Travis Price translates Mercedes Estramil

Red Lounge, Blue Wave

The hardest thing was to decide. Pick up the phone, punch in the guy’s number, ask to use the pool. He always said yes, but first he wanted to know if she was sure. Soon she was getting out of a taxi and he, with Lucy on the leash, was coming to open the gate. The ritual lasted more than a year in an uneven cadence; she might “swim” three times a week or go two months without needing to. It didn’t matter that the water was always cold, or that it sometimes had an oily film on its surface, or even that she didn’t know how to swim. She contented herself with dog paddle, that deceitful refuge for those terrified of the sea.

Although its water was murky, the pool at Red Lounge was not the sea. Inés Morada knew that. Even if she was on the verge of drowning a number of times, she never lost her nerve. First, because drowning didn’t matter much to her, and second, because sitting in the shadows a few yards away, attentive to her breathing while pretending to pet Lucy, was the disgraced Cristiano Fairway. Once, on the first visit, she swam 15 feet without a problem before letting out a scream and thrashing around, as if something had snaked itself between her legs. Fairway dropped Lucy’s leash and in two bounds was at the side of the pool. There he found Inés talking to the culprit, someone who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t surprised. He’d always understood other men’s women. Without leaving the poolside, he watched her continue her arc from one end to the other. He didn’t leave, even when she got out of the water and told him the swim was great, even when she went for her purse, took out the agreed-upon sum, and paid him. His close attention was not unrelated to the fact that Inés always swam naked.

People doing strange things isn’t exactly news, and Fairway began to think of her visits as strangely normal. One time he put on music so her screams wouldn’t alarm anyone. While Red Lounge’s soundproofing made it unlikely, Fairway shuddered at the thought of being connected again with something unseemly, something that might have appeared like abuse or exploitation. In reality, it was the opposite, almost an act of charity. As he himself bragged to his friends, he charged her more than a taxi driver but less than a psychologist. He described to them her body and the snatches of “conversation” he could make out. “The girl is batshit,” was the verdict from his friends, men like him for whom the clock on the wall moved at too slow a pace. When they left, he’d gather the glasses, clean everything up, feed Lucy, and regret dismantling the security system that was in place when Red Lounge had actually been something: Now the footage would have been entertaining, or at least it would have filled the time. Maybe with a little money, thought Fairway. But the idea of rousing himself to “make” money wasn’t flattering anymore, not even to see up close on a TV screen the tantalizing figure of future prey. Why didn’t he film her with his cell phone, asked one of his friends, but a homemade approach was unappealing. And anyway, his cell phone didn’t have a video function.

As a result, his stories of her visits lost their vitality. Imagine it: She arrived, said hello, undressed, swam, screamed, got out, paid, dressed, left. There were erotic scenes in tasteless best-sellers with more substance than that—not to say Fairway had read them, because he hadn’t touched a book since high school, but the references were everywhere, just like Greek mythology. So one day he told them of a break in the routine. He’d noticed suddenly that she’d stopped swimming. She was no longer talking, no longer holding one of her dialogues. And the look on her face suggested the shooting agony of a cramp: Pain under the surface and its expression above. He dove in immediately (they interrupted to ask if he’d taken off his shoes: No) and he swore she weighed less than a feather pillow when he scooped her up and carried her from the pool. Completely oblivious to whatever medical intervention a cramp called for, he massaged her calves and thighs, bent and straightened her knees, and spoke to her in an almost hypnotic tone about things he no longer remembers.

His friends ask him the color of her pubic hair. Fairway offers more details, including one that could well-enough be true, given how democratic body aesthetics have become: She’s had laser hair removal almost everywhere. What remains floats in an enchanting wisp, and that night Fairway swims in the darkness without regard for Lucy’s barking.

With time, even the gasps, sighs, shouts, and swears that come from Inés Morada in the pool acquire for Fairway the form of a precise story, with imagined first and last names, places and times, estrangements, reconciliations, and, above all, yearning. The issue seems to be a fundamental failure to communicate with a man. The type of guy who behaves differently when they are horizontal and when they are vertical. But there are also likely job troubles—Inés works at a home for the elderly—general loneliness, a fear of getting old. In sum, your classic problems. Each time it’s as if she’s elaborating further, from amid the sloshing, filthy water, on the humiliation of being set aside and forgotten by a lover who vacations without her, who declines to answer her calls and stops buying her things; or on spending all day cleaning the messes of the elderly, people who were once beloved members of a family before they were shipped away. Cristiano Fairway begins to think he might be able to solve all her problems.

