Juan José Delaney - The Two Coins

Timeto O'Connor has become old enough by now that he has begun to divest himself of property, possessions, habits and friends. Well, the absence of friends was always there, though in recent years he has rejected even the most meagre attention directed toward him. At night, every night, he goes to sleep with a coin on each eye, for a reason he has forgotten but of course we can remember - to pay Charon, the ferryman, who carries dead souls across the Styx and Acheron.

Until a short time before, the voice of the radio had accompanied his meals, but that old artifact also had been added to the sizeable list of objects in his life that had ceased to interest him.

Timeto isn't a miserable character, or even particularly upset or sad, but he is old, time, and knows that each day now is highly likely to be his last. Virtually the sole connection he retains to the outside world is his correspondence with Sinéad O’Reilly; for forty years now they have been corresponding, for reasons which were never quite clear and which seem to make even less sense as they are now both old, tending toward senile, and increasingly vague in their correspondence.

He knew, however, that Mrs. O’Reilly was the granddaughter of a first cousin of his mother who had died (God rest her soul), leaving him with the job of preserving that distant connection and, in time, with her descendants, an epistolary relationship that maintained his ties with the Green Isle, the land of his ancestors. And since Timoteo—the youngest of seven brothers—had always been easygoing by nature, the arrangement had continued unbroken. The fact that he was a dutiful son was attested to by his never having been married.

Juan José Delaney begins his story with the dutiful, detail-accumulating narrative of a much bigger work. His opening seems almost novellistic, filled as it is with the impressions of Timeto's home. We learn exactly what Timeto eats for dinner, and we learn the full and complete address of Sinéad O’Reilly. We learn a few of the movies Timeto likes, and as well as that a song. Delaney creates of Timeto's home a coherent physical space replete with details concerning objects, distinct action, memory, recollection, and connected thought. This is, then, a complete beginning to a larger piece.

But then the story shifts. Sinéad O’Reilly has posted not just a letter but also a package, which contains not only the gift of an hourglass but also has unfortunately become filled with spiders during the long journey between Ireland and Argentina.

It turned out that countless small spiders were spreading out over his skin in a kind of exotic dance. He brushed them off with his hands and as they fell to the floor he stepped on them repeatedly. As he did this, he noticed the straw stuffing that he had tossed on the floor: that was where the aggressive little insects had emerged from.

But this is a minor bother - Timeto kills the spiders and then cleans up their bodies. But the hint of something menacing remains in the air. Delaney ratchets up the intensity, shifting the narrative from a collection of spaced paragraphs lightly breezing their way through Timeto's evening, to a single large paragraph which spans almost the entire remainder of the story. This massive block of text suffocates as it goes on and on and on, and soon Timeto himself is feeling the effects:

He felt ill and, now experiencing lightheadedness, decided to stay seated right there, next to the cheese parings and the now empty wine glass. When he placed his hands on the table he saw that the age spots on his skin were surrounded by a trail of red blotches that stretched up his arms and that resembled mosquito bites, but whose size was far larger than is usual with that insect.

Timeto realises that sleep is perhaps his only option. As he climbs into bed (never forgetting the coins on his eyes, of course), Timeto knocks over the hourglass from Sinéad (now confirmed as a clearly symbolic gift), which shatters on the floorboards.

The next sequence becomes more effective if one recognises the references to Greek mythology and specifically Hades. Timeto doesn't know, but we should, that he has more than likely died. He follows the familiar journey that all men must take upon their death, which is to say they must pay passage across the river to the ferryman Charon with the coins upon his eyes, and then he must journey deeper into the unknown.

Delaney plays with the Greek mythology just enough that we can, if we familiar with it, recognise Charon and the rivers, but we can also, if we wish, suspect these visions as the hallucinations of a very sick man. After all, does Timeto not place the coins upon his eyes each night? Yes - which means, even if he has forgotten, that he once knew the story of Charon. In the vision, the rest of the journey (which is really quite involved) is much vaguer than the mythology described by the Greeks - there is, for example, no indication that Cerberus is guarding anything, and the judgement of Timeto does not come. It's a puzzle, then, allowing us to believe whichever we wish, or both, for as long as the story unspools. The conclusion gives us our answer, and it is what we (should) expect.

The Two Coins is an oddly effective bifurcated story. It's opening is quite reminiscent of those mild European novels that begin by enumerating the qualities of a man and then proceed to take him where they will. Delaney does this, yes, but Timeto's journey comes quicker than is expected, and lasts longer than the rest of the story. The connection to Greek mythology is strong without being necessary to appreciate what's happening, and the use of metaphor, while again quite strong, never swamps the story or overshadows the plot.

The Two Coins by Juan José Delaney is a short story from Words Without Borders' October 2010 edition, Beyond Borges: Argentina Now issue. All of the work reviewed is freely available online.

See Also

Other stories from the Words Without Borders October 2010 edition, Beyond Borges: Argentina Now issue include:
---Bettencourt, Lúcia - Borges's Secretary
---Bizzio, Sergio - Magic!
---Brau, Edgar - The Key
---Giardinelli, Mempo - God's Punishment
---Martínez, Guillermo - The “I Ching” and the Man of Papers
---Schewblin, Samanta - Preserves
---Shua, Ana María - Octavio the Invader

Also of interest: Index of short stories under review