Things Look Different in the Light and Other Stories
272
Things Look Different in the Light and Other Stories
272eBook
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Overview
Like Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, Medardo Fraile is a chronicler of the minor tragedies and triumphs of ordinary life, and each short tale opens up an entire exquisite world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782270966 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2014 |
| Series: | Pushkin Collection |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
He died in 2013
Read an Excerpt
Things Look Different in the Light
And Other Stories
By Medardo Fraile, Margaret Jull Costa
Steerforth Press
Copyright © 2014 Estate of Medardo FraileAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908968-18-0
CHAPTER 1
BERTA'S PRESENCE
It was Lupita's first birthday. Lupita was an amorphous, attractive being, at once yielding and terrible, whom no one had ever seen in a theatre, a cinema or a café, or even strolling down the street. But she was plotting in silence. She imagined great things engaged in vigorous movement and was convinced that she would triumph. She smelt delicious in her night attire. She smelt like a little girl about to turn one. Her parents had invited their friends over for a bite to eat. "Do come. It's Lupita's first birthday."
Jacobo rang the bell and heard familiar voices inside. When the door opened, he said loudly, "Where's Lupita? Where's that little rascal?" And the child appeared, squirming about in her mother's arms, her small body erect, excited, attentive. Lupita, in her own strange, personal language had managed to convey to her mother the idea of tying two small pink bows — like wide-set miniature horns — in her sparse, perfumed hair. It hadn't been her mother's doing at all. The suggestion had come from Lupita herself, aware of her charms and her flaws. "So what have you got to say for yourself, then, eh? What has Señorita Lupe got to say for herself?" And Jacobo produced a little box of sweets from his pocket and showed it to her. "Baaa!" said Lupita joyfully, showing the visitor her pink uvula and waving her arms and legs about as if fearlessly leaping over each "a" she uttered. She liked Jacobo.
A bottle on the table reflected the branches of the chestnut tree outside the window It was a warm evening, the windows open, full of the distant murmurs and melodies set in motion by the departing sun. One of those evenings on which the scented, rustling countryside suddenly enters the city, as if the countryside had left itself behind for a few hours in order to set the city-dweller humming a tune, whether at a birthday party, in a bar or at home. One of those evenings when the factory siren sounds like the moan of a large, friendly animal gone astray and where the frank, rustic kisses of the soldier and his sweetheart sound like pebbles in a stream. One of those evenings of high, long, tenuous mists, so that when the first stars come out, they will not appear too naked.
Every now and then, the doorbell rang and new friends came into the room. The engaged couple, bound together by a prickly sweetness, the wounding words recently and rapidly spoken on the landing outside not yet forgotten and transmuted instead into delicate social irony. The tall friend, in a dark, striped suit, who keeps looking at his watch only immediately to forget what it said, with the look of a man who has left some poor girl standing on a corner. The newlyweds, inured by now to everyone's jokes, strolling in as if fresh from a gentle walk, he in an immaculate shirt and she full of solicitous gestures. The desperate young woman, who can never persuade her fiancé to accompany her on visits, whose stockings always bag slightly and who has one permanently rebellious lock of hair. The sporty friend, always fresh from the shower, slightly distant and smiling and as if fearful that the great lighthouse of his chest might go out. And Berta, the outsider, the surprise, the one they had not expected to come.
They all got up again when Berta arrived. She greeted everyone — Jacobo rather coolly — and then immediately turned all her words and attention to Lupita. "Look, Lupita, I've bought you some earrings. Do you like them?" Jacobo was put out. He had been just about to speak to Lupita when Berta arrived. He had gone over to her, and Lupita was already looking at him. He was about to say: "Aren't you getting old! One year old already!" But when he heard Berta speak, his words seemed pointless and unamusing. They seemed hollow and, therefore, entirely dependent on intonation and timing. He allowed them to die on his lips, and that death was an almost insuperable obstacle to all the other things he subsequently said and thought.
Jacobo knew how difficult it was to speak to children. You had to have something of the lion-tamer about you or else limitless wit and spontaneity. Children demand a lot of those who speak to them and, unless they instantly succumb to the charm of a phrase, they regard their interlocutor circumspectly and at times harshly. They can tell when the words are sincere and when they falter in any way. They cry in terror at clumsy words or words full of twisted intentions or falsehood. And Jacobo, who had, on occasions, spoken to children quite successfully, fell silent, profoundly silent, listening to the river of efficacious words that flowed from Berta to Lupita.
That was one of Berta's qualities, knowing how to talk to children. With her subtle, imaginative intonation, Berta came out with the most wonderful things. Children stood amazed as they — intently, pleasurably — followed the thread of her voice. It was as if they had before them a fine-feathered, perfumed bird with an attractive, kaleidoscopic throat, like a grotto full of stories and legends. And Berta did not change her voice in the least; she was just herself. That voice — thought Jacobo — emerged from clean, colourful depths; it bubbled gently and was, like water, sonorous and fresh, rich and profound. More than that, Berta knew the language of children, knew which syllables to cut out and in what innocent moulds to reshape words so that they could be understood. How could one speak to them using the serious, rule-bound words used by grown-ups, words that have been through the hard school of Grammar?
