The Willow Tree
(from the Spanish)
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 108 (June 2024)
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz (Buenos Aires, 1939) is an Argentine novelist and journalist who moved to France in 1978, settling in Paris and also for a while the Toulouse region. Her dozen novels include Mireya (1998), Un corazón tan recio (2011; Such a Sturdy Heart), and La procesión va por dentro (2019; The Procession Within). Her autobiographical novels--El árbol de la gitana (1997; The Gypsy Woman’s Tree), Las perlas rojas (2005; The Red Pearls), and Aguardiente (2022; Moonshine), which includes the following chapter—were published as the trilogy Andanzas (Ediciones Equidistancias, 2023; Adventures). She has also written several biographies: Maria Elena Walsh (1982), Maradona soy yo (1993; Maradona Is Me), and Eva Perón, La biografía (1995: Eva Perón, 1996). She received the Konex de Platino Prize for lifetime achievement in 2015.
The translator’s 1997 interview with her can be found here.
Arriving at Les Puits, I found myself in a vivid garden with a history, its rosebushes with woody stems, three or four plum trees with branches in the form of claws, and a stump. Fat, short, and burned black, this was, as we know, the last gasp of a willow tree struck by lightning, a calamity that occurred a little after the death of Madame X who passed the hours seated in its shade, in a white plastic armchair that I inherited and painted green. According to my neighbor across the street, it was about a month between the supposed disappearance of the willow and the authentic demise of Madame X. A willow with no river? That surprised me as I leaned over the hollow trunk, already rotten. Nonetheless, a shoot was moving up its left side, there where the sun hit—the other side was covered in a smooth green; you always have to look at the mildew on trees to know where the wind blows and the cold presses in. “A sign that it’s fighting,” I thought.
Before a couple of months had passed, the shoot turned into a stalk, filled with pointy, silver leaves, and became a willow: someone who climbs in order to fall. Watching it first get up and then weep with such conviction, I wondered again what I would do to be so sure, to know which branches to go reaching upward and downward till acquiring its form, a willow’s form. To see that it was managing to do so without apparent effort filled me with admiration, for its resistance and for its wisdom, for knowing what each one must do in order to be what it is.
And yet I hadn’t seen or heard a thing. The fellow from across the way added, avoiding my eyes:
“Take care of it, Madame, look how that willow is living off of you.”
“Off of me?”
He turned around more than a carousel and finally let out:
“See, a long, long time ago, a plumber got the idea to plant it over Madame X’s septic tank.”
“Ah, so it wasn’t because of the lightning! Rather, when she died, it was left without watering.”
He nodded in agreement. That’s how I saw I was condemned to water it, the willow tree I mean, letting it drink from my own juices. If I was away for a while, it turned lifeless. Seeing it needed to sip often, I took to drinking my maté under its branches, which kept growing more abundant. Cup after cup I drank. Already by that point, the shoot from its side had turned into a tremendous willow, so dense that to get underneath I had to ask permission, to lift up the interwoven branches that seemed to bend low to drink from the earth, as if the earth were made of water, a pure show because really it was the roots that were drinking, I repeat, from me. Settling under the tree made of stripes, some that were silvery and others of light, I became the inhabitant of a second house. Second house, or first in the order of sleep, the willow tree was my home, my true home. Surrounded by that meditative halo, excellent for thinking about what was, and about what was not, I let myself go—where to is the least of it, what counts is to set sail—while the real crybaby, an extravagant creature which at the slightest gust of wind gesticulates like no other, was undoing the knots in the back of my neck with delicate fingers.
For its prudent hesitations, its willful determination, its obedience to some imperious verdict, the first wasp that appeared beneath my dwelling of leaves made me laugh. It was fulfilling a mission. It was an explorer, a pioneer. It came to investigate and flew about the site indicated by its authorities while keeping rigid, as if held up by a thread in the air. That quasi-immobility hardened its tight little waist. It seemed to suffer from lumbago, a topic that was not, unfortunately, unknown to me. If I thought the visit unimportant, that was because so much rapture cast my mind elsewhere.
