Translations of Works by Augusto Monterroso

FLIES

There are only three subjects: love, death and flies. Ever since man was invented, this emotion, this fear and the presence of these insects have been his constant companions. Other people can take care of the first two subjects. Me, I just concern myself with flies—a much greater theme than men, though maybe not greater than women. A few years ago, I had the idea of compiling a universal anthology of flies. It still preoccupies me, this task. But very soon I realized that it was also endless. Flies have invaded every form of literature! Which I suppose isn’t so surprising since wherever you look you find a fly. It turns out that at some moment in their career every true writer has dedicated to a fly a poem, a page, a paragraph, a line; if you’re a writer and haven’t yet done it, I think you should follow my example and do it right now; flies are Eumenides, they are Erinyes; they punish you. They’re the avenging angels of some power we don’t quite know; but you—man, you know that they pursued you once and, since you know this, they’ll pursue you forever. They stake you out. They’re the vicars of an unnameable being, benevolent or malicious. They clamour for you. They follow you. They spy on you. And when you finally die, a single fly will probably be enough—which is pretty sad—to bear away your poor distracted soul, who could say where? Flies, passing on this task to each other indefinitely, transport the souls of our dead and of our ancestors and this is why, always close to us, they accompany us and persist in protecting us. Our small souls transmigrate through them and so accumulate wisdom, knowing everything we never dare to know. It’s possible that the last transmitter of our dying western culture may be the body of this species called a fly which, down the centuries, has reproduced without any self-enrichment. I think it was Milla (an author who I know you’ve never heard of but he was into flies, which is why you’re hearing his name today for the very first time) who said that the fly wasn’t as ugly as it looked at first sight. But at first sight, it doesn’t have an ugly appearance, precisely because no one sees a fly at first sight. Every fly has always been seen. Between the chicken and the egg, there’s still doubt about which came first. But no one’s had the idea of wondering if the fly came before or after. (It’s impossible to avoid here “in the beginning was the fly” or a phrase like that. We live on these phrases. Fly-phrases which,...