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

In the story by Medardo Fraile called ‘The Bookstall’, a man starts to buy books from a stall where the wares are generally so weathered that they’ve become more object than book, like rain-soaked slabs of sod — so much so that if he gives one a “squeeze” he can actually smell “the earth and the air, the rain and the sun” in it. At the end of this story, a story about inevitable disintegration, the man is living in a state of hope and delight. What he hopes is that “one day a novel would simply crumble to dust in his hands”, and what has “surprised and delighted” him most is that inside his latest purchase he has found “a small, dead toad”—quite real, quite dead—“but it seemed to him very beautiful”.

This is reminiscent for a fleeting moment of the American twentieth-century poet Marianne Moore who once defined our true poets as the “literalists of the imagination”, the writers most able to present to their readers “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. It’s a little subconscious nudge, maybe, from Fraile, for us to bear in mind that the dividing line between the forms of short story and poem is often thin and permeable, and that one of the most exciting things that literary forms can do is cross the lines, not just between each other, but between the imagined and the real, between the book and the world, to make a specific, literary and very real kind of surprise and delight.

The stories in Things Look Different in the Light, resonant, distilled, seemingly direct but really shapeshifting and mysterious, have the openness and the exactness of poetry. At the same time they’re salty, earthy, very human stories. They’re often hilarious. They’re often sad. They like to appear throwaway and everyday; some perform like perfect jokes, some act the anecdote, some are so fast as to be over as soon as they begin. But every one of them chases that place where the book and the world come together — where reality, language and fiction meld to make something more revealing about all three.

Medardo Fraile died in early 2013, aged 88. He had spent his childhood and his adolescence in Madrid, but lived in the UK since the 1960s, when he left Franco’s Spain. He worked for a while at the University of Southampton before settling permanently in Scotland, taking a teaching post at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow where he taught Spanish language and literature until he retired from his professorship in the mid-1980s to concentrate solely on his fiction. Fraile began as an experimental playwright, was a writer of academic articles, stories for children, essays about cinema (this collection of stories subtly displays his cineaste love) and along with his bestselling memoir work he was also a translator into Spanish, with his wife Janet, of Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished 1896 novel, Weir of Hermiston.

But it was as a short story writer that Fraile was most acclaimed and beloved in Spain, where over the decades his stories won him honours and several major prizes. Things Look Different in the Light is the first anthologizing of his work to reach publication in the UK — the first substantial translation of his work to be available in English. Its opening story, ‘Berta’s Presence’, is so much about the power of the seemingly small things in life that it could be about the short story form itself. It asks readers to shift perspective on, to understand quite differently, human presence in the world.

A small child is having a birthday party. A young man comes to the party. But then a young woman whose mere presence discomfits the young man arrives too, and the man suffers a crisis in confidence and leaves the party downcast. In short, that’s all that happens. But what really happens is — everything, in a comical, bitter near-tragedy for the young man, whose heart in his chest is so full of dark and light that his chest becomes a “great lighthouse”, and where a tiny child not quite one year old, with no recognizable language at all, can be revealed as a force of articulation, “an amorphous, attractive being, at once yielding and terrible, who no one had ever seen in a theatre, a cinema or a café, or even strolling down the street”. It is a story where someone so small, so seemingly removed from what we recognize as the usual social commerce, proves a source of epic energy, “great things engaged in vigorous movement”. It is funny, and as it draws all of a sudden to its end, suddenly terribly sad. The moodswings from moment to moment in the room, the wordlessness, the unsayables, the small talk, have bristled to life in a story all about people hopelessly unable to speak to each other.

So little is said and so much is conveyed; one of Fraile’s gifts is the giving of voice and language to things and states that ostensibly have none. In his writing, the sea has its own syntax. In the story called ‘Full Stop’, the merest punctuation mark is proof, both at once, of terrible human frailty and ebullient existence. ‘Cloti’, a story of a serving girl who comes from the country to a well-off family in the city, looks like a story whose only purpose is its funny punchline — but its hefty punch, when it comes to the question (in a country where people are the same nationality, share the same history but live as if on different planets) of who has voice, who hasn’t and who decides who gets to speak and how, packs a powerful and far-resonating revelation.

“Life, I think, is full of surprises,” as the narrator of the story called ‘Typist or Queen’ puts it. These stories go out of their way to de-romanticize. This is the beginning of the story called ‘A Shirt’: “Fermín Ulía, although poor — and from a poor neighbourhood — had already sailed, if not the seven seas, at least two or three.” It begins with the puncturing and dismissal of romantic expectations; by the end of its first paragraph it has reduced the sea to “that great cod-liver oil factory… that great factory of phosphorous”. Then, in the space of only a couple of pages, Fraile springs an unfathomable surprise, so that ‘A Shirt’ becomes a story about the mysteries that inhabit even the work clothes we mundanely wear, and one of the most romantic and moving stories in the collection.

In Fraile’s work typists are queens and typists at the same time, just as the two ageing old spinster sisters in one of his most playful stories, ‘Child’s Play’, can and will — and of course can’t and won’t — outwit their own ageing process by hanging extra glass and lights on their old chandelier. Their sitting-room furniture has to be altered to make more room for the monstrous size of the chandelier, and the light they create bleeds through the walls into the apartment next door. The neighbours complain. The landlord shrugs. “One cannot speak ill of light.” There’s nothing romantic about it; the chandelier is a “great jellyfish”, a “gigantic udder filled with light”, and the sisters become like “two old raisins filled with light”. But with the final off-switch, death, both old women dead and buried go on glowing under the ground for weeks. The story pivots between gentle satire and a renewal of vision. At its heart stereotype is dismissed—“we will never be relegated to a corner”, the girls decide when they’re younger. Human sensitivity and strength are lit and liberated by a vital piece of comic storytelling.

Such generosity runs through Fraile’s writing like electricity, or like light and flowers do, but always in the knowledge that flowers wilt and light is a matter of darkness. The people in the stories yawn, yearn, know disappointment, sense the sadness of time as it slips away, and can’t do anything about it.