Robinet Testard, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Translator’s Note: This piece uses the medieval-period translation technique of inserting metacommentary directly into the text when a detail is dubious or has no verifiably accurate translation. The technique is used here to highlight, play with, and contribute to Dávila’s own footnotes regarding unreliable facts within the autofictional narrative. This version adds another layer to the communally constructed story, first published in Spanish in 2019.

That was the summer I had to choose, in a matter of seconds, how I wanted to die; I recommend avoiding as best you can the sort of ill-advised predicament I found myself in thanks to a heat wave that had descended on Boston. I’d just finished my third year of college and had decided to finally take the programming course I’d put off all those semesters, but instead of staying in a dorm, where I’d have to cram into a tiny room with a complete stranger, I joined three classmates who were looking for a fourth person to split the rent for a house. The pluses: I’d have my own room, and, though I didn’t know my new housemates well, I’d chatted a handful of times with one of them, Tom,¹ who was not only friendly but also pretty cute. The minus: the house wasn’t in Cambridge, where the campus is, but in Somerville, a nearby neighborhood that had fallen into decline and was, therefore, where my roommates could afford to live. I no longer remember why I was so hell-bent on sticking to this meager budget—my parents would have helped me out if I’d wanted to find a nicer place—but I suppose I wanted to assert my independence by making my own decisions, even if they were stupid.

My room in the attic seemed romantic at first, with a gable roof and a large picture window that let in lots of light, but by sundown I understood why no one else had claimed it (I was last to join the group). As the highest point in the house—like most old buildings in the Northeast, it was built for the cold, thus offering neither the perks of air conditioning nor a ceiling fan—that was where the heat accumulated from each protracted summer day. I quickly realized it was best to go up there only to sleep (or to attempt an uneasy approximation of sleep) and so I spent most afternoons languishing on the first floor, reading with a sheet thrown over the faux-leather sofa so my skin wouldn’t stick. But sometimes even this was unbearable. Then any excuse to escape the house was a good one—return a library book, make photocopies at Kinko’s,² or, in one instance, go on an excursion that would take a very strange turn. I went out in search of a grocery store to satisfy a craving for cold, green, crisp grapes. 

“There’s a Foodmaster³ ten minutes from here,” Tom said, without offering to join. 

I wanted him to come with me. During that pre-GPS summer, in the prehistoric era before cell phones, if I made it anywhere based on the directions someone explained to me it was an act of God. My destination this time was somewhere within the uncharted territory of Somerville. I should have asked, but I didn’t dare. 

Twenty minutes later I had no idea where I was. Tom’s directions were shitty. I was nowhere near a supermarket and couldn’t even find anyone to ask for help. Houses were boarded up, the front yards overgrown; a sullen quiet occupied what had once been a neighborhood full of families dreaming of upward mobility, most of them workers for Ford Motor Company, who had left when the factories did. The houses had been split into apartments for cheap, short-term rentals, for people who didn’t have an interest in—rather, who didn’t have the means of—maintaining them. We could say they were transitory people, or people forced into transitory circumstances. I was delirious from the heat. Night was falling, but not the temperature. I was weighing whether to abort Misión Uvas (Mission Grape) and turn back when I saw a store that was open, not my Foodmaster but a small butcher shop. The sign read SAVENOR’S MEATS. 

I went inside, grateful for the cold air that bounced off the white, tile-lined walls (I suppose it’s easier to hose down when blood splatters). I was the only patron, but the butcher didn’t notice me; his back was turned, he was busy balancing the foot of a very large animal over the meat grinder. The whirring blades made a sharp screech we could describe as the carnal wail of a pterodactyl. The guy was not taking his eyes off them, so as not to lose a finger.⁴

I meant to ask him for directions, explain to him that I was lost, but I think if he had turned around then, if he’d noticed me the instant I walked in, he would have picked up that I was, in another way, really lost. I had no idea what I was doing sharing this stuffy house in a ghost town with three classmates I barely knew; I no longer knew what I’d been trying to prove to my parents and myself; I was lonely. And being lonely in Somerville was not ideal. I wish I could have seen his face in that moment. Instead, I decided to wait for him to finish what he was doing, and to entertain myself, I peered into the coolers. There is something alluring in what lies behind the cool glass of butcher shops and fishmongers, the juxtaposition, almost sensual, of death and freshness: opaline fish with precise eyes resting on ice; slices of red meat, bright and firm, stacked one on top of another; marbled trails of fat and muscle; ribs fanning out in a neat line. At least that’s how it is in typical butcher shops, which this one was not, as I learned when I read the first tag that labeled a fillet. 

