by Juan Carlos Onetti

Excerpted from Fiction Number 62 (2016).

I. WHERE MAGDA IS NAMED

Once more the story began, for me, on that day-night of Santa Rosa. Lamas and I were in the beer hall, christened “Munich,” in Lavanda. The place was heating up, filling with impatient customers, smoke and voices. There was the continuous evening clinking of mugs and utensils. It was then that Magda and her life, in bits and pieces, began to emerge and expand.

Santa Rosa was back again and threatening to play a trick on Lavanda and Buenos Aires. September 30: the first day of spring. But one must put up with her as a friend and sweat out, almost gasping, the heat and humidity. The solicitor thought about it, but shook his head.

Now it was Lavanda and one had to wait for the noisy arrival of Rosa, the only nice whore, who figures, naughty girl, in Gregory XIII’s book of saints.

I could not remember having known any woman as flirtatious as her. None with her distant thunder, with her jokes like children playing with fireworks, suddenly to preside, so high up, over our conscious breathing, with thunder rolls that announced the end of the rotten world, to cease abruptly and go off with a distant carnival cackle.

She is known to have descended to Earth only once, in Sirilund, Norway, seduced by Lieutenant Glahn.

The full story can be found in Fiction Number 62 Please follow the subscribe link for information on ordering.