In my reviews, when profiling authors, I rarely mention awards. The reasons are several.
Frequently the members of the jury are practically unknown local officials, academics, cultural managers or writers. Or prestigious members of a jury award blatantly commercial novels of debatable quality. Not to mention established writers who have been denied the deserved recognition. Very different is the impeccable career of the National Prize for Spanish Literature, awarded this year to Cristina Fernández Cubas, an award that coincides with Firmamento’s recovery of the short novel El columpio, initially published by Tusquets in 1995.
Fernández Cubas was born in 1945 in Arenys de Mar. As a journalist he lived in Cairo, Lima, Buenos Aires and Berlin, which is why the local and the cosmopolitan are so present in his writing. A master of the short story, in 2008 she brought together, in an edition by Fernando Valls, those published between 1980 and 2006, with the title All the Stories (2008), and in 2015 Nona’s Room appeared. She is the author of the novels The Year of Grace (1985), The Swing and, under the pseudonym Fernanda Kubbs, The Half-Open Door (2013). Her memoir Things That No Longer Exist, published in 2001, was recovered by her faithful publishing house Tusquets in 2011.
The Swing is a gem of short fiction, perfect line by line, in its development and in the increasing tension. “One day, long before I was born, my mother dreamed of me,” a “terrible nightmare that only time, aided by forgetfulness, would transform into a beautiful, imprecise memory,” which explains how much the novel has of dreamlike and delirious as well as a horror novel, which refers us in so many ways to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho. All of this narrated with a strange, peaceful placidity.
Heloísa, after the death of her mother, of the same name, writes to her uncles announcing her arrival at the House of the Tower, in a lost valley on the other side of the Pyrenees. The bus driver stops at an inn where he delivers the mail to a blind old woman. There they give her a letter and she instantly recognizes its handwriting. The Tower House is a mysterious place full of secrets where her mother’s brothers, Lucas and Tomás, and her cousin Bebo live. The first thing that catches your attention is the painting of her with her mother with a diabolo. In the garden there is a swing and a diabolo. Why does her mother play with him? she wonders. And its signature imitates the rope of the toy. She gets on the swing, Tomás pushes her and, when she falls, she hurts herself. Lucas writes a cookbook, Valley Fever, and mysteriously does it from memory, for fear of fortune tellers. Heloise, in a secret drawer, discovers a sheaf of letters from her mother to her brothers, all of them opened and then carefully closed. Why didn’t they answer them?
His uncles organize a small excursion, a surprise. They arrive at the station and, in what is an expulsion, they give him an envelope with the tickets. But he cannot travel without documents and they return to the house in the valley. He later abandons her, approaches the dining room window and watches dinner with the absent mother as if she were present and hears a fake girl’s voice that makes him understand everything. And here, like Cervantes in the episode of Don Quixote and the Biscayan, he interrupts the reading and leaves it in the hands of the reader who, like me, will succumb to the masterful recreation of the atmosphere and the absorbing tension.
Cristina Fernández Cubas The swing Firmament 107 pages 21 euros
