Not the Real Jupiter, page 1
NOT THE REAL JUPITER
A Cassandra Reilly Mystery
BARBARA WILSON
CEDAR STREET EDITIONS
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ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
Pam Nilsen Mysteries
Murder in the Collective
Sisters of the Road
The Dog-Collar Murders
Cassandra Reilly Mysteries
Gaudí Afternoon
Trouble in Transylvania
The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists
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COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Not the Real Jupiter
Copyright © 2021 by Barbara Sjoholm
Cover Design: Ann McMan/TreeHouse Studio
Text Design: Raymond Luczak
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews, without prior permission from Cedar Street Editions, P.O. Box 1705, Port Townsend, WA 98368.
ISBN: 978-0-9883567-6-4 (print)
ISBN: 978-0-9883567-7-1 (e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020924877 (print)
SMASHWORDS LICENSE STATEMENT
Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.
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To Sue O’Sullivan
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1.
“¿Qué es? ¿Qué es esto—esta maldita bola de lana?” said Luisa Montiflores. “A goddamned farting ball of yarn, what the bloody hell is she doing on the cover of my book?”
Luisa’s eyes blazed behind her fashionable bifocals and she ran a furious hand through long, wavy dark hair shot with white threads that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen her, four years earlier.
Luisa and I were sitting on the balcony of her eighth-floor apartment in the Pocitos barrio of Montevideo. The view was of the seaside promenade, the stiff-leaved palms, the beach along the Rio de la Plata. The air smelled of salt water and dry grass. It was early April, a warm autumn afternoon in the Southern Hemisphere. On the table were the remains of our salad, some fruit and Edam cheese from the pampas of Argentina, and half of a bottle of red wine from the high-altitude vineyards of Mendoza. Among the bread crumbs were the copyedited pages of my English translation of Luisa’s new collection of fiction. We’d been going through the text, making small adjustments and alternately praising and castigating the comments of the copyeditor, when Luisa had turned on her laptop and opened an email from someone called Karen Morales, the marketing director at the small American press, Entre Editions, that was publishing her new collection.
Luisa read aloud, in increasingly sarcastic tones, the note that Karen Morales had sent along with the catalog copy.
Hi Luisa! Sorry for the short notice, but due to unforeseen circumstances, we’re all a little bit behind here at the press. The catalog copy is due at the distributors very soon, so if you and Cassandra (who I think should still be in Montevideo with you) could take a quick look and approve, that would be great! Thanks so much, Karen. P.S. We made a last-minute change to the title after seeing the fantastic cover mock-up provided by our amazing designer.
“And here is the disgusting and mendacious text she sends,” said Luisa, turning the laptop in my direction so I could appreciate the horror of the cover illustration:
Luisa Montiflores, one of the lesser-known foremothers of Latin American speculative fiction, gives us a collection of radiant stories that surprise and enchant. The title story is a mysterious tale of maternal love and loss between Jupiter and two of her daughter moons, Io and Europa.
The background was blue-black, with galactic bursts of color. The ball of yarn—white, striped and swirled with pale orange—was obviously meant to suggest the largest planet in our solar system, with two strands pulled out and wound into two little yarn balls, one orange, one white. The original title in Spanish was Júpiter y sus lunas, which I had changed to On Jupiter, with Luisa’s grudging agreement.
“We can’t call your collection The Moons of Jupiter,” I’d argued. “That’s Alice Munro’s book.”
“¿Y que?”
“Well, for one thing she won the Nobel Prize.”
“So that gives her monopoly on the title forever?”
“In a word, yes.”
“You know, Cassandra my friend, that my Jupiter is not the outer-space planet. It is a state of mind, coldness, attachment, loss. It is not the real Jupiter.”
“I think that will be obvious.”
Luisa and I had argued strenuously, but at the moment we were agreed: Unraveling Jupiter, the publishers’ new title, was hideous, and so were the balls of yarn.
“We’ll protest,” I said. “I’m sure we can tinker with the catalog copy as well.”
“I am not the lesser-known foremother of anything, and I am not a Latina foremother of speculative fiction in particular. What the hell is ‘speculative fiction’ anyway?”
“It’s a sort of an umbrella for a lot of genres,” I said, though I wasn’t absolutely certain myself. “Not just hard science fiction, but other sorts of nonrealistic narrative? The supernatural, time-travel, stuff like that? It’s probably just something the marketing director thinks will make your book will sell better.”
