The Boots! The Boots!

I was cracking up as I translated this!

At the end of the meeting, I noticed some commotion among the people. They whispered something amongst themselves and kept glancing in the direction of other huts.

There, I saw Arasibo walking towards us, holding a pair of Spanish boots in front of him, the cause of our fears the night before. The Indian limped slowly, with the solemn air of a priest bearing a sacred relic. With that impassive face, he reached us and approached me amid the general silence. All stared at us, captivated as if they were watching a bizarre religious ceremony. Vagura—always the joker—broke the silence with a snort of suppressed laughter.

“Your boots have found you!” he said to me. “There is no escaping them now!”

Arasibo stood before me and placed the boots solemnly at my feet. And they were serious boots: massive, huge, hard as a tool of torture, with uppers reaching above the knee. And if you wore them, they were as hot as hell.

“It’s the kanaima!” I jokingly shouted, pointing to my boots as if tormented, evoking the name of the vengeful spirit.

Arnak and Lasana laughed, but Manauri preserved a serious expression. Some frowned at hearing me invoke the name of the demon.

“Yan! We do not want you to get bitten by a snake,” said the chief. “You are a precious brother to us, and there are plenty of snakes here. Listen up, people! Are there vipers here, yes or no?” he asked the rest of the Indians.

“There are! There are! Plenty! Big ones, too!” all earnestly confirmed.

“We honor our chiefs with feathered caps decorating their heads,” Manauri continued relentlessly. “Whereas you... we will honor you with these boots decorating your feet!”

“They pinch like the devil!” I objected. “They bake my feet! You can’t make me wear them!” I defended myself as best I could.

“Life brings many heavy burdens which we must bear patiently,” Manauri said in an admonishing voice. “In these boots, you will look distinguished, respectable, powerful, invincible.”

“But I will be sore and unhappy,” I waved my hands in opposition. “Come on, wise chief, in the name of god, do not make me do this.”

But Manauri was not inclined to be merciful, stubbornly insisted, and did not intend to budge. He spoke to me in polite words but with an unwavering expression and a hard look in his eyes:

“I ask you, Yan, don your beautiful boots! They will be a mark of your dignity!”

The good Manauri had apparently devised for me some role of a ceremonial chief and chosen these nasty boots as my insignia of power. The devil take him! What was worse, other Indians seemed to share his view and got it into their heads that it was my honorable duty to wear these boots. Have they all lost their minds?

Only Arnak and Lasana did not take part in the general argument. They kept calm and were clearly having great fun at my expense. They had no intention of coming to my rescue. As for Vagura, his eyes sparkled with hilarity. He chuckled, addressing me in English:

“Your boots have caught you! You will now be a White Jaguar in Boots!”

He remembered—the cruel scoffer—that Lasana had called me White Jaguar, and he was determined to milk that for all the fun he could get.

Of the whole group, only Arasibo was an exception. He was still standing next to the boots and, immobile, was watching me intently. He watched my eyes and lips and was thinking something, calculating. The intensity of internal effort twisted his ugly face in a terrible grimace.

What did Arasibo want from me? How much intense desire was in that ugly face, in those little penetrating eyes!

Suddenly, I understood.

With a cunning smile, I turned to the chief:

“Well, then, Manauri, you say these are my boots?”

“They are! They are!”

“Very well then!”

I lifted them from the ground, and I handed them to Arasibo.

“There! I gift them to you!”

The chief seemed to puff up with indignation, but Arnak, Vagura, and Lasana exploded with such wholehearted and catching laughter, and Arasibo put on my boots with such lighting speed and dexterity that there was nothing left for him to do. He laughed with the rest of us and waved his hand, admitting his defeat.

When the laughter died down, Manauri declared:

“Very well, Yan. This time, I give in. But you have to promise us two things, and both are for your own good.”

“As it is a request between brothers, I agree in advance.”

“First: always, always, always watch your step, watch the ground and beware of snakes. And second, and equally important, when we enter our village, you will wear the Spanish captain’s uniform you have and the boots.”

“We are going to take that uniform with us, too?” I panicked.

“Yes, we will.”

“Very well, if you insist, I will deck myself out on our arrival. But just for our entry. Then, I will take it all off.”

“That is fine. But you will also put it on whenever other chiefs visit our village, OK?”

I looked at Manauri with admiration. The man deserved to be a tribal chief: he clearly understood the political importance of pomp and ceremony.

Banned by Facebook Again!

Last time, our ad was shot down because reading Divine Julius might affect the way you vote. This time, it is on account of its explicit nudity. :)

Enjoy, you perverts. You probably also eat your hamburgers with mustard.

Btw, the artist is Jean de Bosschère (Uccle, 5 July 1878 – Châteauroux, 17 January 1953), a Belgian writer and painter.

Eat your heart out, Arthur C. Clark

Justly does Sir Arthur enjoy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of hard science fiction; but his prose is that of an engineer: it is precise, accurate, clear and--boring. It is uninspired. It is dull. It is pedestrian. In Clark's books the science and the plot have to do all the heavy lifting.

By that standard, Stanisław Lem is the greater writer. Like Clark's, his plots are good and his science is excellent, but his prose is absolutely brilliant, with occasional flashes of genius. Unlike Clark, Lem is a writer, he writes literature. Just read this fragment of Fiasco, in which the hero is traversing the great Brinam Wood--an imaginary geological feature on Titan:

Then the land changed. It was still forbidding but in a different way. The planet had gone through a period of bombardments and eruptions, sending blind bursts of lava and basalt skyward, to freeze in wild, alien immobility. He now entered these volcanic defiles. The overhangs farther on were unbelievable. The non-living dynamism of these seismic congealings—inexpressible in the language of beings raised on a tamer planet—was accentuated by gravitation no greater than that of Mars. To a man lost in this labyrinth, his striding vehicle ceased to seem a giant. It dwindled, insignificant among the crags of lava, which once, in kilometer-long cascades of fire, had been transfixed by the cosmic cold. The cold cut short their flow, and before they froze, falling in the precipices, it drew them out into gigantic, vertical icicles—monstrous colonnades—a sight that was one of a kind. It made of [his vehicle] a microscopic bug that inched past towering pillars—pillars of a building abandoned, after construction as careless as it was mighty, by the true giants of the planet. Or: a thick syrup flowing from the lip of some vessel and hardening into stalactites—as witnessed by an ant from its crack in the floor. But no, the scale was more awesome than that. It was in this wilderness, in this order-disorder so foreign to the human eye, bearing no similarity to any mountains on Earth, that the cruel beauty of the place showed itself, the beauty of a waste vomited from the planet’s depths and turned, beneath a remote sun, from fire to stone. Remote—because the sun here was no flaming disk as on the Moon or Earth; it was a coldly glowing nail hammered into a dun sky, giving little light and even less heat.

Outside, it was 90 below, the temperature of an exceptionally mild summer this year. At the mouth of the gorge Parvis observed a glow in the sky. The glow rose higher and higher until it took up a quarter of the firmament. He did not realize at first that this was neither dawn nor the illumination of a solector, but the mother and ruler of Titan, great-ringed, yellow as honey: Saturn.

(translated by Michael Kandel)