By THIRSTY
Eduardo
Halfon is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Roger Caillois Prize, the
José María de Perdez Prize for the Short Novel and was named one of the best
Young Latin American writers by the Hay Fesitival of Bogotá. His book, The Polish Boxer, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a
finalist for the International Latino Book Award, and his novel Monastery was longlisted for the Best
Translated Book Award. He is the author of fourteen books published in Spanish
and three in English. His newest novel is entitled, Mourning. A native of Guatemala, he moved to the United States at
the age of ten, attended school in Florida, college in North Carolina and
currently lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
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| Eduardo Halfon (credit: Paula Morales) |
Because of
his unique talents and his bright future, Stay
Thirsty Magazine was pleased to extend to Eduardo Halfon the opportunity to
participate in our One Hundred Words
project by responding to our topics in precisely one hundred words.
STAY THIRSTY: Secrets.
EDUARDO HALFON: Every family has
secrets tucked away in the closet, hoping nobody finds them there in the dark, in
the past, praying that some distant nephew or grandson doesn’t decide to become
a writer and start poking around. As with all of my books, Mourning started with a family secret about my father’s brother who
drowned in a lake as a boy, and a nephew who years later became a writer and
started poking around, seeing what else he—or I—could find. There’s something
about a secret or forbidden story that has always sparked my desire to write
about it.
STAY THIRSTY: Immigrant.
EDUARDO HALFON: I was born an
immigrant. The best way to explain this is to explain my childhood, growing up
in Guatemala. I was born a Jew in a completely Catholic country. All of my
friends were Catholic. All of the school activities and holidays were Catholic.
I was allowed to watch everything from the sidelines—their First Communions,
their Christmas lights, their Holy Week processions, their annual fiambre meal on the Day of Dead—but not
play along. I never gave this much thought. It was just my reality. I was an
outsider looking in. An immigrant in my own country.
STAY THIRSTY: Past.
EDUARDO HALFON: Fiction does not
recreate the past, it creates it. It imagines a world as it could have been,
not as it was. It doesn’t reconstruct the past—which would imply that the past
was at one point intact—but takes a few bits and pieces from the past and
builds a new present. The phoenix from its ashes. A scion from a dead oak. A
story which only appears to be about a sister’s ultraorthodox wedding in
Jerusalem, but is really about something else, something much more personal and
intangible and hidden within the thick, damp walls of a monastery.
STAY THIRSTY: Exile.
EDUARDO HALFON: To say that I live
in exile sounds pretentious. I am not being persecuted by any religious group
or fascist country, that I know of. I can come and go freely, with one of my two
passports. Then why do I feel like I live in constant exile? Exiled from what?
From a homeland? From a city I could finally call my own? From a house where I
could live for more than five years? Is it a Jewish Diaspora thing? As I write
this, I see that all of my books are still in boxes, my suitcase is
nearby.
STAY THIRSTY: Silence.
EDUARDO HALFON: As a kid, I’d ask
my Polish grandfather about the five digits tattooed on his left forearm, and
he would tell me that it was his phone number, that he’d had it tattooed there
so he wouldn’t forget it. Since he arrived in Guatemala after the war, after
spending six years in concentration camps, he refused to speak about his
experience. He kept silent for sixty years. Until the day he told me about
growing up in Lodz, and arriving at Sachsenhausen, and being saved by a boxer
at Auschwitz. Slowly, book by book, I’m giving voice to his silence.
STAY THIRSTY: Loss.
EDUARDO HALFON: My wife’s father
died two months ago, after years of battling cancer. I’ve been thinking a lot
about him lately. He was a beautiful, kind man, and with his death we also lost
something else, something I can’t quite name or even understand yet. I’ve
noticed that my wife’s grief for her father isn’t general, but always sparked
by very small, precise things. Coming across his wristwatch. Noticing that, since
the day of his death, she hasn’t ripped off any more pages from the Japanese tear-off
calendar in her office. As if his death, his leaving her, had stopped time.
STAY THIRSTY: Mourning.
EDUARDO HALFON: The title of my
new book, in Spanish, is Duelo. But
that word, in Spanish, has three meanings. Duelo
as in duel or combat. Duelo as in
mourning. Duelo as in pain. The three
meanings are critical in the book; they’re three of its major themes. But since
there’s no one word in English that encompasses all three meanings, we had to
pick one. And finally we went with Mourning.
I’m still a bit saddened that English readers will miss out on the other two
meanings of the title in Spanish, which quite literally got lost in the
translation process.
STAY THIRSTY: Voyage.
EDUARDO HALFON: I don’t travel
well. My anxiety starts two days before leaving. I can get airsick on the
plane, especially if I don’t have a window seat. I always travel with enough
tools—masking tape, duct tape, a Swiss Army knife, black plastic trash bags—to
cover up the hotel-room windows, any annoying flickering lights, small crevices
under the doors. From the moment I leave, I’m already counting the days till I
can come back home, to the safety of my routine and a completely dark bedroom. Fortunately,
when I write, I know the difference between a trip and a voyage.
STAY THIRSTY: Memories.
EDUARDO HALFON: Part of a writer’s
craft is learning to deal with memory. But not memory as a fixed thing; not
memory as something that needs to be investigated, like a historian would do.
For me, memory is only a jumping-off point. A glimpse of a fragment of a
picture from which I can then imagine and create the rest. But it’s a picture
that never existed, or that only started existing through my stories. Stories
that are both intimate and universal. Or stories that are universal because they feel intimate. And they
feel intimate because they began as a specific memory.
STAY THIRSTY: Identity.
EDUARDO HALFON: I’m told by academics
that identity is one of the main themes in my books. I have no idea what that
means, of course. I don’t sit down and ponder how to write about a subject so
frigid, so sterile. I just write stories about a guy who looks a lot like me,
and has a biography very similar to mine, and even shares my name. But he isn’t
me. He smokes—I don’t. He travels frequently and well—I don’t. He seems to be
searching for something profound and much larger than himself—I’m content when
the Yankees win.
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