The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy Read online

  Edited and translated by

  Margaret Jull Costa and Annella McDermott

  THE EDITORS

  Margaret Jull Costa has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, amongst them Bernardo Atxaga, Mario de Si-Carneiro, Ramon del Valle-Inclan, Carmen Martin Gaite and Luisa Valenzuela. She was joint-winner of the Portuguese Translation Prize in 1992 for her translation of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and, with Javier Marias, she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White.

  Annella McDermott is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Previous translations include a biography of Simon Bolivar and The World of Mestre Tamoda by the Angolan novelist Uanhenga Xitu.

  The editors would like to thank the following for their generous help and advice on various aspects of the anthology: Bernardo Axtaga, Steve Howell, Javier Marias, Antonio Martin, Pilar O'Prey, Ben Sherriff and Palmira Sullivan.

  Introduction 7

  Bernardo Atxaga An Exposition of Canon Lizardi's Letter 11

  Max Aub The Raincoat 27

  Gustavo Adolfo Becquer The Kiss 39

  Juan Benet Fables 9, 10 and 10a 53

  Juan Benet The Catalyst 59

  Pere Calders The Desert 67

  Noel Claraso Beyond Death 73

  Isabel del Rio No one 91

  Isabel del Rio The Key 99

  Isabel del Rio Countdown 103

  Pilar Diaz-Mas The Little Girl Who Had No Wings 107

  Rafael Dieste Concerning the Death of Bieito 115

  Wenceslao Fernandez Florez How My Six Cats Died 119

  Anxel Fole How the Tailor Bieito Returned to Hell 127

  Pere Gimferrer A Face 133

  Juan Goytisolo The Stork-men 135

  Alberto Insua The Shooting Gallery 143

  Julio Llamazares The Yellow Rain 149

  Javier Marias Gualta 157

  Eduardo Mendoza No News from Gurb 165

  Jose Maria Merino The Companion 179

  Jose Maria Merino The Lost Traveller 187

  Juan Jose Millis The One Where She Tells Him A Story 201

  Quirn Month Family Life 207

  Quim Monzo Gregor 219

  Carlos Edmundo de Ory The Preacher 225

  Emilia Pardo Bazin The Woman Who Came Back To Life 231

  Joan Perucho The Holocanth 237

  Merce Rodoreda My Cristina 241

  Alfonso Sastre From Exile 251

  Ramon J. Sender Cervantes' Chickens 263

  Jose Angel Valente The Condemned Man 305

  Ramon del Valle-Inclan My Sister Antonia 307

  Enrique Vila-Matas In Search of the Electrifying Double Act 325

  Alonso Zamora Vicente A Poor Man 341

  For this anthology, we based our choice of stories (including four extracts from longer works) on a broad definition of fantasy, as being any fiction depicting events which depart from what is possible or plausible in reality. We were looking too for that frisson one gets from the best literary fantasy, be it of fear, surprise, shock or pleasure. Such stories offer the reader new perspectives on reality by defamiliarising the familiar.

  As well as major contemporary writers, such as Bernardo Atxaga, Juan Benet, Juan Goytisolo and Javier Marias (all of whom are available in English translation), and classics, such as Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Emilia Pardo Bazan and Ramon del Valle-Inclan (either patchily translated or with translations long out of print), we have included writers who, though widely read in Spain, are entirely unknown to an Englishreading public.We also discovered some excellent writers, whose books were much read in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, but whose names are now little known even there, for example, Noel Claraso, Wenceslao Fernandez Florez and Alberto Insua. Inevitably, there are omissions - because of personal taste and the inevitable limitations of any anthology - but in the case of two fine Galician writers of fantasy, Alvaro Cunqueiro and Xose Luis Mendez Ferrin, it is because a number of their stories are, gratifyingly, already available in English translation.

