Felix Calvino's Blog, page 3
February 18, 2022
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January 26, 2022
Young Love & Other Stories I Amazon I Noh
January 27, 2022
Like a bird's nest holding six subtly hued bird's eggs, Galician Felix Calvino offers up yet another gathering of tales from his homeland, stories as haunting as they are enchanting.
noh
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Offering
January 25, 2022
Young Love & Other Stories I Amazon I Grady Harp
January 26, 2022
Grady Harp
'Gossipers need to feed their addictions'
Félix Calvino deserves a much wider audience here in the United States. His novel ALFONSO proved his mettle for extending a thought into a full-length novel. Yet his first collection of short stories, gathered under the title A HATFUL OF CHERRIES, were piquant brief morsels that ranged from a few pages to extended stories and every story managed to paint imagery and place and character so clearly with the most economical style that each appears like a flashback of thought in every reader's memory bank. Furthering his appreciation for the art of short stories, he has published SO MUCH SMOKE, and now YOUNG LOVE & OTHER STORIES, proving he is a master craftsman!
Calvino was born in Galicia and spent his childhood on a farm not unlike those scenes he so frequently recalls in these stories. Under the reign of General Franco, Calvino fled to England to study and work and eventually migrated to Australia where he currently lives and writes his magical prose. From these various regions Calvino gathers the fodder for his tales - stories that take place in Spain and in Australia with settings that range from dealing with the earth as a child to discovering love as a youth to encountering the realities of small community prejudices to simply celebrating the aspects of the very young to the very aged characters he describes so well.
The stories in this collection are Sunday Lunch, Young Love, Knick-knacks, Abel’s Journey, The Beehives, and Shopping Trip. Calvino's writing style is the opposite of florid. With a few brief sentences on a few pages he is able to bring the reader into the focal point of his stories that usually take a quiet twist at the end, a technique that makes reading a collection of short stories more like reading a full length novel, so engrossed is the reader in his ability to capture attention and imagination. Example, in the story ‘Sunday Lunch’ he writes ‘Manuel stood in the doorway of the kitchen and asked, “what are you cooking that smells so good?” “Stewed partridge with herbs and new potatoes.” Amadeo answered, without looking up from the kitchen bench where he was chopping parsley with a large knife. “Have you seen Avelina?” “I saw her a few days ago. She said she was making a cake to mark the occasion” “What occasion?” ‘She didn’t say.” Manual, Amadeo and Avelina were the three remaining inhabitants of the remote village of Carballo. The men were both seventy-seven, fragile, lean, and of average height…Avelina was seven years younger, short and slim…Their relationship, although they had lived and shared in all aspects of the village public life, had never been a close one.’ – We then discover the destiny of this tale as the core of ‘interconnected stories that call up the ghosts of the past half-century for the three survivors of a lively, colourful world that had no notion of how soon it was to disappear.’
Some astute publisher should capture the talents of this Spanish Australian writer. He deserves center stage in the arena of authors who have mastered the art of writing short stories. Very highly recommended. Grady Harp, January 22
Grady HarpHALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER 5.0 out of 5 stars ‘Gossipmongers need to feed their addictions’
January 12, 2022
The Library Thing I Tim Bazzett
January 13, 2022
Young Love & Other Stories
Tim Bazzett
It’s probably been a few years since I’ve read any Hemingway, but every time I read something by Felix Calvino, I think of old’ Ernie. Because his influence is so strong it shows through in Calvino’s stories. From the first pages of YOUNG LOVE & OTHER STORIES, in “Sunday Lunch,” for example, with its “cooking that smells so good … Stewed partridge with herbs and new potatoes … [and] chopping parsley with a large knife,” I was taken back to the Nick Adams stories in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Nick pitching his camp near a trout stream and preparing an onion sandwich with thick slices of bread. Granted, the Galician village in the northwest corner of Spain is a long way from upper Michigan, but the ‘flavor’ and the plain, spare language are very similar.
Felix Calvino is an Australian, but he emigrated there from Galicia via England more than fifty years ago, and it always amazes me that his prose, so starkly honed to perfection, is written in what is his third language, because Galician dialect is more like Portuguese than Spanish (his second language, learned in school), and then to master English in this way, as an adult, well, it simply boggles my mind. Think Nabokov, maybe, who learned to write in English, after he was already an accomplished writer in his native Russian. Or the Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who recently began writing in Italian simply because she fell in love with the language.
