SOURCE: McPheeters, D. W. “Years of Transition.” In Camilo José Cela, pp. 72-82. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1969.

[In the following essay, McPheeters surveys Cela's short fiction and sketches published between the years 1944 and 1951—a very productive period in the author's literary career.]

Studies of Cela's works have not considered the writings of the seven years between 1944 and 1951—the dates of the novels Nuevas andanzas y desventuras de Lazarillo de Tormes and La colmena—in relation to his developing novelistic style. During this period he published six volumes of sketches and short stories, the first of the books of vagabondage—Viaje a la Alcarria—and meanwhile continued to work on La colmena. An entire monograph could easily be devoted to the short stories, which are of value for showing the elaboration of his methods of observation and presentation which culminate in La colmena, but this brief chapter can include only a sampling.

I. THE YOUNG STORYTELLER

Cela himself has told us how in 1941, almost by accident, he wrote his first short story. Friends on the journal Medina asked him to write a tale, and he replied: “Come, man, I don't know how to write stories, … if you want a poem. …”¹ Since then, the short fictional piece has become a regular part of his literary effort. In the prologue to the second volume of the Obra completa, the author does not distinguish clearly between the various genres; indeed, he claims to be unconcerned with the usual classifications, the main difference between the short story, the “apunte carpetovetónico,” the short novel, and the novel being, in his opinion, merely one of weight by the scales (II, 21-22). It will be demonstrated, however, that with the publication of the third volume of sketches Cela attempts to separate and define the “apuntes” more clearly. There is substantial elaboration of technique between the first collection of short stories, Esas nubes que pasan, 1945, and La colmena, 1951. The title, The Passing Clouds, and the mood of the prefatory page—“The clouds over the city, lofty at times, like proud gentlemen in love; gray and taciturn, on occasion, like weary traveling beggars, like debtors who dislike the morning light” (II, 48)—remind one of the well-known “Las nubes” (“The Clouds”) by Azorín. Cela's friends from an old seafaring town begin to appear so that, from the outset, the tone of the collection is colored by a melancholy reminiscence. Some of the stories are humorous, with occasional “tremendista” elements, grotesqueness, sentimentality, improbable coincidences and plots, and, at times, unlikely dialogue. Although the stories retain something of the conventionality of an earlier generation of Spanish writers, they nonetheless give evidence of his skill of treatment. Poetic and lyric flights are frequent and, by comparison, longer than those found in later writings.

The very first tale incorporates arbitrary, unconvincing, and only partially developed features, but has an amusing ending. Don Anselmo, whose name is the story's title, causes the proprietor of a shooting gallery to lose an eye accidentally, and friends advise that he go away for a few months even though the injury is not entirely his fault. Anselmo leaves behind a large sum to care for the poor man. After an absence of eight years, he returns with a Puerto Rican wife, two servants, and two parrots, all of whom die conveniently in one paragraph. Cela never hesitates to dispatch his characters—the fatum to which he alludes on occasion. To amuse himself, the lonely widower visits neighboring cities until one day he comes home in downcast mood. The victim of the shooting accident is now performing as a circus wild man, eating raw meat, and considers himself fortunate to have good pay and plenty to eat, but Don Anselmo is touched by such degradation.

Another composition, “El misterioso asesinato de la Rue Blanchard” (“The Mysterious Murder on Blanchard Street”), contains “tremendista” elements and a rather unlikely double “murder.” One-legged Joaquín Bonhome attempts to give his repulsive wife a kick, with the result that a hook on the wall penetrates her glass eye and kills her; and he falls backward striking his head in such a way that he dies also. The wife's effete brother, whom the cripple has always despised, is sent to the French penal colony of Guiana for the supposed “crime.”