Camel. Written in cursive on a little white square.

Bear, the next one read. Zebra. Giraffe. Animals we might see in a zoo rather than in a shop cooler. Yak. Python. Alligator. And in the last one, in delicate script: Lion. Arranged on ceramic plates, not the usual Styrofoam trays wrapped in cling film, the lion steaks were nearing a state of decay, or so it seemed, a whitish layer of mold forming on top. It appeared I had entered the twilight zone of extreme carnivores, a world with penguin breast and kangaroo loin, where the steaks are left to cure for weeks out in the open (that is, with bacteria) until achieving the perfect level of acidity—a process of dry aging. Around the mid-eighties, before Anthony Bourdain and his show Parts Unknown, before the media’s infatuation with eccentric celebrity chefs and Ferran Adrià’s kitchen lab, anyone would have been startled to see the items sold at Savenor’s, but a naive college student, we could argue, most of all. 

Who eats lion? I wondered, thinking of Elsa, the lioness of Born Free. The Lion King had not yet taken hold of our collective consciousness, thankfully—if it had, then a Simba sirloin really would have been scandalous. Who eats bear? Giraffe? Who would eat monkey? Then I remembered something I had read that claimed there were people in China who ate monkey brains;⁵ urban legends have circulated about the practice of eating them while the monkey is still alive, the guests sitting around a table specially designed with a slot where the animal is inserted and tied in, leaving only the tip of the head exposed. The skull is then sliced open, and the humans sink their teeth, or more likely their silver spoons, into the gray matter.⁶

Years later I would watch a similar scene, but with a human in place of the monkey, in Ridley Scott’s film Hannibal. The dynamic Dr. Lecter is not only a vicious cannibal but also a top-tier foodie, with a taste for dining on the liver of his victims, as he describes to the FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, “with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”⁷ Hannibal, who surely would have tried lion or hippo had accountant or nurse been unavailable, is not the only killer foodie, in fiction or in real life. Studies show that psychopaths use twice as many words when describing basic physiological needs, like food and water, suggesting a predatory nature to the way they view the world.⁸ After all, the best way to fully possess something is to ingest it, to internalize and process it. As the story says, in the rituals of cannibalism, after a battle, the most valiant and clever warriors were captured and prepared for dinner so that some traces of those qualities might be absorbed. 

That afternoon at Savenor’s I still knew nothing about Hannibal Lecter or the truth about cannibals; I only sensed that the content of those coolers had, like the mythic ritual, like the dinner of monkey brains, less to do with nutrition than with a drive for possession and domination. I read the little white card again: Lion.⁹ There he was, the king of the jungle, conquered by man, the worst predator of all. I imagined the word HELP! scribbled by coyotes and pumas with their bloody paws on the white tile, a message no one would see because the butcher would hose it all down at the end of the day. It didn’t matter whether the animals at Savenor’s had been killed there or had arrived as corpses or steaks; the place had something sinister, transfixing about it, and I was prey to morbid fascination. But my reaction was closer to surprise than dismissal: here is an example of the true power of food, of its ability to delight or to gag. My own diet, like that of everyone else I knew then, was limited to farm animals: cows, pigs, chickens, a duck every now and then; maybe you would glimpse some venison on my plate, but that was rare, and not even my puertorriqueñidad, my patriotic love of tripe full of coagulated blood,¹⁰  could save me from my shock. 

“Can I help you?”

