It is summer in the global North and winter in the global South. Reason enough to bring summer and winter together in August's Literatur.Review and publish previously untranslated or unpublished stories from the North and South of our world.

Jessica Zafra, born in 1965, is one of the most famous authors in the Philippines. She writes columns for publications such as the New Yorker and Newsweek, primarily on cultural topics, is a film and literary critic, works as a television journalist and writes screenplays. The Age of Umbrage is her first novel, which was published in the Philippines in 2021 and reached its fifth edition in 2024. It was published in German by Transit Verlag in 2025.

She was very beautiful, so she always had her way. Throughout her childhood people told her parents that her beauty would bring them great fortune. To her parents, lowly bank employees, this meant she would become a beauty queen or a famous actress, and they would never have to work again. Her education was spotty—what was the point, she wouldn’t need it—and she was shockingly ignorant. Barely was she out of diapers when talent scouts came knocking. As a child she appeared in TV commercials. In her teens when she joined beauty pageants, the other girls fell silent and burst into tears, for how could they possibly compete with her? One fashion designer declared that she looked like Rita Hayworth—this was before the Internet, so no one could Google what he meant. She automatically qualified for the semifinals on the basis of sheer beauty, but she was lazy and petulant and made no secret of the fact that she thought everyone was beneath her. Her parents begged and wheedled to no avail, and soon she was a perennial runner-up and there were no more contests to enter.

A talent manager got her bit roles in a few movies, but she always came to the set late and couldn’t be bothered to remember her lines. Not even the casting couch, where she should’ve held sway, could make producers abandon their god, Profit. And then it was the Nineties and she was 25.

At a bar in Malate she was chatted up by a Saudi Arabian man in his late 30s. His Armani shirts, Ralph Lauren jeans, Gucci loafers and gleaming Rolex announced that he was the man she and her parents had been waiting for. A week later she was living in his suite at the Hotel Intercontinental, which soon became crowded with shopping bags from Manila’s most expensive stores. She only had to glance at a dress or a piece of jewelry, and he would buy it for her. She had found her calling, which was to be kept by a rich man. It was not as if she had negotiable skills. The objections of her parents, church-going people, were quickly overriden by gifts of large flasks of French perfume, a Louis Vuitton clutch bag, and the latest Nike sneakers for her younger siblings. Six months later, the Saudi Arabian bought her a condominium in a nice building in Legazpi Village—a studio, but it was just the beginning. When she had a child, they would move into a posh gated subdivision like Corinthian Gardens, where she would have maids and drivers to serve her every whim.

More from Jessica Zafra on Literatur.Review: Review of Jessica Zafra's novel ‘The Age of Umbrage’

Two months later, without a word of warning, he announced that he had to return to Jeddah to marry a proper Muslim girl. There was nothing he could do, his parents had commanded it. She railed and threatened to slit her wrists, but three days later he was gone.

So she went to Malate, to the bar where she’d met the Saudi Arabian, and got roaring drunk. By midnight she had kicked off her shoes and was dancing on top of a table surrounded by ogling, cheering men with their tongues hanging out. At 3am she passed out. When she woke up at noon she was lying naked in bed with a man who was also naked. He gazed at her, and said in a funny accent, “Would you like to marry me?”

She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before in her life. In fact she’d never seen him before in her life. He was pale and skinny, with a tuft of chest hair that was lighter than the dirty blond on his head. His face was long and thin and cut in half by a large, beaky nose. He had deep, moist eyes and the look of a benign parrot. “Who are you?” she yawned, stretching her limbs and flinching at the sunlight spilling into the gap between the curtains.

“Charles,” said the stranger, his smile revealing small, crooked teeth. He had a nice face. A kind face. The Saudi Arabian had been kind, until he wasn’t.

“Will you marry me?” he repeated.

What did she have to lose? “Okay.”

Charles was from Paris, which she’d heard of, in France, which she hadn’t. He was also rich, as confirmed by his wardrobe, possessions, and general demeanor. He was going back to Paris in a month, and he wanted her to come with him. His contacts at the French consulate would provide her visa, and they would get married before they left for Paris. She had seen Paris in a movie, it looked beautiful. She was tired of Manila, of her grasping parents and her friends who clung to their boyfriends extra-tightly whenever she was around—as if it were her fault that they wanted her. What was she supposed to do, make herself ugly? How would she even manage that?

The ceremony was performed by a judge, and the next day they flew to Paris.  She was disappointed that they sat in Economy, but only because she’d seen some well-dressed people through the curtain separating them from Business class.

In Paris they checked into a hotel with a view of the Seine, and he took her for a boat ride and pointed out the sights. She saw the Notre Dame Cathedral where the hunchback rang the bells. It looked old, why didn’t they build a new one? She saw the Louvre where kings once lived and thought how exhausting it must be to walk from one end of it to another. She was going to be a Parisian now.

