#847 The Two Stories- Feslisberto Hernandez

#847 The Two Stories- Feslisberto Hernandez

Which one is more tortured, the lover or the writer? A man working in a toy workshop is tortured with a story in his head. He has been inspired by the love of a woman, he cant concentrate and has been admonished at work for his unfocussed demeanor. He sets down to write the story, but finds it is lost, and so it is for his love as well.

“He has set down with the purpose of telling everything exactly as it had happened—and soon realized this was impossible. And that was when his vague and secret anguish began.”

What follows is some notes from his writing during the period of his infatuation. Like waking from a dream, stories can be fleeting images left in mind. They are left blurry, vague, and maddeningly unattainable, just out of your grasp. The anguish of greatness lost.

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#818 “Lovebird” Furniture- Felisberto Hernandez

#818 “Lovebird” Furniture- Felisberto Hernandez

This is a bizarre little story, almost feels like something written by Kurt Vonnegut. A man is approached by another man on the trolley and gets tricked into getting an injection of something. Others also get the injection but seem to enjoy the experience. The next morning he begins hearing a radio broadcast from inside his head. The injection had made him a receptor for this station mostly broadcasting advertisements for “Lovebird Furniture.”

After a while the man can’t stand the constant stream of radio noise, but can’t track down the actual station to complain. He finds another injection man, who tells him that the broadcast can be silenced by taking new pills that are for sale. Nice satire on consumer marketing: Create a problem, charge for the cure.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#790 The Green Heart- Felisberto Hernandez

#790 The Green Heart- Felisberto Hernandez

This is a very contemplative piece. A lonely pianist ponders his life while staring at a discolored newspaper that covers his kitchen table. Memories fall out as he lazily pokes at the edges of the paper.

“All of these memories lived in some part of me that was like a small lost town known only to itself, cut off from the rest of the world. For many years nobody had been born or dies there. The founders of the town had been my childhood memories. Then later, years later some foreigners had arrived…This afternoon I had a feeling I was in that town for a rest, as if misery had granted me a holiday.”

Rating: 9-7-8-7 Total= 31

#763 The Dark Dining Room- Felisberto Hernandez

#763 The Dark Dining Room- Felisberto Hernandez

A young up and coming pianist is looking for work, but it is hard to come by. He manages to get a lowly job playing twice a week for a private audience. A strange woman, both widowed and jilted has hired him to fill the house with music. He finds the surroundings odd and uncomfortable, especially his encounters with a disgruntled maid at the estate.

As all the stories in this collection, music plays a huge roll. Here it evokes memories and desire, whether wanted or not. That part of the story was, as always, written delicately and with great effect. However, this was the first of this Piano Stories collection I found disappointing. It was left a bit unresolved or undeveloped in an unsatisfying way. Unlike the others, this was written in a classic style without Hernandez’s penchant for spiritual or other-worldly themes. Classic is fine, but using that as a measuring stick, this fell a bit short (and I’m only using the high level of achievement his other stories hit as a barometer).

Notable Passage: “I hadn’t wanted the title of the song to bring back her bad memories, but I was drawn to the tragedies in other lives.”

Rating: 8-7-6-6 Total= 27

#735 My First Concert- Felisberto Hernandez

#735 My First Concert- Felisberto Hernandez

You can practice all you want, for years on end. Your technique could be perfected and your understanding of the music impeccable.  In the comfort of your own studio you may be the greatest musician ever, but unless you can overcome the nerves of stage-fright, you will never be as good as you think.

This is a charming and all-too realistic look into the fragile nerves of a first time performer. Having been a musician myself, I am very sensitive to these feelings. The days leading up to the performance is a steady roller coaster of emotion that Hernandez writes perfectly. Here are just a few of the telling quotes in this story:

“Rounding a corner I saw my name written large on two huge posters stuck on either side of a cart, and felt even more miserable. If the letters had only been smaller, perhaps less would have been expected of me.”

“I distrusted myself that morning and started going over my program like someone counting his money because he suspects it has been stolen from him during the night, and I soon found out I didn’t have as much as I had thought I did.”

We see the performance, and thankfully is wasn’t a disaster. The lighter moments on stage make for a great tension/release. I love using both a coffin and cannon as metaphors for the piano.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#707 The Woman Who Looked Like Me- Felisberto Hernandez

#707 The Woman Who Looked Like Me- Felisberto Hernandez

This is another beautiful story by Hernandez. A boy thinks he may have been a horse in a former life, or an alternative life. He remembers himself as a horse searching for freedom. Maybe it’s a horse that imagines himself as a boy. Together they are an orphan, fighting for a loving home, one without beatings or hard back-breaking work. The horse would find a new owner, but at the first sign of trouble would jump the fence and run until he hurt.

“The pain made me pay attention to reach separate part of my body as it tried to keep pace with the rest. Now and then, out of step with my other movements, a chill ran down my back, but the next moment it was a shiver of anticipation of the thought of being alone later on, quietly going over my new store of memories.”

He walks into a school during a play and finds an adoring crowd. He settles in with a teacher that kind of looks like him, and he thinks he has found his home. But horses aren’t free around here and one of his owners comes to find him. If you keep running, you will always be alone.

