Dionea
(from the Spanish)
Julio Olaciregui
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 91 (Oct 2015)
Julio Olaciregui (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1951) has lived in Paris since 1978 and published many books, most recently: Vida cotidiana en tiempos de García Márquez (2015), and the story collections La segunda vida del Negro Adán (2014) and Una mano en la oscuridad (2013). Besides fiction, he has also written plays, poetry, and film scripts; was long involved with African dance troupes in Paris and produced a couple of music recordings in Senegal; helped raise a French family, with one grandchild already; and recently retired after decades as a journalist in the Spanish section of the Agence France Presse.
The following two (non-sequential) chapters are from Olaciregui's mytho-novel Dionea (2005), fifteen years in the making: a mind-altering, identity-shifting, prismatic gem of a narrative that swirls around its title character, who is both an ancient Greek goddess (lover of Zeus, mother of Aphrodite) and a Colombian woman brought to Paris from the Caribbean as servant to a French professor—whose surname, Dindon, is French for turkey, specifically a male turkey, though it can also be used to mean a dope or even a fall guy. The novel carries a sense of ancient worlds—Mediterranean, African, Amerindian—intersecting, inhabiting modern stories, as it plays out the often farcical encounter between the European and the brown and black peoples of the global south.
The Sorcerer Appears
The day of the Feralia[1] I was at the Austerlitz station waiting for one of my daughters when suddenly I sensed that someone was signaling to me. A big Black just like me, Cambundongo, Congo, Rebolo, Benguela, Muchicongo, or Calabar, was standing there, smiling at me. He approached me and we greeted each other as we had seen friends greet each other when they met in the middle of Barranquilla, in Dakar, or Martinique, in the Bronx or Puerto Rico, a dry cheerful slapping of hands.
Then I realized that that man in his forties was my magic double, someone who had come from far, far away in time, from the Omo valley and the ancient night of Atlantis, I know, to wine and dine me like some Poseidon with a sunburned face to help me write this book that had run aground, for years bogged down with my iguanas and caimans, my burros and my dead boys without knowing how to resuscitate them and give them breath, form, to hear their stories with the great lady traveler.
I came in on the train with the girl, talking about the Holy Honeysuckle we needed, the good-luck necklace I brought her from Mexico . . .
"Have you heard of the Blacks of Alexandre Dumas, grandson of a Haitian slavewoman, Balzac said, ooh how are they going to compare me with that Black man, those who helped him write his books, cinnamon skin, chocolate, those who gave us cane sugar and the conga, taste? Well, I'm one of them," he told me with his genie-in-the-lamp face, guffawing in the way shy people do. His eyes sparkled behind the hoops of his intellectual pince-nez. I liked his smile, it made me unwrinkle my very knitted brow, cheek-face, yes, worried as I was about being done with this blessed book, story of the beast who turns into a man by the spell of a goddess who falls in love with him, she takes him out of the mire and places him to dry in the sun, beside the sea, the man abandons his caiman skin and becomes the father of a family, founds the city of Barranquilla.
At night we uncorked a bottle of good cheap French wine, heritage of humanity, and got down to talking. Before, entering the building, when he began to speak French with the security guard, Madame Beaumont, I saw her treating him like a little Black boy on carpet duty, a dwarf, she wanted to see him stammering worse than a pygmy child who had just arrived at the Paris airport Roissy-Charles de Gaulle.
"And what have you come looking for in France, if that's not too indiscreet?" the policewoman asked him.
In order to explain he tried to correct his accent, to speak like an actor from the Comédie Française reciting Racine.
"I came to Paris, lantern for lovers hung up in the jungle of the world, because they told me that my father was living here."
The police lady shrugged and kept sweeping. We climbed up to the tower to eat fried plantains with garlic and cheese, drinking the good cheap French wine while we came to an agreement about how we were going to work so that he might help me finish this book.
I heard the policewoman muttering can you imagine, if like that with those lips that Black man kisses, and that butt, that nice ass how he shakes it when he walks, he must have the other thing like that, an enormous, mythical, rod prick like people say they have, in that way I am certainly no racist.
