You Shall Leave Your Land


 
 
 
 You Shall Leave YOUR Land
 
 
 
 First published by Charco Press 2023
 Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh EH10 4BF
 Copyright © Renato Cisneros, 2017
 First published in Spanish as Dejarás la tierra by Planeta (Perú)
 English translation copyright © Fionn Petch, 2023
 Poems translated by Robin Myers © Robin Myers, 2023
 The rights of Renato Cisneros to be identified as the author of this work and of Fionn Petch to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
 All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
 ISBN: 9781913867300
 e-book: 9781913867294
 www.charcopress.com
 Edited by Robin Myers
 Cover designed by Pablo Font
 Typeset by Laura Jones
 Proofread by Fiona Mackintosh
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Renato Cisneros
 You Shall Leave Your Land
 Translated by
 Fionn Petch
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 For Natalia and Julieta, my family
 
 
 
 In the beginning, a family’s energy usually springs from misery. And this misery often produces a family member’s drive to escape to a better life; and sometimes he paves the way for other members to follow. So you have a family on the rise, motivated and industrious. And within a generation this industriousness can produce wealth. And with wealth can come status, even nobility. And with nobility comes pride, and often arrogance. Arrogance is usually an element that leads to decline, and in time back to misery.
 Gay Talese, Unto the Sons, 168
 I have lived a hundred years without knowing these things: allow an old man to throw into disorder what has been written down, with what he knows.
 Enrique Prochazka, The Swineherd
 Now the Lord had said to Abram:
 ‘Get out of your country,
 From your family
 And from your father’s house,
 To a land that I will show you.’
 Genesis 12:1
 Who has not, at one point or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood?
 Jorge Luis Borges, I, a Jew
 
 
 
 PART ONE
 
 
 
 CHAPTER 1
 Lima, 2013
 We went to the cemetery that day, resolved to confirm once and for all the truth of the story that great-great-grandmother Nicolasa was buried alongside Gregorio the priest. It was noon. The sun warmed the gravestones and dazzled the stray dogs, sending them off in search of shade. Little by little the silence of the Presbítero Maestro was broken, first with our breathing, then with the weary footsteps of the occasional people who came to commune with their dead at this time of day.
 The sunlight did little to disperse the gloom of the labyrinthine pavilions that seemed to form whole districts of buildings with bricked-up windows, withered flowers in planters, and gravestones painted with elongated black crosses like teardrops. Decrepit, ravaged edifices stuffed with cadavers whose spectres surely waited for nightfall to roam abroad, sharing forgotten things, their mysteries and their sorrows.
 Passing before the rusting gates placed at regular intervals, connecting the cemetery with the realm of the living, we noticed that the wardens had left their posts to get their lunch, or hadn’t turned up yet, or perhaps there weren’t even any wardens to occupy these faded booths that from afar resembled empty sarcophagi. 
 With no one to ask, it took us an hour to locate the San Job quarter, not before making false starts in the San Estanislao, San Joaquín and San Calixto sectors, where we amused ourselves with the afflicted expressions of the stone angels crowning the crypts and mausoleums of certain heroes of the Republic. 
 Once we’d identified San Job, guided by a new-found intuition, Uncle Gustavo strode with conviction towards the stones in the C sector and began a visual inspection, repeating three digits out loud.
 Two, five, three.
 Two, five, three.
 Two, five, three.
 He looked like a sleepwalker uttering the magic words that would wake him up.
 In no time at all he had identified the tomb we were searching for. Beneath encrusted dirt and ragged cobwebs, the lettering cut into the marble could still be read clearly:
 Here lies Doña Nicolasa Cisneros
 Born 10 September, 1800
 Died 3 January, 1867
 Beneath that, an inscription in Latin: 
 Adveniat Regnum Tuum
 ‘Thy Kingdom Come’
 At the bottom, less an epitaph than an injunction:
 ‘Her children will love her always’
 I touched my forearm and felt goosepimples. I knew that there was nothing inside but a pile of bones, eaten away by worms, perhaps wrapped in a bundle of frayed rags that was once a burial gown. I knew this, but for a minute wanted to believe that something of the spirit of the woman who had been my great-great-grandmother, a presence still so close to our world, could seep through a crack in the mortar and express itself clearly, whether to endorse our visit or chase us away.
 Uncle Gustavo set out to clean the glass of the tomb with a cloth. He worked at first with delicacy and care, as if washing the hair of a dying man, and then with uncontained vehemence. Some force in him desired to crush or penetrate the mortar and profane that deposit, gathering up, however briefly, the debris of the woman who had left us her surname two centuries ago, and acknowledging in this detritus the material from