Three days later they checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to Charles’s house. She clutched her husband’s arm in excitement.  Her new life stretched out before her, in one of those palatial houses that looked like wedding cake. She felt like a princess. Then the car went into a narrow street and the grand boulevard turned into a warren of gray streets of shops and newsstands.  They could’ve been in Manila with its congestion, garbage, and seedy characters on street corners waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting pedestrian. That was her old life, which she had happily left behind. And then Charles told the driver to stop in front of a grotty Chinese restaurant called Le Canard Chanceux.

“But I’m not hungry yet, it’s still early,” she told him.

“You’re so funny,” her husband said, but he wasn’t laughing. He got out of the car and started unloading their luggage. She hurried out to grab her new Louis Vuitton suitcase before he could set it down on the dirty concrete.  What was going on? Were they changing cars? Then the taxi drove away and Charles was carrying their suitcases to a door beside the Chinese restaurant. He punched some numbers into a box, and the door clicked open.

“Come on, what are you waiting for?” Charles asked her.

“I…I…” Her limbs had grown roots. The past weeks seemed like a distant dream. The world had thrown a glass of ice water at her face, jolting her awake.

“Perdita!”

I am Perdita Lozada Bouyer from the beautiful city of Manila!

Meekly she dragged her new suitcase through the door and up the dimly-lit stairs to her Parisian life.

Charles’s parents were rich, Charles was not. The French are not like the Filipinos, whose children are coddled long past childhood. Charles worked in an insurance company and lived in a two-bedroom apartment. One room was his bedroom and the other one was full of boxes and sporting equipment. The bathroom was tiny and contained a bathtub, washing machine, and dryer. The toilet was in a separate room, tinier, and had no sink. The hallways smelled of grease, ginger, and a spice that smelled like feet. Perdita wanted to weep. She wanted to turn around and go back to Manila,  to write off this entire episode as a drunken nightmare.  Just then Charles took her passport out of his coat and put it in a briefcase—“For safekeeping,” he said, as the combination lock clicked shut. The briefcase went into the back of the closet. For the foreseeable future she was stuck in the small apartment above a reeking restaurant in a dingy building in an unfashionable section of Paris.

Every morning Charles would go to work and she would stay in bed until she got hungry. Then she would throw on a coat and without bothering to comb her hair, go out to look for something to eat. Charles gave her an allowance, and they ate out every night so she didn’t have to cook. A woman from Ghana showed up every Wednesday to clean the apartment and do the laundry. The cleaning lady was black. Perdita had an irrational fear and suspicion of black people, unless they were basketball players and therefore rich. Rich people were automatically trustworthy. The first few times the cleaning lady came to the apartment Perdita kept a close eye on her, expecting her to make off with her Cartier watch or her Chanel bag. After a month or so she stopped caring. Let her take whatever she wanted, nothing mattered but to get out of there.

But where would she go? Each day as she walked aimlessly around the neighborhood she noted the looks she got from the men on the street. It was a look she had been getting since she was nine—surprise, then admiration which quickly turned into covetousness. Men wanted to possess her like a watch or a pair of sneakers. When she was younger, a mere two or three years ago, she had reveled in her power over them, kept them dangling until they were ready to tear their hearts out and offer her the bloody, throbbing mess. “I will die without you,” they said countless times, like the refrain of a bad pop song. When she agreed to be theirs their happiness was touching; she felt like a goddess bestowing her blessings on the hapless mortals. It was as if she had guzzled very expensive champagne straight from the bottle. And then, without warning, something would change. The men would wake up as if from a deep stupor and gradually shake off her enchantment. They still wanted her, but her power began to wane, and before long she would merely be a possession, like a watch or a pair of sneakers.

Perdita, who had never bothered to pay attention to her lessons in school, found herself thinking for the first time in her life. But for the circumstances in which she found herself, it was refreshing to discover her mind.  It did not require much thought to conclude that the solution to her problem was not another man: she would merely be switching jailers. There had been many reports on Philippine TV of Filipino migrants who had fled their abusive employers and foreign husbands (often they were the same person) and sought aid at the Philippine Embassy. She decided that that would be too embarrassing. Also, she had an inkling that going back to Manila would not  solve anything. She would merely return like a hamster to its wheel, running to stay in place. For now she would consider her stay in Paris a vacation from her life. Charles wasn’t so bad, he demanded little and wanted only to be liked.

She had been in Paris for a month when Charles came home one day in a high excitement. His mother had invited them to lunch the following day. Melanie, a professor at the University of Paris VII, was the most elegant, most accomplished woman in the world, he declared. Perdita should wear her best outfit and be her most charming self when she was presented to this paragon. They spent the entire evening practising how to say “Bonjour,” “Merci,” and “Madame” properly.

