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So Much Smoke I Halford I Sydney Review of Books
December 2, 2016
Félix Calvino’s Lost
Galicia
James Halford is a
recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the
second of three essays by Halford that will appear on the Sydney
Review of Books, alongside essays by other fellowship recipients, Ben
Brooker and Ali Jane Smith.
‘Galicia is a garden where one always
breathes pure aromas, freshness, and poetry,’ wrote the romantic novelist and
poet Rosalía de Castro in 1863. ‘Lakes, waterfalls, streams … serene blue skies
like those of Italy … Need I say more? No pen could enumerate its charms.’ De
Castro and other nineteenth-century nationalists of Galicia’s
literary Rexurdimiento were moved to proclaim their love of the
region at the height of the greatest exodus in its history. Between 1860 and 1910
something like half a million Galicians left for the Americas. This was the
largest in a series of mass migrations from the region, which was among the
poorest in Spain from the eighteenth century right through to the 1970s. For
centuries Galicians had to periodically abandon their farms due to
overcrowding, unemployment, and crises in agricultural production. During the
nineteenth century they arrived in Latin America in such numbers that ‘gallego’
jokes, based on peasant stereotypes, became a genre of their own. In 1955, the
Galician intellectual Ramón Otero Pedrayo, a less romantic nationalist than De
Castro, described his home, not as a garden, but as a ‘land of goodbyes.’
Out of this history of material
struggle and displacement, Galicia’s writers have fashioned a rich literature.
In recent times, a new crop of Galician-language authors – Manuel Rivas, Xose
Luis Mendez, and María do Carme Kruckenberg among the most prominent – have
carried on the Rexurdimiento tradition at home, even as diasporic writers
have created a new branch of Galician writing abroad. All of them have had to
negotiate a relationship with the controversial legacy of Galicia’s best-known
twentieth-century writer, the Franco loyalist and 1989 Nobel Laureate for
literature, Camilo José Cela.
Franco’s dictatorship drove mass
migration, not just from Galicia but from all corners of Spain, for decades.
The post-war Spanish diaspora spread to Australia, where expatriate communities
developed in both Sydney and Melbourne. Australian Immigration Department
records show that about 26,000 Spaniards arrived in Australia between 1945 and
1975. Many of them came under Australian government-assisted migration schemes
such as Operación Canguro (1958-1963). This was less a humanitarian
gesture on the part of the Australian government, and more an acknowledgement
that the preferred British migrants were unlikely to work for paltry wages in
the Queensland cane fields or the Riverina tobacco plantations. The early
Spanish migrants often languished in squalid camps, like the infamous
Bonegilla, for extended periods.
_____
The Galician-Australian writer, Felix
Calvino, arrived with a slightly later wave of Spanish migrants. Calvino grew
up in a small village about an hour’s drive from the Galician capital,
Santiago de Compostela, and fled Spain in 1964 on his twentieth birthday to
avoid military service. After a few years learning English in the UK, he
emigrated to Sydney and established himself as a restaurateur, wine merchant,
and travel agent. He was a prominent member of the Spanish expatriate community,
married and had a family. In the nineties, he made a new start in Melbourne,
and finally fulfilled a lifelong goal of undertaking tertiary study. His
talents as a fiction writer were not discovered until he was well into his
fifties. At the encouragement of the Greek-Australian writer George
Papaellinas, one of his teachers at the University of Melbourne, Calvino began
publishing short stories in Australian and US literary magazines.
His first short-story
collection, A Hatful of Cherries (2007), is notable for its
juxtaposition of Galician and Australian settings. About half the stories
unfold in the underdeveloped, autocratic post-war Galicia of Calvino’s youth,
the rest deal with working-class Spanish migrants in 1960s and 1970s Australia.
The ghosts of the Spanish Civil War have haunted his writing from the start. In
‘Don’t Touch Anything,’ the child narrator is sent away from the burial of a
school mate’s grandfather when the adults stumble upon a mass grave. ‘After
that,’ he remarks, ‘dreams of earth and bones often visited me in my sleep.’
