Asakiyume mita

You may remember that I encouraged anyone I knew from my visit to Timor-Leste in 2013 to send in a story to Strange Horizons for their Southeast Asian writers issue. They were specifically looking for submissions from Timor-Leste.

My call on Facebook didn't get much traction--probably because I'm not very active on the site, so it deprioritizes my posts in people's feeds--but one acquaintance reached out to me, a guy called Nando. I remembered his smile super-well. He's just one year older than the healing angel, my youngest kid.

He's not fluent enough in English to write in English, though, so he wrote his story in Tetun, and I translated it--and wrote about what a thrill that was. We submitted it ... but it was rejected.

Of course there are a million possible reasons why a thing is rejected, but I would guess it's because Nando's story is a folktale rather than an invention of his own. It's a story his grandmother told him about his own family. It's a true story, he says, though it's filled with magic. I don't doubt him: the world is filled with magic. But I suspect for these reasons, and for the manner of its telling--and who knows, maybe the manner of my translating--it didn't ping as speculative fiction in the editor's mind.

I thought of trying to submit it elsewhere, but I also thought of the heartbreak that involves (or can involve). And that's not what Nando signed up for: he was submitting to this one magazine's one special issue, which I'd called to his attention. (I did tell him that rejection was a possibility.)

So I thought, why not publish it here on my blog? If **I** publish it, I can include the photos he sent me of the places mentioned in the story. AND, I can include the Tetun version of the story, so people from Timor-Leste can read it too. If I publish both the Tetun and the English, then it can also conceivably be a resource for people, all sorts of people, who are interested in the culture of Timor-Leste and stories from Ainaro. And if I publish it, I can do an interview with him.

I can't afford to pay as much as Strange Horizons would have, but I can afford semipro rates, so I offered, and he accepted. (And doing foreign remittances was an interesting experience, but that's a blog post for another day. Suffice it to say, PayPal doesn't operate in Timor and there's no post office, so I sent money via Western Union.)

I have all the pieces, and over tomorrow and Wednesday, I'll prepare them and put them up. I hope you all enjoy the story, and please, when it comes out, share the link widely! I really want people to know about this story. There is SO LITTLE fiction/folklore from Timor-Leste available for the Anglophone public.

I learned about this story from amaebi, who said it's like part of a folktale, and she's right.

"Treasure Washes up on Venezuela's Shore, Bringing Gold and Hope to a Village,"
by Anatoly Kurmanaev and Isayen Herrera; photos by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
New York Times December 12, 2020.

Such a story! All this gold, washing up in a poor fishing village. True to folktale form, the first thing to turn up was a gold medallion with an image of the Virgin Mary on it:

The fisherman, Yolman Lares, saw something glisten along the shore. Raking his hand through the sand, he pulled up a gold medallion with an image of the Virgin Mary ... “I began to shake, I cried from joy,” said Mr. Lares, 25. “It was the first time something special has happened to me.”

After that, people found all sorts of things--"hundreds of pieces of gold and silver jewelry, ornaments, and golden nuggets."

Some people think it's ancient pirate treasure, others a miracle from God, others the wreck from some modern-day smugglers' ship, or a government operation to pacify dissatisfaction (... may I just say that I love the idea of the government's nefarious plot involving ... seeding the shore with gold?)

The New York Times commissioned a test on one of the findings, and the results indicated it was probably produced in Europe, and probably in the mid-20th century. So probably not ancient pirate treasure, unless they're time traveling pirates. But the other explanations are all still on the table.

Yolman Lares sold what he found and used the money to buy food--so the family can eat two meals a day for a while instead of just one--some sweets for his kids, and a used speaker to go with the TV he fixed, so the family can enjoy some entertainment. He kept a pair of gold earrings, though:

a pair of simple gold earrings decorated with a star. Despite the pressing need, he doesn’t want to part with them because they remind him of the ancient navigators who crossed the Caribbean guided by the stars.

“It is the only pretty thing that I have,” he said.

The photos accompanying the article are beautiful. These are just two of them, but the others, showing things like a haul of sardines or the inside of a house, are wonderful too.

Neighbors were talking about when leaves fall (some early, some late), and one said, "My father always used to say about oak leaves, 'They don't like to fall until they smell the [Thanksgiving] turkey in the oven.'"

(Some hang on longer; they wait until the next generation come along and give them a push.)

Also: catch a falling leaf and you can make a wish, but what if a falling leaf catches you, and hangs on? This happened to me the other day. Does it get a wish?