On another occasion she stops again in the middle of the pool, but this time she appears relaxed, floating on her back, her stark whiteness uninterrupted, her body barely making a ripple in the water around her. Fairway pretends he doesn’t notice what is happening and resumes petting Lucy. When she finishes, she lets herself sink down and then slowly bob back up, as if she’s touched the bottom, her hair all wet, resplendent in the few lights that still work. She gets out and her expression is a declaration of happiness and solitude. Fairway explains that, on this day, when she comes over to pay him, he can make out the gurgling of her stomach, as though she hasn’t eaten in days. He seizes on the opportunity to invite her to dinner. The table is set as if in the middle of a stage, the scenery for a romantic encounter hastily arranged. His friends ask him what happened next, but he is a tactician when it comes to sex, and also a gentleman, and he tells them that time is his friend, that nothing can be rushed. They give him a hard time, but secretly they envy Fairway’s patient anticipation of what’s to come.

Which doesn’t last long. Near the pool is a spiral staircase that leads up to a loft, and there Cristiano Fairway spends his nocturnal hours, usually sleeping, and sometimes having efficient—or, in other words, brief—sex that he doesn’t tell anyone about, more out of laziness than discretion. The bed has blue sheets and wheels on its base that aren’t locked into place, causing it to slide around. Inés christens it the “blue wave.” It’s almost the only thing she says. She doesn’t exactly stand out for her ability to make conversation, thinks Fairway. The friends want more details, because a story without details sounds like a lie, but he’s stingy, as if careful not to reveal the spoilers in a movie.

Late one night she asks for an emergency session, but he tells her there is another swimmer already interested. It isn’t true, but it could be. His friends agree that women need to be kept in line so that they don’t think they’re a bed of roses, the last Coca-Cola in the desert, Cinderella reincarnated. They use metaphors, analogies, clichés. Deep down they hope the episode won’t lead anywhere because they don’t want Fairway to experience things they have not. In any case, months pass before Inés Morada returns.

When she does, her hair is short and the dynamic has shifted. Now she wears a one-piece suit and a swim cap, and she’s learned how to swim. Fairway studies her impassively as she skillfully navigates the dark water littered with cigarette butts, empty beer cans, used condoms, and other sundry things whose stench climbs the spiral staircase like a creeping predator. She no longer screams or speaks out loud whatever it is that torments her. In fact, her expression appears to be one of utter calm, although, of course, that could be an act. The stories Fairway relays take on a different tone. They have an edge now. He tells them how he blindfolded her and tied her to the bedpost, hitting her until she begged. His friends guffaw as they down booze in front of Lucy’s listless eyes, the early symptoms of a fast-moving and fatal cancer of the snout already blooming inside her, a disease Cristiano Fairway will fail to detect until it is too late.

Months later, one of his friends offers to pay Fairway to let him spy on Inés. Fairway explains that she doesn’t swim naked anymore, that the arrangement has lost some of its original luster, but the friend insists. Curbing the folly of others has never been a virtue of Fairway’s, and so he doubles the price and doesn’t ask any further questions. His only condition is that the friend not film her. He isn’t going to expose a young and respectable woman to public derision, and, anyway, he’s begun to grow at least a little fond of her.

The friend hides himself behind a column where none of the remaining lights—angled toward the water—shine. He eyes her hips and her ass with Fairway’s many tales in mind, and he watches as she takes off her neoprene cap with the same agonizing deliberateness with which a whore removes a glove. For the next visit, another friend offers to double the fee again. He’s someone Fairway barely knows, with a split lip and shifty eyes. He lights a cigar when she climbs the stairs to the loft and he smokes it the whole time she’s in the shower scrubbing off the pool’s terrible stench of death. Fairway manages to get the guy to leave before she comes back down, and when he accompanies her to the taxi he advises her not to come back.

But she doesn’t listen. Need is always inexplicable.

In time, all of them are spying on her. Although they are hardened types, not quite bad men but not good either, raised in the school of macho superiority and yet softened by failure, they still can’t figure out why a girl like that would swim in shit, be it existential anguish, private drama, or heartbreak. They are aroused by the contrast between the shining and serene moment when she undresses and dons her cap and the instant when she gets out, wearing a new layer of filth that seems to make her proud. Sometimes they hear her chat a while with Fairway before going up to shower, and from the gentle, submissive tone she uses, they have to admit she seems crazy about him. Why else would she swim in these conditions, or flaunt herself so that she might be spied upon by men like them? Why else would she pay? He has stopped telling them the stories, but every once in a while he lets on that they are still having sex.