“As always,” whispered Aicila. “For anyone else, the wasp stings. For you, that gliding about is a sign of superior intelligence, and meanwhile they keep coming.”
She was right, as always, right in a sour way. When I wanted to agree, it was already too late to turn back. My beloved willow tree was buzzing from head to foot, while its mane shook loudly. Once more, it took me a while to understand. What were the wasps doing in a tree that had no food, when a few paces further, the stiffened plum trees had decided to produce hundreds of fruits that didn’t last, neither on the branch nor in the basket, but which on the grass ended up burst open as if they had already been cooked and mixed with a wooden spoon, a violet marmalade with the smell of childhood in the Paraná Delta? It would have been more logical for the wasps to get all excited around the sweet, but no: they preferred the willow. Once again, the fellow from across cleared up everything for me:
“Aspirin, Madame, the leaves of the willow tree contain salicylic acid.”
Was I supposed to deduce that the wasps were getting drunk on plums and to get rid of the hangover they were taking aspirin from the willow? In any case, life beneath my leafy dwelling was getting complicated. This time the advice was:
“Call a beekeeper to find the nest.”
Just seeing the wasp expert putting on his spacesuit, I knew it was a mistake. His frightened eyes showed through, so did his thick sweaty face behind the plastic that his breath fogged up. That gear was hot and heavy. The man stumbled. He attacked the willow with a liquid developed for the war in Vietnam. Several days after he left, the stinky toxic clouds still wafted about. He didn’t find any nest and as soon as he could he took off the Gagarin getup, pleading:
“Will you let me cut off a few small branches?”
Seeing the whipsaw, I felt cold, but the Soviet hero was anxiously waiting for my response.
It made me sad, I’m easily moved.
“All right,” I accepted, defeated, “cut, but not much.”
When I returned from washing plates, the willow wasn’t weeping, it barely sobbed with a few weak complaints.
“Don’t worry, Madame, a willow never dies,” the man who went to space consoled me.
With the mantle of leaves gone, a twisted noodle appeared in its attempt to find the sun.
“An elderberry, Madame,” was the diagnosis, “it’s worthless. It has flowers and berries, but the branches are hollow.”
I placed a pole to straighten the column, it was still bent but it kept going. In not even a month, a few vertical stalks came out, vigorous shoots that pulled it strongly upward, as if grabbing it by the suspenders to keep it afloat, and a few white flowers made of stars. Something in that impetuous growth drove me to google them both, the saúco (elderberry) and the sauce (willow). The tree that was so worthless turned out to be the god of the druids. The woodland priests turned their hollow branches into flutes in order to speak with the dead. Every star was a fairy. Sleeping in its shade made you dream of love. With respect to the aspirin, Paracelsus had noticed that willows grew beside water and didn’t get sick. They must have had something to cure fever.
Deprived of the willow, I felt like a bug living under a rock. Suddenly they take it away. First, it kicks about desperately, then it curls into a ball. What more could I do but take that as an example? Curled up but watchful, day by day I kept checking the veracity of Gagarin’s words about the willow’s eternity. A new branch sprang up from the sawmarked trunk. With time, it got fatter, softer, it became smooth, pulpy, seductive, it shook off the lightning bolt and the shredding with a big kick, gave them a dodge full of curves, and displayed its form of a woman with her sex in view. A hint of half-open legs with a cleft covered by a handful of coarse hairs the color of a squirrel. And if that weren’t enough, from the dark and rotted remains came forth a new stump that kept filling up as if it were growing flesh, soon converted into a trunk again, upon which other willow branches started to pout like babies. Would they turn into willow number four? For the moment, what was happening was the continuation of the story of the third willow tree, not the end because willows, according to Gagarin, have no end, but at least a new instructive episode.