YOUNG LOVE & OTHER STORIES is Calvino’s fourth book, following two other story collections, A HATFUL OF CHERRIES and SO MUCH SMOKE, and a novella, ALFONSO. I’ve read them all and they are, quite simply, the finest examples of pure storytelling one might ever encounter. In this newest collection, Calvino has chosen to focus on a few of the denizens of one tiny Galician village in the era of Franco. The first story, “Sunday Lunch,” sets the scene in the final years of the village, when there are only three people left, all septuagenarians, survivors who have become casual friends, meeting weekly –
“It had started with coffee, bread and cheese following the burial of Generosa several years earlier, the last village woman but for Avelina. They had taken turns doing the cooking until Amadeo said that cooking relaxed him. Manuel contributed fresh bread and game, and Avelina brought homemade biscuits, trout and eel when in season.”
And then, suddenly, there were only the two men, coping calmly and sadly with the task of burying Avelina, and worrying about the propriety of how to wash and prepare her body, something that had always been a task for the women. As they go about wrapping the corpse, digging the grave and building a coffin, both Manuel and Amadeo are lost in their own thoughts, remembering past wakes and the unusual history of Avelina, who had endured a forced marriage and a long widowhood, managing quite well on her own. They use a wheelbarrow to transport the body to the cemetery at the other end of town, and build the coffin at graveside of scrap lumber. They remember to bring ropes to lower the box into the grave, but forget to bring more nails for securing the lid. But they agree it is a “barbaric” custom, so they covered the unsecured lid with only partially filled shovels, “deposited with extreme care, as if not to awaken Avelina.”
In the title story, “Young Love,” we are taken back to Manuel’s boyhood, his friendship with Carlos, and his long, nearly mute courting of Amelia (who likes him because of his quietness), first in the schoolroom and then after they have left school. This is indeed a story of “young love,” in the sweetness and innocence of the couple, filled with those inner insecure feelings of “does he/she really love me?” as well as all the inner turmoil of sexual awakening. And in a long sequence about a wedding attended in a nearby village, we learn that the young men are leaving the region because there are “no women of marriageable age” and fewer babies being born each year, which perhaps explains Manuel’s nearly deserted village of sixty years later.
“Abel’s Journey” is perhaps the most absorbing of the six connected stories here, and the longest, at more than fifty pages. Abel is an orphan, passed from family to family for the first twelve years of his life, used mostly as a farmhand and cowherd, until he comes to the home of Antonio and Cristina and their two children, where he is finally well-treated and accepted as “part of the family.” But he continues to wonder about his own unknown mother. He falls in love with Rosalia who emigrates to Australia, then with Pilar, and then he is off to the Army for his national service, traveling across Spain to a training camp near Zargoza. There he makes a good friend in Jose, who helps him to learn who his mother was and what happened to her. But then, upon his return home to Antonio and Cristina’s farm, preparing to marry Pilar, he learns he is losing his sight.
Throughout Abel’s story he continuously falls back on a gallery of scenes from his life, mental pictures and images he can call up at will. I could relate easily to this, as I too have a “scene gallery” from the various stages of my life, images that never fade. These images become more important as we age and physical strength and abilities begin to fade. Calvino and I are the same age. Judging from the stories here, we both understand well the changes that age can bring – friends die, priorities change, and memories become so important. I was pleased to note that there was a dog in many of these stories. Manuel has had several dogs in his lifetime, all named Mateo, after one of the Apostles. There is a Mateo in the first story here, and another Mateo in the last, a puppy. Dogs and old men. I get it, Felix. I love my dogs too. And I loved the stories here. I wish I were a little better at explaining why they move me so, but, well, they just do. The language here is so exact, so spare, so beautiful. The characters are so real, so perfectly realized, so very human. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVE
January 9, 2022
Young Love & Other Stories I Jill Lindquist I ABC Book Club
January 10, 2022
Young Love &and Other Stories
Jill Lindquist
One of my favourite Australian writers, Félix Calvino, has produced another stunning collection of stories, Young Love & other Stories (Arcadia) which takes the reader into the heart of his homeland in Galicia, Spain, revealing the essence of his rural upbringing and sharing stories of life and love in all its various forms. As in Calvino’s other collections, the stories are atmospheric and deceptively simple. I’ll provide my impressions of just two:
The first story ‘Sunday Lunch’ describes a barren, remote Galician village, once a bustling community but now silent and decaying and with only two men and a woman the surviving residents. The three elderly friends meet for lunch each Sunday. It is their way of checking in on each other and a time to share stories of the past. When they find the woman, Avelina, dead, the two men must deal with the process of giving her a respectful send off. They are in shock and ill-prepared. Their heartbreak, difficulty and frustration at dealing with the body of their friend is palpable. There is also the unspoken question that with only the two of them remaining, which would die first and leave the other alone to face the impossible burden of doing all that the two together could barely manage for Avelina?
