Uriel Quesada

For ten years, I haven’t been to the sea.  I want to see it so badly that this morning I begged my mother until I made her break down in tears.  I remember the sea, despite how long it’s been and how small I was then.  I can almost make out its rhythmic motion, its sound, as if it were chewing sand, its far boats in their rise and fall over the rumps of waves.

So begins Uriel Quesada’s “We Have Brought You the Sea,” the story of a speaker whose dying wish is to see the ocean one last time.  When the trip to the sea proves impossible, family members must find a way to bring the sea to the speaker.

Uriel Quesada is the author of Ese día de los temblores, in which this story is originally published as “Te hemos traido el mar.”  He is also the winner of an essay contest for his work on Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House.  “We Have Brought You the Sea” is translated by the editor of Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Barbara Ras.

Photo Credit: World Wide Gifts / CC BY-SA 2.0
Source: Ras, Barbara, ed. Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts, 1994.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2015 at 8:00 am. It is filed under Costa Rica, Creative Culture, Nature, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.