Back to Issue Fifty-Seven

A COCKROACH

by HUMBERTO BALLESTEROS, TRANS. BY MARÍA MATILDE MORALES

 

Il n’y a pas d’amour de la vérité 
sans un consentement sans réserve à la mort.
—Simone Weil

 

[1] From the time she was a little girl, Elsa of Marmato had been able to see, in her own words, “a light that is not light, that is more and less than light […], invisible, that reveals what it touches.” Her second letter to Yeison Morales, from which this quote is taken, describes as well the sensations that preceded her visions. First a headache; then a distance from things, especially voices, that seemed to “come from underwater”; a dry throat, shaking hands, and finally, a demolishing tiredness that forced her to lie down. In childhood, she would stretch herself out on the side of the road where she worked selling cocadas. In the convent, her peers soon learned to escort her to her cell whenever she seemed to be succumbing to a fainting spell.

In his monograph, a valuable first attempt at recovering and interpreting Elsa’s oeuvre, Amilcar Torres claims that these visions were a fiction, a “literary device” that she deployed to cultivate her “cursed poet” persona. Beyond the inappropriateness of that category to describe a mystical writer who spent three decades cloistered in a convent, my disagreement with Torres derives from a particular belief, impossible to confirm but supported by her texts, that Elsa’s visions were real to her, sensory experiences stricto sensu. I refer the specialist to the numerous studies of the life and work of Hildegard von Bingen, whose case is similar in more ways than one; the casual reader of this anthology should look to Sonnet 6 of the first notebook, which likely dates to Elsa’s first years in the convent. After two quartets, both written in a somewhat naïve existential tone, the young poet describes the light that sometimes invades her:

They say I should turn from the din
of the world, where everything is forsaken:
where an instant is all, yet you awaken into nothing, not a pin.
I hesitate, directionless, indifferent
to my path. Every twist, every spin
is a trap. I don’t walk. I sin.
Every step, a misstep, mistaken
Until I stumble over one I haven’t taken,
blinded by the incinerated kiss
that smiling light stretches against my lips—bliss.
Then I become the light that plays, meshed
with the light itself; in light I embrace myself.

 

[2] Elsa of Marmato, the youngest of seven siblings, was born with the name of Elsa Yuleidy Mosquera Mendoza in Marmato, a small town in the Colombian department of Caldas, on December 2, 1970. Her father, Heriberto Mosquera, a miner, was buried in a tunnel collapse when the girl was three years old. Her mother, Yohana Mendoza, was a housewife. After Heriberto’s death, for which the family received a small compensation, Yohana opened a convenience store and devoted herself to managing it with the help of her eldest daughters. The boys worked in the mines. According to her family’s hesitant testimony, Elsa was a distracted and strange girl. At the age of four she began to help in the store, but a habit, on the nature of which we need not elaborate, made her disagreeable to her mother. Months later she began to sell cocadas by the side of the road.

Around this time a curious one-paragraph article appeared on the second to last page of La patria, a newspaper from Caldas. According to the article, soldiers riding in a military jeep found a girl laid out on the side of the road. The soldiers at first thought she was dead. But as they walked up to her, they saw that she was breathing. Her eyes were open but she was unresponsive to any stimuli. They wanted to take her to the hospital. Halfway there she revived. She told them that she had fallen asleep. When the soldiers insisted on taking her to the hospital, she began to cry. She said that her family wouldn’t be able to pay, much less pick her up. She insisted that she could walk back. They let her off, and she gave them each a cocada. The reporter suggested that the small seller might be narcoleptic and advised drivers to be careful on that part of the road.

Earnings from the store, the cocada sales, and the brothers’ income was not enough to sustain the family. In 1977, a small contingent of nuns from a convent in Manizales spent a few months in Marmato, teaching children to read. Yohana asked the nuns, headed by Sister Guadalupe, the Mother Superior, to take her youngest daughter into their care. At first the nuns refused, and when they left town, they did not bring Elsa with them. But some weeks later Sister Guadalupe returned to speak with the girl, and after several additional visits, she decided to take her. Elsa entered the convent in October or November of 1978, never to leave. In her sixth letter to Yeison Morales, the nun remembers a conversation she had with the Mother Superior a few days before her departure from Marmato:

She asked me about the light my brother Chepe said I saw. I told her it wasn’t light.

Then what was it?

I said I wasn’t sure, but it was my friend.

Friend or foe?