The title story ‘Young Love’ is a sensitive portrayal of a boy, Manuel, transitioning with all the painful shyness, confusion and insecurity that comes with crossing the great divide from boy to man. Manuel’s stumbling attempts to negotiate the minefield of misunderstandings in the world of courtship are told against the backdrop of the changing seasons, work in the fields, the bonds of male friendship and social opportunities to observe and engage with the ever-mysterious female.
Calvino’s writing is so very evocative; his voice authentic. There is a humanity and sweetness to the stories that avoids sentimentality. He stretches out a hand and takes his reader into a very different world but one which explores universal themes.
January 4, 2022
Book Launch I Melissa Ashley
Avid Reader
December 16, 2021
Launch of Young Love & Other Stories by Félix Calvino
Melissa Ashley
Good evening, and welcome. It is my absolute honour and delight to speak a few words about Félix Calvino, author of the brilliant new collection of short stories, Young Love.
I first met Félix Calvino when we were postgraduates at the University of Queensland. According to Félix, one day I came out of my supervisor’s room after a meeting sobbing (I don’t actually remember this part). But I do remember that I was struggling and Félix told me to come with him, we would go for a walk. We bought coffee and drank in the fresh air and bright sun and this became our daily habit. Both Félix the man and Félix the author are excellent guides in finding practices – daily observances – that break down periods of being stale, tired, stuck. And both Félix’s need connection and friendship. Ritual and fraternity are central themes in Calvino’s stories and as proof, I have a lovely quote. He puts it far more eloquently than me. He is a poet, really. It’s from the first story in Young Love: ‘Sunday Lunch.’
‘I said that what was good for him was good for me. We walked on under a low, bright moon. We took the long way around, avoiding the village, to reach the Hernandez watermill at the foot of the hills where the river is born.’ (18)
I had read A Hatful of Cherries (2007) before I met Félix and was much in awe of his talents and thrilled when he befriended me. Félix is one of the most generous people I know and has taught me much about writing and about life. Be kind to oneself, practice, persevere. Have faith. A change of scenery when bogged. I observed it all while I was at university with Félix in his lived example. He toiled over the collection he wrote for his degree, So Much Smoke, not unlike the rye-threshing and wheat-grinding manual labourers he was writing about. I would always ask about how his book was coming along. He usually dramatically shook his head. His answers had a similar theme: I am writing it again. I am having a tough day. It is progressing very slowly. I love Félix’s Philip Roth / James Joyce perfectionism, but it is all a humble front – genuinely so, of course. Félix has a work-ethic of stone.
Along with A Hatful of Cherries and So Much Smoke, Félix has also published a novel, Alfonso. We are here tonight to celebrate the release of his fourth book, the short story collection, Young Love. The six short stories contained in Young Love explore the demise of the – never named – Galician village that Félix grew up in. If you have read Félix, you will know that this is a literary place he returns to over and over in his stories. In Young Love, which Félix tells me has been the most difficult of his books to write, a eulogy is created for the village and its former inhabitants, its centuries of tradition, the failure of its outmoded agriculture and ensuing poverty, the migrations of its youth and families.
‘There is nothing left,’ Félix says to me, with a wistful shrug and glance of the eye that conveys so much more than a long and wordy explanation.
