We have to take off her nightgown.”

  “Her underwear, too?”

  “Her underwear, too.”

  She shivered, and suddenly, there before us, lay her body. We felt tender towards her arms and legs, the tenderness you feel for things too fragile, precious toys you have to touch carefully; we didn’t know how to feel about her torso, two contradictory feelings pulled us in opposite directions. You could hardly see her scar, and there was a small hollow below her chest and above her stomach. We thought it was pretty.

  “That’s pretty,” we said, and Marina’s face relaxed, just for a second. She leaned her head back, her eyelids almost closed; suddenly she blossomed, smiling, delighted.

  Dolly, once I peed in my pants in class and when everybody found out I wanted to die, and I thought over and over and over again: I wish I was dead right now.

  For a few minutes nothing on her face was still. Eyes and lips and nose and mouth were all there, but not connected; you had to really stare at her to remember that she was pretty and that we liked her. It started on her skin, on the surface of her skin. As if there were many layers, one on top of the other, and suddenly she was rough to the touch. We touched her and we couldn’t understand what was happening: suddenly she was far away, but without having gone anywhere, still here: something impossible that only happens in books and movies.

  Dolly, sometimes I get under the covers and say bitch, whore, cunt, fuck, dick.

  Then very very gently, she closed her eyes, and we watched her eyeballs dart behind her eyelids. Where before there had been eyes, now there was very fine skin, closed, silent, trapped by an eyelid that you could touch with your finger, and when you touched it, it twitched, a tiny shudder, and her eyebrows crinkled up; it was like a baby summer, and inside it, a sun, all in miniature. We always liked little things.

  Dolly, one time I saw the devil in a dream and he came up to me and ate my legs, and then I didn’t have any legs.

  Yes, always little things. And then we were discovering that her body was smaller than it had ever been. And with the smallness came fascination. Because anything small fits in our hand, and we can touch it, and move it, and guess what it’s for, and see how it works. Someone took the doll’s hand and made her hit herself. A silly game that the doll accepted, because she was a doll and dolls accept everything. Because dolls are dried up and empty, and they hardly speak, and their bodies are heavy with sleep and they’re silly.

  Dolly, when you first got here I wanted to be like you, and I watched you, and one day I came up to you and I thought: if I touch her dress, I’ll be like her. And then I touched you and nothing happened.

  But the doll resisted; we moved her hand and just when she was about to hit her face, she’d push back a little, so she didn’t hit it as hard. Then, after doing it several times, she opened her eyes and said firmly:

  “Stop it.”

  “You can’t talk; you’re a doll.”

  For three seconds the doll was alive, then she closed back in on herself, as if she’d finally accepted the game; and everything else, everything we’d done up until then, was just the beginning. She closed her eyes again.

  Dolly, sometimes I say: My mother is a whore; she left me.

  What happened next? The game was not right, suddenly. As if something had broken, and nothing was simple anymore: not the game, not us. We started putting makeup on her face. We gave her a huge mouth, enormous eyes. Because her mouth had to be like that, all red, and her eyes all black, and we pressed hard, entranced by the way the pencil bore into her skin, the way the lipstick went almost up to her cheeks. We inhaled the lipstick smell, sweet and sticky, as if the doll had burst, like liquid in a filled chocolate, like liquid that was red and we could eat it.

  Dolly, one time I hit you and I was scared, because I didn’t know how I felt.

  We started jostling against each other, as if we were in each other’s way, but without knowing why. It was as though we’d suddenly gotten hungry, as if it were lunchtime and they’d said we were having fried ham and cheese, and we were overeager. Ears pricked up, hands tense, a feeling bigger than us enveloped the room, the beds, the dressers with our names written on the drawers in colors. We didn’t know whether or not to laugh. We were happy. We joined hands and started to circle around the doll.

  Dolly, I’m filled with shame.

  The doll opened one eye, her right one, slowly, surprised. Her hands were still, resting on her knees, waiting, for what she did not know. We didn’t know either. It was just the momentum of the circle, the knowledge that something was about to spring like a coil, the conviction that the circle would spin faster and faster and faster until it was so fast that it would vanish into the air, and we’d vanish with it, everything would vanish.

  Dolly, I broke off your hands and legs and I buried you out with the caterpillars.

  Who leapt first? Was it me? Was it you? Who flew from the circle through the stale air separating us from the doll? Who pounced first? Then all we felt was fury. Passed from arm to arm, from mouth to mouth, nothing but spit and fury. Yes. That thing we couldn’t understand, that thing that we wanted and loved, smooth pink fingernails, someone must have covered the doll’s mouth so she wouldn’t scream. Was that me? Was it you? Someone must have pushed her because we all fell to the floor, on top of her. Someone must have held her down so she’d stop kicking and be still, stiller than any other doll had ever been, so still that we had to get our breath back.