*
Soul in the Mouth and Bones in a Gunny Sack
Only now, with the publication of Jean Dindon's notebooks, edited by his son, the young poet Fabien Dindon, can the world have an idea of the mysteries of Barranquilla and know a few fragments of the myth of El Hombre Caimán and the palm tree women, a true mix of founding tales, a tangle of stories from the ancient Caribbean Indians and Bantu African slaves, stay there, half-breeds and quadroons, Sevillian women and Malambo folk, who settled there and conceived—on stone beds, on matting, in hammocks, canvas cots and straw pallets and cotton—our ancestors, the children of many of the men and women who came from Europe one day to the Atlantic coast of Colombia, in order to make a fortune and to found the coastal mystique, that family. Clearly they must have read the Bible before sleeping together, because how else explain that they baptized their offspring with names like Saúl, Raquel, Judith, Efraím, or Nehemías.
All these stories, as Jean Charles Dindon was able to verify firsthand, were until quite recently still very present in the daily life of people on the north coast of Colombia.
In the following lines we relate some of the circumstances from his trip to that mythical land, based above all on what his son Fabien told us when he returned to Paris in May 1978.
Professor Dindon arrived in Barranquilla, one of the most important port cities in the Caribbean basin, in the early 1950s, on his way to the Amazon because he wanted to follow a lead about the myth of Atlantis among certain tribes in Colombia.
He had left his family—madame and their two children—in a house on the outskirts of Paris. After studying comparative mythology at the Sorbonne, he had gotten that grant for the long trip to South America, which would allow him to finish his research and write the thesis that would lift him out of obscurity. Then the totemic caimans of the university would come to nibble away at him and lick his boots. For now, he walked around and discovered why they also called that city La Arenosa [Sandy Town].
His books were supposed to arrive by boat from Pointe-à-Pitre to the River and Maritime Terminal in that hot, dusty, noisy city where he had landed at six in the morning coming from Maracaibo. Waiting for news from the port, he decided to take a room at Las Tres Palmeras, right near the market square. That's where he met Dionea, the youngest of three sisters who took care of the place, frequented above all by foreigners like him. He fell instantly in love.
The guesthouse had two floors where one heard various European languages spoken. From his room, with its whitewashed walls, he could make out the ochre and lime-green tones of the water in the Magdalena River, called Huacahayo in the indigenous language, river of the tombs, bed where El Hombre Caimán slept, that legend he was so interested to study. He knew that for many of the ancient peoples of that continent, Mother Earth was born of a caiman who lived in the original waters, symbol of the abundance and profusion of plant life.
He lay down on the canvas cot to rest and think. He noted each rafter in the ceiling and the geometrical mouths of the spiderwebs. The heat had knocked him out a little, that's why he spent two hours sprawled on his back there, without his boots, in an animal gloom. The sensual branches of the palm trees rocked him. He would start writing his diary when he got up. Some letters to his family, as well. And notes for his thesis, last night's dream . . . writing was one of his passions.
Dindon was 42 "wheels" old, as they say in some neighborhoods of the city, and he was crowned by the generous baldness of an indefatigable thinker. He smoked a pipe, wore classic tortoiseshell glasses, and seemed to sweat without mercy, stuffed into his thick boots and the khaki uniform of the foreign explorers or engineers who had developed that spot back in the 1930s.
Since his arrival a musical cloud had gotten tangled around his neck. The lyrics to the songs heard in the restaurants downtown cheered him up and surprised him, in Baranoa I will stay because this is the land of pretty women. Another singer shouted: hurray for guts! He also stayed in Barranquilla, you know, because it was carnival season.
He himself didn't know too well how all that sorcery had started. He liked to remember the slightest details of the day he saw Dionea naked for the first time. Remembering her was pure delight. He stretched out on the bed and with his eyes closed he thought endlessly about saying to her I love you. That was a new mystery for him. He caressed a book on the night table, The Song of Songs, translated by Fray Luis de León. In his imagination he wrote a long, confused letter to his wife in Ivry, telling her the whole truth.
[1] Ancient Roman public festival celebrating the spirits of dead ancestors, Feb. 21.