I thought about the water that at first seemed to get tied up with things, with a tree, with the river, with the road, with a dog; and then it was as if it shook, as if it boiled, and it was clear that it came from within things, not without. That it was things, their invisible part. And it also was and was not my body.

I thought of how it was kind, big, powerful, and how it wanted me. I told her: friend, and Sister Guada started crying. I didn’t understand why she was crying, and I still don’t know, but I have a theory. Sister Guada didn’t know if it was He who would come visit me or if I was crazy, or something worse; and when I told her that it wasn’t my enemy, but my friend, not just my words but also the way I said them made it clear to her that it was He who sometimes brushed His luminous fingers against His servant, because He wanted to save her, to keep her a girl forever. She cried because she had understood.

Then she asked me if I wanted to leave with them. I said I didn’t know. I thought about my road. I, dear Yeison, liked my road. Almost no one ever walked by, and the bag of cocadas hardly weighed anything in my hands. I would walk one way and then the other. The birds would sing, the trees would sway, the river was around the bend. And sometimes He, who is not a person but something much better, would come, and I would throw myself on the ground, and His kiss would descend from heaven and ascend from the earth at the same time, and in His embrace, which colored me with fever, I was free.

I told Sister Guada I didn’t know. She held my hand and told me I had to leave with her, because what I saw was miraculous, because God had chosen me. And also in the convent there was food every day and my mom would be glad to see me go. Of course she would be glad, considering I was good for nothing and she had to work to feed me. “The light will also be glad,” said Sister Guada. And that was what convinced me.

 

[3] The years immediately following Elsa’s entrance into the convent are a particularly dark period in her life. Her autobiography, A Servant’s Notes, gives few details, but this was clearly a difficult time, marred by spiritual conflict and her peers’ rejection.

The causes of the latter have attracted much speculation. Amilcar Torres lists Elsa’s near-sightedness, her notorious difficulty learning proper names, and her tendency to fall silent mid-phrase. When she became famous, the tabloids noted an “unpleasant odor,” and Father Sebastian Murillo, author of a pamphlet published in the weeks following the poet’s disappearance, asserts that her visions were announced by an “odd color that no one liked,” one that would get “smeared” over her pupils.

Clearly these reports amount to little more than idle talk. I cannot resist adding an observation: any visionary, whether madman or saint, is also, inevitably, a pariah.

A few years ago I visited the convent where Elsa spent most of her life. It is an austere building not lacking in solemnity. The façade faces a square. There are two gates. The one for the church is an arch about three meters high protected by two thick wooden doors. The other, leading to the cloister, consists of a little rectangular door, tucked away on a side wall, that is never open. The church is plain. Its windows, tall and pointy, have no stained glass. The exterior is covered in plaster, while the interior is exposed brick.

The gilt reliquary, donated by a German businessman in the golden age of mining in the region, stands out like a coin against bare soil. A brick partition separates the benches where the faithful sit from the space used by the nuns to hear Mass.

The cloister gave me the impression of a grand family home converted into a hotel. The two floors are spread out in a rectangle around a central courtyard. There is a fountain where birds bathe; there are tomatoes, orange trees, mangoes, a fig. There is a niche decorated with roses and rhododendrons, in which a baby-faced Madonna opens her arms in timid reproach, palms up. I imagined Elsa sitting before that Madonna; I imagined her wandering around the patio or the second-floor balcony, sweeping here and there with a fique broom.

On the first floor are the kitchen, the refectory, the library, the chapel, and the classrooms where nowadays a primary school operates. My guide couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me what was there in Elsa’s time. As can be inferred from the eleventh letter to Morales, the cell where she was imprisoned for the last nine months of her life must be nearby. We quickly passed through that side of the cloister, and I glimpsed a small, windowless room. Maybe that was it. If the tunnel really did exist, perhaps its remnants were still beneath those tiles.

The second floor consists of the Mother Superior’s office, the treasury, the bathrooms and the cells: twenty-four little chambers of three by four meters, each with a cot, a stool, a table, and a lamp. There are no closets. Each nun has a trunk in which to keep her pajamas, her toiletries, and an extra pair of sandals.

Following a few steps behind, my guide let me wander around the second floor for a while. The fountain’s gurgling gathered in the corners, playing with things without touching them. It did not seem unfathomable to spend a happy season there, in that space designed to minimize the difference between one day and the next. But then I thought of Elsa’s stubborn silence, her ugliness, her loveless childhood, her pathological fear of people.