Finally the butcher turned his attention toward me. He had finished his slicing, probably of Bambi.¹¹ 

The sun was setting by the time I walked out of Savenor’s, the gray sky not unlike the mold growing on the exotic steaks I’d just bid goodbye to, and an evening haze was blurring the edges around things—the sidewalk releasing all the day’s heat, making everything look tenebrous.¹² Maybe it was the combination of exhaustion and my exaggerated imagination, but even the Foodmaster supermarket (in the end it was, as the butcher directed me, only three blocks away), with its aisles of placid grains, took on the tone of my nocturnal excursion, and my mood turned fluorescently macabre. Or probably it was the effect of the neighborhood, which had become worse over the final two blocks. As I was paying at the register for my anxious grapes, I thought, with more than a little apprehension, about how I had to go back, this time in the complete night, the same long and convoluted way I’d come.

“Do you know Perry Street?” I asked the cashier, who nodded. “What’s the fastest way to get there?” 

He pointed in the opposite direction I’d come from, proving I had very much gotten lost and taken an unnecessarily long route; I’d probably been going in circles within the very small border of the city limits. 

“Is it far?”

“No. Like a ten-minute walk.”

Bag of grapes in hand, I doubled back to where the cashier had pointed, onto a long street. At first it seemed like all the ones before, but soon it changed, turning deserted, darker, with no houses. I walked some more. On both sides of the street, weeds were growing in spacious abandoned lots. I looked behind me, considering whether to turn around and go back to the supermarket, but figured I had already made it past the halfway point. 

I didn’t see the first of two men until I was walking right past him. No way to know if he’d been watching me and was waiting, partially obscured, behind a metal column, a leftover structure from some defunct subway line, or if he was startled when he saw me and the reaction was instinctive. 

It’s a cliché but also true that time stops in these kinds of moments, or else it sprawls all around you and everything takes place in an expanded present: I walk past him. He’s thin, has a mustache; we make eye contact. I walk faster, but only barely. I don’t want to show my fear.¹³ He lifts his jaw in a gesture not meant for me. From the shadows on the other sidewalk emerges another man, this one big and burly. I notice some dumpsters in the empty lot to my right and know that’s exactly where I don’t want to end up, victim of a grisly hunt. My hearing, along with my other senses, bristles. I hear a click. I look behind me. The two men are following. The skinny guy has a knife in his hand.

With the magic of editing, we see, in National Geographic films or Planet Earth, a lion sprinting toward a gazelle, and the gazelle, though it sees the lion, remains still. We might want to yell something like “What are you waiting for, move!!!” but she is frozen, registering it all, assessing her options. In my case, one option arrived as a car turned the corner in our direction. 

I threw myself at it. The gleam of the headlights was so bright I closed my eyes, hoping I’d made the right call, that being run over was the better outcome. But the driver’s reflexes were as good as a Fast and Furious stunt double. With a blast of the horn they swerved around me. Behind me I heard screams and snapped out of my stupor. In track and field I was always placed in the slowest tier, which my gym coach, a cruel woman, called the “little turtle” group, but now adrenaline was taking over.¹⁴ My heels kicked up and I ran without looking back, not wanting to know whether they were following me or had decided I was a trophy not worth the effort. I didn’t slow down until I was at the front door of our house. I didn’t even notice—not until much later—that I’d made it home empty-handed, the grapes probably lying out there scattered and smushed in the middle of the street. 

I told my roommates about my scare, completely forgetting to mention the visit to Savenor’s.¹⁵ It wasn’t until much later that I remembered that strange place, and then it was with a tinge of doubt, like it might not really exist. But some places refuse to fade completely from our minds—the image that pops up when suddenly an event, idea, or mysterious trigger brings it into relevance—and then when the internet was invented, finally I was able to look it up, not by the name (which I’d forgotten) but by the phrase “lion meat near Boston.” Bingo. The website for Savenor’s Butchery appeared, with five stars on Tripadvisor and a narrative about its life in that unlikely abutment between Cambridge and Somerville. The owner, Jack Savenor, was a close friend of Julia Child, the iconic first celebrity chef in the U.S.,¹⁶ who had lived in Cambridge for many years, until the end of her life. You can read about this brief history, alongside a photo of Julia and Jack. In his apron, he’s preparing a cut of meat while she leans over the butcher block, whispering something into his ear. (Fitting, given one of her catchphrases was “Every woman should kiss their butcher.”) In honor of his friend’s French training, which led to her television show The French Chef, Jack had the phrase bon appetit etched into the sidewalk by the front door. It’s still there.¹⁷