(from the Spanish)
Julio Olaciregui
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 91 (Oct 2015)
Julio Olaciregui (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1951) has lived in Paris since 1978 and published many books, most recently: Vida cotidiana en tiempos de García Márquez (2015), and the story collections La segunda vida del Negro Adán (2014) and Una mano en la oscuridad (2013). Besides fiction, he has also written plays, poetry, and film scripts; was long involved with African dance troupes in Paris and produced a couple of music recordings in Senegal; helped raise a French family, with one grandchild already; and recently retired after decades as a journalist in the Spanish section of the Agence France Presse.
The following two (non-sequential) chapters are from Olaciregui's mytho-novel Dionea (2005), fifteen years in the making: a mind-altering, identity-shifting, prismatic gem of a narrative that swirls around its title character, who is both an ancient Greek goddess (lover of Zeus, mother of Aphrodite) and a Colombian woman brought to Paris from the Caribbean as servant to a French professor—whose surname, Dindon, is French for turkey, specifically a male turkey, though it can also be used to mean a dope or even a fall guy. The novel carries a sense of ancient worlds—Mediterranean, African, Amerindian—intersecting, inhabiting modern stories, as it plays out the often farcical encounter between the European and the brown and black peoples of the global south.
The Sorcerer Appears
The day of the Feralia[1] I was at the Austerlitz station waiting for one of my daughters when suddenly I sensed that someone was signaling to me. A big Black just like me, Cambundongo, Congo, Rebolo, Benguela, Muchicongo, or Calabar, was standing there, smiling at me. He approached me and we greeted each other as we had seen friends greet each other when they met in the middle of Barranquilla, in Dakar, or Martinique, in the Bronx or Puerto Rico, a dry cheerful slapping of hands.
Then I realized that that man in his forties was my magic double, someone who had come from far, far away in time, from the Omo valley and the ancient night of Atlantis, I know, to wine and dine me like some Poseidon with a sunburned face to help me write this book that had run aground, for years bogged down with my iguanas and caimans, my burros and my dead boys without knowing how to resuscitate them and give them breath, form, to hear their stories with the great lady traveler.
I came in on the train with the girl, talking about the Holy Honeysuckle we needed, the good-luck necklace I brought her from Mexico . . .
"Have you heard of the Blacks of Alexandre Dumas, grandson of a Haitian slavewoman, Balzac said, ooh how are they going to compare me with that Black man, those who helped him write his books, cinnamon skin, chocolate, those who gave us cane sugar and the conga, taste? Well, I'm one of them," he told me with his genie-in-the-lamp face, guffawing in the way shy people do. His eyes sparkled behind the hoops of his intellectual pince-nez. I liked his smile, it made me unwrinkle my very knitted brow, cheek-face, yes, worried as I was about being done with this blessed book, story of the beast who turns into a man by the spell of a goddess who falls in love with him, she takes him out of the mire and places him to dry in the sun, beside the sea, the man abandons his caiman skin and becomes the father of a family, founds the city of Barranquilla.
At night we uncorked a bottle of good cheap French wine, heritage of humanity, and got down to talking. Before, entering the building, when he began to speak French with the security guard, Madame Beaumont, I saw her treating him like a little Black boy on carpet duty, a dwarf, she wanted to see him stammering worse than a pygmy child who had just arrived at the Paris airport Roissy-Charles de Gaulle.
"And what have you come looking for in France, if that's not too indiscreet?" the policewoman asked him.
In order to explain he tried to correct his accent, to speak like an actor from the Comédie Française reciting Racine.
"I came to Paris, lantern for lovers hung up in the jungle of the world, because they told me that my father was living here."
The police lady shrugged and kept sweeping. We climbed up to the tower to eat fried plantains with garlic and cheese, drinking the good cheap French wine while we came to an agreement about how we were going to work so that he might help me finish this book.
I heard the policewoman muttering can you imagine, if like that with those lips that Black man kisses, and that butt, that nice ass how he shakes it when he walks, he must have the other thing like that, an enormous, mythical, rod prick like people say they have, in that way I am certainly no racist.