The third willow grew, really it multiplied; in the spring, it turned lemon yellow and filled with what looked like furry cats that gave it a cottony aspect; in the fall, it took on a yellow color again but verging toward gold, an image of circular time, like a serpent biting its own tail; and two summers later, substantial changes in its way of being were already noticeable. Whereas the second, counting from the lightning, had poured all the way to the ground, an impenetrable cascade that forced me to crawl under there so I could take my siesta on the floral mattress of Madame X, the foliage of number three was quite sparse. What had happened, given its situation of dependence on me, if I was punctually giving it the bottle? To answer the question, I should introduce the rest of the characters in the drama: six hemlocks and one elderberry, this last one quite large, full of bright leaves (I was thinking of that line by the Poet which said “the brightness of the elderberry leaves”). Who would have recognized, in a similar piece of tree stretched out to its sides like an octopus, that downcast branch it used to be? It had remained somewhat small, that’s true, because it wasn’t allowed, nor did it try, to lift its head above willow three, but it occupied the space all the way across. Each summer, following the flowers of the fairies came bunches of a sort of miniature grape, poisonous for people but delicious for birds.
That wasn’t the only attraction of the place: a large bin which I filled with water and grasses, torn out by the roots and converted into aquatic plants against their will—the last thing they would have wanted, poor things, was to be transformed into water lilies but, when one door closes, they formed a red weave, slimy and rather repulsive, more or less as if our veins had become visible—it turned into a meeting place for some little brown birds, or blue ones with black masks, never at the same time, which came to drink and bathe; lovely to see them with the gleam of the drop in their open beak.
It was my first approximation of a flock of birds heard but not seen up till then. The one with the mask, a chickadee, in French a mésange and in Spanish a paro, turned out to be a bird bearing arms. When the cold arrived and I hung from a branch a pot with seeds and a mesh with butter for all of them, the masked one took out what he wanted and settled down with his partner to guard what they had. With a sole exception: the robin, a chubby bird that, maybe because of its swollen size and the incandescence of its breast, imposed respect. But why were the elderberry leaves suddenly tinged with white?
“Birdshit, Madame, the fruit of this tree gives them diarrhea,” our friend informed me. Let’s not leave the metal bin without mentioning the wasps that also came to drink, struggling at the rim so as not to drown and using my grasses there as a sort of bridge. Now I received them with pleasure. I liked the swaying of their little striped backsides while they drank water. Gone was my fear of the swarm that invaded the willow seeking aspirin. The nest that Gagarin had looked for in vain, a few summers later I found it, under a rock, three steps away from the armchair where, sheltered by the willow, the hemlocks, and the elderberry, I used to sit quiet as a mouse to write the nonsense without which what’s the point of living. Peaceful coexistence, the same with the birds: the wasps did not interfere with my life, nor I with theirs. They loved alcohol but never fell into any of the traps I set nearby, on the advice of the fellow in front. Seeing how not a single one ended up flopping about in the beer, I gained respect for them. They chose to kill me with indifference. That’s right, they were very British: the time I spoke by phone gesticulating like Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma, one of the biggest condescended to sting me.
For their part, the six hemlocks planted next to the railing had drawn closer to each other, elbow to elbow. The highest crest almost surpassed the height of willow three. A jubilant world, but in danger. That is, if we think of life as a race, in any of its transformations the willow had sung first. From that point of view, no one could dispute its legitimacy. It owned the place, but hemlocks and elderberry had invaded. The situation became more serious still when the fellow in front let slip a disturbing observation, given the delicacy of the case:
“The elderberry and the hemlocks are taking water from the willow, Madame.”
How to avoid the conflict? Yank out some to benefit the others? Don’t even think of it. So then, can three different peoples occupy the same territory?
It was then that the third willow showed its true superiority—moral, I mean. I soon realized, it seemed less dense than the second one because, instead of weeping close to the trunk, it was weeping on high, above the elderberry and the hemlocks, encompassing them in an embrace entirely made of air. It wasn’t fighting, it was covering. Instead of arguing with them for space below, it passed above them with ample movements. It wasn’t an act of possession, it was a firm decision to stay alive and besides, courtesy does not take away from courage, a fraternal gesture.