  Dolly, I cried for days, and I missed you.

  We played with her all night, so still.

  Then, overflowing with gratitude and joy, we sat around her and slowly kissed her lips one by one, as if we were eating.

  Translator’s Note

  Lisa Dillman

  One of the first things that struck me when I read Such Small Hands was the way in which Andrés Barba, at the time in his early thirties, managed to render so stunningly, poignantly, and convincingly the voices of orphaned girls, to recreate, almost hermetically, their thoughts and insecurities—their suffocating world. Here he was, a grown man, plunging readers into the complex psychology of a group of seven-year-old girls. It left me astounded. In the eight years since the book’s Spanish publication, Barba has continued to write many more masterful novels and novellas, and I’m no longer shocked by his talent. I’ve simply come to expect it. His books delve vertiginously into the mindset of characters who are on the verge of change—struggling to reconcile two (or more) contrasting perspectives, two (or more) disparate social realities, two (or more) seemingly incompatible ways of existing in the world.

  In 2009, after tracking down Barba’s email address, I proposed translating the novel to him. I spent many months dra
fting an initial version of the manuscript and then traveled to Madrid to meet him in person and ask countless questions about his choice of verb tense and mode, his idiosyncratic punctuation, surreal images, and haunting atmosphere. At the time I was so nervous that I pretended—to date I’ve never told him this—that I was going to be in Madrid to visit friends and thus could conveniently meet him while there. In truth, I went explicitly to meet Barba, and took advantage of the fact that one of my best friends happened to live there, too. (¡Mil gracias, Alejandro!) Barba’s generosity and openness were, and continue to be, remarkable. Before we’d even met, he offered me a place to stay, as well as his time and insight. Over the course of subsequent Andrés Barba novels that I’ve now translated, I have benefited again and again from his generosity and frankness and continue to feel indebted to him. A renowned translator himself (of Melville, Conrad, and Henry James, to name a few), he understands the issues involved that many writers don’t. He knows, for instance, that the sound of a sentence, its intrinsic rhythms and cadence, matter just as much as the meaning of the words in it. He knows that being “faithful”—a problematic word for many reasons—to an original often does not equate to using English dictionary equivalents, because semantics is one element of many that goes into creating the mood and tone that are representative of any given book. Barba’s vast translation experience, therefore, makes his perspective refreshing and liberating when we discuss approaches and dilemmas.

  Translation is the closest form of reading there can be: by its very nature, it’s a process that requires you to examine and reflect on every word of a text both in isolation and in relationship to those surrounding it—it’s con-text, the text that is with it. But in addition, of course, translation is a term often used metaphorically. The word itself, from the Latin translatio, means to carry across, and this is a process that occurs in many realms. Indeed, there is, for example, an entire field of translational medicine, which examines how medical knowledge and scientific advancement are carried out, brought “from bench to bedside,” as the expression goes. In this metaphorical light, it’s fair to say that Such Small Hands is in many ways about translation. The novel centers around Marina and a group of girls at an orphanage who are struggling with all sorts of emotions that they don’t know how to make sense of, how to handle, or what to do with. Love, desire, envy, and jealousy are not things they are equipped to discuss. So their emotions are translated into actions, sometimes touching and sweet, sometimes cruel, even violent. In his finely wrought prose, Barba allows us to see through them, to apprehend the reasons for their behavior. He translates the girls into language we feel on a gut level. And this is translation’s job, at its core: to carry across, to make sense.

  Such Small Hands is one of the most meaningful books of my life: it is not only the first of the five novels by Andrés Barba that I’ve translated but also the only book that I have ever translated on spec. I had no contract, no prior interest expressed from publishers and no funding for the project. And yet so taken was I by the novel—its plot, the rendering of mood, the languorous prose and astonishing crystalline intensity of emotion, the granular visual descriptions (Oh, the caterpillars! Oh, the car seat!), which are infused with nail-biting tension—that I decided to undertake the project anyway. This is something that most translators advise against. There are too many stories of heartbreak out there: sometimes the pined-for book is picked up by a publisher who then has it translated by someone else; more often, completed translation manuscripts end up in a drawer and never see the light of day.

  For all of these reasons, I can hardly express my joy at the fact that, all these years later, the newly launched Transit Books has published this remarkable novel as its first translation. I’m so grateful to Andrés for having written it, and indescribably grateful to Adam and Ashley for having been so taken with it.

  —Decatur, GA, August 2016

  Afterword

  Edmund White

  Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings. Kafka did that. Bruno Schulz did that. Now the Spanish writer Andrés Barba has done it with the terrifying Such Small Hands, which introduces us to the psychosis of childhood emotions and midnight rituals. This is a unique book.