  Both Cunqueiro and Ferrin (like Dieste and Fole in this anthology) write in Galician, one of Spain's four official languages. Other stories included here were originally written in Basque (Bernardo Atxaga), Catalan (Pere Calders, Pere Gimferrer, Quim Monzo, Joan Perucho and Merce Rodoreda), and the remainder in Castilian. Galicia is a region particularly rich in fantasy, a land of storytelling and superstition (see Valle-Inclan's atmospheric tale `My sister Antonia'). Writers like Dieste and Fole were keen collectors of oral folk tales and drew on this fertile source in their own writing.

  Folk tales, fairy tales and ghost stories have, of course, been around for centuries and, in Spain, in the late medieval period, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these provided the literary bedrock of the innumerable works of literature dealing with miraculous and supernatural events. However, one would hesitate to use the term `fantasy' to describe such works, because then both author and reader inhabited a world of religious belief in which the supernatural and the miraculous were considered part of reality. Spanish fantasy really came into its own in the mid-nineteenth-century Romantic period and continued to flourish up to the 1930s, under the influence of such movements as Symbolism, Expressionism and Surrealism, all of which posed a challenge to rationalism and realism. However, while there were a few notable examples of fantasy literature in the early post-Civil War period down to the late 1950s, it was common for writers, particularly those opposed to the Franco regime, to feel that realism was the more appropriate mode to deal with the situation in Spain at the time. It is only since the 1960s and, in particular, since Franco's death in 1975, that Spanish writers have felt confident that fantasy would not be dismissed as mere escapism. This reacceptance of fantasy as a valid literary genre might be taken as a healthy sign of Spain's reintegration into the European mainstream.

  Other writers, of course, used and still use fantasy as a way of approaching reality from a metaphorical or symbolic angle. Amongst the stories here, Pilar Diaz-Mas' tale of a wingless child in a world of bird-people becomes a reflection both on disability and on the ambiguous nature of motherhood; Juan Goytisolo's cobbler, on the other hand, sprouts wings in order to win back his wife, and the story can be read as a meditation on the human cost of emigration; in his highly original story, Alfonso Sastre probes another of the key Spanish experiences of this century, political exile; and Julio Llamazares summons up the haunted landscape of one of the many deserted villages in an economically threatened rural Spain. Fantasy can also provide the reader with a `Martian' view of social and religious rituals, literally Martian in the case of Eduardo Mendoza's `No News from Gurb' and, more obliquely, in Quim Monzo's `Family Life'.

  Themes in this anthology include doppelgangers, people returning from the dead or being buried alive, the transmigration of souls, people metamorphosing into other creatures, inanimate objects becoming invested with human powers or emotions, and fiction shading into reality. All these themes touch on deep-seated fears and concerns - our fear of death and what, if anything, lies beyond it, what it is that makes us human, and the nature of time. Fantasy provides writer and reader with a way of approaching these issues, for example, Pardo Bazan's `woman who came back to life' is greeted by her loved ones not with joy but with horror; in Javier Marias' darkly comic `Gualta', the protagonist entirely loses his sense of identity when confronted by a man identical to himself; the anonymous narrator of Alonso Zamora Vicente's `A Poor Man' slips in and out of his body and into another's as if souls were fitted with a revolving door. />
  There is a fascination, too, with the narrow line that divides us from our animal selves. People become transformed into other creatures for all kinds of reasons: in order to escape the cruelty of their fellow man (Bernardo Atxaga's `An Exposition of Canon Lizardi's Letter' and Jose Angel Valente's `The Condemned Man'); as part of a compact with the Devil (Valle-Inclan's `My Sister Antonia'); for possibly satirical motives (Sender's `Cervantes' Chickens'); and, in Monzo's story `Gregor', in a reversal of Kafka's Metamorphosis.

