Latin American Fiction
Michael B. Miller
Traducciones español-inglés

Tinka
This is the story of Tinka, a young bushman who lives with his tribe in the Kalahari desert and who demonstrates uncommon courage and selflessness in his desire to save his people from certain death.

The Journey of Little Wind
When he grows up, Little Wind wants to be an "important" wind, but he doesn't know how to go about it. To resolve his doubts, he decides to make a journey and become familiar with the different roles that a wind can play in Nature. He learns that there are winds that help to sow seeds in the earth, others that dedicate themselves to destruction, others that contribute to bringing the rains...But what will be Little Wind's calling?

The cat who wanted to fly high
Floro, doña Paquita's cat, enthralled by the flight of the town's stork, dreams of imitating him and one day flying high over the roofs of the houses and shops of his little town.

Love and Heartache in Gringolandía
LOVE AND HEARTACHE IN GRINGOLANDIA


Michael B. Miller

The cosita between Magdalena’s legs, my cosita lured me like the smell of sweet papaya, with the power of passion and affection. My cosita. Mine. Not any of those harsh or clinical words I’ve learned here in Gringolandia, but cosita––the little thing––cute and sweet. Innocent, like Magdalena. To me, her cosita, more precious than a diamond, like a green chili pepper that bit the tip of my tongue and made my lips tingle. Still does in my dreams.
All that’s changed now, for a time anyway. I’m waiting for the day we can be together again.
We met in Gringolandía, at a church picnic arranged by Father Morales. She was young and beautiful, only seventeen. Skin…like smooth mahogany. Hair…lujoso like black silk. Eyes as deep as her soul. Lips, fleshy and pink, lips that begged to be kissed. Breasts that begged to be caressed.
The animalejo in me wanted to make her mine. She turned me into a coyote dog, the kind that would howl in the night outside my family’s stone fence in the foothills of Cerro el Tigre in Usulután. Coyote dog possessed of a spirit. Magdalena. Fire and ice. The air I breathed. Her name burned into my heart like the hot embers of the wood burning fire that heated my mother’s iron skillet. Tortillas and salt, pupusas filled with chicharrón, and some meat if we were lucky.
Our country ripped apart by war, papi and me, we left all that behind, went north to Gringolandía to escape the blood and sorrow, to earn money we could send home. Gringolandía, our salvation, just the way Magdalena became my salvation. Mi ángel. I loved her like I loved no other. I wonder now if she’ll stay with me. She says she will. Palabra she told me. “I promise.” I hold onto it like a man holding onto a life raft.
Things were going great for us, until he showed up. Then everything went bad. Like a tornado that sweeps through a town and takes everything with it. Afterwards, all that’s left are cinders and broken dreams scattered everywhere. I was always a peaceable guy, anyone can tell you that. I still can’t believe what I did. It’s all a blur now. That’s what happens when you let your blood boil and you don’t think straight. But I need to tell you the rest of my story, just so you see how things were for me, how happy I was, before that mean gringo came through on his motorcycle, trying to mess with my Magdalena.
El Norte, a new culture, a new language. I had to get used to so many things. Latinos or Hispanics, as the white Anglos call us, prefer to say things more obliquely, or at least, our mothers did anyway; they’re the ones who taught us to say the unmentionable in a nice way. Just like the boy’s thing is the miembro viril, but it sounds so odd in English: the virile member. But what should we say? Penis, dick, cock, meat, pecker? All those words I learned after I arrived in Gringolandía. And the girl’s thing, we have other words for that too: papaya, like the fruit, succulent and juicy; or raya like a line in the desert, like a streak of light, like a soft and narrow brush stroke on a canvas; or timbre like a little bell or buzzer you push or a little postage stamp you lick to put on the envelope. Shrine of love, temple of the one-eyed snake.
But I was careful with Magdalena from the very start. I could see she was a nice girl, just a sweet kid from the campo, like me. A good-looking, wholesome nicaragüense; a nica who spoke my language. An American family brought her over as a domestic to look after their kids and to cook and clean for them while the wife worked out at the health club and played tennis and the husband flew all over the world, a big shot executive for a chemical company.
Magdalena melted my soul, made me ready to lay down my life for her. Everything about her, like angel dust…even the patch of dark bristly hair that covered her sex where I liked to lay my head after we made love. Without a struggle, she captured my soul, so different from the other girls I slept with in my Fernando’s hideaway: Motel 8 out on US Route 40, near Havre de Grace, when Papi was still living with me. After he went back home, I brought them to my trailer where I seeded the desert and drank papaya nectar all night. I always had plata in my pocket, too, you know: money. Just to show them a good time.
