#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

Now this is writing! In a period where some writers try too hard to make virtue out of the mundane, it is refreshing to read a story like this. Language can be an art-form in itself without having to be lofty. It can uplift without looking down its nose. Too many writers try too hard to be clever, mistaking word play for depth. Hernandez has no such affliction.

What better place to showcase beautiful language than through the imagination of a child. The boy in this story remembers fondly his childhood piano lessons. Like many lonely children, he sees the world around him and bends the things he doesn’t understand to a creative world he can. Inanimate objects suddenly have personality and life:

“Although the secrets of grown-ups could be glimpsed in their actions and conversations, I had my favorite way of uncovering them—when the people were absent and I could find their traces in something they had left behind…the moment it was left unattended I could begin to trace that person’s secrets in it.”

He idolizes and falls in love with Celine, his music teacher. Such a crush can have a lasting effect on a person:

“Celine would make me spread my hands on the keys and, with her fingers, she bend mine back, as if she were teaching a spider to move its legs. She was more closely in touch with my hands than I was myself. When she made them crawl like slow crabs over white and black pebbles, suddenly the hands came upon sounds that cast a spell on everything in the circle of lamplight, giving each object a new charm.”

Story aside, there are myriad phrases and paragraphs in this story that ooze with emotion and make the reader stop, breath deep, take a moment, and go back to read them again, only this time slower and with more time to savor:

“Someone dumps chunks of the past at the feet of the imagination, who hastily sorts through them in the swaying light of a small lantern it holds over them, mixing earth and shadows. Suddenly it drops the lantern on the soil of memory and the light goes out. Then once more the imagination is an insect flying over forgotten distances to land again on the edge of the present.”

Notable Passage (as if there were only one): “What never went quite to sleep was the specter of magnolias. Although I had left behind the trees where they lived, they were with me, hidden in the back of my eyes, and suddenly I felt their presence, light as a breath somewhere blown into the air by thought, scattered around the room, and blending into the furniture.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40