Espantos de agosto (The Ghosts of August) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I read this story as part of my Spanish Challenge. It is a classical ghost story like those of Charles Dickens or MR James.  It comes from his collection Strange Pilgrims / Doce Cuentos Peregrinos. Reading these Marquez’s short stories for the first time, I conclude that they are probably more accessible than his magical realism novels to many readers.

One Sunday in early August, a family seek out The Renaissance castle of Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva for a visit in the Tuscan countryside. They have difficultly locating it and on asking directions are warned that the house is haunted and not to stay overnight. Inevitably they do. But before retiring to their modernised ground floor room, they are shown the rest of the house including the unchanged room where the original owner, Ludovic, killed his wife and set his own dogs upon himself. .All seems well when the man of the family wakes up the following morning. His wife is still sleeping soundly and his children are in the adjacent room. But all is not well. 

Marquez hardly builds any tension in the story, but lays the foundation simply in the warning and in the description of Ludovic’s room.

“Era el dormitorio de Ludovico.
Fue un instante mágico. Allí estaba la cama de cortinas bordadas con hilos de oro, y el sobrecama de prodigios de pasamanería todavía acartonado por la sangre seca de la amante sacrificada. Estaba la chimenea con las cenizas heladas y el último leño convertido en piedra, el armario con sus armas bien cebadas, y el retrato al óleo del caballero pensativo en un marco de oro, pintado por alguno de los maestros florentinos que no tuvieron la fortuna de sobrevivir a su tiempo. Sin embargo, lo que más me impresionó fue el olor de fresas recientes que permanecía estancado sin explicación posible en el ámbito del dormitorio. “

Subtle and not over the top. No blood and gore. Just well drawn. Note: pasamanería  - I had to look this up even in English which uses the term passementerie for the art of making fancy trimmings and edgings for clothing or furnishings using gold or silver braid,cord, silk threads, or beads.

Un día de éstos – One of those days by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

Continuing on with My Spanish Challenge and reading this one by one of my favourite authors. It is part of the collection entitled Las Funerales de Mamá Grande / Big Mama’s Funeral and is also reproduced on Collected Stories. The Spanish version I worked with is found here.

It is the story of Aurelio Escovar, a dentist, who finds himself with the mayor as his patient. The unnamed mayor has had a damaged molar for five days and has a swollen face and is in lots of pain. Initially the dentist refuses to attend to him, but is then threatened by the mayor, a military man clearly used to getting his own way. Time therefore for the dentist to extract comeuppance for the mayor’s activities around the town “Tiene que ser sin anestesia” “¿Por qué?” “Porque tiene un absceco” Great excuse! The dentists extracts the tooth murmuring “ Aqui nos paga veinte muertos, teniente” Here you pay as for 20 deaths, lieutenant.

¿Tejar o tejer? To tile or to knit?

Casa Tomada

by

Julio Cortázar

One of this first ever stories, it can be found in his collections Bestiario (The Beastery) and Casa tomada y otros cuentos. Still consulting a dictionary, I read this as part of my Spanish Challenge.

In the story, an unnamed man and his sister, Irene, stay on in a huge old house that had belonged to their parents and their grandparents before them. Bother are middle aged and unmarried. Irene knits, but unravels much of her work.  He reads and smokes a pipe. They have no contact with other people outside of the house. One evening upon going to the kitchen for a glass of water he hears sounds coming from the library or the dining room. “Han tomado la parte del fundo” / They’ve  taken over the back part” he reports back to his sister. After this, they live in the  other wing of the house separated from this part by a large oak door. They have to leave many things behind them on the other side of the door.

The scene repeats itself, with the man going to the kitchen for a drink, hearing the noise from the kitchen or the bathroom, until the two become convinced the noises have moved onto their side of the oak door into their wing of the house. “Han tomado este parte / They taken over our section” Irene said.  There and then at 11PM they decide to  leave the house leaving behind them everything, their clothes, his books, her knitting and 15,000 pesos hidden in the wardrobe. On exiting the house, he locks the door and flings the key down the drain because “It would not do for some poor devil to decide to rob the house now it has been taken over”.

A strange short story. When reading it I assumed it was either a ghost story or a nightmare due to the recurrent nature of both the knitting of the sister and of him hearing the noises. In fact Cortázar himself said in an interview that it was written from a nightmare of his own – “One of my first and most popular stories, “House Taken Over,” is a nightmare I had. I got up immediately and wrote it.” Whoever/whatever has taken over the house is never identified, because neither the brother or the sister make any attempt to investigate the causes of the noise. They have been trapped in the house by their past, their mundane life existing on a day to day basis without change or excitement, without contact with others. Then they are trapped in ever reducing set of rooms by their fear of the unknown. Only at the end do they appear to break free and venture forth into the world beyond their house. Perhaps a story of grief and grieving.

Spanish learnings:  I made a mental note of interest of the similarity between to knit = tejer, el tejido = the knitting  and el tejado = the roof, tejar = to tile

My Spanish Challenge

In my 30s I read a lot of Latin American literature, fell in love with magical realism and made a promise to myself that once I was retired I would take my basic tourist level Spanish and not only brush it up but improve it to the level where I could read the Hispanic classics in their original language. My  ideal goal would be to read Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which in the meantime I promised never to read in English.  Whether I ever make it to that pinnacle, is in many ways irrelevant: what matters is the journey there.

So I have been taking Spanish classes this past year, going back to basics to learn properly that which I had taught myself and just picked up along the way. It is slow going this going back to beginner level – sitting there with students with much less vocabulary, doing the basics like the Present Tense etc, but it also lets me know not only what I know but more importantly what I didn’t know. The group, now on its second course together, is of mixed ability, mixed requirement and mixed time to spend learning. Luckily I have found 2 other woman of like mind and the 3 of us compliment each other very well with our Spanish skills sets. One has a very clear voice and articulates the language very well; the other had learnt Spanish years before at school and this course is bringing it all back – she is stronger on the grammar points; and I would say I was strongest on the vocabulary. We have taken to meeting outside of the class and working in more depth on new readings, doing extra exercises etc. I think it is working well.

Alongside this I have on my own now started to read some more adult stories – no not adult in that sense !– just more interesting reads than the “in the hotel” or “at the train station” scenarios of textbooks and courses which after a while do get a bit  boring.  I wanted to set myself a private challenge to maintain my interest levels and since I think reading improves vocabulary enormously. Being an avid reader anyway and quite often reading short stories with my Constant Reader buddies online, this form provides the ideal starting point.  So a few weeks ago I sat down with my first proper story which I had not read before in English. It was The Blizzard  - La Tempestad de Nieva by Pushkin. Yes, I found difficult. Then on Sunday I sat down with my second  - Emma Zunz by Jorge Luis Borges. I decided, as much for my own benefit as anything, to write a few words here to record progress on this challenge.

Both stories have been a challenge. With the  Borges, I have not read much of his work in English so I was not familiar with his style. I have had to sit with the dictionary and consult it several times a paragraph. I found some of the sentence structures quite difficult -  usually those in the passive voice which really test out my verb tense recognition skills. But I got there!  Now the challenge is to remember the new words and try to apply some of them in my writings and speech within the class and the group in order to reinforce them in my memory :)