I know because I recently traveled to Boston and took a cab to Savenor’s. On the way there I recognized the corner where the somewhat sinister Foodmaster had been, now occupied by a bougie Whole Foods. The neighborhood has gentrified and so has Savenor’s: they bought the adjacent building and converted it into an open-air café where bikes are parked next to a chalkboard announcing the latte of the day. They’ve modernized the butcher shop area, which now has better lighting for beholding the cuts of python, kangaroo, elk, and bear, as well as the llama patties, the camel sausage, the whole rattlesnakes, the lizard tails, the yak thighs (whose excrement, I learned, in contrast to horses and cows, is odorless), and, of course, the lion chops.

When I left the store, I walked all the way to Union Square, near Perry Street. I passed a Thai spa, a chocolatier, hipster dive bars, internet cafés, and a gluten-free donut shop. I looked for the house we’d rented that summer, but I couldn’t remember the number and didn’t recognize it anywhere. I can close my eyes and picture it—cream paint, three stories, picket fence—but that image exists only in my mind’s eye; in the real world, memory is both too little and too much. Overcorrecting the erosion of time with its own inventions, the mind fills in the lacunae of a story until we no longer know for certain if, for example, the sofa on the first floor where I used to read was faux leather or real, if I actually could hear the scrape of the meat slicer or see the butcher pushing a foot into a meat grinder, if the cashier at the Foodmaster was a boy.¹⁸ Or if, on the dark street where the two men crept up behind me, there were, as we described, train tracks. But if there weren’t, does that matter? I couldn’t find the street. I didn’t try to look for it. And I wouldn’t try again now, either, not out of laziness or a paranoia that I wouldn’t recognize it, but because of the possibility that the endeavor would be, best-case scenario, futile—I would never find it because it never existed—or worst-case, reckless. To return to the place where death once waited for me, and got so close, may be asking the angels for too much.

[1] Tom is his real name. His role is incidental in this story and the author couldn’t be bothered to change it, because, she writes in a footnote, the story contains nothing compromising about him. But even though the author says he was friendly and cute, it does seem somewhat compromising to his character that he didn’t offer to walk with her to the store that first time. As for the others, we try to be faithful to the events and not embellish much, not distort reality. Although all memory is, in the end, a distortion; time turns remembered images into something more vivid and detailed than they originally appeared, such that it’s difficult to distinguish between what happened and the memory of what happened.^1.1 Or, for that matter, between what was written and what was translated. And so it doesn’t matter if his name was in fact different, or if we are certain that Tom’s name was Greg. 

[1.1]  Considering the amount of emphasis my author places on the unreliability of memory, the sense of fidelity as described in the text is not to the facticity of the events so much as to the force of the story as the events are told. It is in that spirit, then, that details have been added to verify the facts in this story that are in fact verifiable, with some additions of similarly salient details that I (the translator) have come across in my research. Some aspects of the story, also, could be considered part of our (the author and translator’s) collective textual consciousness, so to speak, and have thus been noted with the use of the first-person plural. In the medieval period it was common for translators to insert commentary on their theories and methods directly into the text, to openly cite their authority when a detail was difficult to believe, or to acquit themselves of their duty and thus justify a divergence from the original. “In story as we read,” “as saith the text,” “as mine author doth write,” “as it tells in the book,” and “so saith the French tale” were some of the tags often used to stylistically emphasize a dubious reference (and thus distance it from the translator), or to add an interpretive flourish to the style or meaning.^1.2 

