"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...