Galicia is a coastal region in the northwest of Spain – it has its own language – which for centuries was one of the poorest parts of the country. Waves of migration pepper its history, beginning in the nineteenth century, and continuing into the mid-twentieth century and beyond. Félix himself left Galicia in 1964 at twenty years of age, to escape military service.
Calvino uses the character Manuel, who features in five of the stories in the collection, as a metaphor for the demise of the village. We first meet him in his seventies, in ‘Sunday Lunch’. The youngest we are introduced to him is at age fourteen in 1939, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. It is the period of Franco’s authoritarian rule, which will last until the mid-1970s during which time many Spanish fled the country. When we leave Manuel, his literally the last man standing in the nameless village – despite a limp – along with his new puppy, Mateo.
The short story genre is one of pressure, economy, strong themes and repercussions. It is a completely different beast to the novel, which relies upon the coherence of plot to bring all the ribbons of narrative into a tight package. In the short stories, the actions, thoughts and experiences of a character can be singularly explored and examined, the consequences of a choice or event stripped down to the barest of essentials. The narrative arrangement of Young Loveis particularly compelling, in that all of the stories speak to one another, and in this vein, it recalls writers like Alice Munroe and Elizabeth Strout, who have written collections that span the lives of a specific character, not as a galloping plot, but a series of discrete images, memories, events, in short stories.
I must make a little aside here and advise you to read Félix’s collection from front to the back. It is not chronologically arranged, but like Adele’s last album – she had Spotify turn off a function that let listeners hear the tracks in random order – Félix has chosen the order of each story carefully and for precise reasons.
The first story in Young Love, called ‘Sunday Lunch’, begins on the day of the weekly meal shared by characters Amadeo, Avelina and Manuel. Loosely friendly and in their seventies, the trio are the last three inhabitants of the village. However, plans for Sunday lunch are abandoned when Manuel and Amadeo discover that Avelina has died.
‘Sunday Lunch’ unfolds as an allegory, a metaphor for Félix’s theme of the death of the village, the character Manuel personifying, embodying, the complex reasons for its end. We discover that Avelina, Manuel and Amadeo have carried on the tradition of preparing the dead for burial, and with Avelina dead, the rituals cannot be properly observed. Félix concretises the absoluteness of the abandonment of the village by its former inhabitants by closely describing the labour required to bring the body to the cemetery. The coffin cannot be carried in one piece by the men, and they must nail it together at the gravesite.
Félix uses powerful imagery to convey one of the major reasons for the village’s demise, which is poverty brought about by the failure to modernise its agricultural economy:
‘One of my vivid memories of her is the growing consternation on her face when adding a piece of salted pork from the pig killed at Christmas to the vegetable soup, and how the piece got smaller and smaller from month to month. That was only one of the things that measured the nightmare of poverty she had to contend with every day of her life.’
As with Félix’s prior work, he is a master of a compressed metaphor, combining a striking visual image with an arresting subtext or inference.
Here is another example, from ‘Sunday Lunch’:
‘Do you ever smoke / no / but you know how smokers roll their cigarettes / I do / Manuel proceeded to wrap her light and small body with great care. Both the sheet and the blanket were sufficiently wide to wrap her twice and long enough to tuck in her head and feet’
Félix’s narrators are at heart solitary, kind, stoic and fatalistic. Both Manuel and Abel – a young orphan who is treated poorly, moving from home to home – internalise their suffering, ruminating and meditating upon yearning to meet a woman, a desire for connection. A major theme in Félix’s works is a self-imposed solitude, the dignity in this, its deep and private longing. The narrator in Sunday Lunch provides a clue that perhaps the inner life is the more authentic, that we cannot judge from the self we present to others:
‘He then remembered the educated saying that in every man and woman was an internal and external individual. The external one was just appearance, while the inner was reality.’
Talk is cheap for Félix’s characters, and readers are taken on a journey into their inside lives, their confusion, desires, their suffering and the transcendence and joy they experience, when perhaps a moment exposes a coherent thread connecting all. In ‘Sunday Lunch’:
‘Once or twice, the men looked at one another and returned to the food. The tasks ahead, although in their minds, were not mentioned.’