(from the Spanish)
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 108 (June 2024)
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz (Buenos Aires, 1939) is an Argentine novelist and journalist who moved to France in 1978, settling in Paris and also for a while the Toulouse region. Her dozen novels include Mireya (1998), Un corazón tan recio (2011; Such a Sturdy Heart), and La procesión va por dentro (2019; The Procession Within). Her autobiographical novels--El árbol de la gitana (1997; The Gypsy Woman’s Tree), Las perlas rojas (2005; The Red Pearls), and Aguardiente (2022; Moonshine), which includes the following chapter—were published as the trilogy Andanzas (Ediciones Equidistancias, 2023; Adventures). She has also written several biographies: Maria Elena Walsh (1982), Maradona soy yo (1993; Maradona Is Me), and Eva Perón, La biografía (1995: Eva Perón, 1996). She received the Konex de Platino Prize for lifetime achievement in 2015.
The translator’s 1997 interview with her can be found here.
Arriving at Les Puits, I found myself in a vivid garden with a history, its rosebushes with woody stems, three or four plum trees with branches in the form of claws, and a stump. Fat, short, and burned black, this was, as we know, the last gasp of a willow tree struck by lightning, a calamity that occurred a little after the death of Madame X who passed the hours seated in its shade, in a white plastic armchair that I inherited and painted green. According to my neighbor across the street, it was about a month between the supposed disappearance of the willow and the authentic demise of Madame X. A willow with no river? That surprised me as I leaned over the hollow trunk, already rotten. Nonetheless, a shoot was moving up its left side, there where the sun hit—the other side was covered in a smooth green; you always have to look at the mildew on trees to know where the wind blows and the cold presses in. “A sign that it’s fighting,” I thought.
Before a couple of months had passed, the shoot turned into a stalk, filled with pointy, silver leaves, and became a willow: someone who climbs in order to fall. Watching it first get up and then weep with such conviction, I wondered again what I would do to be so sure, to know which branches to go reaching upward and downward till acquiring its form, a willow’s form. To see that it was managing to do so without apparent effort filled me with admiration, for its resistance and for its wisdom, for knowing what each one must do in order to be what it is.
And yet I hadn’t seen or heard a thing. The fellow from across the way added, avoiding my eyes:
“Take care of it, Madame, look how that willow is living off of you.”
“Off of me?”
He turned around more than a carousel and finally let out:
“See, a long, long time ago, a plumber got the idea to plant it over Madame X’s septic tank.”
“Ah, so it wasn’t because of the lightning! Rather, when she died, it was left without watering.”
He nodded in agreement. That’s how I saw I was condemned to water it, the willow tree I mean, letting it drink from my own juices. If I was away for a while, it turned lifeless. Seeing it needed to sip often, I took to drinking my maté under its branches, which kept growing more abundant. Cup after cup I drank. Already by that point, the shoot from its side had turned into a tremendous willow, so dense that to get underneath I had to ask permission, to lift up the interwoven branches that seemed to bend low to drink from the earth, as if the earth were made of water, a pure show because really it was the roots that were drinking, I repeat, from me. Settling under the tree made of stripes, some that were silvery and others of light, I became the inhabitant of a second house. Second house, or first in the order of sleep, the willow tree was my home, my true home. Surrounded by that meditative halo, excellent for thinking about what was, and about what was not, I let myself go—where to is the least of it, what counts is to set sail—while the real crybaby, an extravagant creature which at the slightest gust of wind gesticulates like no other, was undoing the knots in the back of my neck with delicate fingers.
For its prudent hesitations, its willful determination, its obedience to some imperious verdict, the first wasp that appeared beneath my dwelling of leaves made me laugh. It was fulfilling a mission. It was an explorer, a pioneer. It came to investigate and flew about the site indicated by its authorities while keeping rigid, as if held up by a thread in the air. That quasi-immobility hardened its tight little waist. It seemed to suffer from lumbago, a topic that was not, unfortunately, unknown to me. If I thought the visit unimportant, that was because so much rapture cast my mind elsewhere.