Another early story, ‘Two Men at the Border,’ fictionalises the ordeal of
escaping Franco’s Spain.
Calvino’s second book, the
novella Alfonso (2013), tells the story of a Galician man struggling
to invent himself in 1960s Sydney. Alfonso is desperate for the love of an
Australian woman, but remains a virgin into his thirties, unable to establish
or maintain an adult relationship. Why this sensitive, hard-working, and
resilient young man cannot give or receive love is the book’s central mystery.
Nothing that we know of him – the loss of his father in the Civil War, his
lapsed Catholicism, or his macho Spanish friends’ warnings – fully explains his
decade-long terror of Australian women, his decision to sever contact with his
elderly mother in Galicia, or the depths of psychological torment to which he
subjects himself in his dilapidated Surry Hills terrace house. Calvino’s
unsettling imagery and language disrupt what at first appears to be a simple,
realist Bildungsroman. The novel gestures at a culturally particular form
of homesickness that can never be fully expressed in English. Morriña, the
specifically Galician ache for home, has been a favourite subject of its
writers since De Castro’s time.
_____
Eight of the eleven stories in
Calvino’s new collection, So Much Smoke, return to the nameless Galician
village that appeared in his first collection. The very short story
or microcuento is a Calvino speciality. At only 600-words, the opener,
‘They Are Only Dreams,’ stands out for its unity and concision. As mother and
daughter watch milk boil on the stone hearth of a farm kitchen in winter, the
girl confesses she has dreamed of an old man dying. Bells are heard tolling in
the village across the river and a neighbour brings news that the shoemaker has
died in the night. Spooked, the mother shares this latest proof of the girl’s
prophetic gifts with her husband. The man listens as he oils a fox trap in the
barn, but refuses to believe.
A sequence of concrete images and sense
impressions – the milk, the fire, the dead man’s white beard, the bells, the
snow-covered hills, the trap – fulfil a function akin to the effet de
réel of the classic realist short story (we might be reading Chekhov or
Maupassant). Yet the absence of an authoritative narrator gives equal weight to
the man’s positivist viewpoint and the woman’s mystical, religious one. In the
tiny clockwork universe of the microcuento, the fox trap never springs
closed, so that both readings of the story remain available, and the unresolved
tension lingers.
It is no literary effect that Calvino’s
stories set in rural Galicia in the 1950s and 1960s sometimes feel like they
could be unfolding in the nineteenth century or even the middle ages. After the
Nationalist victory, Franco deliberately set back the clock in the Spanish
countryside, aiming, as George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia, ‘not
so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism.’ But Calvino also bears
witness to the exhaustion of the old rural order and the arrival of modernity.
In ‘The Road,’ a peasant dies without leaving a will, and his two sons must
negotiate the division of the family land. Benito tricks his simpleton younger
brother José into accepting the swampy, unproductive plot by the coast. But a
landslide in a storm results in a sudden reversal of fortunes: ‘the receding
waters exposed a stone road, emerging from the sea like a recalled ghost.’
Heritage tourism, not agriculture, it turns out, represents Galicia’s economic
future.
The new collection’s novella-length
centrepiece, ‘The Smile,’ unfolds closer to home. It is set in the Sydney
Spanish community during the final years of the Franco dictatorship, a world of
English classes and shift-work, football on the radio, and paella on the stove.
The young Galician protagonist, José, befriends an older Spanish couple, Fidel
and Consuelo – a street sweeper and a cleaner – whose Sunday lunches in the
Andalusian-style garden of their home are a refuge for exiled Spaniards.
Calvino’s attention to the rituals of food and drink highlights the way meals
bind friendship networks together in the new country. ‘It’s like my mother’s
cooking, which I miss,’ remarks one character.
In the Australian stories the elements
of parable, fairy tale, and magic realism are less pronounced but not absent.
Both Fidel and Consuelo have disfigured faces that frighten children and
attract stares from adults. As Consuelo is dying in hospital of an inoperable
brain tumour, José experiences a ghostly visitation outside his kitchen window.