The young Abel, in the short story Abel’s Journey is Félix’s most abject, discarded character. As a child, he is abandoned and motherless, shuffled from home to home. Later in life, when he has overcome many obstacles, he develops an eye disease that will send him blind:
‘In this carnival of frustrations, Abel retreated into himself, into protective silence. He became sparse with his words and rarely expressed his opinion. In any case, decisions had always been made for him, and arguing with the decisions had been counterproductive. He felt no animosity towards anyone; it was simply the way things were, and he could only get used to it.’
In the story ‘Young Love’, fourteen-year-old Manuel lives off the glances he shares with a girl in his class, Amelia, an experience we can all remember, an intense crush that is made of projection and innocence. It is tender, fragile and perhaps, as in a story like ‘Cat People’, delusional. However, this is where Félix is elusive, uncanny, a little psychic even. For in ‘Young Love’, the beloved Amelia experiences the same feelings as Manuel:
‘But in her actions, there was a higher purpose than just giving a compliment. He had stirred feelings in her, well before her friends of the same age had begun to take an interest in boys. Initially, it was curiosity, as it seemed to her he avoided being noticed. Then, she liked the way he walked, his pleasant face, the soothing tone of his voice. He would not be much taller than her, which was fine. And he was given to speak when it mattered, unlike most other boys who talked all the time and said nothing.’
Through Manuel, the reader tenderly rediscovers these emotions, distilled by Félix into the speech of the heart and the speech of the body. The language is crisp, perhaps a nod to Hemmingway or Beckett, a modernist minimalism, clearly but gently delivering its knowledge of nostalgia and youth.
Another theme Félix explores is the village’s conservative, traditional beliefs. As in previous writing, he circles back around Catholic customs, sifting through that which is useful and discarding practices which bring added suffering. Many of Félix’s characters are children and adolescents who are still discovering their identities, questioning received practices and sloughing off or undermining customs and attitudes they have little evidence are true or good. When the judgement of the community is harsh, cruel, scapegoating or vilifying, Félix addresses these injustices.
This is Amelia, from ‘Young Love’, thinking to herself about not conforming to the society’s expectations:
‘She had her aunt to thank for it. ‘Desires, setbacks, confusion are part of life, and you must have a place to escape to in rough times,’ she had said to her once. She liked her aunt very much. A failed nun, a failed lover, now back home to stay was the adults’ description that Amelia was not supposed to hear.’
Félix subverts village prejudices with a clever, gentle humour, favouring the outsider, and turning them around, so a different aspect of their humanity is revealed. But his characters never completely turn their backs upon what is known and supposedly fixed. Rather, they consider and question if a practice is useful, and try to discover why it is this way. If it is helpful, practical, and not harmful, his characters maintain the status quo. Says Amadeo in ‘Sunday Lunch’:
‘I have no interest in the ideology of it. It is tradition that I respect.’
Félix’s characters all have a little of the Buddha in them. Or perhaps a Greek stoic. They accept suffering as a given, they quietly carry it with them, but they do not, I think add to it with guilt, hatred, cruelty, making their burdens heavier and more unpleasant. There is something deeply affirming about this. Félix takes pains to show his characters’ quiet desperation, made bearable by routine and ritual, acts of grace and kindness, and conviviality, the pleasures of sharing a meal:
On the grinding stone, covered with a tablecloth, there was a wicker basket containing wine, cheese, bread, salami, tins of this and that. In one corner, there was a bed of hay and blankets, and in the other, there was wood ready for a small fire.
Félix is also very funny. In a sly and clever way, with various layers. This image here is typical of him, from the short story ‘Abel’s Journey’:
They were in bed, lying on their backs in matching white-and-blue-striped flannel pyjamas. Cristina had made them in the pattern of prison uniforms from a roll of cloth they had bought at a closing-down sale some years back. Half of the cloth was still on the roll, standing behind the door in her sewing room. Occasionally, it reminded them of ill-fated inmates serving long sentences.’
And another one, from the story ‘The Beehives’:
‘The queen bee had his respect – a life of responsibility and progeny. The humble worker bee has his affection – a brief life of relentless toil, beginning with cleaning out the cell where each is born. As for the drones, who only have to mate but otherwise never do a day’s work, he does not care for them.’