“And what does she mean here, that ‘The title story is a mysterious tale of maternal love and loss between Jupiter and two of her daughter moons, Io and Europa?’ Is Karen Morales an idiot? Does she not understand metaphor? The story is about a human mother and her two human daughters. Cassandra, you told me that this editor of Entre Editions was clever, this Giselle Richard. You showed me the letter she wrote about how dazzling my writing was.”
“Well, she did say that,” I muttered in my defense. “And she looks intellectual in her photograph on the website. With the glasses and the dramatic stripe of white in her hair.”
“We must change the title. We must drop Jupiter completely if that’s confusing them. There are other stories in the book. We must choose one of those titles. What about ‘The Lost Dog’ or the ‘The Empty Apartment’? I’m going to write this Karen Morales immediately. She must be Latina with that name. I’ll write her in Spanish. And I won’t spare her feelings.”
“Please wait, please don’t do anything rash,” I begged, having been the recipient of a few letters from Luisa that did not spare my feelings. “Most of the stories are short but Júpiter is almost a novella—that should be the title of the collection—and Giselle loves the title story. She really was fascinated by the idea of the two moons—the daughters—and the remote mother. I’m sure there’s a misunderstanding here. Let’s not respond to Karen, but get in touch with Giselle directly.”
“No, I’m writing Karen Morales and I’m telling her what I think of her cursed cover and title. I will unravel her, see how she likes that.”
She made as if to start typing, then slammed down the lid of her laptop, and stood up. She was short in height but anger always made her larger.
“This is all your fault, Cassandra!”
Most things were, when it came to Luisa.
“I’m leaving!”
This, too, was familiar. A slammed door was a statement she had probably been making since childhood and certainly a dozen times in the almost twenty-five years I’d known her.
I didn’t bother to respond—I knew in a few minutes, if I looked over the balcony railing, I’d see her dashing along the Rambla, a fifty-eight-year-old-woman in a black and white dress and a short red cardigan, expensive shoes, no purse, keys clutched in her hand, dark hair streaming behind her.
In an hour or two she’d be back. All I had to do was return to the copyedits and wait.
Instead I drained the rest of my red wine and went into the guest room to take a siesta.
* * *
2.
Some years ago I came to understand that a translator doesn’t have to be as intelligent as the author she’s translating. I credit this important and liberating discovery to my working relationship with Luisa Montiflores.
In the beginning of my years of translating Luisa’s fiction I used to spend hours in libraries hunting down references in books and encyclopedias and writing her long letters asking the meaning not only of certain words and expressions, but of tone and ambience. I asked her to send me photographs of Montevideo in the 1960s and early seventies, when she was a child. I read up on the era of repression and terror that had sent her, as a fifteen year old, into exile with her parents in 1975 to Rome. I read the work of other Uruguayan authors, those who came before her, those who went to Spain, Chile, or Sweden, those who returned home to Uruguay, and those who didn’t.
I even—which shows how dedicated I was to ‘background’ in those years—attempted to read, in French, the first volume of Écrits, by Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst whose work had been so essential to Luisa’s mother, Estella Montiflores, a psychoanalyst who had attended the master’s famous seminars in Paris in the late seventies, and who had practiced a very Lacanian style of therapy in Montevideo from the time of her return to the capital in the eightie
Yes, in those days I was fairly thorough, out of respect as much as due diligence. I wanted the authors I translated, as well as the editors I worked with, to see me as not just capable, but sophisticated. I felt I had to transcend a typical American high school education and two years at a Michigan state college, where modern French philosophy wasn’t on the curriculum. I went to Spain during my junior year and never returned, traveling and picking up ideas about culture and history as I went, and learning to alternately remedy my ignorance or disguise it.
Most of the authors I began to work with initially were simply happy to be translated into English at all, and more than glad to offer me help, not necessarily in the nuances of style, since few Spanish or Latin American authors at that time were fluent in English, but in the hundred and one other details I needed to know to translate their stories and novels. The Spaniards told me harrowing stories about the Civil War, Franco, and the Guardia Civil. Some of them had lost family members or had grown up in exile in France. Just as Spain began to recover from the Franco years, desperate political exiles poured in from Uruguay, then Argentina, then Chile. Some of the Uruguayans had been displaced twice; after having first fled to Chile in 1972, they had to relocate again after Allende was killed in 1973. Barcelona, where I came to settle, on and off, in the seventies, was the city that many writers chose, because of the number of publishing houses. Some authors, especially the magic realists, became well-known, like Gloria de los Angeles, the Venezuelan author whose block-buster novel, Big Mama and Her Baby Daughter, was my great breakthrough as a translator. Other exiles languished. They tried writing popular fiction or literary criticism to make a living; they founded their own literary journals; they drank and smoked too much; they complained and ached for familiar tastes and smells, and some died early of heart attacks and homesickness.
