North

After many years in prison, unable to return home, and for their own security, four men live in a safe house, run by a charity foundation.  As the outraged locals hurl rocks through the windows, and the long-suffering manager works to keep his charges fed and watered, the ex-convicts share uneasy tales of the criminal pasts that brought them here.

These men have no double; they’re one of a kind, my sons.   They’re all my sons.  This afternoon after doing some lines I wondered, how could they do what they did?  And I came to understand them and now, now I’m not scared of them, I can even love them.  My children.  Who grew up to be rebels, murderers and perverts.  My boys, who were born with problems.  The sun caught them on the back of the neck and activated that perverted part of the brain which we all have, but that they developed in the north.  

And when they say north they say mountain hoof T-shirt cinnamon ice-cream three p.m. neoprene packed lunch mortadella lumbago baby-girl sugar-candy fairground hard-boiled egg pneumonia rabid dog bonfire ingrowing toenail dry hand cold water.  

No charity for my children.  Not a tin of peas.  My imperishable sons, cut off from the sun.  My sons, mimicking nature in a pre-fab country with a murderous, perfumed side of its own.

Contact me for more details.  

Back to translations.