"Pilar Orsini Oquendo has just lost the love of her life. Her fiancé, Gonzalo, has been wrenched from her grasp by his untimely passing. Left alone to grieve, she finds herself at their favorite place, on a secluded beach in Spain. It is here where Gonzalo’s childhood friend finds Pilar and, in a fit of lust, rapes her. Distraught and betrayed, Pilar soon finds the rape has produced a pregnancy. Despite the difficulty, Pilar decides to keep the baby. She struggles to wade through her emotional turmoil and continue her ambitious career as a translator of American literature. While speaking at Columbia University, Pilar meets Gus Brubaker. Gus is a Spanish literature translator, and he is immediately taken in by Pilar’s intellect and stunning beauty. Pilar is conflicted and still dealing with the aftermath of her rape as her attacker continues his harassment. She is also pregnant. How will she explain this to Gus, who, she believes, will surely leave her when she reveals her pregnancy? The Translators tells a story of troubled romance set in the world of linguistics and literature. As Pilar and Gus travel the world together, they also must travel beyond pains of the past. In the conquering of violence, there is a possibility of healing and perhaps, a possibility of endless love."
The Translators
A NovelBy Robert FedorchekiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Robert Fedorchek
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-4943-0Chapter One
When my mother named me Augustus, for it was her doing, she thought that
Augustus Brubaker had a seignorial ring, and that, when I grew up and prospered and assumed my rightful place in society,
A. B. would have a dignified sound when used by intimates and business associates. Dad, wise in the ways of his and Mother's marriage, knew better than to argue and held his tongue, knowing—as he explained to me when I was of an age to understand—that he would savor sweet revenge by calling me
Gus and not
Augie from the time that I was an adorable infant pooping in my diapers and demanding the breast (both breasts more often than not, since it seems I was a greedy little thing). That I managed to gurgle during these two exercises was taken as a good omen or a harbinger of things to come, for surely those gurgles foretold a sunny disposition. So much for a prediction of one's adult temperament when one is a babe in arms. (As an aside I will add that Dad won out, because
Gus I became and
Gus I remain, to all and sundry. I thank my lucky stars. Can you imagine going through life as an
Augie? I love Mother dearly, always have and always will, but in her attempt to give yours truly an ... uh, shall we say
august bearing through onomastic symbolism, she very nearly cut me off at the knees. It goes without saying that in addition to thanking my lucky stars, I have been eternally grateful to dear old dad.)
Let me say from the outset that, at the age of thirty-one, I am not blessed with an abundance of admirable character traits. However, on the plus side, I am loyal to friends and loved ones and honest to a fault, this latter quality or idiosyncrasy being my Achilles heel in the opinion of most of the women I've seen over the years. My only problem as a consequence, if a problem it be, is that I don't have all that many friends, because in a true friendship you both give and take. And if all you do is give, the friend is selfish; and if all you do is take, you're selfish. Acquaintances, yes, I have numerous acquaintances, but who doesn't? So with the few genuine friends, honest-to-goodness friends, that I have, I feel blessed. While on the subject of my character, I need to add that I tend to be impatient with pomposity, pettiness, and superciliousness, and as a disillusioned, rebellious academic I've seen enough of all three to last me a lifetime. But I get ahead of myself. In all fairness, I should tell you, as objectively as I can, how I came to be an academic, that is to say, a disillusioned, rebellious academic.