Notable Passage: “I set out slowly because I was tired. But my freedom made me fearless.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#672 Except Julia- Felisberto Hernandez

#672 Except Julia- Felisberto Hernandez

Letting go is difficult. Can you spend time both getting in touch with your own soul, and also connecting with others? A man has a tunnel, it is like an isolation tank. He uses it to shut out the world and heighten his senses. He believes that outside influence hinders his ability to see clearly.

“I used to hear a loud radio when I was strolling in the garden and it made me lose sight of the trees, of my whole life. It was a defilement that spoiled all my ideas: my own home longer seemed mine.”

He invites an old friend to his tunnel to experience this heightened perception. The experiment goes well, his friend sees the benefit of the tunnel, and of seeking the mysteries of the self. But he also sees the conflict. If they are in the tunnel together then their experience includes that person. It is unavoidable.

“I‘ve lived near other people and collected memories that don’t belong to me.”

“Soon we would be entering the tunnel with the memories of all the things the light had blurred before it went out.”

“In the tunnel I can feel all sorts of ideas going by on their way to someplace else.”

In the end, the man must decide to compromise, or be pure in his pursuits. If you are attached to someone, they become part of your “self”. 

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#644 The Usher- Felisberto Hernandez

#644 The Usher- Felisberto Hernandez

An usher at an old-fashioned movie theatre believes himself to be special, something better than a mere usher. He “knew how to bow at once with respect and contempt.” While he went about working and exploring the city, he developed a delusion. Most of us may believe we have an inner-light, but his was an actual light that could make him see things in the dark.

Like many working class people who believe themselves to be better than their station, this usher focused his “power” on a wealthy man and his estate. He convinced the estate’s butler to allow him inside at night to illuminate things in the dark, believing that the wealthy man’s things to be more interesting than his own.

What makes this a fable is the lesson that it teaches. Maybe this usher did have an inner-light that made his special. Who’s to say? When he used it to for diligence and being good at his job, he was making his way to bigger and better things. He was making money and enjoying himself. When he fell to delusions of grandeur, worrying not about himself but coveting what others had, he lost his job and his enjoyment of life.

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#616 The Balcony- Felisberto Hernandez

#616 The Balcony- Felisberto Hernandez

I am utterly taken with the beautiful writing in this collection. Hernandez is just as much a musician as a writer, taking an extraordinary person and building a magical setting around her like a composer builds strings around a piano soloist.

A pianist is invited to visit the home of a father who’s daughter cannot leave her house. She is afraid of going outdoors and has created a world around herself. Her friends are the objects she sees, the colors of parasols she adorns the hallway with, and the balcony she spends most of her time. Her anthropomorphic eye extends to more elusive things like shadows:

“As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they develop souls as they came in touch with people.”

Silence is another theme that gets a lot of attentions here. Like the shadows, silence is seen as something alive with not only personality but emotion:

“I could see it growing on the big black top of the piano. The Silence liked to listen to the music, slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion. But once it felt at home it took part in the music. Then it was like a cat with a long black tail slipping in between the notes, leaving them full of intentions.”

-I was sinking into something like the bowels of silence

-the silence was a heavy animal with a paw raised

These are the types of stories that makes reading more than just entertainment. Enough of the stories that try to relate to everyday life. We see everyday life, exist in it, I don’t want to read about it. I read to escape from everyday life, go somewhere only the author can imaging. I’m glad people still write like this, although that’s not entirely fair…nobody writes quite like this.

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

#581 No One Had Lit a Lamp- Felisberto Hernandez

#581 No One Had Lit a Lamp- Felisberto Hernandez

There is a gathering in a parlor, and the narrator is giving a live reading. He is telling a story about a woman who attempts to commit suicide. As he reads, his mind wanders around the room, to the listeners, an intriguing young woman, the a statue outside, to the light hitting a vase of flowers in an adjacent room, making it look like its aflame. 

After the reading he is surrounded by admirers, each trying to impress him or get his attention. All he wants to do is talk with the young woman. They eventually do speak, but only of superficial things, or only of things one talks about in a parlor. As the sun fades, the crowd dissipates, because “no one had lit a lamp.”

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#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

#525 Just Before Falling Asleep- Felisberto Hernandez

#525 Just Before Falling Asleep- Felisberto Hernandez

In the introduction to Piano Stories, Italo Calvino says this about Uruguayan author Hernandez:

“Felisberto Hernandez is a writer like no other: like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an ‘irregular’ who eludes all classification and labling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.”

And the first piece in this collection is called How Not To Explain My Stories. Where beautifully describes the creative process:

“At any given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promise.”

So, I will read this collection with enthusiasm and will try not to think too hard about what they mean. We start with a small vignette, or a dreamlike Just Before Falling Asleep. The man has a recurring vision as he sets off to bed. He sees his family sitting around a table, and he fears that they have forgotten him. But he finds more comforting thoughts and his mind is calmed.

This is more poetry than short story, but it is easy to underestimate how difficult it is to create a short piece. There is no room for error or explanation. Each word must be perfect, each phrase meaningful. An orchestra may cover the broken string of a single cello, but not during a solo.

Notable Passage: “At times when the memory has followed me and caught up with me at night, the colors of the day were like those of an ordinary postcard, but their smiles were unchanged.”

Rating: 10-7-8-7 Total= 32