A bystander’s unsettling memory becomes an homage to a city monument in Víctor Hugo Ortega’s “The Most Beautiful Statue,” our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Through a string of digressions that subtly parody the eyewitness voice, our narrator recounts the scene of a minor accident by fixating upon the minutiae leading up to the crash. We’re taken on a meandering sequence of explanations about football history, Channel 13 news, Chilean poets, and the chaotic beauty of Santiago. What results is an amusingly voiced vignette guiding us through a seemingly disconnected set of details and a closely connected set of events. “The Most Beautiful Statue” offers a narrative exercise redolent of Baker’s The Mezzanine or even Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” for its dizzying compression of time and recollection.
Only once in my life have I seen a car crash with my own eyes. Luckily, it was nothing very violent or bloody. As I suppose is the case for crashes all over the world, this was out of the blue. I was at the scene of the accident, thinking of what I’d seen just before, and all of a sudden came the collision.
Unfortunately, I remember it often. More than I would like. If I add things up, I think I remember it three times a month, more or less, which doesn’t please me. On the contrary, it frightens me. If you do the maths, I remember it thirty-six times a year. And that’s a lot. I’ve asked myself why. The answer is that sometimes, when I walk through the city centre, I hear a vibration underfoot that distracts me from the purpose of my journey and brings me back to the memory of that deafening sound. It’s a sound that makes me nervous, makes me think that I could be witness to another crash. It’s a very strange thing. The pavement’s vibration serves as a sign of what might come, like an alert to be prepared for a possible collision. It’s like what they say about dogs and their earthquake-predicting behaviour.
Never again have I heard a sound so loud as the one I heard that day. Nor have I smelt that smell of smouldering tar, which made my nose and head ache. But I can’t be reckless. I have to be prepared. Santiago is a noisy city, overpopulated with cars, buses, and trucks, so the risk of seeing another traffic accident recurs day after day. Luckily for me, or for the good of the streets, lately all risks have turned out only to be vibrations.
There’s no doubt, I was affected by the incident. Maybe also a little traumatised. But it is what it is, what can I do. Also, to be honest, it wasn’t just because of the accident, but because of what happened after. Let’s take it bit by bit.
The first thing I should say is that there were no casualties. This makes the memory not so terrible. I don’t even want to imagine what would have become of me if the crash had left someone dead. I was lucky. Sometimes I think that because there were no deaths, I associate what happened before with what happened after, which to me seems marvellous. Although it’s a double-edged sword, because when the bad memory of the crash comes up, so does the good memory of what happened before. And when the good memory of what happened before comes up, so does the bad. READ MORE…