I grew up in Georgetown, Connecticut, an affluent town nestled in the southwestern corner of the state. North of Stamford as the proverbial crow flies, it was, and continues to be, a swanky neighborhood built around lots of 19th-century Connecticut money and lots of 20th-century New York money. As an only child, I had the undivided attention of my mother, ne Ava Gamble, my father, Hugo Brubaker, and the woman who made the house run, Josefina, whom we all called Fofe, a borinquea from Ponce, Puerto Rico, a delightful chatterbox of a person and surely one of the warmest and most loving individuals God has seen fit to place on planet Earth. We all loved, and still do love, her dearly. Although nominally our cook, she also functioned as part-time governess, full-time overseer of the weekend cleaning crews that attended to the house, the pool, and the grounds, as well as the licensed full-time disciplinarian for A. B., that is, little Gus and big Gus, in other words, un servidor, as child, teenager, and adult. Because my mother was a woman of considerable foresight and believed that one day Spanish would be spoken as much on the east coast as it is on the west coast, she charged Fofe with speaking to me only in the language of Ren Marqus, and as a result I became fluent in Spanish at an early age, and, had I not been obtuse, stubborn, and immature, would have become bilingual, but kids will be kids, and sometimes I turned resistant and argumentative. As a result of my occasional childhood obstinacy, I am not bilingual. Para serlo, me falta ese poquitn. I'm close, though, I'm close.
When I went off to boarding school I met a few clever boys from Ro Piedras, well-to-do sanjuaneros, who took it upon themselves to teach me some macho language. I should have rued the day. Innocent that I was, having mostly heard Fofe's pure speech, little did I know that many stateside Puerto Ricans and other Latinos have decided to enrich the idiom of Castile by affixing Spanish suffixes to English words, by virtue of which a "lunchera" becomes an establishment where one eats lunch and a "washetera" a place where one does one's laundry. Home for Thanksgiving one morning I was in the kitchen with Fofe and saw an elderly groundskeeper out by the pool raking the last of the leaves. Look, Fofe, I said to her. Ese pobre viejo se va a frisear los cojones. My straightforward and innocuous observation brought an immediate swat on my rump with a wooden spoon. She shocked me into momentary speechlessness. Speak like that again and you'll get another one, she said indignantly. At first I suspected that it was my use of cojones that had upset her. But it's not that off-color. Everybody knows what it means, right? (Translator that I am I will tell you that I observed to her, "That poor old boy is going to freeze his gonads off.") But no, she objected to my use of the coinage of frisear for "freeze." Who's taught you to bastardize our beautiful Spanish language when we have a perfectly good word like helar?
Fofe was proud of how well she spoke. No doubt about it. And I think it secretly pleased her to introduce her charge, a charge with the not very Hispanic-sounding surname of Brubaker, to visiting cousins and watch their reactions as I spoke with a pure Puerto Rican accent, dropping practically all of my final esses, as well as the ones before consonants. However, lest you think our beloved Fofe a prude, I shall relate one more anecdote, one that tickled her fancy so much that she told it and retold it ad infinitum.
It occurred during my undergraduate days at Dartmouth in a poetry seminar given by Professor Tyrone Drake, Dr. "Ty," as we used to call him, who actually spoke Spanish very, very well, and with the lilting lisp of Castilian learned in Salamanca. (You'll notice that I already considered myself a competent judge of one's linguistic ability.) It was just that one afternoon he was so zeroed in on language, so focused on nuance that he forgot and made a slip. Oh, what a slip! It became historic. The stuff of legend. There were nine of us in the class, two of whom were bonafide native speakers of Spanish, my great friend Nelson Ortiz from Bayamn, PR, and Domingo Montalbn from Veracruz, Mexico. Dr. Ty set about explaining that you cannot use nouns adjectivally in Spanish as you can in English, and he chose the example of tea and cup, both of them nouns, but nouns that can be used together to become teacup. Perfectly acceptable English usage. It was at this point that he put his foot in his mouth, figuratively speaking. "You cannot," he continued, "say tetaza for 'teacup,' as there is no such word in Spanish." Now. He was both right and wrong. No, tetaza does not—by any stretch— mean teacup, but there actually is such a word. I caught it, I am pleased to report, only a split second after Nelson and Domingo. To the point: t means "tea," and taza means "cup," however ... tetaza is a horse of a different color in Spanish. The root teta is one of 13,000 words in the language of Cervantes that mean a woman's mammary gland, or tit, in the vernacular; -azo, -aza are augmentative suffixes that speak to great size, and as a result a tetaza is a "big tit." I really and truly thought that poor Domingo was going to wet his pants, so hard did he try to suppress laughter. Minutes later, when we had a break and the others stayed behind to chat with Dr. Ty, the three of us exited the classroom and Domingo ran to the water fountain. From the other end of the hallway, he yelled, in stitches, Oye, Nelson. Qu te parecieron las tetazas de Drake? How did you like Drake's big tits? Now, when Fofe laughed her belly shook; when she really laughed, tears came to her eyes. The day that I related this anecdote her lacrimal glands were in overdrive.
