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