Young Love and Other Stories
By
Félix Calvino
Arcadia,
2021
Reviewed
by Alison Clifton, StylusLit
In his
masterful new short fiction collection, Young Love and Other Stories,
Félix Calvino explores the shadows, shades, and occasionally shady dealings of
the people who inhabit a village in the Carballo area of Galicia, Spain. The
interplay between light and shade, silhouettes, shadows, and mirrors, is
central to this collection. These stories of village life are set in a liminal
time: post-war but pre-electricity. At the one-room school, the lone teacher
makes annual promises that the shrinking village will be connected to the grid
the following year, while a dwindling group of ageing men gather after the
winter rains each spring to fix the unsealed roads.
This may
seem like a simple existence. Yet the lives of shepherds, trout fishers,
cowherds, basket-weavers, carpenters, healers, and publicans are complex and
multifaceted. Though a character may glimpse the bucolic idyll, threats of
starvation, social exclusion, and damnation loom over the landscape, casting
shadows of potential ruin. To live in a village is to know everyone and be
known by everyone. To have one more cow than a neighbour is to rank above them
in the social order, but also to teeter precariously close to peril. Fields can
flood, livestock can sicken and die, crops can be ravaged by drought. To be
different is to be a pariah, suspect, scapegoat. Yet all is not as stifling as
it may seem.
Calvino
enters into a dialogue with the giants of European art – visual, sculptural,
poetic, prose, and dramatic – who juxtapose light and dark in an eternal,
futile battle. In the Christian universe, the Devil must remain subordinate to
the omnipotent God who created him. Good must ultimately triumph. Yet, this
dichotomy provides the tension in so much of European art and literature.
Italian artists like Caravaggio used tenebrismo in
their paintings. A harsh, dramatic light isolated and accentuated heroic
figures, throwing the spotlight on the struggle between good and evil, Heaven
and Hell, God and Satan. Calvino witnesses the implications and repercussions
of this simplified, fabricated cosmos of chiaroscuro. Yes,
God is Light, but so too was Lucifer the Angel of Light before his fall.
Calvino recognises this kinship and rejects reductive binary oppositions.
Instead, his characters inhabit a world of subtle shades and hues: the greys
brighten to white as often as they darken to black.
Calvino’s
collection opens with “Sunday Lunch” (1-27): a meditative tale of loss and
death that introduces two protagonists who re-emerge in later stories the way
shoots sprout from the soil in spring. When the last female inhabitant of the
village, Avelina, dies, Amadeo and Manuel, the two surviving men, must bury her
in the proper manner. Things do not go as planned. The pair must make do and
mend as they have all their lives. Because it would take four men to shoulder a
casket, Amadeo and Manuel improvise. Thus, “the spectral silence of the
village” is disrupted by “the screeching of the rusty old wheelbarrow” that
will cart the body of their friend to her grave (25).
Meanwhile,
Mateo the dog watches on, a constant companion whose loyalty, dogged persistence,
and bathetic banality mirror the life of his owner, Manuel. Walking alone
through the ghost village at dusk, Manuel lowers his eyes, and the reader is
granted a glimpse into his thoughts: “This was the hour of neither day nor
night, when shadows, malformed, real, or imagined, appeared from nowhere,
silently. Shadows and ghosts were like twin brothers, he thought” (5). Manuel’s
matter-of-fact musings are presented without pomp or flourish. In this twilight
realm, almost anything is possible, and almost everything thought relegated to
the past is capable of re-emergence, regeneration, regrowth, reappearance…
perhaps even resurrection.
Calvino’s
deft touch with free indirect discourse is further evident in the delightful
“Young Love” (28-71). This story alternates between two focalisers – a youthful
Manuel and the love of his life, Amelia, who is lost to him under tragic
circumstances. The word “Carballo” not only refers to the region where the
village is located, but also the oak in the Galician language. Fittingly, one
of Manuel’s “favourite pastimes” is to lie on his back “under the enormous oak
trees” where he dreams of describing to his beloved Amelia the numinous
luminosity of “the sun’s rays filtered through the green leaves” (38). In such
moments, the young man, both tortured and thrilled by his nascent feelings for
his paramour, is dappled with light and shade under the protective, penumbral
oak tree.
Calvino’s
stories are punctuated with such quietly clever moments. His prose is as
unassuming and unhurried as the characters he depicts, yet also as deep,
generous, and abundant as the rivers and streams that flow through this rural
region of Spain.
