Notes
Ces narrations présentées ici ont été écrites en anglais, d'une banlieue New Yorkaise, entre les années 2004 et 2011.
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Par lui-même : traduction en cours
Roberto Beltran is a 35 year old goat of a writer—he eats most of what he writes, and he drinks down all the bad things he's done. Roberto never liked apples, but he loved the five years he lived in New York City, loving all the different colors and the fact that he could only afford to write when he couldn't buy food. But Roberto stopped being a vegetarian and moved to Buenos Aires where the beef is better than good, and as cheap as Roberto would be if he were a prositute for all the women who hated him. Roberto Beltran is a writer but he'd ratter be a plumber.
L'éditeur
NOT FOR LONG AND NOTHING DONE (excerpt)
My mother was a prostitute in Mexico before dancing her way to America. The man she found to take over for the man who stayed inside of her for too long, was a blue-eyed teamster from Southern California
who had a knack for cards, and for some reason, smoked cigarettes like
God would—each cigarette never knowing at what level of its fiery existence it would be put out.
The first time I met my soon-to-be father was an hour before he was about to sneak me into the country where he already had my mother all dolled-up in
front of a washing machine waiting to complete her instant family.
He brought me my first ever pizza pie, thinking that this hot treat
would help calm my illegal immigrating nerves, which at three years-old, I had none
whatsoever. I was just going for a long ride away from Mexico forever with the white man who
married my young mother before knowing who she was.
He picked me up and put me on the warm hood of his car. I stared at
him while he was looking the other way and smoking, almost posing for me. I liked how he looked. He was a toughly beautiful man with a pair of eyes so blue that the whole world became dark with each blink, but not in a soft way. His greased blondness told of never taking overdone showers with fancy soaps and sponges that come from the warmest oceans. The type of man who only showered to get the blood off his hands after hours of working hard with metal tools that sometimes work back, or to get the stink of the other woman off of him before coming home. He’s very tan because he just is, not because he tiptoes around the beach in panties.
...
THROUGH SHEETS I'VE TRAVELED excerpts from the unfinished bookl I LOVE YOU MORE THAN COCO COLA by Roberto Beltran. (excerpt)
Four months went by before I had the hand of woman holding mine. I was in the lower east side having a few afternoon beers with my friend Alex, a past guest of the hostel, who was from Chile but moved to Miami from the wave of his mother's tears when he was seventeen to go to culinary school. Five years later he came to New York City with an American girlfriend who danced her way out of his arms for a couple of dollars from a man who was prettier then he was, and who reminded her of the father she wished for. Alex looked soft, almost gay, but his smile was loaded by a bank robber, a one of a kind shit-eating-grin only a non gay man could hold. Alex talked his way into a job serving tables at the fanciest sushi restaurant in the city. He was a certified sushi chafe, but in the food business in this city you make more cash serving than making. He'd steal tips with that smile. Alex was a good guy, and a decent friend, but after a year or so he'd be easy to ignore, like most friends in this city they're easy to ignore unless you loved them, and the only man I loved other than me was my father. My mother and sister had a lot of competition but never my father.
Alex asked if I wanted to join him later on that night at a dinner party. I took down my fourth beer before saying yes to his invitation. The only info Alex had about the dinner party was that it was being thrown by two women out-of-towners living in the west village for only a few more days. Alex met me at the hostel and we quietly took the train down into the village. I had a headache from the beers and the nap before, and was also a bit nervous do to the fact of this being my first dinner party; I was becoming an adult with a childish hangover. Alex brought with him two bottles of white wine, and I had a cheap cheesecake from the deli.
...
SUICIDES WITHOUT A PEN excerpters from the unfinished book I LOVE YOU MORE THAN COCO COLA by Roberto Beltran. (excerpt)
On the day of her move, I came down slow with the loud sounds' of the old staircase moving faster than me, and with a more pure force that came from age and not from self-battle. It was a bit before noon and Elodie was down in the lobby waiting for my unneeded help that was hanging over into the front of my future alongside the smell of my familiar hangover.
I'm going to miss this French girl with the name that gave my English trouble, was my third thought when seeing her there with just one suitcase standing next to the plant I pissed in the night before. My first thought was if I died right then the only thing I would leave behind in this world would be a plant that smelled of piss. And my second thought was the hope to not shit my used pants on the train to Brooklyn. I needed to write more with a pen and paper and not so much with my lonely actions was my forth thought.
We rode the train with her one suitcase and the plant that was my punch line the night before. The fuckin' plant was my excuse to come along, for my typewriter was bigger than her suitcase with wheels. She smelled the booze float away through my pours alongside my hopes for that day. I was there with her sitting right across from me as we rode the train into Brooklyn. This plant was my fourth gift to her by then, and the one that cost me nothing, but that had the most of me inside of it.
The room was nice enough; it came with its own bed and dresser. It was a big apartment as we sat on the couch very close, but both knowing it was not the time for our first kiss in front of that plant. We walked her new neighborhood, but it was nothing like the calm I felt when walking with her through Chelsea in the summer nights listening to sirens coming towards the pain I was going to cause a year later. She walked me to the subway station and we exchanged phone numbers before holding one another in our first hug that moved passed friendship with the tightness brought by us not wanting to be lonely anymore.
...
ACTING TOUGH FOR FREE WHISKEY (excerpt)
What is something you know about women?
