The City

While I peel the potatoes
the good woman of Sichuan
- more awkward than ever -
sets out plates of rice, nuts,
hot sauce, pastry, broccoli
for me to have my lunch, still
for three pesos and forty cents, plus taxes.

I  ride there with a taxi-driver who chews an island English
and knows nothing of this world
except that tomorrow he will have
to work again
work at night
work in the daytime
and so on till the end.

Or it may be Regas that comes
when he’s translating Vallejo in the long winter
and the customers take off their coats and hang them up
and say good day and ask for a suvlaki, a liter of Retsina
or almond patties and greet and converse with
a professor of Aramaic and old Rae Dalven
or the singer with food in his mouth
our Peruvian Carlos Germán Belli
smiling and bald in his turtle-neck shirt.

My dirty neighborhood is transformed
into the south side of Central Park in high summer
with its pyramids to the Fathers of the Nation who stare
with every solstice at the damp loneliness of these streets
their smell of burning rubber
and the horses, prisoners of their carriages
put their heads down among the carrots
relieving the season’s thirst.

New York of hardship and opulence
with your processions of whites complaining
of blacks complaining
of yellows complaining,
of our brothers bleeding
for their daily thirty pesos
and their shattered illusions
and their souls in a thousand pieces.

Dressed in white,
she waits at the subway exit, without pants as usual.

The stinking hotel with its pornographic graffiti
would watch them consume the five dishes of flesh and water
with which they satiated life in death.

And he wouldn’t see her again
nor hear about her sick mother
or her husband who hit her before making love
or savor her buttocks covered in golden fuzz
and the perfume of her vagina
more like max factor
than a cunt imported from the tropics.

You open the door
and San Marcos street
fills with curly-haired boys
looking for an old coat
to be fashionable
and buying second-rate candies
to be fashionable
and getting a punk haircut
to be fashionable
and consuming everything consumable
to be fashionable
and dancing like pacing colts
to be fashionable
and unfailingly sucking their cheeks
to be fashionable
eating among cockroaches
yogurt and purple rice and charred chicken with annatto
and lamb’s meat green with decay
served by an Indian
with a hollow, foul-smelling smile.

New York

of cheap food
and cheap beer
and cheap life.

Traslated from Spanish by Rowena Hill