My gringa girlfriends told me they went for me because I had a lot of color: the way I talked, the way I danced a really neat salsa, with all my sexy moves. American guys can’t dance to our rhythms. They don’t have the feeling, the passion. You have to feel the love, the amor, the heat when you dance salsa. Yeah, the gringas were all over me and I loved it. “You’re different, Enrique,” they would tell me. “You’re hot. Caliente.” I taught them that word, and other words too that sounded so cute coming from them, with their gringa accent. They loved it when I talked to them about their cosita and all its sweetness as if I were describing a ripe papaya or a little tinkling bell. I’ll never forget this one girl, a sexy little blonde from the local Dairy Queen, had the biggest pechos I’d ever nuzzled against. Carajo, I sucked on those mounds like a baby calf at its mother’s teats. One night she tells me, all breathless and everything: “It turns me on, Enrique, really turns me on, you know, the way you say those things. Just thinking about it makes my cosita go all wet, you know, my timbre, my raya.” She liked using the words I had taught her. All the girls did. Anyway, she tells me, “Yesterday, at work, I was at the soft custard machine, you know, filling a cone for this guy, and it happened again, just thinking about the way you devour it with your eyes and kiss it and play with it like it’s a little toy you can’t get enough of, and I thought to myself, Candy, for the love of God, you’re going to have an orgasm right here, and I had to squeeze my legs together real tight when I handed him his triple vanilla swirl and took his money from him. I swear to God he looked at me in a real funny way, like he knew something. I thought I was going to die.”
I confess, I owe a lot to my cousin Gabriela. She’s the one who initiated me. We didn’t live far from each other in Cerro el Tigre. Mamacita, what a hot number! So hot for my body, too; three years older than me and she wanted to show me all kinds of stuff. I was fifteen then and still a virgin, and feeling plenty hot to know the real thing. I didn’t want to have to keep going out behind the excusado anymore––the outhouse––alone, at night, just me and the garrobos, little lizards you found everywhere. Besides it always made me feel like mierda, shit, you know. And the priests said you could go blind from it. What I always wondered, though, was how come they weren’t blind? “A real man doesn’t do that.” That’s what Paquito told me once. We worked alongside each other in the sugar cane fields and would get to talking about things. He was forty, with a wife and five kids, but looked to be sixty-five, sagging face and deep lines in his leathery skin. “A man finds himself a woman,” he said, “and sticks in it her good and hard until she can’t walk a straight line between a row of corn, stick it to her hard so she stays that way, and then she’ll keep coming back like a mama bird returning to her young because she can’t help herself.”
Girls fifteen in the country already have the body of a woman, and some of those little campesinas want to screw just as much as the boys, only they’re scared to because of what their mamas teach them. But Gabriela had cojones, if you know what I mean. Balls. Nothing scared her…went off and joined the revolucionarios a year later, served under Comandante Nidia Díaz. After Nidia was captured, Gabriela herself became a comandante. She had fire in her heart, between her legs, too. A real inferno. The first time she took the one-eyed snake into her mouth, I cried out, vida mía, vida mía. I saw the stars that night even when there were no stars in the sky. We did everything under the big guanacaste tree out behind her father’s field when nobody was around. We invented ways to meet, and she let me kiss her cosita, and do other things with it that set her to trembling beneath my touch, till she jumped like a little minnow in a pond. And she showed me how to use a preservativo too, so I wouldn’t get her pregnant. Something she had learned up north in Gringolandía while living with Mercedes, an older cousin of hers. She came back with a whole supply. We did it as much as we could get away with, without anybody suspecting anything. Tío and tía never caught on to us, thank God. They would have killed us both.
It was terrible when I had to leave El Salvador three years later. I had gotten addicted to her, my Gabrielita, and she to me. I think I even loved her. She would sneak down from the mountains at night and signal me with a whistle. We’d go out to the field and go at it like two dogs in heat. Then she’d sneak back to her camp before dawn, just so she didn’t run into any National Guard. They would have fucked her ten different ways before they shot her and left her body draped over a fence. A warning to the rest of us.
The other girls I knew wouldn’t let me do anything with them, just kissing and touching. One of them did it to me with her hand, but when I squirted all over her blouse she called me cabrón and said it was disgusting, that she wouldn’t do it again. I wasn’t any fucker. I was a joven, young and with needs, and when I couldn’t be with Gabrielita, well, the pressures just built up in me until I felt like a volcano ready to explode. Girls like that said God would punish them if they did anything bad. That’s what their mothers taught them, because they got that from the priests and from the Church, which didn’t do a goddamn thing to help us against the landowners and the generals. And when we finally got a young priest with new ideas, telling us we didn’t have to wait for a future heaven, that heaven could be ours now, here on earth, he ended up in a ditch, alongside some road, with a bamboo stick up his ass and his balls in his mouth. The poor bastard. I said a prayer for him.