“Don Juan,” on the other hand, is a charming, deceptively simple account with the sentimental overtones of the traditional Spanish short story. A poet and amateur gardener, unable to find a publisher for his book on the care of flowers, dies, and when it no longer matters, one of his two surviving cronies pays for an edition of the work as a final tribute. Here the simplicity and naturalness of sentiments are an excellent combination. Other tales, however, are no more than anecdotes or jokes, for instance, “Don Homobono y los grillos” (“Mr. Goodfellow and the Crickets”). With a few platitudes about Mother Nature, the kindly protagonist saves a cricket from the clutches of a small boy, but later that hot August night when a cricket keeps him awake, the former benefactor swats the creature without compunction (II, 143-46). In the last story of the collection, “Culpemos a la primavera” (“Blame It on the Spring”), there is an amusing but overly ingenious plot involving the amorous intrigues of two servant girls, a milkmaid, a young brother and sister, the father of the family, and a neighboring doctor. To the mother's considerable vexation, a kind of spring madness affecting the characters leads to their love trysts. The story ends with four lines describing the mother's death and burial the following winter.

These rather ephemeral stories were first written for daily papers to amuse the casual reader who would hardly submit them to intense scrutiny. The humor of some is considerable and is much more gentle and humane than the sardonic irony of situations involving the apartment building of the homosexual in La colmena. It is well to remember that Cela has this light humorous vein; if one were to judge only on the basis of his two best-known novels, such talent would in all probability go unnoticed.

The contrast in range and variety of these scenes with the sustained hopelessness—or, at best, dreariness lightly touched by humor—of La colmena is striking. The episode of the impecunious musician and the colored glasses, incorporated in La colmena, was first published in Arriba (1946) as a short story, and Cela includes it in volume II of the Obra completa as the first of four “Cuentos al natural” (“Artless Stories”) which, except for their simplicity and a certain lack of anecdotal quality in the usual sense, are not particularly homogeneous. In “El capitán Jerónimo Expósito” (II, 231-35), the second of the “Artless Stories,” Captain Jerónimo, as the title implies, is a foundling. The main idea seems to be that emerging from nothing, he makes his own personality by organizing a band of adventurers who, at the story's abrupt, rather pointless end, await orders from their leader. Cela himself becomes aware of the truncated outcome, and much later, in Los viejos amigos (II, 65-67), adds three pages, continuing the story of the group's departure from Algeciras for La Guayra. Nothing more is ever heard from the men; so “they probably fell by the wayside.” The narrator adds phlegmatically that if he ever learns more about their exploits, he will not remain silent. Although most of the persons in La colmena lead aimless lives, curiously the writing about them is charged with implications. The “Captain Jerónimo” as it stands lacks the incidental or circumstantial elements necessary to a story; it reads like a note for a longer account of a minor epic of crime, high adventure, or just plain frustration. The last selection of this series has the general heading “Fauna del adoquinado” (“Fauna of the Pavement”) and the subtitle “El prodigio de que un niño viva como un saltamontes” (“The Miracle that a Child Can Live like a Grasshopper”), II, 241-43. The boy reminds one vaguely of the little gypsy street dancer in La colmena, but at the story's end we are told that the lad may grow up to be a taxi driver, notary, carpenter, or priest so that he is pretty much like many others of his age. There is a note of wistfulness for the carefree days of youth which most men, in common with the author, feel at times.