“As always,” whispered Aicila. “For anyone else, the wasp stings. For you, that gliding about is a sign of superior intelligence, and meanwhile they keep coming.”
She was right, as always, right in a sour way. When I wanted to agree, it was already too late to turn back. My beloved willow tree was buzzing from head to foot, while its mane shook loudly. Once more, it took me a while to understand. What were the wasps doing in a tree that had no food, when a few paces further, the stiffened plum trees had decided to produce hundreds of fruits that didn’t last, neither on the branch nor in the basket, but which on the grass ended up burst open as if they had already been cooked and mixed with a wooden spoon, a violet marmalade with the smell of childhood in the Paraná Delta? It would have been more logical for the wasps to get all excited around the sweet, but no: they preferred the willow. Once again, the fellow from across cleared up everything for me:
“Aspirin, Madame, the leaves of the willow tree contain salicylic acid.”
Was I supposed to deduce that the wasps were getting drunk on plums and to get rid of the hangover they were taking aspirin from the willow? In any case, life beneath my leafy dwelling was getting complicated. This time the advice was:
“Call a beekeeper to find the nest.”
Just seeing the wasp expert putting on his spacesuit, I knew it was a mistake. His frightened eyes showed through, so did his thick sweaty face behind the plastic that his breath fogged up. That gear was hot and heavy. The man stumbled. He attacked the willow with a liquid developed for the war in Vietnam. Several days after he left, the stinky toxic clouds still wafted about. He didn’t find any nest and as soon as he could he took off the Gagarin getup, pleading:
“Will you let me cut off a few small branches?”
Seeing the whipsaw, I felt cold, but the Soviet hero was anxiously waiting for my response.
It made me sad, I’m easily moved.
“All right,” I accepted, defeated, “cut, but not much.”
When I returned from washing plates, the willow wasn’t weeping, it barely sobbed with a few weak complaints.
“Don’t worry, Madame, a willow never dies,” the man who went to space consoled me.
With the mantle of leaves gone, a twisted noodle appeared in its attempt to find the sun.
“An elderberry, Madame,” was the diagnosis, “it’s worthless. It has flowers and berries, but the branches are hollow.”
I placed a pole to straighten the column, it was still bent but it kept going. In not even a month, a few vertical stalks came out, vigorous shoots that pulled it strongly upward, as if grabbing it by the suspenders to keep it afloat, and a few white flowers made of stars. Something in that impetuous growth drove me to google them both, the saúco (elderberry) and the sauce (willow). The tree that was so worthless turned out to be the god of the druids. The woodland priests turned their hollow branches into flutes in order to speak with the dead. Every star was a fairy. Sleeping in its shade made you dream of love. With respect to the aspirin, Paracelsus had noticed that willows grew beside water and didn’t get sick. They must have had something to cure fever.
Deprived of the willow, I felt like a bug living under a rock. Suddenly they take it away. First, it kicks about desperately, then it curls into a ball. What more could I do but take that as an example? Curled up but watchful, day by day I kept checking the veracity of Gagarin’s words about the willow’s eternity. A new branch sprang up from the sawmarked trunk. With time, it got fatter, softer, it became smooth, pulpy, seductive, it shook off the lightning bolt and the shredding with a big kick, gave them a dodge full of curves, and displayed its form of a woman with her sex in view. A hint of half-open legs with a cleft covered by a handful of coarse hairs the color of a squirrel. And if that weren’t enough, from the dark and rotted remains came forth a new stump that kept filling up as if it were growing flesh, soon converted into a trunk again, upon which other willow branches started to pout like babies. Would they turn into willow number four? For the moment, what was happening was the continuation of the story of the third willow tree, not the end because willows, according to Gagarin, have no end, but at least a new instructive episode.