On the last day of autumn, Inés arrives by bus, and for the first time she is late. This causes Fairway, freshly bathed and cologned, to do something he has never done before: consult his watch. On this night she didn’t ask to come; it was Fairway who called her, as if arranging a romantic date. He employed—like he was borrowing from some kind of dating manual—an arsenal of seduction: compliments, attention, availability. She arrived just as night was falling. As usual, the neon sign that bore the words Red Lounge hung from its dilapidated mount. There had been an era of splendor, and Fairway had been there then, too, just as he was here now. The abandoned facility was flanked by a God is Love temple and a business that sold and rented photocopiers. Before entering, Inés stopped to look at the three establishments together and decided they were one and the same. She rang the bell with characteristic delicacy and waited.

The week prior, Fairway’s friends had helped him over long hours. Cleaning the pool was the man with the split lip’s idea, and while his intentions couldn’t have been good, the presence of the other two—Denis and Olivera—had reassured Fairway that things would work out. Now all the lights around the pool were lit (Denis had been in charge of electrical); they illuminated brilliant blue-green water, colored by newly gleaming tiles that adorned what had once been a playground for the rich. The men had emptied the pool in just one day, but cleaning and filling it had taken several. Some of the things uncovered at the bottom they had seized like the spoils of war—objects that had played a role in countless nights of revelry, symbols of decadence, symbols of promises and hopes in which many people had invested what they did not have. Faced with each salvaged discovery, Fairway looked away, as if none of the dripping items meant anything more than a cadaver. A lot of people came through here, was all he said. Cleaning the grime off the walls and removing a sticky green substance took hours and gallons of water and was only possible thanks to the physical strength of Olivera, a one-time boxer now retired and forgotten.

Inés Morada looked at the pool but said nothing. She barely smiled.

Fairway asked her if she wanted to swim. Before answering she took in the entire venue—the columns, the seats, the terrace where Lucy usually sat (she didn’t ask where she was), the staircase to the loft. She said she hadn’t come ready to swim. No one was there except for them, Fairway said, a statement that is always false because people are never truly alone. He suggested she swim naked if she wanted, now that the water was clean. Inés sighed. She usually swam when she was at her most distressed: the cleanliness of the water had never mattered to her, she told him, and now she didn’t need to swim there anymore. When Fairway asked her if she was swimming somewhere else, she replied that there were plenty of pools to go around, but said nothing more. Fairway had prepared a spread of charcuterie and cheese and had opened a bottle of white wine. Before they could begin to eat, the bell rang again.

It was Olivera. He was holding a strawberry cake, and his arrival didn’t seem planned, but nor did it seem exactly unplanned either. Fairway let him pass and then introduced the two of them. Perhaps because after his boxing career he’d been a bouncer in a series of places like Red Lounge, Olivera had a way of looking at women, a look that was at once protective and disdainful, a gaze accentuated by the size of his body, which was not small, and the vitality of his soul, which was mostly vacant. Inés withstood his gaze throughout the interrogation, answering questions about whether she’d ever been married, if she had children, who she lived with, what she did for work. Olivera’s senile mother was in a geriatric facility, it turned out, but not the one where Inés worked.

They had just toasted when Denis showed up. He brought low-fat ice cream. Maybe he was nervous, or on something, because as soon as he sat down he knocked over a glass. Olivera and Fairway didn’t budge, but Inés reached for a napkin to help him clean himself. Maybe it was also on account of his nerves that Denis reached out and grabbed her hand and held it for a moment, long enough for Inés to feign an embarrassment she did not feel. Fairway looked at her steadily with his lips pursed, as if recognizing a game of chess unfolding before him.

During dinner, which passed amiably, with snatches of old boleros floating down from the loft, they spoke about the situation of the country, the general deterioration of things, the latest movies at the theater. A second bottle of wine was uncorked. Inés wanted to talk about a French film she’d seen with a friend about a long-time marriage that begins to fall apart after the wife suffers a stroke—but none of the men had seen it nor cared to. They laughed like children when she asked if they weren’t afraid that something like that might happen to them. Well, it isn’t going to happen tonight, said Fairway, touching her knee underneath the table. With the desserts they opened a third bottle.

By then the friend with the split lip had arrived, without ringing the bell or bringing anything, smelling like tar and other substances. He greeted the men with a handshake and kissed Inés’ hand, just as ladies and gentlemen did in those classic films where one could smoke cigarettes without any guilt. He even gave a bow, which she acknowledged with a courtesan’s smile. She was beginning to realize that, yes, she did want to swim, even with a stomach full of dinner and alcohol, even without her suit and cap—because she said she hadn’t come prepared—even in a pool that was now disgustingly aseptic and false. She felt a pulse of nausea when she stood, but the sound of scraping chairs behind her meant they were watching over her, that they wouldn’t let her fall if she slipped on tiles that were now immaculately clean.