"So, Berta, what are you doing here? What happened?"
And while Berta was explaining that she was spending a few days in Madrid before leaving again for Seville, where she had been sent by her company, Lupita was momentarily ignored and she remembered that, before Berta had arrived, someone else had been about to speak to her. And she turned her head, looking at everyone there, one by one, until she found him: Jacobo. Eyes wide, gaze fixed on him, she urged him to say his sentence. Jacobo noticed and grew still more inhibited. For her part, Lupita's mother, smiling sweetly, was following the direction of her little girl's eyes. Lupita even uttered the usual password: "Baaa!" But Jacobo, who, when he arrived, had managed some quite acceptable phrases, now nervously crossed his legs, stared into his glass of wine or grimly studied a painting on the wall, or else shot a fleeting glance, which he intended to appear casual, at a newspaper or some other object. Lupita felt suspicious, and her gaze grew more searching and persistent. What a strange man. It was so hard to know what he was thinking.
Jacobo refused, after much hesitation, to compete with Berta. As everyone there could see, her presence only increased his sense of his own absurdity, and so he tried hard to make a good impression. Not that he made much of an impression with his familiar long silences, his all-consuming shyness that showed itself in the form of an affected seriousness and slightly tactless, brusque remarks. He could never, with any naturalness, manage those strange verbal deviations of Berta's, those clean leaps from one word to another. "How's my little babbler, my baboon, my bouncing bean!" And it worked perfectly. Lupita — like all babies — did babble and could certainly shriek like a baboon and, at certain moments, she actually did resemble one of those neat little butter beans, all creamy and soft.
"What's so fascinating aboutJacobo, sweetie? Why do you keep looking at him like that?" said Lupita's mother.
"Yes, she won't take her eyes off him," said the others.
And Jacobo gave Lupita a faint smile, accompanied by a determined, almost aggressive look that asked the usual nonsense one asks of children. But his shyness, crouching in his eyes like two dark dots, censured the words it occurred to him to say, pursued and erased them, leaving only a charmless, bitter void. There was a dense silence. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, for Jacobo to speak to Lupita. Half hidden in a corner, Berta was watching and smiling imperceptibly, curious and silent.
"It's awfully hot, don't you think?" he said.
And he said this as a warning to the others. He meant to say: "Yes, it's true, children do sometimes stare insistently at some grown-up, it's a habit they have, but we shouldn't pay them too much attention, we should simply talk about our own affairs. And it is awfully hot today Unusual for the time of year. That's what we should be talking about."
"Baaa!" cried Lupita defiantly
"It's usually getting cooler by now."
"Say something to the child! Can't you see she's looking at you?"
Yes, the moment had arrived. The silence and the expectation thickened. Eyes flicked fromJacobo to Lupita and back again. Slowly and terribly shyly, almost regretfully, Jacobo finally managed to say:
"Hello! How are you? Why are you looking at me like that? What's up? What do you want? What did I do?"
As if he were talking to a moneylender.
"What do you think she wants? Say something funny, man. Pay her some attention. That's what you want, isn't it, Lupita?"
Lupita burst into tears. She had seen the scowling black cloud advancing towards her across the room. And she hadn't wanted things to go that far. The words had left a dramatic aftertaste in the air, threatening and exciting. Lupita was crying because she had ventured innocently into unknown territory, where the somewhat stiff words exuded a certain bitterness, and where situations crystallized into impossible shapes. The daylight blinked, and the room filled with loud, laborious, rhythmical words of consolation. Lupita pouted and sobbed and wept bitterly. It lasted a long time.
The evening succumbed meekly. The clock struck the hour. Jacobo made his excuses, saying that he was expected elsewhere, then got up and left. He was walking slowly down the street, not sure where he was going. It felt slightly chilly. He was thinking about Berta, to whom he still felt attracted, about Lupita, so friendly and funny and lovely, and about his friends, his old friends. How nice it would have been to have stayed with them to the end.
CHAPTER 2WHAT'S GOING ON IN THAT HEAD OF YOURS?
Paco El Largo was my best friend at the time. The one I saw most often. I had another friend, too, who was a coal-man. But I never really knew what his face was like, still less what he thought. We used to chat in the coal-yard where he worked, and my impression was that he was rather fair-skinned. I must have seen him dozens of times outside of work, but I never knew it was him; and he never said hello either. Through such friends, however, I acquired some very picturesque acquaintances, people I don't even give the time of day to now. We had fun, even when we didn't have a penny to our names. Paco, especially, knew a lot of people and, now and then, thanks to him, we'd organize a really good shindig, sometimes even with a few Gypsy musicians laid on.