I sometimes think Félix the author is a philosopher, a psychologist even. He practises, in all of his characters, an unconditional love, an unconditional positive regard, and it is freeing, an opening up, rather than a shutting down, so his readers and characters can deeply explore that which most perturbs, confuses and draws them in. His narrators are humble and self-effacing, but his prose succeeds at the promise of the best literature: it shows us who we are, it underscores our common humanity, it is respectful, and perhaps, most of all – maybe this is just me, I am not sure – it brings incredible comfort and affirmation. This is what we do, this is who we are. This is. He does all the work for us, his wisdom presented like a lunch shared with friends, the wine cellared, the cheese matured, the bread leavened, the salami perfectly smoked. It awaits our enjoyment with a friend, cooked, prepared, served.
I cannot recommend more highly Félix’s beautiful collection of short stories, Young Love. Buy it, read it, tell your friends about it, introduce it to your reading groups, gift it for Christmas. You will be the better for it, I guarantee. In strange times, Félix’s prose comforts us, reminds us of our shared humanity, gives us permission to be what we are, flawed and human. And hope, in the texture, beauty, light, habits and connections of our day-to-day existence.
For all this, I must add that there is something of an enigma, a central mystery at the heart of all of Félix’s works, and of Félix too. He shows us that while we are knowable in many ways, there are also parts of us all that are not, and that this is just the way it is.
Congratulations, Félix!
___
Melissa Ashley is the author of historical fiction The Bee and the Orange Tree and The Birdman’s Wife, which won the Queensland Literary Awards Fiction Book Award and the ABA Nielsen Booksellers Choice Award. She is passionate about uncovering stories of women in the arts and sciences whose lives and achievements have been forgotten. Melissa lives in Brisbane with her partner, the poet Brett Dionysius, and their two teenagers.
January 1, 2022
December 6, 2021
Young Love & Other Stories
December 7, 2021
Invitation
Félix Calvino - Young Love
Thursday 16 December 2021
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
In store at Avid Reader Bookshop / ZOOM Online
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Join Melissa Ashley as she launches Félix Calvino Young Love & Other Stories.
Set in a remote village in the northwest coast of Spain, Young Love is a deeply moving collection of six interconnected stories that call up the ghosts of the past half-century for the three survivors of a lively, colourful world that had no notion of how soon it was to disappear. Closely observant, and always aware of the plural realities that define individual lives, Félix Calvino has once again created a world that readers can immediately enter and make their own.
Félix Calvino was born in Galicia, on the northwest coast of Spain. Félix is the author of A Hatful of Cherries, Alfonso, and So Much Smoke, released by Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Melissa Ashley is the author of historical fiction The Bee and the Orange Tree and The Birdman’s Wife, which won the Queensland Literary Awards Fiction Book Award and the ABA Nielsen Booksellers Choice Award. She is passionate about uncovering stories of women in the arts and sciences whose lives and achievements have been forgotten. Melissa lives in Brisbane with her partner, the poet Brett Dionysius, and their two teenagers.
https://avidreader.com.au/events/felix-calvino-young-love
March 16, 2021
Gutter 23 I Knick-Knacks
March 16, 2021
Gutter 21- 25
Félix Calvino
Knick-Knacks
A few days after Carlo’s birthday a knick-knacks vendor arrives in the village. His kind, along with tinkers, are regular visitors during the spring and summer months. They supply practical items, and fantasy ones such as figurines of meigas. They break the village tedium: children drop their games and are the first to gather around the visitor. Girls and young women pause in their chores, consult the mirror, and after a few strokes of the comb, they too are on their way.
The collective reaction is no different this time, but the knick-knacks vendor is: he gives sweets to the first children he meets on his arrival and promises them more after they spread the news of the great bargains on offer. He wears a pale green corduroy suit, and a General Franco moustache. He exudes trust and rectitude as opposed to the charlatans the villagers are used too. Even his mule has a shiny coat and its apparel is of quality leather.