The point of all the above is to say that dear Fofe watched over my Spanish; my mother, blue pencil ever at the ready, watched over my English.
I say my mother because my father couldn't write a decent sentence, let alone a paragraph, to save his soul, even though he was the publisher of the Bramble Group, community newspapers that flourished from New Haven to Darien. On the other hand, if you needed shrewd business acumen, someone who saw at a glance the significance of balance sheets and debit/credit statements and how to untangle them to produce a profit, he was your man. But getting back to Mother. She was the lynx-eyed copy editor and occasional columnist of Perennials & Annuals, a well-respected magazine that to this day commands the loyalty of flower enthusiasts all across the country. Mother was also a voracious reader of foreign fiction, and she introduced me to a host of Spanish- and Portuguese-language authors like Camilo Jos Cela, Miguel Delibes, Carmen Laforet, Lus de Sttau Monteiro, Joo Guimares Rosa, Jos Lins do Rgo, and many others, thereby instilling in me a love of literature and a desire to read them in the original. So after I left Dartmouth with an A.B. degree (for Artium Baccalaureus, and not Augustus Brubaker as some wags claimed), that love became the impetus for me to study at New York University, at which institution I enrolled in the graduate program of the department of Spanish and Portuguese, and where I studied for the M.A. and Ph.D. with some of the best professors I ever encountered in eight years of both undergraduate and graduate work.
Now, Seoras y seores, there are only so many avenues open to the holder of a Ph.D. in romance languages, even from such a prestigious institution as NYU. Banking?; no. The CIA?; no. The FBI?; no. The State Department?; maybe. The truth be told, I could have explored other maybes, but alas, I had become addicted to life in the city (as people in these parts refer to the borough of Manhattan, there being, one needs to understand, no other city in these United States of America). Spanish, Puerto Rican, and Cuban restaurants, as well as restaurants of every other Latino stripe; a Portuguese delight in the Village that rivaled those in Trenton, NJ; a string of Brazilian eateries on West 46th's Little Brazil Street; the Hispanic Society of America on upper Broadway; the music of Isaac Albniz and Joaqun Rodrigo at Carnegie and other halls; the lovely Rita Moreno everywhere; Alicia de Larrocha playing Enrique Granados ... I could go on, but you get the idea. It was too much to give up. I couldn't ask it of myself; I refused, for my well-being, to ask it of myself. What did it leave? Teaching? There were a few advantages. Time off at Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, the semester break, the Jewish high holidays, Easter, and summers. Yes, summers. Honesty must prevail. These were indeed advantages.
At the risk of seeming vainglorious, I had, even back then, a certain flair, a certain presence, and was sure I could succeed in the classroom, but, for perfectly obvious reasons, I dismissed grade school and middle school. That left the high school and college or university levels. A major consideration: Could I teach literature, my passion, in a high school? Besides, did I have the fortitude, let alone the courage, to teach high school? I asked this crucial question of myself and decided that I did, but it gave me considerable pause when I learned that I needed education credits (theory and a practicum, if you will) to teach in a high school in Connecticut or New York, for I was determined to be in one of these two states. (The apartment at Pelham Court had much to do with this decision, and I shall explain the apartment in a moment.) Therefore, imagine my delight when I learned from the NYU placement bureau that I did not need education credits of any sort to teach at the college level. I was thrilled. All those poor saps who taught in secondary schools had to have education credits, while I, the soon-to-be Dr. Augustus Brubaker could walk into any college classroom in the land and ply my trade, that is, my profession, without any theoretical training whatsoever, by virtue of having earned a Ph.D. degree, the union card of the day for us university types.