On Goodreads, it says I started reading Love in the Time of Cholera on June 5--which is when I committed to reading it (it's my book group's next book)--but in fact I didn't start it until this past Monday, the 9th. As it happens, I started reading it in a church chapel, the day after Pentecost. As it happens, the story opens on Pentecost--an interesting coincidence.

I was having a hard time getting into it--I read maybe fifteen pages that day.

Today I sat down to read a little more.

I sat down behind a card table in my driveway, because it's the weekend of the neighborhood tag sale, and I thought I'd try to get rid of some things (I didn't; the only things we sold were things we didn't have on offer), including some Chinese floral paintings I inherited from a friend when I helped her clear out a storage unit. One of these was displayed on the card table, held in place by two fist-sized rocks.

And so I read more about eighty-one-year-old Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who hated most animals but loved his parrot, whom he taught to speak French, as well as the Latin accompaniment to the Mass, among other things. He was trying to get this parrot down from a mango tree--he had climbed up a ladder and managed to grab the parrot--but then the ladder slipped out from under him, and JUST as I read these words . . .


(But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.)

. . . there was a gust of wind and a loud DING noise, and one of the rocks that had been holding the painting down landed on the recto page I was open to, wrinkling it back and tearing it just a little. The DING turned out to be where it hit my coffee mug on its descent.

Evidence:



Pretty dramatic commemoration of a character death!

. . . It's still rather heavy going, reading-wise, though I have liked a couple of things. I'm glad I have some other things to read as well, that are a little less demanding.

Mt. Kablaki is not the tallest mountain in Timor-Leste; I think it's the third-tallest. But it's a sacred mountain, like Mt. Ramelau, the tallest--and it's visible (and hike-able) from Ainaro.

Mt. Kablaki



One of the students asked me when American independence day was, and I told her it was July 4th and asked when Timor-Leste's independence day was. May 20th, she told me. Then I told them the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. It's a myth, but it encapsulates values we'd like to think our first president had. Then I asked them to tell me a story about Xanana Gusmão, their national hero and current prime minister. One of the students told me how, during the resistance, local people hid him on Mt Kablaki.

I've also read that he got a protective amulet there--the sort that lets you move unseen past your enemies.

I've also heard that he could transform himself into a dog. There are many many dogs running around loose in Ainaro, so that would be a good disguise. I asked one girl if she had any dogs, and she said yes, four or five. I asked what she fed them, and she said rice, or rice gruel.

Later, when I was rinsing rice for dinner (and in Timor-Leste there's much more reason to do this than there is in America, because in Timor-Leste the rice contains lots of bits of chaff and hull), I went to pour off the water in the yard, and one of the local dogs came trotting over eagerly. Aha. Rice gruel, I thought.

neighborhood dogs



But back to mountains. All the mountains roundabout Ainaro are beautiful.



Here's dawn over the pre-secondary school, across the street from where I was staying.

At this latitude, at this time of year, it's easy to walk into nighttime--it comes rushing up to meet you. Tonight small birds were employing their magic to disguise themselves as leaves: sparrows fluttered up off the ground--then became elm leaves when I looked more closely; a killdeer or other small plover ran across the road, but feeling my eyes on him, became an oak leaf.

It was still daytime--but only just--when, after one failed attempt, I worked up nerve to go down the long drive and then up the forbidding steps of the house that's attached to the property where the goat was. I had a carrot for the goat and a note to leave if no one was home. The house was as tumbledown as everything else. There was an artificial pine wreath on the door, which was encouraging, but snarling dogs jumped at the door's window when I knocked, which was not. I didn't leave my note. I walked around to where I had seen the goat before, but she wasn't in her little pen.

The sky was pink when I went to the little shrine of glass and candles beside our church and left an offering for other people's hopes and prayers (and also for the goat).

Night had settled in to roost by the time I was buying eggs at the convenience store.

"Someone's parked in your loading ramp; you'll have to have 'em towed," said an old guy to the young and handsome manager.

"No, no, that's me," said the manager. "I'm parked there."

"I know, I know it's you; I'm kidding you," said the old guy.

"That's my Mercedes--how to you like it?" asked the manager.

"That's not a Mercedes; that's one of those Hondas or something," said the old guy. "I bet you only bring out the Mercedes when you're taking out the girls."

"It's not a Honda, it's a Mazda," said the girl at the checkout.

"Yeah, a Mazda; my Mercedes is a Mazda," said the manager.

"Mazda, Honda, one of those foreign cars," said the old guy (which I thought was amusing, because what's a Mercedes then?)

As I left, the old guy said to me, "Stay warm!"

I thanked him and told him I would.