He settles in the village square. On a low trestle, covered with dark green velvet cloth, the display of rings, bracelets, sunglasses, gold and silver chains, glitter in the afternoon sun and stir the fantasies of young and the old alike. In the religious section, a painted sign affirms the crucifix and rosaries as made of timber from the Holy Land and blessed by the Holy Father in Rome. On display is also black silk fabric to make women’s scarves, a wide range of sewing thread in various colours and thickness, lace edging, needles and thimbles, together with a roll of light blue cloth for men’s suits. ‘Cashmere of the highest quality’ reads the sign, in italic letters.
Carlos gazes over the merchandise. The roll of blue cloth catches his attention. In it he sees the opportunity for his most wanted first long, going-out trousers and he hurries back home.
His mother who is in the kitchen about to make cottage cheese listens to him, then says,
‘There is nothing to be gained in dealing with knick-knacks vendors.’
‘You promised I would have it for my 15th birthday.’
‘And you will. I never break a promise. I wish you did the same.’
‘You could at least have a look at it.’ She gazes at him for a long moment, shakes her head, and takes off her ash coloured apron.
*
At the square she touches and feels the cloth between her thumb and index twice, and a third time.
‘And the price?’ she asks.
‘Two thousand pesetas,’ the vendor replies.
She smiles and starts for home. Carlos follows her.
‘Mum I like it,’ he implores.
‘The man will not leave for a while, please calm down,’ she says.
Back at the house she searches for her husband, finds him in the barn and speaks to him close and quietly. Carlos waits outside the barn door. When he hears his father say ‘the best price you can,’ he hurries to the square just in case the knick-knacks vendor decides to leave or someone else buys the material. Although the chances of this happening are remote, there is nowhere else he wishes to be.
She takes her time. Carlos begins to doubt that he heard his father’s consent back in the barn. On her return she buys some coloured threads and safety pins, and then she joins some neighbours a short distance away talking about lettuce seeding and the right moon cycles for planting turnips. From her market days in town, Carlos is familiar with her buying and selling techniques in which time and indifference play a part, and he knows he has just to wait.
*
‘About the cloth,’ she says to the knick-knacks vendor a short time later.
‘Cashmere of the highest quality, Señora.’
They haggle. They come to an impasse. She extracts a Pope’s blessed crucifix and the deal is completed.
The following day, Vidal, the village tailor, takes Carlos’ measurements. A week passes before the first fitting. The second fitting takes place almost overnight.
*
One Sunday afternoon in early May, Carlos sets out with five other single neighbours for an evening dance at a village about two hours’ walking distance from theirs. He wears the new suit. Shirt, socks, shoes, tie and belt are also new.
It is a perfect late spring with clear blue sky, but for a mountain of dark and motionless clouds in the far west. There is birdsong in the trees and excitement in the men’s hearts. This fiesta is a popular one and women are plentiful, according to the older man in the group. But they are astute, cunning, hard-headed ones, he reminds them. Carlos’ heart throbs with excitement. Or maybe it is anxiety.
By the time they arrive at the large meadow where the dance is to be held the sun is fast retreating behind the Faro Mountain. They head for one of the tent bars surrounding the field. The sacristan’s son orders beer for everyone.
‘Carlos must pay for the first round,’ says Ovidio, the apprentice shoemaker.
Carlos is happy to do so. A small price to pay to join the adults’ world, he thinks.
Someone buys another round. The muffled compressor has started and the electric lights, timid at first, come into full life. In the middle of the field, on the stage erected for the occasion, the 7-piece orchestra begins to tune-up.
‘Time for action,’ says one of the men as he finishes his drink.
‘I agree,’ says another, rubbing his hands.
A third discreetly pulls up his trousers, tightens his belt.
Alfredo, Carlos’ mentor in the way of women, gestures to him to stay and orders two cognacs. ‘Beer makes you pee, cognac sharpens both courage and intellect when needed,’ he says to Carlos after the waiter places two glasses of Fundador on the counter mats advertising Estrella de Galicia beer. ‘Besides, there is plenty of time. Sensible women will not settle for the first monkey that comes around waving his tale.’
Carlos is caught between his heart’s wishes and the clarity of Alfredo’s logic. He nods. After a while they leave the tent bar. It is then, walking along the promenade area surrounding the dancers that Alfredo mentions a long-time friend of his who is now coming towards them. Her name is Laura. Her companion is called Antonia, she is twenty-one and wearing a green and white summer dress.