The third willow grew, really it multiplied; in the spring, it turned lemon yellow and filled with what looked like furry cats that gave it a cottony aspect; in the fall, it took on a yellow color again but verging toward gold, an image of circular time, like a serpent biting its own tail; and two summers later, substantial changes in its way of being were already noticeable. Whereas the second, counting from the lightning, had poured all the way to the ground, an impenetrable cascade that forced me to crawl under there so I could take my siesta on the floral mattress of Madame X, the foliage of number three was quite sparse. What had happened, given its situation of dependence on me, if I was punctually giving it the bottle? To answer the question, I should introduce the rest of the characters in the drama: six hemlocks and one elderberry, this last one quite large, full of bright leaves (I was thinking of that line by the Poet which said “the brightness of the elderberry leaves”). Who would have recognized, in a similar piece of tree stretched out to its sides like an octopus, that downcast branch it used to be? It had remained somewhat small, that’s true, because it wasn’t allowed, nor did it try, to lift its head above willow three, but it occupied the space all the way across. Each summer, following the flowers of the fairies came bunches of a sort of miniature grape, poisonous for people but delicious for birds.
That wasn’t the only attraction of the place: a large bin which I filled with water and grasses, torn out by the roots and converted into aquatic plants against their will—the last thing they would have wanted, poor things, was to be transformed into water lilies but, when one door closes, they formed a red weave, slimy and rather repulsive, more or less as if our veins had become visible—it turned into a meeting place for some little brown birds, or blue ones with black masks, never at the same time, which came to drink and bathe; lovely to see them with the gleam of the drop in their open beak.
It was my first approximation of a flock of birds heard but not seen up till then. The one with the mask, a chickadee, in French a mésange and in Spanish a paro, turned out to be a bird bearing arms. When the cold arrived and I hung from a branch a pot with seeds and a mesh with butter for all of them, the masked one took out what he wanted and settled down with his partner to guard what they had. With a sole exception: the robin, a chubby bird that, maybe because of its swollen size and the incandescence of its breast, imposed respect. But why were the elderberry leaves suddenly tinged with white?
“Birdshit, Madame, the fruit of this tree gives them diarrhea,” our friend informed me. Let’s not leave the metal bin without mentioning the wasps that also came to drink, struggling at the rim so as not to drown and using my grasses there as a sort of bridge. Now I received them with pleasure. I liked the swaying of their little striped backsides while they drank water. Gone was my fear of the swarm that invaded the willow seeking aspirin. The nest that Gagarin had looked for in vain, a few summers later I found it, under a rock, three steps away from the armchair where, sheltered by the willow, the hemlocks, and the elderberry, I used to sit quiet as a mouse to write the nonsense without which what’s the point of living. Peaceful coexistence, the same with the birds: the wasps did not interfere with my life, nor I with theirs. They loved alcohol but never fell into any of the traps I set nearby, on the advice of the fellow in front. Seeing how not a single one ended up flopping about in the beer, I gained respect for them. They chose to kill me with indifference. That’s right, they were very British: the time I spoke by phone gesticulating like Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma, one of the biggest condescended to sting me.
For their part, the six hemlocks planted next to the railing had drawn closer to each other, elbow to elbow. The highest crest almost surpassed the height of willow three. A jubilant world, but in danger. That is, if we think of life as a race, in any of its transformations the willow had sung first. From that point of view, no one could dispute its legitimacy. It owned the place, but hemlocks and elderberry had invaded. The situation became more serious still when the fellow in front let slip a disturbing observation, given the delicacy of the case:
“The elderberry and the hemlocks are taking water from the willow, Madame.”
How to avoid the conflict? Yank out some to benefit the others? Don’t even think of it. So then, can three different peoples occupy the same territory?
It was then that the third willow showed its true superiority—moral, I mean. I soon realized, it seemed less dense than the second one because, instead of weeping close to the trunk, it was weeping on high, above the elderberry and the hemlocks, encompassing them in an embrace entirely made of air. It wasn’t fighting, it was covering. Instead of arguing with them for space below, it passed above them with ample movements. It wasn’t an act of possession, it was a firm decision to stay alive and besides, courtesy does not take away from courage, a fraternal gesture.