  It is reputedly based on an incident that occurred in Brazil in the 1960s, in which the girls at an orphanage took the life of another child and played with her body parts for a week. But Such Small Hands is not a grisly fait divers. Following the lead of Jean Genet, who in The Maids turned a newspaper account of two psychopathic servants killing their mistress into a strangely hieratic, ritualistic tragedy, Barba has subsumed the grand guignol aspects of the bloody anecdote into a poetic meditation on love and childhood.

  To signal that he doesn’t intend for his novel to be just a psychological study of little Marina, unable to express her grief after her parents’ death, Barba has introduced a Greek chorus of the other orphans. They are all in love with her; her introduction into the orphanage has changed their lives. She is beautiful and small and delicate. She has a mysterious scar on her shoulder caused by the same car accident that killed her parents; it seems almost like the scar where an angel wing was removed. The orphans are fascinated by Marina who, after all, lived a normal middle-class life with indulgent parents until recently; she has only lately joined their ranks and become orphaned.

  Everything she does steals their attention. For instance, for a while she stops eating, repulsed by the sight of other girls stuffing their mouth holes. She seems somehow purer and stronger because of her fasting.

  Then she invents a game in which each night, after lights out, Marina chooses a new girl to play the doll—passive, silent, asleep, motionless. Each “doll” is stripped of all her clothes and dressed in a special scratchy outfit. The girls are nearly hypnotized by this game, perhaps because it appeals to everyone’s fear (and forbidden wish) to be turned into an object, without a will or even motility, the unconscious target of everyone’s attention, utterly without responsibility for one’s actions (since one has none). Marina seems to understand the appeal of the game she has devised; she hints that she will be introducing a game hours before she reveals its exact rules and builds up enormous suspense and curiosity.

  “Tonight we’re going to play a game,” she said.

  “What game, Marina?”

  “Just a game I know.”

  “How do you play?”

  “I’ll tell you tonight.”

  “Can’t you tell us now?”

  “No. Tonight.”

  Ever since her parents’ death Marina has been playing with a doll given to her by a psychologist, perhaps for companionship, perhaps as a means of externalizing her bottled-up grief. The other girls, torn between their desire to love Marina and to hurt her, steal her doll and return it only limb by limb, in a terrible prefiguring of the catastrophe of this drama.

  Although Such Small Hands is constructed around a plot that has all the inevitability and dignified horror of a Sophoclean tragedy, we read it with intense pleasure not just for its trajectory but for the ingenuity of its prose. As we submit to its murmuring cadences we thrill with the recognition not of familiar, ready-to-hand feelings but of long-forgotten ones. The psychologist Jean Piaget posited that children pass through stages of cognitive development that radically affect our perceptions of the world; if we could suddenly enter the consciousness of a child we would understand nothing since a child’s mental life is organized by entirely different schemas than those used by an adult.

  Barba is not a scientist and his book is not the demonstration of a theory, but when we read a paragraph like this one about a dormitory of sleeping girls we are convinced that we are plunged into an archaic system of perception that we’ve forgotten but that is oddly reminiscent:

  All together, they looked like a team of sleepy little horses. Something in their faces slackened, became friendly. They slept with an unbearable pa
tience. When they were asleep they were like an oil painting, they gave Marina the impression that different faces rose up from beneath their faces, faces that bore no resemblance to their daytime voices: peculiar, polished faces. They had a defiant, challenging quality about them despite being at rest, like dozing predators.

  This roiling, unstable perception of the surround reveals the almost psychotic, oneiric processes of a child’s mind that has not yet been able to understand the notion of object constancy, that doesn’t realize that there are things out there that remain the same no matter how they are illuminated by our imagination. Everything for a child is in flux, dangerously so, and Barba captures perfectly this seasickness, this instability.

  When the girls cluster around Marina’s bed to play the dolly game, the chorus says:

  How did our desire begin? We don’t know. Everything was silent in our desire, like acrobats in motion, like tightrope walkers. Desire was a big knife and we were the handle.

  Anyone who has ever fallen asleep during a lecture knows that the mind instantly starts producing images as one is half aware of the setting and the speech, little cartoons that try to make sense of the waking and sleeping realities. This is the unmoored, precarious image-making of Barba’s girls. They can’t explain what they’re feeling nor why, they can only paddle in this ghastly fluid between reality and fantasy. Barba has returned us to the nightmare of childhood.

  ANDRÉS BARBA first became known in 2001 when his novel La hermana de Katia, shortlisted for the Herralde Prize, was published to considerable public and critical acclaim. It was followed by Ahora tocad música de baile, Versiones de Teresa, winner of the Torrente Ballester award, and Agosto, octubre, Muerte de un caballo, for which he won the 2011 Juan March short novel award, Ha dejado de llover, and his latest work, En presencia de un payaso. His books have been translated into ten languages.