Armed with this information, I submitted to the humiliation of the meat room of the Modern Language Association's annual convention, which was held in Toronto that year, where neophytes and job seekers of all ages market themselves. There are private meetings in rooms and suites, but I started out late, so I entered the meat room—an auditorium with between eighty and one hundred long tables, and upwards of four hundred tired, as well as tiresome, interviewers—with good cheer and a stout heart, and charged into seven interviews. They resulted in invitations for five on-campus visits, which produced two offers, generous offers considering that I had no teaching experience, zero scholarly publications, and a doctoral dissertation titled "From Romanticism to Realism: the Evolution of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literature."
I accepted the offer made by the academic vice president of Northern Connecticut State University in Winsted, Connecticut, a picturesque New Englandish town that lies in the, that's right, northern reaches of the state. Northern Connecticut is the second oldest of the compass universities, as Nutmeggers call them, together with Eastern, Southern, Western, and, in the eye of the magnetic needle's pivot, Central. Because it enjoys an excellent reputation and high enrollment, and offers a degree in forestry, a program not available even at the state's flagship school, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Northern's trustees and administration view it as the metaphorical north star of the state university system.
The position of assistant professor of Spanish in the department of modern languages was right down my alley. I hit if off immediately with Jean Louis Diderot, the chairman (whose bailiwick was French), and Dom Izzo (Italian), liked the courses I would teach (survey of Spanish literature and two advanced language classes), loved the campus that hinted at the beauty of the Berkshires, delighted in the legs of the assistant dean who acted as my guide (even though I could tell that she was going to make a valiant effort to resist my charms), and suppressed a shout of joy at the prospect of a nine-hour teaching load on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. I would be around for students all three days and devote Thursdays to class preparation and correction of written assignments, and then ... and then, Friday afternoons—when I felt so moved—I would drive to Georgetown, a mere sixty-six or sixty-seven miles away, or roughly an hour and a half road time. There I would snack on Fofe's fried plantains, chat briefly with Mom and Dad, and then take the train into the city. To the above-mentioned Pelham Court apartment on East 86th that Perennials & Annuals provided for my mother, a nifty apartment that she used only two or three days a week (and only rarely on weekends with Dad), an apartment that she would graciously allow her loving son to inhabit on Saturday, Sunday, and part of Monday. I had fallen in love with it during my graduate student days, even though it was quite a trek from the Village. But coming back to NCSU. What more could I ask? From Winsted to Georgetown to Gotham in a matter of hours.
I expect you can surmise from the above that from the very first week I was a success in the classroom—in all honesty, an unqualified success. Without a theoretical underpinning and without education credits. Outside of the classroom I got to know most of my colleagues; some I grew to like and shared their outlook, some I did not especially like and most emphatically did not share their views on pedagogy. Diana Whitaker, the assistant dean with the oh-so shapely gams, treated me with reserve and kept me at arm's length; in other words, she treated me correctly, but coolly. Since there were other attractive ladies on the campus, I made no attempt to ingratiate myself. Wishing to be entirely objective, I scrutinized my feelings at her rejection of my overtures and determined that it was her loss. I stayed away from faculty hook-ups in the belief that they would color my judgment in such matters as committee decisions and votes at senate meetings, which explains why I turned my attention to two librarians. One of them (Kate) was as thin as a fi ve-penny nail, but read voraciously and carried on a very pleasant, as well as informed, conversation; the other (Melissa), with a bit more weight on her, had a matchless derrire, and although she read a touch less, she carried on an equally pleasant conversation and was a good listener to boot. As I am sexist on occasion, there was an additional factor in Melissa's favor, one that harkens back to a saying taught to me by Fofe's Uncle Willie.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Translatorsby Robert Fedorchek Copyright © 2010 by Robert Fedorchek. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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