A Nice Boy From a Good Family
Published in Issue #9 Translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger(Excerpt from a Novel)
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Laurita’s head throbs as she stands there for a moment, pausing but about to leave, with her hand on the doorknob, as she tries to understand the force of that surprising gust of wind that’s lifted her so high, all the way to the seventeenth floor of the Santos Dumont building on Avenida Gorlero, Punta del Este, to this empty apartment, beside Kalnicky Kamiansky, who, sitting on the floor in his underwear, sobs in anguish, invoking his Grandpa León while the radio blares Hey Jude by the Beatles.
Her guilt is so evident that it’s pointless to try either to justify or refute it. Laurita isn’t looking for absolution, just a slightly reduced sentence. At this point she’s not even attempting to reconstruct the facts or figure out where her culpability began: when she accepted the invitation to go upstairs and into the apartment, or much earlier, when her own grandmother offered to introduce her to a nice boy from a good family, and she’d said yes, of course, she’d love to, all too eager to demonstrate that she had nothing against the good Jewish families that were prepared to offer their coveted male offspring on the open market.
The fact is, Laurita was growing bored during that terribly hot summer in Punta del Este, where (as her mother had reminded her once more before they left, as they loaded the car with jars of jam and blocks of cheese because everything was so expensive in Uruguay), such a nice atmosphere prevailed.
A few days earlier, wordlessly rejecting...
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