[1.2] For example, one might be reading about a demon that visits women in the night and come across the translator’s helpful elaboration: “Such a fiend, as the book tells us, is called Incubus.” There might even be more deliberation integrated into the text if the translator deemed it appropriate. In John Capgrave’s 1451 translation of Life of St. Gilbert of Sempringham, he explains that, in the story of a miracle performed on a sick man, the man was given a type of cloth that Saint Gilbert once wore. Because there was no definitive way to know exactly what kind of cloth it was, Capgrave added: “I suppose verily it was his alb, for mine author here setteth a word ‘subucula,’ which is both an alb and a shirt.” 

[2] The national photocopying chain started in 1970 in California, was acquired by FedEx in 2004, and four years later ceased to exist. Paul Orfalea, born in LA to Lebanese parents, nicknamed Kinko because of his curly red hair, opened the first Kinko’s with a sidewalk copy machine. At the time, copy machines were mainly available in offices. The copy shop effectively democratized the photocopy and gave birth to a wealth of punk movements, zines, and other countercultural print materials and scenes. Artist, curator, and activist Josh MacPhee described in an interview the special nature of the counterculture that blossomed in the early days of Kinko’s: “You knew that if you went into a Kinko’s in any urban area and stayed there long enough, you would find someone who was coming in to copy a zine or make a punk flier and you would be able to connect with them.”^2.1 

[2.1] From the same interview with Josh MacPhee: “That’s part of why I like to figure out ways to play with or challenge authorship, because there’s a set of less visible realities that are a product of the valorizing of self-expression: for example, erasing the fact that all ideas are communal and all information is social.” 

[3] Full name: Johnnie’s Foodmaster, part of a chain of fourteen supermarkets that operated in the Boston metro area from 1947 to 2014. The Somerville location didn’t have the best selection or the best prices, and the vegetables weren’t always the freshest, but people in the neighborhood still patronized it because of its convenient location and because the cashiers (who wore long-sleeve white shirts with black ties) were kind. The Foodmaster was also known for having wall-to-wall carpeting, an odd choice for a supermarket. The color of the carpet was, unsurprisingly, brown.

[4] Beef, pork, and chicken are not the only things that get ground up in the huge processing plants in the U.S.; there are also fingers and whole human hands. In 2016, The Nation investigated workplace accidents at Tyson factories and reported an average of one amputation per month, almost all of them involving meat-grinder operators. Workers in the poultry industry are ten times more likely to have an accident caused by stress in production lines. If despite all this you’re still interested in being a butcher, you must be at least eighteen years of age, be able to spend countless hours in refrigerated spaces, have a steady hand for operating sharp tools, and, last but not least, possess a good sense of humor: the number of butchers who play around by, for example, making a steak toupée, is not small. Somewhat relatedly, the loss of fingers also became a popular topic online following the release of the iPhone 5s, which allowed users to unlock their phones using a fingerprint as the passcode. Fortunately, one cannot, in the case of a robbery, unlock a person’s phone using the owner’s severed finger; the system only recognizes the electric pulse of living cells. 

[5] The legend about eating monkey brains in China may have to do with a translation error: there is an edible fungus called the monkey-head mushroom, whose long white strands resemble the fur of primates like the macaque. In North America, this variety is more commonly known as “lion’s mane.”

[6] My author mentions perhaps the most well-known, albeit racist, depiction of this phenomenon set in India, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: brains served straight out of the monkey’s skull. In China during the Qing dynasty, some sources claim, the dish was served this way at banquets, but these days it’s illegal to serve monkey brains at a restaurant—also, eating them has been linked to illnesses such as transmissible encephalopathy.

[7] The film my author references here resolved a phenomenon known as the Mandela Effect, where a large group of people remember something differently from the known publicly accepted fact—a sort of collective misremembering that mystics might say is a sign of a parallel universe. One of the most iconic lines from The Silence of the Lambs, “Hello, Clarice,” is never actually said in the original movie. Strangely, Jim Carrey did an impression of this erroneous line in the 1996 film The Cable Guy, perhaps because the fake memory had already seeped into the public imagination (or else Carrey introduced it). Anthony Hopkins’s character finally uttered the famous phrase in Hannibal, released ten years after the original.