First she takes off her gray jacket. It is a gift from many years before—she no longer remembers from whom, even though it was a good present, now missing a button. Next she unbuttons her white blouse, purchased days earlier at the flea market and not terribly well made—some threads hang loose—but serviceable. She’s standing with her back to them. She swears she hears religious chants from the temple next door, but that’s impossible because Red Lounge is soundproofed, from the outside in and from the inside out. Cristiano Fairway watches inexpressively as she removes the black corduroy skirt he’s taken off so many times. Next, the white lace bra, the kind that opens in the front with a silver fastener that leaves a red mark on the skin. The same kind of lace is on her thong, held fast by nylons. While she bends down to undo her boots she glances toward the water; it’s rippling in a wind that’s coming from somewhere, and it seems to her just like a blue wave. She has to admit that the men have done a remarkable job.

She feels cold. For a second she thinks about turning around and looking back at all of them and maybe changing her fate. But she knows she would only be able to look at Fairway, and she also knows that their glance would be intersected and interrupted by the eyes of the others. She enters the water.

 

Translator’s Note:

“Not every writer has a voice that distinguishes them from everyone else,” Uruguayan essayist and literary critic Alicia Torres has said. “But [Mercedes] Estramil does.”

An imperative in translating Mercedes’ work is conveying its strange internal logic—there’s a quickening sense of momentum that is both hard to explain yet utterly compelling. Mercedes has said that her writing seeks out the darker parts of human nature because she finds them more honest and worthy of exploration than the lighter parts, which are often just for show: “There is nothing more twisted than the human mind,” she says, “and literary characters, even the most complex, rarely even scratch the surface.”

I find it useful to zoom in and examine specific choices, keeping in mind, of course, that the act of translation requires thousands of such choices over the course of a short story. For this piece, the original title is half in English, half in Spanish: “Red Lounge, Patineta Azul,” which literally translates to “Red Lounge, Blue Skateboard.” Taken on its own terms, it is a comparison of two things that appear not to go together, both the objects themselves and the languages employed. There is tension in the title, contrast, enigma. It’s a structure Mercedes also used for the title of her latest short story collection, Espinos blancos, fiestas privadas, (White Hawthorns, Private Parties). Why do these seemingly disparate things go together? What do they represent? We are compelled to read on to find out.

But in translating the title of this story, I hit a road block: In Spanish, “patineta” is a lovely word; in English, “skateboard” is discordant and harsh-sounding. I considered titling the story just “Red Lounge”, but that would have lost the vivid contrast in the title that I found beguiling as a reader. Could I swap “skateboard” out for something else? Complicating matters was the fact that the title came from a specific moment in the story, when Inés compares Fairway’s bed, with its sliding wheels, to a blue skateboard. Again, at the end of the story, she invokes the memory of the bed, claiming that the newly cleaned pool also “seems to her just like a blue skateboard”. If I wanted to replace it, the new word needed to work both in the context of the moving bed and the immaculately glowing pool. When I came up with an idea, I ran it past Mercedes. Changing a title, after all, is a big decision. As always, Mercedes was open, thoughtful, and excited about the change and its interpretations by a new audience of readers. We agreed on “Red Lounge, Blue Wave”.

Reading about the dark side of human nature can be arduous, but Mercedes’ work never feels heavy or overly foreboding. In this short story, Mercedes allows glimpses of the characters’ humanity to come through. The writing itself pulses with life. And that’s what most draws me to Mercedes’ writing: its essential buoyancy.

 

Mercedes Estramil is an Uruguayan writer and critic. She is the author of five novels and three short story collections, including the recently released Espinos blancos, fiestas privadas (2024) [White Hawthorns, Private Parties]. Her novel Rojo (1996) was named winner of the Premio Narradores de la Banda Oriental, and her novel Mordida (2019) won Uruguay’s Premio Nacional de Literatura. Translations of Estramil’s short fiction have recently appeared in English for the first time in Gulf Coast and The Adroit Journal. Estramil was born and lives in Montevideo.

Travis Price is a translator and writer of fiction whose work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Malahat Review, Hobart, Wigleaf, and other publications. After completing a Fulbright in Uruguay in 2018, Price has become one of the primary translators bringing contemporary Uruguayan fiction to English-speaking audiences today. He also co-founded the literary workshops North Island and Los Matemates. Price lives in Philadelphia. You can find him at travisprice.net.

 

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