I forgot to mention the confessionals. There are two of them, made of very dark wood lined with velvet on the inside. They flank the door that connects the church with the cloister. Every Sunday morning the nuns kneel before them and confess to the diocese priest, whispering their sins through a screen. I am not a man of faith. Perhaps it was for that reason that the confessionals seemed threatening but anachronistic to me, a pair of small abandoned cages.

 

[4] How Elsa of Marmato became a poet is another question we can only answer with conjectures. It is possible that during her childhood she did not receive any type of instruction and that she learned to read and write in the convent. According to Amilcar Torres, the initial writings in the first folio, grouped here under “Juvenilia,” date from when she was eighteen or nineteen. But this seems impossible to me. Such a precocious development seems implausible to the extreme. Lacking more exact information, in this anthology I abide by the general contours of Torres’s chronology, but I have not demarcated the years.

In any case, it is clear that Elsa’s first exposure to other authors’ poetry came through the convent library, which Sister Guadalupe, again according to Torres, managed as though it was her personal collection.

That nun, whom unfortunately the author of this note did not have the opportunity to meet, exercised an immense influence over the poet. Torres reports that she was an aficionado of St. John of the Cross, able to recite from memory his best-known poems as well as some of his minor ones. She also liked Garcilaso, Dante, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Machado, and Darío. In her youth, she published a brief, pious, and in my opinion, forced interpretation of the First Dream in the magazine of a coastal Catholic university. The fact that the nun was allowed to publish her religio-literary speculations in the 1970s testifies not only her intellect, energy, and rhetorical ability, but also to her connections. It is plausible that she was the one who encouraged young Elsa to write down her visions.

 

I opened my eyes without opening them, and I was lying on the side of the road in Marmato. I knew the light was going to come, and that this time, it would be special. I waited a while. Suddenly I heard a car. I didn’t want to lose focus so I stayed still, though I felt very curious about who was coming in that car.
I heard it stop near me. Someone got out.
A shadow covered the sun. A hand touched my forehead. In that hand there was a heat that didn’t burn, and a cold center that didn’t freeze but only calmed, like ice laid on a bump after you get hit. I couldn’t see anyone, but it was clear that someone was there with me.
I dared to speak. Is it you? I felt His voice that sang without words, telling me yes, it was His. His heat and His ice rained on me from within and without, leaving me soaked. He laughed, very softly. Welcome, He said. It was an ordinary voice, but it was also uniquely His. I’m so bad at explaining. I don’t know why He chose me but ever since then, I have belonged to Him.

 

[5] Elsa’s life, superficially monotonous but pyrotechnical in spirit, has bequeathed us a testimony as beautiful as it is enigmatic: her writing. Six one-hundred-page notebooks contain her poems, the stories of her visions, the eighty-four pages of her autobiography, and the eleven letters that she wrote to Yeison Morales. Amilcar Torres calls the notebooks “folios,” and numbers them according to what he perceives as the development of her style. This anthology follows that enumeration.

Her first works imitate Spanish poetry from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In an essay published recently, Professor Ellen M. Hightower affirms that the experience of reading these poems is “heartbreaking [desgarradora],” finding it tragic that a natural poet was forced, for historical and cultural reasons, to produce work that can only be seen as “[a] sadly crystalline curiosity, pathetically ill-suited to our times [una curiosidad tristemente cristalina, patéticamente inapropiada para nuestro tiempo].” Perhaps because my taste is more antiquated and my reading more limited, I can’t help but admire pieces like the following sonnet, Poem 19, from the first folio:

 

If a horse suddenly bolts from its stall,
it moves even the grass that’s far from its mane;
if a whip rustles through torrential rain
it electrifies even the water that doesn’t fall.
So your light—that my verse must abstain
from touching—evokes caresses sunlit
against my mouth, grazing my writ,
sun to my snow reign.
Of miraculous life you are the flower
that renews the wilted vine by choice,
and with the same subtle, silent power,
make this vulgar and distracted servant rejoice
as though by chance, unwilling, at the last hour,
you granted me life by giving me voice.

 

Slowly Elsa started to incorporate into her repertoire lesser-known forms. This villanelle appears on page twenty-three of the second folio:

 

Unknit the red thread with which you made the day
and give me some string for my game.
Do not allow night to tear me away.