  Fantasy can also convey that deeply buried sense one has of an animistic universe, in which houses harbour grudges and wreak a terrible revenge (Enrique Vila-Matas), where statues rise up to defend their long dead spouses (Gustavo Adolfo Becquer) and where glass table tops become home to disembodied faces (Pere Gimferrer). As is only fitting, literary fantasy also deals with our relationship with fiction itself and the power of the imagination to alter reality, eerily blurring fact with fiction (Jose Maria Merino's `The Lost Traveller' and Juan Jose Millis' `The One Where She Tells Him a Story'). Part of the enjoyment of reading literary fantasy often comes from recognition of familiar themes and of writers' ingenious variations on those themes. In selecting stories that we ourselves enjoyed, we hope also to have given some idea of the variety of themes and styles in Spanish literary fantasy over the last two hundred years.

  The letter in question covers eleven sheets of quarto paper, parts of which have been rendered illegible by the many years it lay forgotten in a damp cellar, for it was never sent. The first sheet, the one in direct contact with the floor, is in a particularly parlous state and so badly stained that one can scarcely make out the canon's opening words at all. The rest, with the exception of one or two lines on the upper part of each sheet, is in an excellent state of preservation.

  Although undated, we can deduce that the letter was written in 1903 since, in the closing words that immediately precede the signature, the author states that he has been in Obaba for three years and, at least according to the cleric who now holds the post, everything seems to indicate that Canon Lizardi took over the rectorship of the place around the turn of the century.

  He was clearly a cultivated man, judging by the elegant, baroque calligraphy and the periphrastic style laden with similes and citations he uses to broach the delicate matter that first caused him to take up his pen. The most likely hypothesis is that he was a Jesuit who, having left his order, opted for ordinary parish work.

  As regards the addressee, he was doubtless an old friend or acquaintance, even though, as mentioned earlier, the poor condition of the first page does not permit us to ascertain that person's name and circumstances. Nonetheless, we feel justified in assuming that he was a person of considerable ecclesiastical authority, capable of acting as guide or even teacher in the very difficult situation prevailing in Obaba at the time, if one is to believe the events described in the letter. One should not forget either that Lizardi is writing to him in a spirit of confession and his tone throughout is that of a frightened man in need of the somewhat sad consolation of a superior.

  On the first page, according to the little that one can read at the bottom, Lizardi writes of the `grief paralysing him at that moment and describes himself as feeling `unfitted to the test'. Those few scant words allow us to place in context the story that the canon unfolds over the subsequent ten pages and prevent us being misled by the circuitous, circumlocutory style. Let us look now at the form the text referred to at the very start of the letter might have taken. This is what Lizardi writes on the second page, which I transcribe word for word.

  ... but first, dear friend, allow me to speak briefly of the stars, for it is in astronomy books that one finds the best descriptions of this daily wandering, this mysterious process of living which no metaphor can adequately encompass. According to the followers of Laplace, our universe was born out of the destruction of a vast ball or nucleus drifting through space, drifting alone, moreover, with only the Creator for company, the Creator who made everything and is in the origin of all things; and out of that destruction, they say, came stars, planets and asteroids, all fragments of that one lump of matter, all expelled from their first home and doomed ever after to distance and separation.

  Those, like myself, who are sufficiently advanced in years to be able to discern that dark frontier of which Solinus speaks, feel cast down by the description science so coldly sets before us. For, looking back, we cannot see the world that once enwrapped us like a cloak about a newborn babe. That world is no longer with us and because of that we are bereft of all the beloved people who helped us take our first steps. At least I am. My mother died fifteen years ago and two years ago the sister who shared my house with me died too. And of my only brother, who left to travel overseas whilst still only an adolescent, I know nothing. And you, dear friend, you yourself are far away; at a time when I need you so, you too are far away.

