Medardo Fraile: Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories

But the stories suggest and offer a different currency, and it’s typical of Fraile that Rosita, in ‘The Cashier’, takes the money in the café bar she works in and at the same time records, in a story about the real worth of the stories we tell about ourselves and others, “the hidden depths and ways of the regular customers” or that Luis, in ‘That Novel’, knows he’s read a novel in which the whole of life is held, “in richer, livelier and more memorable form” than life really is, but can’t remember the name of it, and the story’s bathetic and funny ending is both a denial of satisfaction and a satisfaction in itself. In these stories, like in the shining ‘Reparation’ Fraile calls for the recognition of a different kind of accountability. A man’s wife has died. In their lifetime, the man and his wife were robbed of their only substantial income. At her death the man decides to become a beggar and at its end the story calculates what is owed the man, but so exactly that the act of the story becomes a reparation in itself which resonates across all the losses, all the disappointments.

In Fraile’s eyes, “the mornings were the colour of rabbits or wild boar.” “The road was a strange, sleeping, endless blue vein.” Miracles are an everyday matter here and the everyday so surreal that, as the narrator of ‘Play it Again, Sam’ suggests, why would we need cinema when the mundane is so shocking a surreality? But the real miracle in this work is the revelation of the worth, not of strangeness, but of ordinariness. “Was I the boy who was going to write Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy ?” the narrator of the bittersweet ‘The Lemon Drop’ says. “Something very valuable was cut short. And something perhaps far more ordinary was set in motion.”

In these robust, funny, transformatory stories, Medardo Fraile, a master of the short story form, sets the ordinary alight; he graces it with an enlightening shift of vision like the kicker in a cocktail, and with an energy that’s a repeating efflorescence. He reveals the dust of us as really worth something. He questions not just how we’re seen and how we see, but what books are for — books like the ones on that bookstall, so wet and weather-ruined that they’ve stuck to the planks of the stall and have to be prised off, prised open. Inside, “those books contained the tunes he played on the harmonica, the ox carts, human time, the joy of walking the earth.”

It’s a real matter of delight having these stories in English at last.

ALI SMITH

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?

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