Family life and the family house — always dimly lit, with the shutters half closed — bored me rigid, and when it came to choosing between spending the evening with my family or going out on a spree with a friend, it was hardly a difficult choice to make. It was my mother, I think, who first started nagging me — when I was alone with her and my father and at mealtimes — about my friends and, even more, about my future.
As I understood it, my life was deemed to have taken a displeasing and, needless to say, suspect turn. It was summer — which we were spending at home — and I realized that they were all determined to put a stop to my propensity for idleness. My father, it seems, had never been like that — like me that is — and this, it seems, was accepted by everyone as an irrefutable argument. My father was also shorter than me, despite being older, and yet it would never have occurred to me to reproach him for his lack of height. But it would have occurred to them. They disapproved of any aspect of myself that did not resemble him. They wanted me to be a sort of second edition of my father.
All this happened in the year when my uncle Alberto decided that I should apply myself to my studies. Frankly, I had absolutely no desire to pick up a book, but my uncle had got it into his head that the phrenological characteristics of my frontal bone indicated a studious turn of mind. My uncle Alberto was — and still is — a young man; he had three university degrees, was keen on trout-fishing and going out on the town at night, plus he was my father's favourite brother, and all these factors weighed so heavily in his favour that they proved very hard to resist, given that everything was now focused on making an honest man of me.
One day, he called me into his office.
"My dear nephew, you are probably thinking, 'What on earth does my uncle Alberto want with me?'"
I looked at him. I didn't think him capable of setting a trap. He talked a great deal, and what impressed me — and this was doubtless done for dramatic effect — was that he stood right next to the portrait of my grandfather. He put his case to me almost casually, as if it were as simple a matter as putting stamps on a letter. My grandfather — long since dead — agreed with everything he said. I don't recall ever in my life having seen a portrait take such an active role in a perfectly ordinary conversation as that portrait of my grandfather, moving his eyes and lips and generally demonstrating his agreement in such a variety of ways. At the time, such things made a great impression on me. Nevertheless, I said what I thought, I didn't hold back. I told him that I would much prefer, for example, to do what my friend Paco el Largo had done.
"And what did your friend Paco el Largo do?" asked my uncle.
"He got a job in that new hotel on the Gran Via. And this summer he's going to work on La Toja."
"Does he speak any languages?"
"Sort of."
"I see."
"You know, just what he learnt at school."
"And where does he work? In reception?"
"No, he's a waiter."
I proved easy enough to persuade. I was still pretty naive at the time. My uncle said the most amazing things about me and seasoned the dish with tales of fishing. He gave a nod to Socrates with one of his jokes about Pliny and fishing for trout with hemlock. He said that hemlock resembled parsley. The result was that when I left his office, I started turning the idea over in my mind.
"I could be a gentleman and not like Paco el Largo. After all, a university degree is a university degree. My uncle's quite right. Not everyone is as intelligent as me! And yet I ..."
These thoughts carried me to the University It was a curious world full of very pompous people, whom one gradually got used to. The girls weren't like that. They were ordinary and pretty and often burst into tears. Generally speaking, the girls led a life of leisure in the afternoons, quite different from ours. We gave ourselves over to scepticism, getting chilled to the bone and talking. Many of us spent the afternoons recovering from colds. Everyone hated the textbooks. As an antidote, they looked up the catalogue numbers of French novels to collect from the same pharmacy, namely, the library Some people were studying English and they would gaze out of the windows in the direction of the Atlantic. The big windows were splendid, providing excellent views of the Guadarrama Mountains and of El Pardo, and the mornings were the colour of rabbits or wild boar. Some students did nothing but study; others devoted themselves to art. I particularly noticed the sculptors and sculptresses. They were never splattered with clay nor did they have the hands of stonecutters. I found that odd. But then they were only beginners.
My uncle asked me how things were going and, as I was telling him, he offered me a cigarette, and I noticed that his hand was trembling. He didn't look well, and yet he wasn't ill: it was those wild nights on the town. Suddenly, he raised his eyebrows and said:
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Things Look Different in the Light by Medardo Fraile, Margaret Jull Costa. Copyright © 2014 Estate of Medardo Fraile. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, 9,Berta's Presence, 17,
What's Going On in That Head of Yours?, 25,
A Shirt, 34,
Typist or Queen, 39,
Child's Play, 47,
Things Look Different in the Light, 55,
The Cashier, 64,
The Album, 74,
The Lemon Drop, 78,
That Novel, 91,
Restless Eyes, 97,
The Letter, 106,
Nala and Damayanti, 113,
Reparation, 120,
Full stop, 130,
The Car, 138,
Senor Otaola, Natural Sciences, 143,
The Sea, 148,
Nelson Street. Cul-de-Sac, 156,
Cloti, 162,
Mistaken Identities, 167,
The Bookstall, 174,
The Armchair, 179,
Old Man Drive, 186,
Last Rites, 191,
Play It Again, Sam, 196,
The Bench, 200,
An Episode from National History, 204,
The Last Shout, 211,
Translator's Acknowledgements, 219,
Dates and Places of First Publication, 221,