VERSIÓN INGLESA DE "AUDI 100".

AUDI 100
Translation: Joaquín Bueno

Manuel Vilas bought himself a third-hand Audi, an Audi 100,
and he drove it at 200 on the Barcelona expressway,
and then he had to pay a toll, and he wasn't even going anywhere.
He'd stare at his Audi on Sunday afternoons,
in the middle of a field, in the middle of the desert.
In the great desert that surrounds the city of Zaragoza,
sterile and sour like a mouthful of enriched uranium.
He'd stare at the wheels and kick them with his pointy boots,
and he thought they were really hard, filled with toughened air,
and the thing is, he'd just been at a gas station called "El Cid,"
and he'd inflated them, that powerful whistling of the valves,
and he'd stared at the design of the tires, labyrinthine and abstract like the
lines
of a hand, and he looked at his hand, rough skin exalted
in the middle of nowhere, and he'd replaced
the Audi's old cassette player with a Pioneer CD player,
with six speakers, 800 euros at Carrefour,
and he put Lou Reed in the deck, and good, very good,
he put in Street Hassle, and good, good, very good, he said again,
this was everything, the Audio 100, blackened life, the outskirts of
a village
named Bujaraloz, the Barcelona expressway, infinite trucks,
an Osborne bull billboard near Pina, Sunday, sour and crucified,
and Lou Reed playing nowhere, in the heavenly desert,
800 euros turned into the most beautiful scream on Earth,
and none of the angels descending from heaven, and Manuel Vilas
--servant of nothingness, smoking, sterile, reasoning, moaning--,
whistled beneath the harsh sun, scattered, the drunken sun,
and he kicked the wheels and the wheels
kicked back, and that was funny,
and he thought of the glove compartment, and he opened it and looked at the
papers,
and read his own name, and opened the trunk, and it seemed to him that there was
a ton of space to keep things, and that, suddenly, made him
completely happy.