*
Soul in the Mouth and Bones in a Gunny Sack
Only now, with the publication of Jean Dindon's notebooks, edited by his son, the young poet Fabien Dindon, can the world have an idea of the mysteries of Barranquilla and know a few fragments of the myth of El Hombre Caimán and the palm tree women, a true mix of founding tales, a tangle of stories from the ancient Caribbean Indians and Bantu African slaves, stay there, half-breeds and quadroons, Sevillian women and Malambo folk, who settled there and conceived—on stone beds, on matting, in hammocks, canvas cots and straw pallets and cotton—our ancestors, the children of many of the men and women who came from Europe one day to the Atlantic coast of Colombia, in order to make a fortune and to found the coastal mystique, that family. Clearly they must have read the Bible before sleeping together, because how else explain that they baptized their offspring with names like Saúl, Raquel, Judith, Efraím, or Nehemías.
All these stories, as Jean Charles Dindon was able to verify firsthand, were until quite recently still very present in the daily life of people on the north coast of Colombia.
In the following lines we relate some of the circumstances from his trip to that mythical land, based above all on what his son Fabien told us when he returned to Paris in May 1978.
Professor Dindon arrived in Barranquilla, one of the most important port cities in the Caribbean basin, in the early 1950s, on his way to the Amazon because he wanted to follow a lead about the myth of Atlantis among certain tribes in Colombia.
He had left his family—madame and their two children—in a house on the outskirts of Paris. After studying comparative mythology at the Sorbonne, he had gotten that grant for the long trip to South America, which would allow him to finish his research and write the thesis that would lift him out of obscurity. Then the totemic caimans of the university would come to nibble away at him and lick his boots. For now, he walked around and discovered why they also called that city La Arenosa [Sandy Town].
His books were supposed to arrive by boat from Pointe-à-Pitre to the River and Maritime Terminal in that hot, dusty, noisy city where he had landed at six in the morning coming from Maracaibo. Waiting for news from the port, he decided to take a room at Las Tres Palmeras, right near the market square. That's where he met Dionea, the youngest of three sisters who took care of the place, frequented above all by foreigners like him. He fell instantly in love.
The guesthouse had two floors where one heard various European languages spoken. From his room, with its whitewashed walls, he could make out the ochre and lime-green tones of the water in the Magdalena River, called Huacahayo in the indigenous language, river of the tombs, bed where El Hombre Caimán slept, that legend he was so interested to study. He knew that for many of the ancient peoples of that continent, Mother Earth was born of a caiman who lived in the original waters, symbol of the abundance and profusion of plant life.
He lay down on the canvas cot to rest and think. He noted each rafter in the ceiling and the geometrical mouths of the spiderwebs. The heat had knocked him out a little, that's why he spent two hours sprawled on his back there, without his boots, in an animal gloom. The sensual branches of the palm trees rocked him. He would start writing his diary when he got up. Some letters to his family, as well. And notes for his thesis, last night's dream . . . writing was one of his passions.
Dindon was 42 "wheels" old, as they say in some neighborhoods of the city, and he was crowned by the generous baldness of an indefatigable thinker. He smoked a pipe, wore classic tortoiseshell glasses, and seemed to sweat without mercy, stuffed into his thick boots and the khaki uniform of the foreign explorers or engineers who had developed that spot back in the 1930s.
Since his arrival a musical cloud had gotten tangled around his neck. The lyrics to the songs heard in the restaurants downtown cheered him up and surprised him, in Baranoa I will stay because this is the land of pretty women. Another singer shouted: hurray for guts! He also stayed in Barranquilla, you know, because it was carnival season.
He himself didn't know too well how all that sorcery had started. He liked to remember the slightest details of the day he saw Dionea naked for the first time. Remembering her was pure delight. He stretched out on the bed and with his eyes closed he thought endlessly about saying to her I love you. That was a new mystery for him. He caressed a book on the night table, The Song of Songs, translated by Fray Luis de León. In his imagination he wrote a long, confused letter to his wife in Ivry, telling her the whole truth.
[1] Ancient Roman public festival celebrating the spirits of dead ancestors, Feb. 21.