“Yes, the whole affair proved disastrous for her. She had to work day and night to earn enough to buy another necklace. And then, just imagine, some years later, walking along the street, she meets her childhood friend. And what does she discover? That the pearls on the necklace she had lent her were fake, it was costume jewelry!”
“You won’t believe this, Mathilde,” said her friend, “but this necklace hasn’t been the same since you wore it to that ball, the pearls have a different quality about them altogether, almost as if they were real.”
That story was followed by another by Schwob, the story by Schwob by one by Chesterton, and then, telling tales as we went, we left the highway and took the road that winds through the mountains to Obaba. We opened the car windows.
“When we were little, we used to call this road ‘the road of moths,’” I said to my friend.
“I’m not surprised,” he replied. In the beam of the car lights, an infinite number of white moths could be seen fluttering about us.
“It looks like it’s snowing,” added my friend.
“We often came this way when we were small. By bike, of course, like the girls in Evelyn Waugh’s story. We’d spend the whole summer riding around on our bikes.”
“But why are there so many moths?” asked my friend.
“I think this particular variety of white moth feeds on mint. And the woods we’re passing through now are full of the stuff. I imagine that must be the reason.”
Inspired by what I’d just said, I stuck my head out the window and took a deep breath of the warm summer air. Yes, the woods still smelled of mint.
We drove the next mile or two in silence, each of us immersed in his own thoughts, observing the moths, watching for stirrings in the woods. From time to time, where there was a stretch of road with clear views to the side, we could make out the bright lights of houses on the slopes of the mountains, distant and solitary.
When we were only half an hour from Obaba, we saw a small white cloud form in the sky among the stars. The small cloud was followed by the noise of a rocket exploding.
“There must be a fiesta in one of the villages near here,” said my friend.
“That one down there,” I said, pointing to a bell tower whose silhouette stood out above the trees.
“It seems moths aren’t too keen on fiestas. Look, they’ve disappeared.”
My friend was right. At that moment, the car headlights showed only the colored flags adorning the roadside.
We parked the car right at the entrance to the village, on a hill. From there, as if from a high balcony, we looked out over the whole square and could watch the dancing. The music from the small band came to us in gusts, depending on which way the wind was blowing.
“So what conclusions have we reached about stories then?” my friend asked.
He didn’t want to go down and mingle with the crowds without first clarifying the question, at least to some extent. And to tell the truth I felt exactly the same. It was nice up on that hill, ideal for daydreaming and smoking.
We didn’t stay there long, but, even so, we managed to make a fairly reasoned analysis of what it was that writers as fine as Chekhov, Waugh, and Maupassant set out to achieve when it came to writing their stories; and, in conclusion, we managed to establish the characteristics of the genre and were left with a sense of having had a highly profitable conversation.
In the first place, there seemed to us to be an evident parallel between stories and poems. As my friend said when summarizing what we’d talked about, both come from the oral tradition and both tend to be short. Moreover, and because of those two characteristics, both have to be intensely meaningful. The proof is that bad stories and bad poems end up being, as someone else said, “futile, empty, and trite.”
“Looked at like that, the key doesn’t lie in making up a story,” my friend concluded. “The truth is that there are more than enough stories. The key lies in the author’s eye, in his way of seeing things. If he’s really good, he’ll take his own experience as his material and extract its essence, something that has universal value. If he’s a bad writer, he’ll never get beyond the merely anecdotal. That’s why the stories we talked about tonight are good. Because they express essential things and aren’t just anecdotes.”
The band hired to make the fiesta go with a swing was playing a very slow, sentimental number. The couples who only a moment before had been bouncing about to the music were now clasped to each other, barely moving.
“That’s why so many stories have been written on the great themes,” I said, taking up the thread of the conversation again. “I mean stories that turn on themes like death and love and the like. In fact exactly the same thing happens with songs.”
“Didn’t Valentín send you something about that?” he said.
“Which Valentín? The one who lives in Alaro?”
“That’s the one.”
My friend was referring to a writer we often saw.
“That’s right, he did. He sent me a manual by Foster Harris. If I’m not mistaken,” I went on, “Harris has some very odd theory about the short story. According to him, a story amounts to nothing more than a simple arithmetical operation. Not an operation involving numbers, of course, but one based on the addition and subtraction of elements such as love, hate, hope, desire, honor, and other such things. The story of Abraham and Isaac, for example, would be the sum of pity plus filial love. The story of Eve, on the other hand, would be a simple subtraction, love of God minus love of the world. Moreover, according to Harris, additions tend to produce stories with happy endings and subtractions ones with tragic endings.”
“So he ends up saying more or less the same as us, then.”
“Yes, although his theory is even more restrictive. Anyway, who knows? Maybe that’s all we are, a few unfortunates ruled by the most elementary arithmetic.”
“Even so, what we’ve said doesn’t seem to be enough somehow. And having a way of looking at the world that is capable of capturing the essence of something isn’t enough either. A good story has to have a strong ending too. At least I think it does,” my friend asserted.
“Oh, I agree, I think a good ending’s indispensable. An ending that’s both a consequence of everything that’s come before and something else besides. And the need for such an ending would explain, I think, the abundance of stories that end with a death. Because death is the ultimate definitive event.”
“Absolutely. Just look at the Chekhov story, or the one by Waugh, or at the story about the servant from Baghdad you told me in the café. They’re all packed with meaning and they all have very powerful endings. The story about Baghdad reminds me of what happened to García Lorca. He flees from Madrid thinking he’s going to be killed there, and then… it’s almost a prophetic story, really excellent. The best of the night in my view.”
I smiled at my friend’s words. At last he’d returned to the story I’d told him in the café. The moment had arrived to produce the card I had hidden up my sleeve.
“Oh, there’s no doubt it’s good. But if it was my story I’d change the ending. I hate all that fatalism,” I said.
My friend looked at me in astonishment.
“I’m serious, I really dislike the fatalism in that story. It seems so implacable, the kind of thing reflected in the saying that life is just like a throw of the dice. What the story is telling us is that we’re born with a fixed destiny and that our will counts for nothing. We have to accept our destiny, whether we like it or not. If death comes for us, we have no alternative but to die.”
Shrugging his shoulders, my friend gave me to understand that he saw no other option.