Give me just one spark, and my somber gray
soul will build a bonfire, tranquil and tame.
Unknit the red thread with which you made the day.

From life that is not mine let life give way.
Center your light in my blind frame.
Do not allow night to tear me away.

And when, in agony, I am finally your prey,
I glance at your strong hand that with detached aim
unknits the red thread with which you made the day.

Another light behind it, yours and mine, may
displace the sun with our shared flame.
Do not allow night to tear me away.

Night is day’s inherent decay,
but you have no night. To you I exclaim:
Unknit the red thread with which you made the day.
Do not allow night to tear me away.

 

The third folio, my personal favorite, slips the straitjacket of classical forms. The poet develops a curious taste for meters rarely used in Castilian: hexasyllables, heptasyllables. Her work from this time includes this little ode to the rain, Number 2 in this notebook:

 

Each droplet so unique
that it looks almost still,
and all under water
marveling and docile.
Temptation to come out
with both arms wide open
not opening one’s mouth
to drink the universe.

 

Another of the poems from that time, Number 17, is erotic in theme, suggesting that it dates from the beginnings of her relationship (or whatever it may be called) with Morales:

 

I hide something of yours,
a seedling in my mouth,
without heat
or shape: your name.
And if I speak it
the orchid of longing
begins to bloom
unbidden, within me.

 

In this notebook there is also a poem suggestive of reading material that Elsa may have discovered at this time, doubtless through Sister Guadalupe. The poem is the only one in her oeuvre that has a title. It is Number 32, and it is called Emily:

 

Though she is alone
in the frigate embroidered with her breath,
she is indomitable.
Now submissive, now fearless
instrument of the very wind
that dominates her,
she—a ship full of herself—
brandishes
her plain voice
like a needle,
and wounding—opening—mending
with nothing but pure air
darns the water.
Yet if she has made an entire sea by hand
it is also true
that she has no goal.
She has chosen no prison,
her free voice
relentless.

 

Unfortunately, by the fourth folio Elsa had already started to see the cockroach. Her poems became cryptic. The last ones are indecipherable.

According to Amilcar Torres, this change illustrates her “fall into madness.” I resist that interpretation. It is undeniable that the poems from the fourth, fifth and sixth folios are less, so to speak, luminous than those of the first ones. If Elsa’s production had been limited to those poems, this anthology would likely not exist. But those poems were written by a woman who had spent decades exploring Spanish-language poetry, not only as a rhetorical and intellectual exercise but also as a vital discipline; and my conviction is that they contain as much or more meaning than the juvenile exercises, although much of it, due to our and not the author’s limitations, is unavailable to us. I believe that what happened, little by little, painfully, ineluctably, was that Elsa realized that language was an inadequate tool for her quest.

In an attempt to renew or dismiss that tool, she uses dots, the little circular traces that slowly began to populate her poems. Notably Torres does not say populate, but devour. His theory is that they represent moments of doubt, confusion or impotence. That Elsa used them because she could not find the word she needed. That they are a symptom of how impossible poetry was becoming for her.

My interpretation is different. Something about those dots (their color? their shape?) was far more meaningful to the poet than any of the words she had at her disposal. Nevertheless I think the dots do represent a kind of word—one that stands in direct, though mysterious, relation to the cockroach. While this word might be voiced, there is no need to evoke it aurally; it is less a signifier than a signified. As proof of this conjecture I offer the tenth poem of the fifth folio:

 

with . starts
with . ends
and . for .
the . of the world
reveals itself as a .
that its own . illuminates

 

Sadly, after the irruption of the dots other characters come into play (a z crossed with a kind of lightning bolt, a long dash followed by a short one, three dots forming a triangle, a black rectangle), and nowhere does Elsa offer the least hint as to their meanings. The author of this introduction has dedicated three years, generously financed by both Colombian and North American academic and cultural institutions, to investigating those folios. The publication of this anthology, from which almost all of those poems have been excluded, is the sole product of that labor, in equal parts exhaustive and frustrating. Nevertheless I am convinced that these are not nonsensical doodles, even as I am forced to leave the task of deciphering them to someone else.

 

[6] The two central events of Elsa’s personal life were her relationship with Yeison Morales and the irruption of the cockroach. We can reconstruct them but only in fragmentary form, based on her letters, her poems, and the news, always sensationalized, spread by the media during the time of her fame.