  This paragraph is followed by a few barely legible lines which, as far as I can make out, refer to the psalm in which the Hebrews in exile from Zion bemoan their fate. Then, on the third page, the canon concludes his long introduction and embarks on the central theme of his letter:

  ... for you know as well as I, that life pounds us with the relentlessness and force of the ocean wave upon the rocks. But I am straying from my subject and I can imagine you growing impatient and asking yourself what is it exactly that troubles me, what lies behind all these complaints and preambles of mine. For I well remember how restless and passionate you were and how you hated procrastination. But remember too my weakness for rhetoric and forgive me: I will now explain the events that have led to my writing this letter. I hope with all my heart that you will listen to what I have to say with an open mind and ponder as you do so the lament in Ecclesiastes: 'Vae soli!' Yes, the fate of a man alone is a most bitter one, even more so if that man, like the last mosquitoes of summer, can barely stagger to his feet and can only totter through what little remains of his life. But enough of my ills; I will turn my attention to the events I promised to recount to you.

  Nine months ago last January, an eleven-year-old boy disappeared into the Obaba woods, for ever, as we now know. At first, no one was much concerned by his absence, since Javier - that was the boy's name, that of our most beloved martyr - had been in the habit of running away from home and remaining in the woods for days on end. In that sense he was special and his escapes bore no resemblance to the tantrums that, at some point in their lives, drive all boys to run away from home; like that time you and I, in protest at an unjust punishment at school, escaped the watchful eyes of our parents and spent the night out in the open, hidden in a maize field ... but, as I said, this was not the case with Javier.

  I should at this point explain that Javier was of unknown parentage or, to use the mocking phrase so often used here to describe him, `born on the wrong side of the blanket'. For that reason he lived at the inn in Obaba, where he was fed and clothed in exchange for the silver coins furnished to the innkeepers - vox populi dixit - by his true progenitors.

  It is not my intention in this letter to clear up the mystery of the poor boy's continual flights, but I am sure Javier's behaviour was ruled by the same instinct that drives a dying dog to flee its masters and head for the snowy mountain slopes. It is there, sharing as he does the same origins as the wolves, that he will find his real brothers, his true family. In just the same way, I believe, Javier went off to the woods in search of the love his guardians failed to give him at home, and I have some reason to think that it was then, when he was walking alone amongst the trees and the ferns, that he felt happiest.

  Hardly anyone noticed Javier's absences, hardly anyone sighed or suffered over them, not even the people who looked after him. With the cruelty one tends to find amongst the ill-read, they washed their hands of him saying that `he would come back when he was good and hungry'. In fact, only I and one other person bothered to search for him, that other person being Matias, an old man who, having been born outside of Obaba,
also lived at the inn.

  The last time Javier disappeared was different, though, for so fierce was my insistence that they look for him, a whole gang of men got together to form a search party. But, as I said before, nine months have now passed and poor Javier has still not reappeared. There is, therefore, no hope now of him returning.

  Consider, dear friend, the tender hearts of children and the innocence in which, being beloved of God, they always act. For that is how our children are in Obaba and it gives one joy to see them always together, always running around, indeed, running around the church itself, for they are convinced that if they run round it eleven times in succession the gargoyle on the tower will burst into song. And when they see that, despite all their efforts, it still refuses to sing, they do not lose hope but attribute the failure to an error in their counting or to the speed with which they ran, and they persevere in their enterprise.

  Javier, however, never joined in, neither then nor at any other time. He lived alongside them, but apart. The reasons for his avoidance of them lay perhaps in his character, too serious and silent for his age. Perhaps too it was his fear of their mockery, for a purple stain covered half his face, considerably disfiguring him. Whatever the reason, the conclusion ...

  The third page ends there. Unfortunately the top of the following page, page four, is badly affected by mould and none of my efforts to clean it up have met with much success. I have only been able to salvage a couple of lines.

  Reading them, one has the impression that Canon Lizardi has once more abandoned the story and returned to the sad reflections of the beginning of the letter. At least so I deduce from the presence there of a word like `santateresa', the local word for the praying mantis, an insect which, according to the nature guide I consulted, is unique in the natural world for the way in which it torments its victims. The author of the guide comments: `It devours them slowly, taking care not to let them die at once, as if its real hunger were for torture not for food.'