Cela's short stories range from the brutal—at least two contain crimes as violent and senseless as those in Pascual Duarte—to the purely humorous, lyric, ironic, commonplace, burlesque, or caricatural. One describes a young writer, C.J.C., on a train composing an insipid story “in the old style” (II, 207-11); some are about everyday situations, but with a certain imaginary dimension or even fantasy; and still others are about Galicia and include songs in the local dialect of that region. The inspiration for “La horca” (“The Gibbet”) came to Cela after listening to Ravel's music at a friend's house (II, 452-56). A section on watches and clocks provides the pretext for narratives like that of the gypsy who has a cracker tin filled with stolen timepieces until the police of the Guardia Civil arrest him and confiscate it. The gypsy is partly consoled when a fellow prisoner gives him a watch; it is still in his possession many years later when he dies (II, 351-61). In these stories Cela demonstrates the inventiveness that writers for the popular press often have—the ability to take almost any object as a suggestion from which to spin a yarn—but his is a far superior style. At times there is a frankly sentimental note, as in the tales about a blind man's dog and a sea-going dog (II, 523-29), or allegory as in the fables anthropomorphizing the outlaw goat named Smith (II, 316-25) and the migration of the body lice in “La tierra de promisión” (“The Promised Land”), II, 212-15. “Claudius, profesor de idiomas” (“Claudius, Professor of Languages”), II, 184-98, is possibly one of his best stories: its plot is based on the series of chance meetings, typical of two acquaintances who see each other infrequently. The friend is identified briefly as the former hangman of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, who now bustles around from one edifying cultural activity to another. At length, he remarks, “I am worried, my friend; in Batavia I must be so far behind in my work!” Either death has taken a holiday, or Claudius, like Camus' Sisyphus, is unable, or really does not want, to escape his absurd vocation.

This sampling of themes from Cela's short stories shows his innate talent for creating literature from all manner of materials, an ability sometimes displayed in feats of virtuosity. The important thing to bear in mind is that his latent capacity to chronicle the everyday, vulgar existence of ordinary people is brought forth by a closer observation of his surroundings, first, in rural settings and then in Madrid, where he comes to grips with the harsh realities of urban life after the ruinous Civil War. Had Cela continued in the earlier vein, he might be remembered as a clever storyteller of modest talent. He needed to escape from the world of literature and contemplate people as they live in order to add sinew to a facile style.

II. THE GRASS ROOTS

Viaje a la Alcarria will be discussed in a later chapter, together with other works of the same type. For the moment it is necessary to mention that Cela presents his observations of half-forgotten towns in a region close to Madrid where, as he says, he saw no unusual happenings and was glad, because if it were necessary to narrate out-of-the-ordinary events, people would accuse him of exaggerating (IV, 28). So, the various short stories included in El gallego y su cuadrilla y otros apuntes carpetovetónicos (1949) offer the humdrum, everyday life of small towns. The almost untranslatable term “carpetovetónico” has come to refer to “the dryness, the violent, bitter spirit of contrast and rudeness of the world of sun-scorched and dusty Castile.”² The word itself derives from the names of two central Iberian tribes mentioned by Roman writers. The towns are little places through which the traveler today drives without even a fleeting thought as to their inhabitants, but where life goes on beneath an exterior as unchanging as the harsh land. Critics have been quick to point out parallels between his “apuntes” and the sketches of customs and regions of nineteenth-century writers.³ But there is a great difference in spirit and locale between the works of such authors and those of Cela, who has deliberately avoided the picturesqueness of a Pereda, for example. He neither visits old churches searching for almost forgotten artistic treasures, nor is he a landscapist. He turns to the little-known, unexplored towns of the Old Castile so fascinating to writers of the Generation of 1898—none of those cited by Cela are natives of the province—and finds that “Castile is at first a bit like a narcotic of bitter and hard draughts which does not affect the Castilian who is already an addict, but which startles and frightens the stranger” (V, 137).

Other regions attract tourists and vacationers because of benign climate, local color, cultural importance, mountain and seaside resorts, or other pleasant settings. Rodríguez-Moñino puts it well in his prologue to Cela's El gallego y su cuadrilla y otros apuntes carpetovetónicos when he declares that city dwellers of Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao do not spend holidays in places like Cebreros, where Cela during four summers returned for lengthy visits.⁴

The weariness which small towns produce in us, the dry Castilian and Estremaduran towns, comes from a feeling expressed concretely in these words: they do not have any personality, they are all alike, nothing ever happens in them, they are boring and monotonous.

