The next day, the Peruvian consul in Andalusia knocked at Juan Ramón’s door amid the olive trees of Moguer. The consul had received an urgent telegram from Lima: “Georgina Hubner is dead.
The Mailman
I saw him in the casket, wearing that unruffled, mischievous expression on his face and I thought: It can’t be. Chubby Soriano is just pretending.
Confirmation came from his son Manuel, who looked just like Chubby, only smaller. He told me he’d given his father a letter to take to Filipi, a friend who had died a few days earlier.
Filipi was a lizard. A strange lizard who acted like a chameleon, changing color whenever he felt like it. In the letter, Manuel taught him a game so Filipi could amuse himself while he was dead, because being dead is really boring. To play the game, you had to write something in capital letters. “Use your claws, Filipi,” Manuel told him.
So that was what had happened. Osvaldo Soriano, whose life had been spent writing stories and novels, letters to his readers, was now delivering the mail. He’d be back soon.
The Reader
In one of his stories, Soriano imagined a soccer game in some little town lost in Patagonia. No one had ever managed to put one in the net against the local team at home. That kind of insult would have met with a hanging or fatal beating. In the story, the visiting team resisted temptation for the entire match, but in the closing minutes the center striker ended up alone, facing the goalkeeper, and had no choice but to send the ball between his legs.
Ten years later, when Soriano landed at the Neuquén airport, a stranger gripped him in a hug that raised him off the ground, suitcase and all.
“It wasn’t just any goal, it was incredible!” he screamed. “I can see you right now! You rejoiced like Pelé!” And the man fell to his knees, lifting his arms to the heavens.
Then he covered his head. “Talk about raining stones! What a thrashing they gave us!”
His mouth open, suitcase in hand, Soriano listened.
“They were all over you! The whole town!” the maniac yelled. And indicating Soriano with his thumb, he told the gathering onlookers, “I saved this guy’s life.”
Then he proceeded to recount, in minute detail, the tremendous brawl that broke out at the end of the match Soriano had played, alone, one far-off night, sitting with his typewriter, a couple of sleepy cats, and an ashtray filled with butts.
The Book
Reina Reyes wanted Felisberto Hernandez to be free to devote himself to writing his wonderful stories and playing the piano. Writing earned him few readers and not a cent, and music was no money-maker either. Felisberto traveled deep into Uruguay and along the Argentina coast giving concerts, and he always had to leave his hotel by the window.
Reina was a teacher, she worked hard to make a living. In all the years he lived with her, Felisberto never heard her speak of money.
The first of every month, Reina gave him a book by one of the novelists or poets he liked. The book contained the freedom that delivered him from the hell of office work or the torment of other employment that steals hours and squanders life. Every few pages, he would find a bill, ironed flat.
The Ink
The chroniclers of the conquest of America outdid themselves praising the rare fruit, never before seen or tasted, that Mexican Indians called ahuacátl and Peruvians palta.
They wrote that it was shaped like a pear and looked like the breast of a fair damsel. That it grew untended in the forest, with God as its gardener. That its delicate flesh, neither sweet nor sour, buttered the mouth, restored the sick, and roused the lazy. And nothing better kindled the fires of love.
The fruit, meanwhile, took these homages as its due, and to keep them from fading she offered the indelible ink of her seeds. The praise was written in avocado ink.
Alphabet Soup
In size and sheen, he resembles a teardrop. Scientists call him Lepisma saccharina, but he answers to the name silverfish, even though he’s no fish and has never seen the sea.
His speciality is devouring books, though he’s no worm either. He’ll eat whatever he finds, novels, poetry, encyclopedias, swallowing word after word in any language at his leisure.
He spends his entire life in the dim light of libraries. Of everything else he’s oblivious. Daylight would kill him.
He would be quite the scholar, if he weren’t an insect.
She Tells
Chiti Hernàndez-Marti sat on a bench under the leafy canopy of Retiro Park and breathed deeply of the green air. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, a dwarf was at her side.
He introduced himself as a toreador. She imagined the size of the bull and frowned.
“You look sad,” the dwarf said. And he asked, no — demanded, “Tell me about it.”
She shook her head, but the dwarf insisted. “Trust me, Snow White.”
And Chiti murmured the first man’s name that came into her head, while thinking how tough the life of a dwarf bullfighter must be. Then she said, making it up, “That creep made a fool of me.”
As the story grew into a novel about a jerk who beat her, abused her, called her a worthless whore, Chiti felt less and less pity for the dwarf and only more for herself, by then pregnant by that twofaced bum of a married man with kids of his own. “How could I have done this to my boyfriend, who’s so good? The poor angel doesn’t deserve this, and now my mother’s thrown me out and I’ve lost my job and I don’t know what will become of me, I don’t know my way around this city, I have nobody, they all slam the door in my face…”
The dwarf, overwhelmed, gazed silently at his feet dangling in the air. Chiti shivered even though it was midsummer, while a stream of real tears flowed from her eyes through the park and toward the pond where rowboats bob on the water.
He Tells
It was the time of exile. Far from his country, Héctor Tizón’s longing for home cut deep and left him raw.
Someone recommended therapy, but he and the psychoanalyst spent each eternal session in silence. The patient lying on the couch said nothing because he was taciturn by nature and in any case thought his life story utterly unimportant. The therapist said nothing either, and session after session the blank pages of the notebook on his knees remained untouched. After fifty minutes the psychoanalyst would sigh and say, “Okay. Time’s up.”
Héctor felt sorry for the doctor and sorry for himself.
He decided things couldn’t stay that way.
From then on, while the midmorning train took him from Cercedilla to Madrid, Hector made up stories. As soon as he touched the couch, he swung away on a rainbow and began to spin stories of mountains bewitched, souls whistling in the night, evil lights in the mist, and mermaids strumming guitars on the banks of the Yala River.
The Shipwreck
Albert Londres traveled a lot and wrote a lot. He wrote about the boiling fury of the Balkans and Algeria, the trenches of the First World War, the barricades of Russia and China, the black slave trade in Dakar and the white slave trade in Buenos Aires, the poverty of pearl fishers in Aden, and the hell of prisoners in Cayenne.
On a calm night, while he walked the streets of Shanghai, something like a shaft of lightning struck him with the terrible force of revelation.