And, after her death, he continually senses her presence in the mirrors of
Fidel’s home. José’s first encounter with loss and grief changes his cynical,
skirt-chasing ways. As the younger man helps Fidel through the ‘exquisite
pain,’ of his wife’s loss, and learns more about his friends’ marriage, their
relationship comes to represent, in his mind, an ideal of self-acceptance and
unconditional love he would one day like to experience. Meanwhile, the bachelor
must teach his older friend the life skills he needs to survive alone: ‘Fidel
learned to boil a potato, fry an egg, grill a steak and hang out the laundry.’
Like Alfonso, Fidel retreats from the material hardship and loneliness of
migrant life into memories of his Spanish past. For him, as for thousands of
other scattered Spaniards, Franco’s death in 1975, opens the possibility of
return.
Calvino’s fiction, too, seems to be
moving back to the village. The stories in So Much Smoke rely upon
the defamiliarisation effect used in his earlier books: Galicia is made strange
through the English language; Australia is made strange by non-native English
and a Galician worldview. In this collection, however, the teeming social world
of the village takes over, threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the
short form.
This collection firmly establishes
Calvino as an English prose stylist. The influence of Anglophone modernist
minimalism is apparent and appropriate. Through absence and implication, the
stories register feelings of loss the characters themselves often lack the
language to articulate. If, as Rosalía de Castro wrote, to sing of Galicia in
the Galician language offers ‘consolation against evil, relief from pain,’ to
write of it in English implies something else entirely.
References
Australian Government Department of
Immigration and Border Protection. ‘Historical Migration Statistics.’
2016. Web. Oct 17 2016.
Calvino, Félix. Alfonso.
Melbourne: Arcadia, 2013.
– A Hatful of Cherries. Melbourne:
Arcadia, 2007.
– So Much Smoke. Melbourne:
Arcadia, 2016.
De Castros, Rosalia. Cantares Gallegos. 1863. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1947.
Fernandez-Shaw, Carlos M. Espana Y Australia: Quinientos Anos De
Relaciones.Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de Espana, 2000.
Giraldez, Jose Miguel. ‘Félix Calviño: La Memoria De Galicia Siempre
Será Mi Refugio.’ El Correo Gallego
2011. Acessed 14 September 2016.
Leggott, Sarah. Memory, War, and
Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women. Vol. 21. London:
Routledge, 2015.
Preston, Paul. A Concise History
of the Spanish Civil War. London: Harper Collins, 1996.
Rodriguez Galdo, Maria Xose, and Abel
Losada Alvarez. ‘A Contribution to the Study of Historical Relations between
Galicia and Australia. Migration and the Labour Market.’ Australia and
Galicia: Defeating the Tyranny of Distance. Eds. Maria Jesus Lorenzo Modia, and
Roy C. Boland Osegueda. 2008. 101-30.
The SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowships
are supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
________________
The Sydney Review of
Books is an initiative of the Writing
and Society Research Centre.
Alfonso I Jennifer Popa I Antipodes
November 30, 2016
In the
quiet company of a dreamer
Jennifer
Popa
Austin, Texas.
Often the novice writer is told that her characters need to
have desires, wants, obsessions. While it seems a rather obvious statement, the
question “What does this character want?” can summon a cringe from the writer.
Matters such as plot, dialogue, or structure—these are manageable craft points,
in that they are sometimes easier to pin down, but succinctly describing the
innermost desires of a human proves a bit unwieldy. There is something
inherently personal and loaded in the question, especially when asked of the
writer herself, who is both attempting to depict it and also the inventor of
said desire. Even in our own lives, it is difficult to say precisely what we
want, at least not plainly or without qualifiers, and if we can identify it, we
are not always right. Yet Félix Calvino navigates this question with ease in
his slender novel Alfonso, as his title character’s desires are palpable; each
page is saturated with his wish for connection. This is possibly because the
character’s life parallels the author’s own. Alfonso’s sense of longing is a
want so unmistakable, so tangible on the page, that the reader inevitably
inherits its burden.