If one must spend a few days in such places, he at first feels out of his element, then antipathy, and finally frank aversion. And Rodríguez-Moñino asks: “What did Cela do in that place where there is nothing to do? He lived. Lived and saw how one lives.” Like a taproot the author was able to extract from beneath an inhospitable surface the moisture sufficient to nourish a luxuriant growth, so that “… he has penetrated deeply the life and essence of those places and has been pouring out in the pages of this book the fruits of a really amazing psychological observation.”

Cela has defined the “apunte carpetovetónico” as something invented for his exclusive use, “… that little, startled chronicle of the dry lands of Spain, that inexhaustible vein of literary themes” (III, 23). The “notes”—“jottings” would be applicable on occasion—may be as rigid as sticks, but articulation is not necessary to show “this, that, or something else. Unlike the article, the ‘apunte’ is neither born nor dies, but simply flows out and disappears … it may well have neither beginning nor end …” (III, 787-88). And it is not a short story which at times expresses an abstraction or permits subjectivism; the objectivity of the “apunte” is fundamental. The author places himself before the commonplace locales with no special artistic or emotional attitude toward them, but, of course, must select material and clothe it in literary language. This will be his same approach in La colmena. Small details permit a display of his skill with words, as in the long paragraph on the flies of Cebreros—quite likely a reflection of “Las moscas” (“The Flies”) of Antonio Machado, a poet whom Cela greatly admires. Attention to small creatures or objects is a characteristic of the Generation of 1898. Whatever the traditional affinities of these sketches, there is no denying that Cela caused the attention of his contemporaries to turn once more to local settings for inspiration. One of the best, Miguel Delibes' appealing novel Las ratas (The Rats), has as its locale a tiny hamlet near Valladolid in Old Castile.

An essential of Cela's technique is the ability to suggest in a few details or mannerisms an entire character or situation. He locates precisely the boundaries of Cebreros, but captures its essential Castilian isolation thus:

The town is far from the railroad, far from the main highway, far from the river, hidden in the shadow of the parish church tower, an Herreran tower of old granite which the drought of four centuries, that drought which denuded Castile, has not allowed to grow the affectionate, silent, greenish moss of age.

(III, 48)

In his Lazarillo Cela speaks feelingly of the village idiot, also the subject of one of the best sketches in El gallego y su cuadrilla y otros apuntes carpetovetónicos. With humor and sympathy he endows this much abused type with the dignity afforded the average villager. The town will not support more than one such moron at a time; so Blas Herrero Martínez—he is honored with a full set of names—has to wait until the ancient Perejilondo dies before taking over the position. Meanwhile, on Sunday Blas serves his apprenticeship by gathering cigarette butts in Doña Luisita's café for the old “tonto,” who gives him a half-dozen as his pay. Finally the old man dies, and the young Blas secretly dances for joy; then realizing that he must show some signs of grief, he makes a point of visiting the grave of the deceased where he leaves all but his usual six butts. Gradually he forgets about his dead predecessor and collects only as many as he wants: “It was a strange sensation to squat down and pick up a butt and have no doubt that it was one's very own …” (III, 119). The village idiot is a familiar type the world over, as anyone who has ever lived in a small town may know; but seldom has the absurdity of every man's role in this world been so aptly expressed.

In an effort to show the new direction Cela's writing will take, only a few of the best sketches will be discussed. In “El café de la Luisita” (“Luisita's Café”), III, 124-26, he dedicates paragraphs to each café in Cebreros with such skillful choice of details that one can visualize the coffeehouses and the particular clientele they attract. Luisita's café is given a more precise description, including a summary presentation of the proprietress and her husband: “Luisita, who was over fifty years of age, was fat and always on duty. Her husband was a scrawny, faded drunk, no longer good for anything” (III, 125). In the last paragraph the writer mentions the bars and taverns of the town and the human fauna which frequents them, but “to talk about all those taverns and their inhabitants would take a whole volume.” In La colmena Cela does indeed give us a novel populated largely by habitués of cafés and bars.

“Doña Concha” portrays the incredibly monotonous life of a childless lady in a small town and her secret envy of the married sister with ten children, to whom she has willed her property. “… The nephews don't know this and they do not wish her dead. Doña Concha hardly knows her nephews …” (III, 91).

