One night when he was wandering like a sleepwalker between berths, he saw an old, yellow-lipped woman with bracelets all the way up her arms and star tattoos on her forehead, sitting in the darkness on a rattan chair. Since the Panama Canal was yet to open, he had to go the whole way round South America, traveling for forty days on a Cape Horner, aboard which two hundred men were crammed into cargo holds filled with caged birds, and the noisy fanfare was such that he didn’t get a wink of sleep until the coast of Patagonia. He left this land of chalk and cereal, morels and walnuts to board an iron ship at Le Havre bound for California. In the space of a few months, all that remained of four generations of winegrowing were dead roots in the apple orchards and wild plants from which he made a dismal absinthe. Born in Lons-le-Saunier in the foothills of the Jura, he had been the owner of a six-hectare estate when the wine blight hit, withering his vines and driving him to ruin. Later, when he returned from the front with half a lung, having lost two brothers to the trenches of the Marne, the scent of citrus would be forever associated in his mind with the stench of shells.Īccording to family legend, his father had left France with thirty francs in one pocket and a vine stock in the other. In those days, he would often leaf through French newspapers at a 12,000-kilometer distance as he soaked in water infused with lemon peel. Lazare Lonsonier was reading in the bath when news of the outbreak of the First World War reached Chile. Emily Boyce is an editor and translator based in London. His two previous novels, Octavio's Journey and Black Sugar, have sold more than thirty thousand copies each in France and have been translated into several languages. Miguel Bonnefoy was born in France in 1986 to a Venezuelan mother and a Chilean father. The following is excerpted from Miguel Bonnefoy's newly translated novel, Heritage.
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