A Place Called Milagro de la Paz
by Manlio Argueta (trans. by Michael B. Miller)
A Place Called Milagro de la Paz tells the story of the courage and strength of a single mother and her daughters, who persevere in the face of loss. Filled with magical moments of love and compassion, this astonishing tour-de-force exemplifies the best in magic realism.

With Every Drop of Blood From the Wound
by Manuel Corleto (trans. by Michael B. Miller)
Winner of the 1996 Rogelio Sinán Award of Panama for best Central American Fiction, Corleto’s novel is a tour-de-force of raw nerve and literary technique, probing the collective psyche of a society and challenging the institutions that govern it. A must read for students of Latin American Studies and fiction.

Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea
1907: Leon, Nicaragua. During a tribute which he delivers during his triumphal return to his native city, Ruben Dario writes on the fan of a little girl one of his most famous poems, "Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea."

1956: In a cafe in Leon, a group of literati gather, dedicated, among other things, to the rigorous reconstruction of the legend surrounding Dario-but also to conspire. The dictator Anastasio Somoza is visiting the city, accompanied by his wife, Dona Salvadorita. A banquet of pomp and splendor is being planned. There will be an attempt against the dictator's life, and that little girl with the fan from a half-century before, will not be a disinterested party.

In Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, Sergio Ramirez encompasses, in a complete metaphor of reality and legend, the entire history of his country. The narrative moves along paths 50 years apart, which inevitably converge. The story becomes a fascinating exercise on the power of memory, on the influence of the past, fictitious or not, in the finality of reality.

A Company Through The Centuries: THE CUAUHTEMOC MOCTEZUMA BREWERY (Trans. by Michael B. Miller) Mexico: Editorial Clio, 2006.
The book details the history of this patriarchal and socially responsible Mexican firm as a model for Mexican
entrepreneurship.

Green Fire: The Life Force, from the Atom to the Mind
by Juan Luis Arsuaga and Ignacio Martínez (trans. by Michael B. Miller)
Green Fire doesn’t just pose the question why are we here, it dares to answer it: humans are the thinking incarnation of nature. The authors, two of Europe’s most celebrated and original thinkers, link the origin of life on earth with the development of the human brain (!).