Again, at
key moments in this story, Calvino focuses his lens on a character’s thoughts
to evocative effect. Manuel heads to a workshop where the young men and boys
gather to discuss the ever-mysterious matters of the flesh, the heart, and the
opposite sex. As he walks, he observes the time of day told through the waning
sunlight: “The afternoon shadows were lengthening, he noted. Shadows had always
intrigued him. They were part of his first recollections” (49). Light and
shadow are mutually dependent Calvino seems to suggest. We need both. We cannot
have one without the other.
Thus, in
“Abel’s Journey” (79-133), the reader learns that the protagonist is rapidly
going blind, his vision obscured by shadows. Abel keeps a gallery of mental
images to retain memories of places lost in the shadows of time. An orphan
passed from house to house, often treated less as servant than slave, Abel is a
figure of the shadows. The children at one house – no different in age to him
but accorded the status of family members rather than an inconvenient mouth to
feed – torment him before a flickering fire. They fill his shoes with “glowing
embers and ash” (85). Fire should provide light and warmth and the means to
cook nourishing food, but it is used to belittle the servant boy and destroy
his meagre possessions.
By
contrast, shadows provide comfort. There, Abel can rest in anonymity and be
certain of the passage of time: “he could always tell the hour by the shadows
shortening in the morning and lengthening in the afternoon on familiar trees or
a wall” (95). However, as Abel is uprooted so often, he is constantly displaced,
rendering everything unfamiliar once more.
Finally,
Abel settles into a family that cares for him and treats him like a son. He has
found a potential wife, Pilar, whose father is dead and whose mother’s health
is failing, meaning that she offers a modest house and land for them to fix and
farm together. However, just as his future appears bright, Abel faces losing
his sight entirely. The doctor despairs. Christina, Abel’s fearful protector
and the matriarch of the household he serves, turns her gaze inwards. She is
torn between risking the wrath of God by taking her ward to a healer in a
nearby village – a woman denounced as Satanic by the Church – and the prospect
of having to support a blind man for the rest of his life. Her husband’s land
can barely sustain their family. She prays. She rues her misfortune. She
considers accepting her fate as ordained by God. Yet, a faint hope glimmers. It
is offered by the healer.
There are
signs that all will be well. The village of Pereiras, where the healer lives,
nestles between hillsides dotted with “ancient oak trees” (126). Again, the
oak, the mightiest of trees according to the medieval Christian concept of the
Great Chain of Being, towers over the protagonists of these pages. The oak was
here long before the roots of Christianity took hold, and a magical, mystical,
pagan presence haunts this region. A spirit of the land predates Christianity,
and Abel is attuned to it.
This
communion is conveyed through the revelation that Pilar loves the “quiet
stability” that Abel brings to her life and his suggestions for “the planting
of trees” on her family’s property (109). In this way, Abel is allied with the
strong, silent oaks that cast their shade over the village, hills, and
waterways of Carballo. He is also a man of the shadows, not bothered by the
villagers’ superstition that they are “the hiding place of ghosts” (132).
Here is
subtle complexity. While Abel finds it strange that “some people were afraid of
shadows,” he also recognises that “shadows had been a source of hope as well as
frustration” for him (132). Shadows are “handy to measure the height of the
church’s bell tower, or a tree,” and they were “inexplicable companions in his
childhood” (132): friendly, if unfathomable. However, Abel also realises of the
shadows that “for many years, he had believed they were hiding the face of his
mother” (132). Orphaned, abandoned, unclaimed by his unknown father and
unwanted by his unwed mother, Abel is a product of shady circumstances. So,
too, is Marcia: the healer who protects his remaining vision. She lives in the
shadows of oppression and persecution. It is unsurprising, then, that her face
becomes obscured by time once Abel’s future is secured: “All his efforts to
install Marcia’s image in his scene gallery had failed” (133).
By contrast, Calvino’s collection is
a triumph. While Calvino eschews binary oppositions and superlatives in his
writing, his readers may find themselves resorting to almost hyperbolic
descriptions of his work. Calvino delivers a superb collection of fiction that
builds upon his earlier work even as it digs deeper into the past and roams
further from his adopted country of Australia. At once profound, comic, and
tragic, Young Love and Other Stories is a
stunningly-rendered kaleidoscope of rare beauty. Not all is monochrome. Warm
and radiant with light. Dark as though diving deep into the hearts and minds of
the people of Carballo. Calvino’s work relies on contrast and contradiction.
That is its power.