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

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From one of the finest short-story writers in Spanish, this is the first anthology of his work to appear in English. 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.

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I ponder the gratuitous wickedness of someone who wanders the streets at night or perhaps works at night and returns to his lair or walks down my street either filled with resentment or rolling drunk. Someone who doesn’t know me, but who, for no reason, rings my doorbell and perhaps other people’s doorbells, too, just to make his crime more heinous. I’ve considered, too, that maybe the low winter temperatures, capable of making the world’s ears buzz, could seal up a door with ice and cause a doorbell to shrink back into the precarious warmth of the house. But why does it always happen when the moon is on the turn, the streets deserted and the dawn at its sharpest and darkest, lit only by the street lamp on a distant corner, penned in by shadows?

The night is a universal truce during which we wait for the new day. The absence of light strikes fear into all of us, animals and men; it’s a time to lock the doors, speak softly, turn out the lights so that our house will go unnoticed and blend in with all the others in the dark, silent street; a time to feel the hammer of sleep and tiredness, to withdraw into the cave of the bed and surrender to the mysterious realm of dreams, to wake perhaps in the early hours, screaming and fearful or, for some unfathomable reason, smiling, eyes closed, as if beneficent wings had brushed our lips. A time to revisit forgotten remnants of our life, a time for births and silent machine guns that will deliver to the new day millions of newborns and corpses. A time to be spent in the other world, whatever that is, a world expressed in sighs and apparently inexplicable groans, in chafings and sudden buffeting winds and quiet disembodied voices conspiring outside, where you can barely hear or understand them.

Trying to make it seem as if I were talking about something perfectly ordinary, I’ve asked various neighbours if they ever hear anything unusual in the small hours, and they always say No and, in turn, ask me why, telling me that the owners of No. 52 have installed an alarm that sometimes goes off for no reason and howls away for hours if they happen to be out for the evening, and perhaps that’s what I’ve heard. I shrug and say, yes, they’re probably right: “Perhaps it is the neighbours’ burglar alarm,” I say. But it isn’t.

My house has two doors, the street door and the one in the living room that opens onto the garden. The garden is fenced and has its own flimsy, apparently lockable gate. The only bell is on the front door, but I suspect that the person who rings the bell at night is trying to tempt me downstairs to open the front door while he sneaks in through the living room and grabs me from behind, and so now, when I hear the bell, I listen for a moment, then go to a window at the back of the house and scrutinize the shadows in the garden, where the bushes and the trees flourish placidly in the darkness or sway obediently in the night breeze. No one. No one? I try to penetrate the shadows, where I can make out odd shapes and figures that appear to be moving and signalling to each other, but I hear nothing, absolutely nothing, and so return to my cold bed, looking right and left, watching every uncertain, somnambular step I take.

The doorbell ringing at night is an illness no doctors can cure. I used to wake before I even heard it, but now, whenever the moon is on the turn, or, rather, always, I lie waiting for it, unable to sleep, and spend long, sleepless nights wishing the wretched bell would ring, because I can’t get to sleep, and if it does suddenly, raucously irrupt into the silence, like a treacherous knife-thrust, like a baleful laugh, I jump out of my skin, then wait a few minutes before creeping out of bed to ascertain whose finger it is pressing the bell, and, after traipsing back and forth in the house, I flop into bed again like a twisted, abandoned, broken body that someone has discarded there.

On two occasions, I opened the front door and stood, looking defiantly out at the night, until the dawn dew invaded my half-naked body with profound, unstoppable shiverings and shakings. On more than three occasions, I opened the door that gives onto the garden and boldly peered behind the trees and among the bushes; I even fell over in the darkness, staggered, somewhat bruised, to my feet and heard incomprehensible, impossible voices coming from a nearby field where the children play on sunny days.

Tonight, if you can call it night, I finally saw something. It must have been about three or four in the morning, and the bell rang, the bell that both kills me and keeps me alive, and, even in my exhausted state, I still had strength enough to half open the blind at the balcony window and there, at last, I saw it, parked right outside the front door, a very long car, black I think, which then moved off very slowly, almost silently, before, with strange solemnity, turning the corner of my street, and that was all it took: that brief presence of only a few seconds was enough to bring me relief, to leave my body feeling lighter and calmer, and then I found myself back in my bed, quite unafraid now, and sure that this time I would sleep really deeply, far deeper than I ever have before.

LAST RITES

DON ANSELMO’S WIFE calls him Elmi. Anselmo sounded to her old-fashioned, like the name of an ointment, and she often said to him:

“Elmi, it’s such a shame they didn’t christen you Luis Anselmo or some such thing. It sounds better, more modern somehow…”

For decades now, Don Anselmo had thought of his wife as a small, insignificant thing with chicken thighs and tightly curled, straight-from-the-hairdresser hair, and, as with curly endives, he always felt there was a slight bitterness about her. When he met her, she called herself Candela, and that’s what he called her, too, even though her name was Candelaria.

Candela thought of Elmi as her own personal bear, because of his slight paunch, which, on some nights, she would stroke just to show that she wasn’t afraid of him, although she would have been delighted if Elmi the bear had surprised her occasionally by taking a good swipe at her or biting her hand off.

Don Anselmo had been a studious and rather ingenuous youth, and the many pages of the many books he had read drove him into a paroxysm of communicative enthusiasm, which he immediately transmitted to the young people who studied under him, but never to his wife, whom he referred to privately as blotting paper.

Candela could not see the point or the interest in knowing that their neighbour’s greyhound, although born in Madrid, was, in fact, of French origin and went by the Latin name of Canis gallicus, or that, without the benefit of many centuries of history, she would never have inherited words — or lexical items, as Elmi called them — which she used almost every day, such as rag, step, drama, alcove or tomato.

Don Anselmo spent hours working in his study, sometimes even forgetting to loosen his tie or take off his waistcoat or jacket. This is what he most enjoyed doing, but, for some days now, he had been bothered by the thought of his approaching birthday, which Candela always insisted on celebrating in the entirely selfish and entirely erroneous belief that it would be fun. He always put up with it, the wasted day, the cake and the candles, the banal comments from the inevitable relatives, the unnecessary presents, the vacant smiles and the glasses of champagne accompanied by a raucous rendering of that ‘Happy Birthday to You’ nonsense. He knew that happiness, if it existed, was something else and not that fraudulent, bogus, foreign idea of “the birthday party”.

He looked around him and saw his papers scattered about on a chair, on his desk, in files, in order and in disorder; his filing cabinets full of documents and letters; his books lined up on the shelves or forming towers of Babel on the floor. He was about to turn sixty-eight, and when he departed this world, Candela would summon one of his former students, the most handsome or the least intelligent, to make sense of everything in that room, or else she would sell his books to an antiquarian or second-hand bookseller and either throw his papers in the bin or sell them by the kilo.

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