March 2, 2017
So Much Smoke
Reviewed by Alison Clifton.
Félix Calvino’s So Much Smoke occupies a liminal space between the old
world of village life in the Spanish pastoral region of Galicia and the new
world of Sydney in the 1970s. This is familiar territory for Calvino, who wrote
the short story collection A Hatful of Cherries (2011) and the novella Alfonso (2013), both of which examine the
Spanish migrant experience in Australia.
In O Tempo como Castigo na Lírica de Rosalía (1986), Luís Caparrós Esperante writes:
“The longing (“morriña”)
for Galicia is confused with the longing for the past; the emigrant’s longing
is similar to the longing for good times gone by.” Esperante might have been
describing the experience of the dislocated Fidel, a migrant in the central
short story of So Much Smoke, “The Smile,” who returns to live in
Galicia after his wife has died in Sydney, knowing that he is destined to
occupy a space as much on the periphery of Spanish life as he was a fringe-dweller
in Australia. The past can never truly be reclaimed; the motherland remains
elusive.
The Galician
word “morriña” is translated into English as
“nostalgia:” a loan word from Greek that means “ache for the past.” Nostalgia
privileges the past as something yearned for but unattainable except through
memories. We experience such thwarted desire as pain. For the Galician migrants
of Calvino’s stories, pain is always present like a menacing revenant.
In “What Do You Know about Your
Friends?” — a highlight of Calvino’s collection — the narrator observes that
another character, Pascual, has a past in Galicia that is “slowly pushing him
towards the hell of ghosts who dwell in two worlds” (15). Ghosts are present
but usually remain unseen, like the Spanish migrant street-sweepers, cleaners,
and labourers who inhabit these stories and who are rendered invisible in
Australian society. Indeed, Calvino plays with what is unseen and what is on
the edge of sight, inverting and subverting the reader’s gaze.
In
“The Smile,” Fidel and his wife have both been cursed with faces so extremely
ugly that they draw stares wherever they go, rendering them visible in an
unsettling and unheimlich way. They build a walled garden around
their Sydney house to escape into: a sanctuary that emulates the gardens of the
stately home in Galicia that had once offered them refuge from another hostile
society. After a priest in Galicia refuses to marry them, saying that they are
so misshapen that they should not be allowed to reproduce, the couple flee to
Sydney where they hope to attain some sort of anonymity. Yet, as objects of the
gaze, the pair are unable to avoid scrutiny even in a society which pushes
migrants to the margins.
On the opposite
end of the spectrum from morriña is the Japanese concept of “natsukashii” which refuses to privilege the past or
the present. Instead, each is held up as equally valuable because necessarily
transitory. With the pleasant feeling of natsukashii, the past is recognised as a time of
happiness which was vacated out of the necessity for growth and which gives
meaning to the present. Natsukashii recognises that there can be no
butterflies without caterpillars. People move on.
However, in
Calvino’s work, the central problem is often a reluctance or inability to move
on. Thus, the protagonist of Alfonso recognises that “the pain of nostalgia
paralysed him” (21) and, as a result, the “demarcation” between the “two
universes inside his head … had dissolved, allowing the old one to infect the
new” (75). Indeed, infection and disease are recurring motifs in Calvino’s
stories: for example, Fidel’s wife, Consuelo, dies suddenly from a brain
tumour. Fidel’s two universes collapse and he must return to Galicia knowing
all too clearly that he can never recover the past. The infection of misfortune
afflicts his life in Australia as if it were a return of the repressed; a
disease that has lain dormant since his life in Galicia but which returns with
renewed and terrifying vigour.
Only
occasionally does the tension between the two worlds of past and present
resolve itself in Calvino’s stories and still even more rarely does a character
transcend the agony of nostalgia to replace it with acceptance and the gentler
recollection of natsukashii. In “The Dream Girl,” true happiness is
relegated to the innocent past, a time that was so “sweet” that it should have
been “bottled” according to the protagonists, a man and woman who had
fleetingly enjoyed a kind of puppy love as children but have gone their
separate ways (131). “Bottling” implies preservation but also shutting off
one’s vulnerable feelings from a harsh and unforgiving society.
Indeed, the characters in these stories
usually inhabit a microcosm rather than a large, anonymous society. There is
village life in Galicia where everybody knows your business or migrant life in
Spanish-speaking enclaves in Sydney where everyone seems to be harbouring a
secret past as the ghoulish figure of the Civil War lurks menacingly in the
depths of their collective memory.
Calvino’s spare style creates a
hyper-realistic world in which spectres from the past haunt the characters
literally in the form of an apparition of Consuelo, who fleetingly manifests
herself before the narrator of “The Smile,” and figuratively in the form of
memories that are usually disturbing. The prose is often stark which suits the
sometimes sinister subject matter and unnerving themes: a chicken is tied up
and shot by a boy who is too cowardly to slit its throat; later, the boy
resurfaces as a teenager who begins to take sadistic pleasure in tormenting his
mother until his wish is granted. As he has tortured his father’s dog, it will
not bond with him and so he wants a new dog; eventually, his father capitulates
and orders the old dog to be shot. The moment when the dog is killed forms the
final image of Calvino’s collection, leaving a disconcerting ending to linger
in the mind, like an uneasy truce between reader and narrator.
So Much Smoke is an intriguing, unsettling read. These
vignettes and short stories feature simple plots that deftly frame the potent,
often disturbing images and nightmarish visions that haunt Calvino’s
intoxicating prose. The absence of complex lyricism makes the prose palatable
to swallow but the aftertaste is less bittersweet than bitter. This is acrid
smoke, perhaps from a bonfire fuelled by the dried-up, desiccated dreams of
migrants seeking a better life only to be ingested by the bleak, surreal city
that promised adoption but delivered only partial assimilation. But there is
also so much smoke because so much fire: the fire of passion, defiance, and
stubborn determination. This is not insipid, watery fiction but an inferno of
evocative and provocative prose.
Arcadia,
2016