"they all remind me of my mother" I answered with my look pointed toward the sun. I'm always staring at the sun until my eyelashes melt down my cheeks, for this is how I think I keep my old beard black.
Do you drink when you write?
"I write like I should when I'm being bad" I take out a bent, half-smoked cigarette from the front pocket of my shirt that is dirtier than the habits I inherited from my father.
What does anger mean to you?
"ink for my pen" Most angry dogs must be gay comes to mind when I smoke too much in the heat. My eyes move again away from her, but I keep my stare on her scent.
Are you in love with anything right now?
"wars that finish on the tips of swords" I tell her with the voice I mainly use for children before stealing a lick of their ice creams.
What do you do for fun?
"sleep like I'm dead" I wonder if the cigarette smoke dances inside my lugs like it does in front of me?
Are you afraid of death, Roberto?
"yes, but only because I'm afraid of not doing what I want" My cigarette is now gone alongside the dream of being a plumber, for now I'll always be a writer, my pen is too old for anything else but to write, there's nothing new anymore that I can do that doesn't involve drinking like a man on a dying horse.
...
TRICK OR TREAT ME AND I’LL COME BACK ON CHRISTMAS (excerpt)
I slid her shirt off from my desk, then a pair of panties that Ihoped weren’t clean, one of those pink razors, reading glasses she never needed to read any of my stuff, the little white string from a used tampon I think I might of eaten on a really drunken night, and a cheesy gold chain from Chinatown I gave her for her third poorest birthday that I broke by trying to choke myself the first time she died.
Gordon gets off his typewriter and just throws himself on their lonely bed to cry in a drunken ball like usual. The whole apartment is her vandalized grave site, and he’s her cracked tombstone, changing what’s written on him with each different drink. Gordon has just been crying and writing for the last four nights. He’s always drank, but like this from the bottle of grief.
Alexia was the name of Gordon’s partner, but he just called her pumpkin or sometimes I-love-you-so-much. She died from a disease Gordon cannot even spell, but of course he still blames himself, it was his way. And on the sillier drunken nights he blames the kinkiness with tin foil he talked her into trying in the early part of their two year relationship, but tonight he feels like he did it with his own fuckin’ hands.
There’s a hard-little knock on the covered window of Gordon’s ground-level loft, and the words “Trick or Treat” coming from the hungry mouth of a child, lifts Gordon out of bed and to the front door as if she was knocking.
...
I RAN AWAY ON A RIDE HOME (excerpt)
The bastard part of me always forgets father's day. It was the twenty-second day of me running away, and I was on the side of the road, lost, but I had my dirty little homeless hand wrapped around the fifty dollar bill I stole the day before with a magic trick that went wrong. That fifty dollar bill was the biggest thing I ever held in my pocket. I felt "placed by God" standing at the side of the road with my hand in my pocket, pressing down on my dickhead every time seeing a car drive bye. I didn't want to go anywhere, so there was no need to have my dumb in the air. I saved my dumb for the little girls who didn't know any better. I'd be like those little girls if I was a girl.
My mama missed me, and cried at the fact that I was born to always be hungry and cold, and my daddy cried with his fist over the son who became a bastard on father's day. I was good at being on the side of the road, any road, any town; the color of the city didn't matter as long as there is a road and a rest-stop that had a sink and toilet for me to work.
I always made friends in rest-stops, dirty toilets and warm water oozing out of everything reminds me of where I was born. And I know how to pick up friends in the places I come form. These rest-stops always have paper for me to clean off my work from the night before, or as I'm working.
Men come walking into these used bathrooms late at night with their erections pressed against the dollar bills they're willing to get rid of as long as I can say the right words for them to touch me in the wrong way. I stand in these bathrooms with ready-eyes, and as still as the porcelain inside of them, but I'm the only thing in there for sale.
...
BAR-TOT RHYTHM (excerpt)
The world isn't so big when your mama is a drunk and knows how to fly. Thinking that we lived in a bar was the last childish thought before growing up with the smell of my mother's vomit in my crooked smile and alongside my missing punches in battle royals with the other cheerfully neglected little boys.
My father killed himself in an elevator when I was eight and my mother was drunk. He always did what he wanted, and he was always the brave one in our group of three. Unlike my father, I loved being there watching my mom making herself happy, no matter what she had to do to get there.—I loved the wild moments of hunger, and being left behind in Halloween costume—peanuts and sticks of winter fresh chewing gum underneath little plastic Christmas trees placed on top of bars always in danger of being drunk—jukeboxes playing our song when asked to do so be my used sneaker made by kids my age in places even further than China—laughing at the pain and then asking it to dance—dancing without a drink at a lower level, but with my head higher than the others.
Rhythm was the second best gift my mother gave me after the total freedom of the ridicules and unneeded. The jukebox was my babysitter and the dance floor our television set. Watching the music turn into movements made my mother more than happy, and order more than one drink.
My parents met in a bar, and fell in love on a dance floor. My dance career started by me trying to hold up my mother by her knees, but she'd fall and break into laughter that I mistook for music, and from that day on I kept up the movement with women. I went straight to the dance floor in every bar she took me to; passing up the other little bar-tots eating dyed cherries on my way to my daily workout on top those little wooden squares, with scoffs of movements that finally became love with a small few of the partners. Music is in all the dance floors of the world, in all the bars we are reminded of a dizzy-sadness and never of the pure-rhythm that made us thirsty in the first place.
...
Première édition, mars 2013.
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