Carlos instantly likes Antonia’s slender neck and large grey eyes. The introductions over, Laura says she feels like dancing, takes Alfredo by the arm and they join the dozens of couples on the dancing area. Carlos and Antonia follow.
Carlos has always suspected that adult dancing will be different from the dancing in short pants with his cousins and their friends, as they learned the steps to match the tunes. But he never anticipated the pleasure and the illusion of heat stealing through his arms and legs.
Minutes seem to be passing. Or perhaps it is hours. Yet their conversation has gone not much further than revealing the names of the villages they come from or commenting on the large number of people that turned up for the night dance. When their eyes meet, Antonia smiles or looks at him intently, both clearly an invitation to talk. But in his flurry of erotic embarrassment his mentor’s lines to assist in the early courting stages have slipped from his memory and he just smiles back.
During the fireworks display at midnight they meet with Alfredo and Laura in one of the tents for a glass of wine, cheese, bread and olives. Laura and Alfredo have been longer at the bars than at the dancing and talk and laugh a lot. They are both thirty—four. She tells Carlos that Alfredo is a good man but romantically unreliable. ‘Please don’t let him influence you,’ she says to Carlos, and places her hand on his.
A new orchestra is on the stage when they return. It plays mostly slow dance tunes. Antonia fits perfectly in Carlos’ arms and he in hers. At two o’clock the orchestra leader wishes everyone good night before playing one last tune. Carlos and Antonia walk to the village square where her friends are gathering for their walk home.
‘Will I see you again?’ Carlos manages to ask.
‘Perhaps,’ she replies. She then encloses his face in her hands and kisses him on the lips.
*
Carlos joins his neighbours at the local tavern and after one last drink they head for home. They talk of this and that: of the musicians, the two guardia civiles and their good-looking horses, of the fireworks. It seems they talk of nothing until the sacristan’s son announces he has got a date for the forthcoming dance at the village of Santa Fe. Another man curses his luck. A third feels cheated because his dance partner of the early evening decided to go back to her boyfriend. Alfredo tells him that, ‘When the cravings of the body and of the heart come together there is nothing you can do.’
Carlos does not take part in the group’s deliberations. Slowly he is going through the night’s emotions from the moment he saw Antonia’s large grey eyes and hears her soft voice, the warmth of her hand in his as they dance, her scent, her nearness, and he hasn’t got a thought for anything else.
In their various states of emotional and physical tiredness, they are not conscious of the stillness in the air until the pale light of the moon is hidden by dark clouds rapidly advancing upon them. Sparse and thick drops of rain begin to fall as they enter the path running through the village cornfields. For a moment they consider retreating and sheltering in a water mill nearby. They decide to hurry ahead.
The downpour catches them halfway through the corn fields. Soon the soft earth under their feet turns to mud. They trudge ahead in silence and near darkness. In the bluish flashes of lightning someone points out their resemblance to the scarecrows protecting the corn from birds and they all laugh. When they get to the village, the rain has stopped.
Dripping water on the flagstones of the kitchen, Carlos removes his mud-clogged shoes and soaked clothes. After fetching a towel and pyjamas from his bedroom, he hangs his new suit from the hooks in a ceiling beam used for hanging the hams to dry after two weeks immersed in salt. On the elevated hearth he stirs the embers to life although the kitchen is still warm from his father’s regular Sunday cards game with neighbours. In a saucepan near the fire, his mother has left beef stew from the Sunday dinner as she said she would. He eats some of it and goes to bed. For a long while he lies staring at the darkness, thinking of Antonia and their physical intimacies just hours before. He feels the taste of her lips on his is ebbing. Other emotions are bubbling in his mind that, apart from sex, he doesn’t recognise.
Some hours later, the cashmere of highest quality suit will be dry but unrecognisable: patches of grey, green and yellow have replaced the original blue. Arms and legs have shrunk unevenly. One of the coat’s lapels has all but disappeared. In the morning, when Carlos comes down for breakfast, the crippled garments have been removed. His mother is putting away the dishes from the night before. Her face is sombre. Every now and then she sighs so loudly that Marisa the cat, in the wicker basket, stops grooming her kittens. But he feels just fine. For now anyway.
Gutter 23
