RAMIFICATIONS
Also by Daniel Saldaña París
TRANSLATED BY CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY
Among Strange Victims
RAMIFICATIONS
Daniel Saldaña París
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Minneapolis
2020
First English-language edition published 2020
Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Saldaña París
Translation © 2020 by Christina MacSweeney
Cover design by Kyle G. Hunter
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Author photograph © Ángel Valenzuela
Translator photograph courtesy of the translator
First published in Spanish as El nervio principal (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2018)
Images on the front cover are from iStock.com: antique children’s book © ilbusca; camouflage pattern © Laures; tropical leaves © pernsanitfoto; and origami bird © Kuliperko.
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Saldaña París, Daniel, 1984– author. | MacSweeney, Christina, translator.
Title: Ramifications / Daniel Saldaña París ; translated Christina MacSweeney.
Other titles: Nervio principal. English
Description: First English-language edition. | Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2020. | “First published in Spanish as El nervio principal (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2018)”—T.p. verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020002758 | ISBN 9781566895965 (trade paperback)
Classification: LCC PQ7298.429.A43 N4713 2020 | DDC 863/.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002758
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
For Ana Negri
I too had a summer and I burned myself on its name
ANTONIO PORCHIA
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
RAMIFICATIONS
ONE
1
TERESA WALKED OUT ONE TUESDAY AROUND MIDDAY. I can’t remember exactly which month, but it must have been either the end of July or the beginning of August, because my sister and I were still on vacation. I always hated being left in the care of Mariana, who systematically ignored me for the whole day, barricaded in her bedroom with the music playing at a volume that even to me, a boy of ten, seemed ridiculous. So that Tuesday, I resented it when Mom got up from the table after lunch and announced she was going out. “Look after your brother, Mariana,” she said in a flat voice. That was the way she generally spoke, with hardly any intonation, like a computer giving instructions or someone on the autism spectrum. (Even now, when no one else is around, I sometimes imitate her, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that writing this is, in some form, an effort to find an echo of that monotone voice in the written word.)
Teresa, my mother, kissed the crown of my head and then turned to Mariana, who received her farewell peck on the cheek without the least show of emotion or any attempt to return the gesture. “When your dad gets home, tell him there’s a letter for him on his night table,” she said from the door, in the same robotic voice. Then she left, turning the key behind her. She had no luggage besides the large tote bag my father used to make wisecracks about whenever we went somewhere together: “Just what have you got in there? It looks like you’re going camping.”
When he got back that evening, my father read the letter. Then he sat with us in the living room (my sister was watching music videos while I was trying to make an origami figure) and explained that Mom had gone away. “Camping,” I thought.
One Tuesday in July or August 1994, she—my mother, Teresa—went camping.
My interest in origami had begun that same summer, not long before the events just mentioned. At school, during recess, I used to perch on one of the planters and pull leaves off the shrubs. I’d fold each leaf down the middle, hoping to achieve perfect symmetry. Then I’d attempt to extract the petiole and the midrib. (I liked calling the stalk of the leaf the “petiole” and the central axis, from which the veins branch out or ramify, the “midrib”; I had just learned those terms in class and thought that using them made me sound mature and knowledgeable.) I’d remove the midrib and the petiole, put them in the pocket of my pants, and forget all about them. In the afternoon, when I was back home, I’d empty the contents of my pockets and line up the petioles and midribs on my table. Sitting before my booty, I’d take out my sheets of colored paper and my origami manual and, with a patience I no longer have, start folding. I saw my compulsion to fold the leaves of those shrubs as a form of training for origami, a ritual practice I could carry out in secret that would help enhance my manual skills.
But the truth is that I was never much good at origami. For all the effort I put into it, I made no progress at all. Teresa had given me that book with ten basic designs a few weeks before she went camping—before disappearing with her enormous tote bag that Tuesday after lunch. The book included the colored squares of paper, and among the figures it explained how to make were the iconic crane, the frog, and the balloon. In all three cases, my lack of skill was notable. I remember thinking when Teresa handed me the book, wrapped in fluorescent paper, that it was a strange time to give me a present as my birthday was months away and my mother didn’t go in for surprises. But I said nothing. I wasn’t going to complain about an unseasonable gift.
It would be unfair to lay the blame for my failure on the book: I tried using other origami manuals, and the result was