None of the men she had been involved with had ever introduced her to their mother. She understood that it was a momentous occasion, and despite her misgivings resolved to make a good impression.

The next morning she blow-dried her hair, applied make-up, and put on her most expensive dress, a Gucci print that made her look like a lascivious, exotic cat. Charles gave a horrified yelp and half-dragged her back to their room. He made her change to a very simple gray dress that made her feel like a nun, and had her wipe off most of her make-up. “Perfect,” he said, as he gazed upon her without desire. It was a disconcerting feeling.

Melanie lived alone in a seven-room apartment in Passy, near the Eiffel Tower. The walls were lined with paintings, photographs, and bookshelves crammed three deep with books. “Has she read all of these books?” Perdita asked Charles, who glared at her and looked away. Melanie was a short, dumpy woman with white hair in a bowl haircut. She wore a shapeless white smock and a brooch shaped like a bunch of grapes. On her tiny feet she wore ballet flats.

“So you’re Perdita,” she said in charmingly accented English. She touched her dry, papery cheeks to Perdita’s and made a kissing noise. Perdita’s carefully rehearsed “Bonjour” came out “Ben joo,” which made Charles wince.

“I have so many questions,” Melanie said as they sat at the ornate dining table. A grumpy looking Sri Lankan maid emerged from the kitchen with a large bowl of salad. “But I’m sure you have just as many questions, so you can go first.”

“This is a very big apartment,” Perdita said. It was full of old stuff, she could never understand why people hung on to their old things when they could afford to buy new ones.

“I inherited it from my parents,” Melanie said. “This building is over a hundred years old.”

“How many rooms?” Perdita ignored the warning on Charles’s face.

Melanie gave a start, as if it had never occurred to her to ask. “I don’t know,” she laughed. “Five?” She turned to the maid who was serving the salad. “Harshani?”

“Seven,” replied the maid, with the certainty of one who had to clean each of those seven rooms.

“Wow!” Perdita said. “It’s like a mansion.”

Her mother-in-law shrugged. “People used to have larger families. And my grandfather used to entertain frequently.”

“And you live here alone?” Charles stared at his salad as if it held several fat, writhing worms.

“Yes,” Melanie said.

“That’s silly, all this space going to waste. Why doesn’t Charles live here?”

“Darling, I prefer to live alone,” he coughed.

“My son needs his independence,” Melanie laughed.

“But you’re not alone now, we’re married,” Perdita declared.

Silence fell over the table like a dropped piano. Charles drained his wine glass and signalled the maid for a refill. It was going to be a long lunch.

After lunch Charles had to go back to the office, but his mother offered to take Perdita to the Louvre. Perdita accepted the invitation enthusiastically, for she thought the Louvre was a high-end shopping mall. Which, if you know history, was not altogether wrong. She liked the apartments of the emperor with the gorgeous furniture and shiny baubles. Old but classy, she thought. She would happily have whiled away the hours looking at the empress’s jewelry, but Melanie insisted on showing Perdita her favorite paintings: large tableaux of historical carnage, naked women with gigantic pink buttocks, and portraits of solemn-looking people gazing out of the frame as if they knew some terrible truth about her.

“Now this is my favorite painting,” Melanie declared. “I think it’s the most beautiful painting in the entire museum.” She put on her glasses to subject it to a thorough examination. Perdita yawned. It was a picture of a girl with an old-fashioned hairstyle, sewing something. “Look at the light, no one painted light the way Vermeer did,” Melanie said. She beckoned to Perdita to step closer to the frame. “Our little lacemaker is fully absorbed in her work. See how the objects in the foreground dissolve into patches of color. See how the red threads spill out like a stream, how she holds the threads tight in her fingers. Such a quiet, intimate evocation of ordinary life, elevating the mundane to poetry.”

Perdita saw none of these. She saw only a girl bent over her labor, which was probably boring and ill-paid. Why was the old woman even showing her this, did she want her to become a seamstress? She noticed the specks of dandruff on Melanie’s collar.

“What do you think?” Melanie said.

“Of what?”

“Of this painting.”

“It’s okay.”

“Okay?” Melanie made a choking noise. “Surely you must have an opinion.”

“It’s nice.” It wasn’t even that pretty, in her opinion. Blue was not her favorite color.

“That’s all?”

“Alright, I don’t get it,” Perdita said. “This painting, all these paintings. I don’t understand them.”

“You don’t like them?”

“No.” What a question. How could she like something she couldn’t understand?

That’s when Melanie offered her 500,000 francs to leave her son. Perdita knew little math, but she could convert foreign currencies to pesos.  Four million pesos, not bad. However, she had no intention of accepting it. Whether it was because she wanted more money, or because she didn’t want to leave her husband and start all over again, she didn’t know.