The few details we have about Morales derive from the only interview he ever gave, a few months after Elsa’s death. He would have been sixteen or seventeen when he met the poet, who was twice his age. Of his mother we know nothing. He lived with his father on a lane near Manizales. They were peasants. The old man thought that his boy “was headed down the wrong path.” Needing to visit the capital to claim a small inheritance, the father left his son in the convent for three days, in the care of the Mother Superior. Sister Guadalupe housed him in her own chambers, assigned him cleaning chores, and forbade him from talking to the other nuns.

At the end of the three days the father returned for him. Sixteen years later, when the scandal of the witch of Marmato burst out, and the yellow press dug through Elsa’s papers, they discovered eleven letters, each dating to a different year, that she had written to Morales in a special notebook that she hid in her trunk with the rest of her papers.

Did the nun and the boy ever speak? The fact that she knew his name seems to suggest that they exchanged at least a few words, but we cannot take that as a certainty. It is also possible that Sister Guadalupe had shared his name with the other nuns. According to Morales, he did no more than greet her a couple of times with a gesture to which she never responded. He did it because the face of the poet had “caught his eye.” When the journalist looked for him, he declared his surprise that that nun would have written him eleven letters that, even if she had wanted to, she would have never been able to give him. But on the other hand, judging by the poems and the letter, the two of them did not just exchange words, but also caresses, perhaps a kiss, and a long conversation whispered through a crack in the wall of one of the bathrooms.

Who speaks truth? She, he, neither? To this scholar both stories seem plausible. In the imagination they superimpose, mirror, complement each other almost as much as they contradict. Finally all that remains is fog, and the only clarity is the unheard-of intensity of the poet’s feelings for that young man who, if we trust her version, was the only man with whom she was able to talk in her adult life. (I would not say confession counts as conversation). In his interview, the only thing Morales claimed to remember about the woman who dedicated all those pages to him were her eyes, because they were crossed. “You couldn’t tell what she was lookin’ at,” transcribes the journalist, recording a moment at least as tragic as it is infamous. “That’s why I’d say hi, to get her to look at me, so I could get a better look at her. I’d never seen such a weird face, you know?”

 

[7] In the poems of the last folios, visions of the cockroach are splattered with dots, hyphens, and other characters that make them increasingly difficult to read. But perhaps because they are as much prose as poetry, it is nevertheless possible to glean details.

The first vision largely echoes one of the most common of those from Elsa’s childhood. She is lying on the road that leads to Marmato, bag of cocadas abandoned, looking at the sky. Her body anticipates “His” arrival. She hears an engine approaching. Closes her eyes. The car stops, someone gets out, touches her forehead. That touch, once magical and human, is lukewarm “with an icy center.” There is no dialogue. Elsa speaks to whomever is touching her and gets no response. There is, however, a kind of crunch.

Elsa finally opens her eyes. Before her stands an immense cockroach, upright on its two front legs. With one of its hind legs it caresses her forehead. The composite eyes are deep, labyrinthine, and wide open—two ponds bristling with small holes, each of which “could contain the universe.”

The terrifying (dazzling?) part is that Elsa feels neither fear nor even astonishment. The presence of the cockroach seems as expectable as it is miraculous. (I am aware that this is oxymoronic, but these are her words verbatim). The cockroach leans even further toward the visionary. It opens and closes its jaws. Elsa smiles. The eyes enlarge as the insect approaches, and the nun is flooded with longing to sink in.

Suddenly, a sort of inverted gravity tears her from the earth and throws her upward. She has become minuscule, and the cockroach is now as large as the universe. She falls toward one of its eyes, arms open, bursting with freedom, as though she were flying. Before she collides with the swampy ground of the labyrinth, she wakes up—and is, at last, horrified. In her vision, “He” had been replaced by a cockroach. It was in that moment, writes Torres, that Elsa of Marmato succumbed to schizophrenia.

The cockroach subsequently took center stage in her visions. In one, it was small, the size of a regular cockroach; Elsa took it in her tongue, like a communion wafer, during a Mass officiated by an incredibly tall man with perfect hands. In another, the cockroach, now gigantic, was a makeshift boat that the visionary sailed down a greyish river toward a distant light. She was afraid until she lowered her gaze and saw that the cockroach was the one taking her in that direction, legs rowing, antennae upright. Once the visions ended, the calmness and love that Elsa felt during her ecstasy would be replaced with disgust.