I’d heard about Luisa Montiflores from some of the exile writers I knew in Barcelona. Younger than most of them, she’d been a child when her parents went into exile in Rome. They later divorced, and Luisa’s mother returned to Montevideo in 1989. After taking a degree in literature at the University of Pisa and failing at an early marriage, Luisa followed her back to a home she barely remembered. Her novel Diary of a First Love in Montevideo won an important prize, but she found it hard to finish a second novel, preferring shorter forms. She was considered brilliant but “arrogante,” “pretenciosa,” “demasiado inteligente para su propio bien.” Too smart for her own good. The usual sexist criticism only made me more intrigued. They also said that Luisa’s Spanish was full of Italian expressions and borrowed concepts. Todo Italo y no fuego, someone said, referencing Italo Calvino, a play on “all smoke and no fire.”
But few had ever met her. Only after her novel was translated into English and published by an American publisher did Luisa begin to appear on the international literary scene. I eventually encountered her in person in the mid-nineties, though by that point we had been corresponding for a few years. I’d read some of her short stories, had translated several, and, with her approval, placed two or three of the translations in literary journals.
We could not have been more different. I was tall, butch, disheveled most of the time. She was petite, straight, and always well-dressed. She would have been about thirty-five then. I was around ten years older, in her opinion a relatively clueless Norteamericana of mysterious class background, with no real sense of style. Sin buen gusto. Nevertheless we got on. It’s true that we quarreled frequently, but then, Luisa quarreled with everyone. At first, in the world of letters, her feistiness was considered a rather charming example of the Latin American temperament. Later, her publishers and the organizers of literary festivals grew tired of her demands and tantrums.
If I lived in Montevideo I would have broken off the friendship long ago, or at least suggested she find a different translator. But time and distance have a way of softening all but the worst clashes. Our most serious argument happened many years ago when she found out I’d signed a contract to translate the first three mysteries in a series by a Spanish writer, Rosa Cardenes, which were proving as popular in the U.K. as in the rest of Europe.
Luisa despised writers of popular fiction who were successful with the public.
But since she didn’t want to admit she felt jealous, she lit on another reason when she phoned me in response to a letter I’d sent her, regarding a story I was translating for a literary journal. I had detailed queries about psychoanalytic terms, about references to Calvino and Italian classical literature, about what certain metaphors meant to her.
We started out discussing my questions reasonably, though I sensed Luisa was irritated that I had to ask some of them. Then somehow Rosa Cardenes came up. Luisa said provokingly that maybe I didn’t really have the time for her poor little stories any more, maybe I didn’t really want to work with Luisa anymore. Childish stuff I’d heard before and had shrugged off. But then she attacked the letter I’d sent her, the questions that showed I didn’t have a clue what her stories were about, and the next thing I knew she was shouting, “You are trying to understand me! You are trying to understand what you are too ... unprepared to understand. Don’t try to be more intelligent than I am, Cassandra. You can’t be. Just get on with the translation. If you have time in between those bad crime novels that aren’t even literature!”
I was fairly sure that the word she’d meant to use instead of unprepared was estúpida. I was furious. Hadn’t I been doing my bloody best to read Lacan and a lot of other psychoanalytic rubbish, so that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself in mis-translating the terminology of one or two of the recent stories? And how did Luisa think I supported myself as a translator if not by taking on authors like Rosa Cardenes, who was an extremely nice, respectful person by the way?
I hung up on Luisa, and for six months we had no contact at all. Even though I had to agree with Luisa, especially after finishing my translation of Rosa Cardenes’ first mystery, that we were not talking great literature here.
Then I got a phone call from Luisa saying she’d been ill and was having surgery, hadn’t been able to write for months, was miserable, and had treated me rottenly. I was the best translator she’d ever had.
I said I had missed her too, and I meant it.
She sent me a round-trip ticket to Montevideo, I stayed with her after her surgery, and we resumed working together, still with our ups and downs, but more or less nonviolently. I stopped trying to read Calvino in the original, but I never stopped being fascinated by her work and enjoying the challenges of translating it. Lacan aside, Luisa always wrote about mothers and daughters. I didn’t have to be as smart as Luisa to understand that.
*
Now, years after our reconciliation, I lay on top of the bed in Luisa’s guest room in Montevideo, with the copy of the Spanish paperback of Júpiter y sus lunas on my chest, staring at the cover, which was quite different from the proposed North American edition. A photo, touched with colors of blue and sepia, of a woman, seen from the back, holding the hands of two little girls, one slightly taller than the other. There was no mention in the brief copy of planets at all.