“Toros en Cebreros” (“Bullfight in Cebreros”) is almost an editorial in favor of preserving the old custom of the local bullfight that a shortage of funds threatens with suspension. Cela points out that the Spaniard is more likely to revolt because some hallowed custom is threatened than because he is hungry, that historically the people usually had a reason for rebellion although their excesses might cause them to lose sight of it in twenty-four hours. In Arriba, where this and many other early sketches were first published, the censorship cut out three rather innocuous paragraphs of ironical references to local administrators (III, 61-63). “El gallego y su cuadrilla,” bearing the title of the collection, describes a small-town bullfight in the province of Toledo (III, 130-35). Here, on a blisteringly hot, dusty day, there is no glamor of the great bullrings: the “toreros” fight in shirt sleeves, not in the “suit of lights”; there is no band; and the arena is the town square, closed off by wagons and barricades. In a sequel, “Baile en la plaza” (“Dance in the Square”), bloody streams from the slain bull and the fatally injured matador mingle in the plaza, and the peasants are careful to wet the soles of their hempen sandals in the gore so as to make them hard and to insure longer wear. The author shifts back and forth from the dying bullfighter to the flirting couple dancing in the square (III, 136-39), thus employing a technique that he will use with proficiency in La colmena.

“Una función de varietés” (“A Vaudeville Performance”) is broadly humorous. Cela interrupts his narration of the banal performance to describe the Ballet Hollywood's great success with the town's womanizers, who later invite the girls of the troupe to a party in the anisette factory. Their womenfolk interrupt the gathering and exchange unflattering remarks with the girls. After this digression, the amusing account of the program and the grand finale continues, and finally: “The curtain rose and fell many times and the people began to file out. The vaudeville had ended. A little later was when the episode of the anisette factory transpired” (III, 146-49).

In the excellent “La romería” (“The Pilgrimage”), III, 93-111, there is a wealth of everyday experience in the account of a typical family outing—a hike—with the customary physical discomforts and minor personality conflicts of a hot, thirsty, boring day with the usual wasp sting, sunburn, and other irritations. On the return trip the family “… found itself near the first lights of the town. A sigh of relief, very low, was audible within each breast” (III, 109). The mother-in-law, characteristically, has the last word to which the dispirited daughter and husband do not even bother to reply.

These sketches have little relation with short stories built around dramatic or picturesque incidents, much less with those where there is emphasis on plot development. Here Cela's ability to turn a phrase to point up the utter triviality, monotony, or commonplaceness of life or, for that matter, death in a small Spanish town has become a fundamental process with him. Even where a topic might be elaborated with colorful or emotional language, he tends to understatement and restraint, with few false notes—an important development in the transition from his earlier “tremendista” tendencies.

Cela's ability to capture essential personality with a gesture, mannerism, or other trait recalls to some critics the neo-realistic or behaviorist approach of those who believe that traditional novels, attempting to portray internal psychology, lack validity and concentrate on externals with almost photographic objectivity; but these outward manifestations are only significant if equated with something fundamental in the subject's temperament.⁵ Cela repeats the outward peculiarities of his characters to facilitate rapid identification.

Notes

1. Gómez-Santos, Diálogos, p. 134.

2. Zamora Vicente, Camilo José Cela, pp. 143-44.

3. When Kirsner, The Novels, p. 120, finds the “Apuntes” undeveloped compared to the cuadros de costumbres of the nineteenth century, something of the problem of equating Cela's sketches with the older works becomes evident.

4. I have the curious first edition which has the imprint on the title page, Madrid: Ricardo Aguilera, 1949, but on the spine the date 1951. Moñino's “Prólogo” is on pp. i-vii.

5. Gustavo Bueno Martínez attempts a systematic application of behaviorist principles to Cela's novel in “La colmena, novela behaviorista,” Clav, III, no. 17 (1952), 53-58.