[8] Caveat: not everything you read is true. To prove even the most ludicrous point, there are no two words more effective than “studies show,” and the only thing worse is to add “recent,” as in, “recent studies show.” No need to offer a date or specific statistic, no matter if it’s the most nebulous of generalizations. Whatever was “recently” studied instantly overrides whatever you knew to be true before. Even still, the author likes this statistic about the dietary inclinations of psychopaths.^8.1  

[8.1] I was curious, and wanted to provide an accurate translation, so I fact-checked. The study, conducted at Cornell University in 2011, and published in British Psychological Society, used statistical text analysis to examine the features of crime narratives provided by psychopathic homicide offenders. Psychopathic speech was predicted to reflect a predatory worldview, unique socioemotional needs, and a poverty of affect. In most cases, their stories included details about what they had to eat on the day of their crime.^8.2

[8.2] A story by the author titled “Marae,” based on a real-life scandal triggered by the murder of a German tourist on holiday in Polynesia (his remains were found in a fire pit after he’d gone missing), satirizes the racist speculation that cannibalism was at play. Coverage of the murder often digressed into the so-called history of regional culinary practices. Some South Pacific cultures are believed to have practiced cannibalism until quite recently, reported news outlets in countries with long histories of colonialism. (One outlet published an article with a picture not of the victim but of Hannibal Lecter.) Most of this supposed history, though, was documented only by early European settlers, and few contemporary analyses (if any) look at evidence in the Maori language. 

[9] Eating lion is controversial but not illegal. Although in the last hundred years their population has decreased from two hundred thousand to under thirty thousand, the lion is the only large cat not in danger of extinction. They are sometimes eaten in China, Africa, and the U.S. In 2010, a restaurant in Arizona served lion burgers in honor of the World Cup in South Africa—but Savenor’s was selling it decades before then. Today, lions and lionesses doomed to become meatballs in Ohio (or Massachusetts) don’t come from the African savanna; they are bred in captivity or, in some cases, descended from zoo and circus animals rejected for being too aggressive or too old. 

[10] Boricua blood sausage would have been a worthy dish for the famous “black mass”^10.1 held by the nineteenth-century writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. His scandalous novel Á rebours narrates the life of the eccentric aristocrat Jean Floressas des Esseintes, who, bored with bourgeois life and people (as Huysmans himself was—in doing research for the novel, he embedded in a group of Satanists), sets off in search of new pleasures, each increasingly intense and idiosyncratic. These include throwing a banquet for his failed erection where everything—dishes, tablecloths, food—is black. 

[10.1] There’s a slight discrepancy here: my author has attributed the black mass to Á rebours, though that scene from the book is in fact called the “black dinner.” There is, however, a licentious and hysterical satanic ritual called the “black mass” in another Huysmans’s novel, Là-bas. 

[11] Regarding the description of the butcher at work behind the counter at Savenor’s: I’m not sure if it was a meat grinder, as the author first wrote earlier upon entering the shop, or a meat slicer, as described here. I viscerally remember the ominous whir of its blade ever since I worked at a bakery where I had to operate one, which we used to slice smoked chicken for sandwiches made on fresh baguettes. The smaller the nub of chicken got, the more reluctant we all became to volunteer for sandwich duty. The most vivid part of the memory, besides that terrible sound, was the paltry beige of the chicken, limp like a human hand.

[12] The prose says “impartiéndoles tenebrosidad,” as if casting a gloomy or creepy aura on everything, but there is a slightly archaic tone to this word choice, more than one might see in gloomy or creepy, and tenebrous recalls the great giallo film directed by Dario Argento, Tenebre (1982), a metafictional work about an author who becomes embroiled in a series of mysterious murders that mirror his own novel. Argento, a master of gorgeous, brooding suspense, would surely depict this story with sharp camera angles, dramatic close-ups, and sudden bursts of color—green grapes, a flash of red light—that signal something ominous. My author does not know this director’s work because, when I tried to show her his earlier film Suspiria, we couldn’t find it streaming anywhere and reluctantly had to opt for Luca Guadagnino’s remake.