We do not know how many visions of this kind the poet had. Doubtless they were numerous. Little by little she lost the serenity of two decades. She became irascible. At some point she must have revealed to someone, likely Sister Guadalupe, what was happening, and she, understandably terrified, would have contacted the diocese priest.

It was the beginning of the end. The priest’s name was Antonio Cabrera. He had studied in a seminary in Manizales, where he had stood out for his oratory and the wise flattery with which he treated his superiors. Upon learning that a nun in his diocese had visions with cockroaches, his response was to declare her possessed. Elsa was subjected to exorcisms, first led by Cabrera, then by other priests. In 2003, they petitioned the Vatican to send an expert in demon-purging. It was then that the media learned of the situation.

This scholar does not wish to dwell on the circus of those months. Suffice to say that, while the diocese awaited the Italian, journalists were sometimes allowed to speak with the poet, who had been confined to a minuscule cell apart from the others. Cabrera himself gave interviews in which he painted Elsa in the darkest and most implausible colors and portrayed himself as a providential figure—since, had it not been for his intervention, the poor little nuns “would have never known what to do with the victim of Satan residing in their hearth.”

The enigmatic ending of the farce is well-known to the reader, but I will retell it so as not to leave loose ends. The Italian, a certain Mazzini, arrived at the convent on a rainy night. He slept in the sacristy. The following morning, when he was brought to the cell, the nun was not there. Under some loose tiles they discovered a narrow tunnel that led into darkness. The exorcist asked for a flashlight and ventured down the tunnel, followed by Cabrera and Sister Guadalupe. They arrived at a dead end. The only thing in the cavern was a cockroach. It was dead.

 

[8] As a result of the despicable media scandal of the months that followed, Elsa has become known as “the human cockroach of Marmato.” Books have been published to prove she was a witch. A documentary has been filmed. Cabrera, who after the scandal quit the Catholic Church, has gained dubious prestige as a healer and “energy expert.” Next to nothing has been said about the notebooks, which in the opinion of a meager but growing number of readers should be the reason for their author’s fame. Thanks to Amilcar Torres’s seminal effort, and despite the protests of a sector of the Colombian Church, which still sees in those pages, including the most innocent ones, the stamp of the devil, fragments of this singular oeuvre have begun to spread. Perhaps inevitably, the seer of Marmato’s works initially gained recognition abroad. A few months ago the first roundtable dedicated to her works was held in Vancouver, involving academics from Europe, Asia, and the United States. Sadly, the only Colombian present was the author of this introduction.

What happened to her body? The theories are as numerous as they are delirious. The most popular is that she turned into a cockroach and descended to hell. Others claim that she escaped. On a street adjacent to the convent, one can purchase the supposed remnants of the tunic she tore as she jumped out a window and ran down the street, praising Satan at the top of her lungs, only to get lost in the woods.

While my own conjecture is not esoteric, it is just as dark. I don’t think there was ever a tunnel or a cockroach. Something may have gone wrong (but what?) with Father Mazzini’s exorcism; or perhaps the plan was never to exorcise her in the first place. Perhaps Cabrera had the brilliant idea of cooking up, as an alibi, a disturbing fiction, on that would captivate the public so fully, no one would want to believe anything else.

Whatever the truth may be, it is the poetry that matters. For that reason I wish to conclude this preliminary note with a poem, the fifth from the fourth folio. According to Torres, the poem was written shortly after the poet’s first vision of the cockroach. He reads it as a “poetic premonition” of the end of her life. But an abstruse story concocted by the tabloids and shrewdly pious priests should not bury the paradoxical verbal brilliance of Elsa of Marmato’s work. The poem reads:

 

Black
           and white
are one
           and the same;
light
           is shadow,
heaven
           the abyss.
I open
           my arms,
subsumed
           by everything
and fall
           into flight.
My death
           is my life.

 

Humberto Ballesteros is a Colombian fiction writer and Dante scholar. He has published two novels and two short story collections in his native Spanish. In 2018, Juego de memoria was shortlisted for the Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana prize, and in 2010, he received the Ciudad de Bogotá National Award for Razones para destruir una ciudad. Ballesteros is the commentator and academic advisor for a critical edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy that is being published in Colombia. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian from Columbia University and is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Hostos Community College.

María Matilde Morales is a researcher and translator from Caracas, Venezuela. Her writing has appeared in Kunstlicht and The Morningside Review. Her introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is forthcoming with Alexandria Labs Books. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

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