A Spanish salsa of surrealism machismo and passion stories longer than the review

The Penguin Book Of Spanish Short Stories Edited by Margaret Jull Costa Penguin Classics €29.99 ★★★★★

HOW short can a short story be? Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway once won a bet by writing a short story just six words long: ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’ In many ways, those six words represent the essence of the short story: a world suggested; a tragedy glimpsed. They certainly demon st rate H.E.Bates’ s two essential ingredients for a successful short story: atmosphere and precision.

The great Irish short-story writer William Trevor called it ‘the art of the glimpse’, and said that the key to it is tension.

I remember once hearing him interviewed, and he told of the day he was driven in a taxi for a couple of hours to give a literary talk in a village hall in Devon. When he arrived at the hall, it was open but there was nobody there: perhaps he had come on the wrong night.

At this point, his taxi driver said that, to give them both a break, he would be happy to sit and listen while Trevor read him one of his short stories. Trevor thought it a charming suggestion, and read a story for 20 minutes. What he failed to realise, however, was that throughout those 20 minutes, the taxi driver had left his meter ticking.

Between the two of them, Trevor and his taxi driver had unwittingly enacted a perfect little short story about the reading of a short story.

The Penguin Book Of Spanish Short Stories contains many barely longer than this review: no sooner have you started them than they have finished. Sadly, none of these very short stories has the precision of Hemingway’s: they read more like notes for a story, or an idea in embryo. The longer stories in the collection tend to be more resonant, and have more depth.

‘Think of this… as a box of chocolates; savour and ponder each story one or, at most, two at a time,’ writes the editor, Margaret Jull Costa, in her snappy introduction.

I tried to follow these rules, but if I found two successive stories empty and inconsequential I was naturally drawn to read a third, in the hope of making it all worthwhile. By its very design – 56 different stories in 377 pages – this book is necessarily bitty. But its range of quality – from profound and touching to slight and so-what-ish – makes it even bittier.

Given that Spain has such a long and rich literary tradition, I was surprised that all but five of the stories spring from the 20th century, and most from the second half of the 20th century. Irritatingly, Jull Costa gives no specific year for when each particular story was written, simply listing them in order of their authors’ births.

This means that it is hard to place each story in its historical context: for instance, an author called Azorín, who was born in 1873 and died in 1967, comes very close to the beginning, even though he wrote his ingenious and hugely enjoyable story The Reverse Side Of The Tapestry in 1956, at the age of 83.

The Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, was clearly the key, devastating event in 20th-century Spain, dividing friends and families, and many of the stories are haunted by it.

To my mind the best of these is Manuel Rivas’s The Butterfly’s Tongue. A little boy called Moncho has his eyes opened to the wonders of the world by a friendly teacher. ‘He could turn everything he touched into a fascinating story. The story might begin with a piece of paper, then set off down the Amazon… everything was connected, everything had meaning. Grass, a sheep, wool, feeling cold. When the teacher went over to the map of the world, we were as attentive as if the screen at the Rex Cinema was

about to light up.’ The boy’s father, a tailor, is so delighted that he gives the teacher a suit.

But then comes the civil war. The boy’s father, a Republican, is obliged to deny his beliefs. The family gets rid of everything that might compromise him. ‘Papa was never a Republican,’ says the boy’s mother. ‘Papa was never a friend of the mayor. Papa never spoke ill of the priests. And another very important thing, Moncho, Papa never gave the teacher a suit.’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘No, Moncho, he didn’t. Do you understand? He never gave him a suit.’

‘No, Mama, he didn’t.’ The story ends with a handful of Republican prisoners, roped together, being marched through the town by the police. Among them is the teacher. The crowd shouts abuse at them. Moncho’s mother encourages his father to join in with the abuse.

‘Murderer! Anarchist! Monster!’ shouts his father. And then his mother tells Moncho to shout too. ‘When the trucks drew away, laden with prisoners, I was one of the children who ran behind them, throwing stones. I searched desperately for the teacher’s face, so that I could call him traitor and criminal…’

Here, in just 11 pages, is a perfect encapsulation of the terrible lies and personal betrayals that occur when a country is at war with itself. In more cumbersome hands, this short story would probably have ended up as a novel, but at this length it carries infinitely more punch.

Some of the tales in the collection seem almost more English than Spanish, both in their content and their style. One, by Teresa Solana, who was born in Barcelona and now lives in Oxford, reminded me of Somerset Maugham, or Roald Dahl. A stiff British diplomat leaves his wife for his brassy secretary, who then becomes The Second Mrs Appleton, which is also the title of the story.

Mr Appleton is appointed ambassador to Washington, but the Second Mrs Appleton is an embarrassment, ‘expert at putting her foot in it at the most inglorious of moments’.

At a major banquet, she gets drunk and loses all her inhibitions. Mr Appleton is dismissed, and is forced to take up a junior appointment in Barcelona, where his wife immediately puts her foot in it again, wondering ‘out loud why the hell the Catalans had to speak Catalan if they could already speak Spanish’.

The couple are at war. Mr Appleton plots to murder his wife. At the same time, his wife plots to kill him. The dénouement is neat, witty and delightfully callous.

Some stories are much more abundantly Spanish, or at least what this Briton thinks of as Spanish, with a winning mixture of macho rivalries, Catholicism, over-thetop passions and surrealism. Lovers are shot, men turn into wolves, prostitutes dress as girls going to their First Communion.

In Luzmila by Alvaro Pombo, a poor woman called Luzmila works as a dogsbody in the Convent of the Most Pure Conception. ‘Dear Jesus, in whom I firmly believe,’ she prays each night, ‘… it is for my sake that you are there on the altar, that you give your Body and Blood to the faithful soul as heavenly nourishment.’

Luzmila leaves the convent and becomes a nanny, and then a cleaning lady. Aged 65, she starts to hide her communion hosts in a little box. Around the same time, she befriends a teenage prostitute called Dorita, who soon runs off with all her money.

This is the sad, steamy, fateful, impoverished Spain we recognise from drama, art and opera.

In A Sense of Camaraderie, Javier Marías, who is probably the best known of all the authors, declares that ‘Here we are at the beginning of the 21st Century and already 90 per cent of 20th Century Spanish literature is completely outdated… at least as far as sexual mores are concerned.’ Marías then turns this idea on its head, telling a funny story of two men at a wedding, ostensibly at odds, but united by a macho sense of being men together.

But, for the most part, I was struck by the bland internationalism of the stories, especially some of the more recent ones. Who knows? Perhaps blandness pays off. In the brief CVs inserted at the foot of each story, there is barely a writer who hasn’t been honoured with a major award.