[13] It may seem counterintuitive, but running, or otherwise showing fear, is detrimental when facing certain predators. Usain Bolt, the fastest person in the world, runs a maximum of 27.29 miles per hour, while any old lion can reach fifty, and so running only ensures you will end up winded and dead. If a lion advances toward you, stay where you are (difficult, obviously), and try to make yourself bigger, wave your arms above your head, throw something, scream. Don’t climb a tree—the lion will climb it better than you. You’d be safest, the author says, sadly, if you were carrying a rifle, but we certainly don’t recommend this. 

[14] I hope to absorb by proxy my author’s reflexes in crisis—I was the fastest in high school (or so I recall) but in the moment that I too was attacked on the street by a stranger, like the gazelle on Planet Earth, my body’s only instinct was to freeze and let myself be tackled with a resigned grunt. When I think of this incident, I think almost exclusively about that awful, embarrassing grunt, and my horror that there’s someone somewhere out there in the world who heard my utterly craven death-rattle, an animal sound which I am certain that he will remember for the rest of his life. 

[15] We might wonder if Tom (Greg) felt bad about not offering to accompany her on that treacherous expedition, or if he remembers everything with a kind of shame that distorts his memory: maybe he recalls he did offer to go with her and my author, trying to play it cool, told him she could find her own way. If you’ve ever reunited with an old friend or a lover after a decade, you’ll know that a comparison of shared memories reveals each person’s respective anxieties or regrets more than any objectively true account of an incident. An ex I hadn’t seen in twelve years wanted desperately to apologize, for example, for insisting on concocting our own homemade saline contact solution to save money (it was so salty it burned my eyes), which I had completely forgotten about but, upon the memory being jogged, remembered it as something funny; while I, on the other hand, had been plagued with remorse over an incident around my having found it frivolous to cook an elaborate kangaroo curry while on a camping trip—a memory that no one else recalls and I may as well have invented. 

[16] In 1961 Julia Child started a (very sorely needed) culinary revolution in the States with the publication of her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The first American celebrity chef was six-foot-two, a cancer survivor, a spy in World War II, and, by her own admission, an amateur with no instinct in the kitchen. Before taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, where she lived for a number of years with her husband, Child was a fan of TV dinners. One of the first times she tried to cook duck, it exploded. Child died in 2004 at ninety-two years old. The famous kitchen at her home in Cambridge (the original, not a facsimile) is part of the permanent exhibits at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

[17] An on-and-off-again lover, now distant friend, lives in Somerville, and I have held back the urge to ask them to fact-check this, scope out the shop, send me a picture, and (what I really want) offer me insight on how much this area and this place might have changed in the seven years since this story was first written. The caveat: my ex-lover is a devoted vegan. My inability to commit to the same diet was one of few barriers in our short-lived romance—a touchy subject for us. 

[18] Similarly, I have reread these lines so many times now that I am certain the original version described the paint as cream-colored, and that the architectural feature of my author’s room was in fact a gable roof; must I verify with the Spanish? In translation, as in life, it can be difficult to detangle our own memories from the recollections we’ve heard from others. The narratives of our lives are constructed around the stories we tell each other. Like authorship, memory is also collectively made. So does it really matter, for example, which of us ventured into the history of Kinko’s in footnote 2? 

Tere Dávila is from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and is the author of three short story collections, a novel, and a book of personal essays. Her fiction has won Puerto Rico’s New Voices Award, two National Literature Awards, and, in Rebecca Hanssens-Reed’s translation, the O. Henry Prize.

Rebecca Hanssens-Reed is a translator and writer from Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in The Cleveland Review of Books, The New England Review, and The Offing. She runs the St. Louis-based reading series Public Practice, and is currently writing a book about the late translator Margaret Sayers Peden.