Melanie raised the offer to 750,000, then a million. “How much would it take for you to leave my son?”

Perhaps she was being contrary, or the old woman’s manner offended her. It could not be any great affection for Charles, whom she regarded as inoffensive furniture. For reasons that were unclear to her, she turned down the offer of money and freedom. She just felt like it.

In the days that followed she could not stop thinking about Melanie’s offer. The old woman’s assumption that she could be bought off made her angry, because it was true. Was this all she was then, an object to be traded?

Paris had flicked on a switch in Perdita’s underutilized brain. It turned out that she wasn’t stupid. Ignorant, yes, willfully so, lazy and self-entitled, but not stupid. For the first time she considered what would happen when she grew older, when her looks began to fade and she ran out of interested buyers. And she could not forget that girl in the little blue painting in the Louvre. What was the point of it? Why would anyone even paint her, much less want to look at her? Why did Melanie say it was beautiful?

In the tradition of French intellectuals she had never heard of, Perdita sat in cafés and pondered her existence over innumerable cups of coffee. When her coffee grew cold, smitten waiters would whisk it away and replace it with a fresh cup and a complimentary plate of cake. She accepted these tributes with barely a nod.

After a couple of weeks of ceaseless thought she decided it was time to do something. But how could she act when she didn’t even have papers confirming her identity? Her passport was locked in a briefcase in the back of the closet. When she asked Charles if she could have it, he pointed out that she had no use for it. He provided for all her needs, and if she had her passport she would probably lose it. Getting a replacement would be hell— she had no idea what the French bureaucracy was like.

That Tuesday morning as she stood at the window watching a van delivering vegetables to Le Canard Chanceux, an idea formed in her mind. She put a coat on over her housedress and went down to the Chinese restaurant.

A waiter was standing at the door, exploring the inside of his mouth with a toothpick. “Hi, I live upstairs. May I borrow a large knife, like a cleaver?” she asked him. The waiter gawked at the vision before him, then shrugged, dropped the toothpick on the floor and went back inside.

Next she addressed the cashier, a harridan immune to her beauty, who stared at her uncomprehendingly then waved her off as if she were a beggar. Finally she walked into the kitchen, where the cook was smoking a cigarette over a frothing cauldron of stew. “May I borrow a cleaver?” she said.

“What?” he said in Mandarin.

“The biggest knife you have,” she said, louder.

It was pointless, she had no common language with the people in the restaurant. Before long the cook was yelling at her to get out of his kitchen and she was yelling at him to listen to her. The commotion attracted the waiter and the cashier, who joined in the yelling, to the consternation and amusement of the customers who had begun trickling in for lunch.

There was a huge cleaver beside the sink, next to the carcass of a duck. Perdita picked it up and brandished it over her head, causing everyone to step back in alarm. “I’ll bring it back very soon,” she assured them. A woman shrieked. When Perdita walked to the door the people shrank away, clearing a path.

The briefcase was old and it did not take her long to hack it open. At last her passport was in her hands. Now she could take control of her life. But first she had to return the cleaver to the Chinese restaurant. Only then did she notice that a crowd had gathered on the street and the wail of a police siren was growing nearer.

“Come out with your hands up,” the French police announced over a megaphone.

“But I didn’t do anything!” she declared at the window. “I was going to return the cleaver!” She waved it in the air, causing the spectators to gasp. The cops ducked behind the police car and aimed their pistols at her. “Drop your weapon,” one said on the megaphone while pedestrians scampered on the street, right into the line of fire.

“I don’t understand French!” Perdita yelled, still brandishing the cleaver. A passing bicycle messenger rode straight into a newsstand, sending magazines flying. There was some frantic discussion among the cops, and then a red-headed cop took the megaphone. “Put the weapon down!” he said in halting Mandarin.

“I’m not Chinese!” she screamed. “I want to talk to someone who speaks English! A woman!”

There was more discussion among the cops, and then someone called the station to get help. Many minutes later a black policewoman appeared under her window. “What do you want?” she asked Perdita.

“Come upstairs so I can explain.”

“What about the weapon?”

Perdita dropped the cleaver, which clattered onto the sidewalk.

She told the policewoman her story from the beginning, from the beauty pageants and auditions to the Saudi Arabian man and then Charles and his snooty mother, and her passport locked away in the briefcase. The policewoman asked her if she needed their help to get away from her husband, and Perdita surprised herself by saying no.

She didn’t leave Charles after all. They stayed married for ten years. She learned to speak French. She got a job at a department store perfume counter. Eventually Charles left her for a Vietnamese woman he met on a business trip.

Perdita stayed on, for Paris had become her home. She got a tiny apartment in the Marais. Men still fell at her feet, and sometimes she went out on dates. Every so often she went to the Louvre to look at pictures. She was especially fond of The Lacemaker by Vermeer.