The book opens on Alfonso walking home from his construction
job, as he experiences the quiet yearning upon seeing the doppelgänger of a
girl from his village. He remembers the village girl at their first communion
“dressed in white and looking more angel than girl” (3). He decides he must
meet the replica girl and devises plans to encounter her again at the bus stop.
Alfonso’s world is one of duality. There is a double
consciousness as he oscillates between replication and reinvention, between his
Spanishness and his Australianness. There is a split in his person at the
moment he leaves Spain, when his two discernible selves take shape: the one
from before and the other who looks toward a bright though elusive future.
Still, he remains hopeful that his turn will come. Although he has escaped
poverty—an achievement that serves as the springboard for all his good fortune—in
Australia he has stayed within the safety of his Spanish bubble. If he wanted,
he could lead a life with minimal assimilation among a community of immigrants,
but mostly Alfonso’s world is one of loneliness. In his kitchen, he dances with
a spatula and a glass of wine, pretending that he is instead dancing with a
beautiful woman. He befriends a neighborhood tomcat, which he names Guapo, but
even the cat remains aloof: “He also concluded reluctantly that in Guapo’s
heart, there was limited space for him” (43). As he restores his row house, he
talks to the disembodied voice of a woman, who is part ghostly companion, part
invention, part hallucination. The woman’s voice is complimentary, though they
sometimes quarrel about his design choices. There is an inevitable
claustrophobia to his routine:
The four walls he had washed and
painted twice as a gesture of friendship would have captured, as a mirror
would, his frustration at trying to sew on a button, or trying not to scorch a
new shirt; his clumsy attempts at cooking dinner with half of the ingredients
missing until he trained himself to write a shopping list before going
shopping; his relentless learning and relearning of English words; his chores
of washing, cleaning, daily bed-making, and weekly changing of the bed sheets.
These same walls would have recorded his loneliness in daytime and sadness
always at night. The narrow wardrobe, the Triumph stove, the couch, two wooden
chairs, and the aluminum table with the green Formica top would have watched his
character crossing from youth to man, although he could not identify the exact
turning point. Perhaps the pieces came together like a jigsaw. (33)
For the reader, the tangible objects in Alfonso’s home take
center stage: the carrots and potatoes he is cooking for dinner, the cabinets
he restores, and the telephone that does not ring. They only fade to the
background when Alfonso retreats to memory to reimagine the details of an
encounter with a woman. The care he takes in constructing a life that would welcome
a companion and these visions of companionship are so earnest. Yet even when
his dream woman arrives in the form of the beautiful Australian Nancy, he is
not entirely sure what to do. Sometimes his naiveté trumps his desires, just as
his loneliness can be at times willful.
Alfonso’s immigrant experience is deceptively simple. Very
little happens in the span of these 117 pages, but there is an economy in
Calvino’s narrative that allows us to fully engage with Alfonso. The rhythm of
his solitary routine renders an agreeable hum on the page, in part because
Alfonso is quite likable as characters go. This is not to say that he is not
fallible but that he is human, and there is a universal familiarity in his
anxieties and dreams. One cannot help but admire his deliberate efforts: when
he is rebuffed by the replica girl, he sets out to learn English through course
work, becoming a member of the library and reading his Reader’s Digest
subscription. After years as a “bed-sitter,” he buys a dilapidated house and
restores it faithfully every day for three years; there is a tenderness in his
dismissing his male friends who vilify women. Quite simply, I enjoy his
company, and there is a comfort in occupying his headspace. While the immigrant
experience might be foreign for the reader, Alfonso teaches us something about
the ways in which we live, in particular about the moments when we might feel
like strangers to our own lives.
Félix Calvino, Alfonso
Author(s): Jennifer Popa
Source: Antipodes, Vol. 30, No. 1 (June 2016), pp.
231-233
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Félix Calvino. Alfonso. Melbourne:
Arcadia, 2013. 117 pp. A$22.95. ISBN:
978-1-925003-20-8
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