Felisberto Hernández - "My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me. At any given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promise. All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes."

“If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn’t be thee writer I am today.” Such a telling quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlights the extraordinariness of this little known author from Uruguay. Also included with the collection's fifteen stories is a preface by Francine Prose and Introduction by Italo Calvino, both illuminating, and Calvino concludes his essay with, “Felisberto Hernández is a writer like no other; like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an “irregular” who eludes all classification and labeling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” As a way of sharing how irregular, I will focus on one of my favorites from the collection. Here goes:

THE BALCONY
Piano Man: On his piano concert tour, the first-person narrator visits a town, virtually deserted since the population has migrated to a nearby resort. “The theater where I was giving my concerts was also half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music; slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion.” This passage is vintage Felisberto Hernández: objects, space and even silence possess hidden vitality and aliveness, oblique personalities with an uncanny ability, for those attuned to their subtle vibrations, to slide sideways into human awareness.

The Meeting: One evening, after his concert, a timid old man comes up to him to shake his hand, an old man who has sore, swollen bags under his eyes and “had a huge lower lip that bulged out like the rim of a theater box.” Likening the old man’s bottom lip to the rim of a theater box serves as a premonition for an object granted a major role in the story: his daughter’s balcony. Such poetic, clear, visual images function for the author very much like a brass section sounding a few minor cords picked up by the entire orchestra later in a symphony – again, vintage Felisberto Hernández.

Living on the Balcony: The old man apologizes for his daughter not being able to hear his music. The narrator (in the spirit of the author’s poetic prose and picking up on the first two syllables of Felisberto, let’s call him Felix) muses on the possible reason why this is the case: Is she blind? Is she deaf, or, perhaps out of town? The old man senses Felix’s groping for the cause and explains how his daughter simply cannot go outside, but since everyone needs entertainment, he bought a big old house with a balcony overlooking a garden and fountain, a balcony where she spends nearly all of her waking hours. A few more words are exchanged and the old man invites Felix to come have dinner whenever he would like. Sidebar: Nowadays we refer to his daughter’s condition as agoraphobia. And with this narrative turn, we have yet again another major Felisberto Hernández theme: a writer or musician invited to the mansion of a wealthy eccentric.

The Mansion: Upon entering through a large gate on one side opening onto a garden with a fountain and a number of statuettes hidden in the weeds, Felix walks up a flight of steps leading into the house and is surprised to see a large number of open parasols of different colors that look like huge hothouse plants. The old man informs Felix he gave his daughter most of the parasols and she likes to keep them open to see the colors. If this sounds a bit odd there is good reason – it is odd! And such oddities, even, on occasion screwball oddities, add a distinctive charm and memorability to Felisberto’s telling.

The Color Yellow: Felix is lead by the old man to his daughter's room on the second floor where she is standing in the center of the balcony. She comes forward to meet them and Felix observes, “Backed against the darkest wall of the room was a small open piano. Its big yellowing smile looked innocent.” The innocence of the piano echoes his daughter’s innocence; the instrument’s big yellow smile echoes the color of those open parasols. Indeed, through the author’s dreamy surrealism and unique way of infusing object with human emotion, similar to a repeated passage in a piano sonata or the repetition of those soft, floppy clocks in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Persistence of Memory,’ the piano’s yellowing smile echoes off the walls, down the corridors and through the mindstreams of not only characters in the story but readers of the story. Perhaps this is one key reason Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, among others, cite Felisberto Hernández as such a major influence.

Finale: What I have referenced so far covers only the first five of the story’s thirty pages. Rather than continuing with events as they unfold, I will leave you in the grand old house, overlooking the balcony with a snatch of Felix’s after-dinner reflection: “A while back, when we were in the girl’s bedroom and she had not yet turned on the light – she wanted to enjoy every last bit of the evening glow coming from the balcony – we had spoken about the objects. As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they developed souls as they came in touch with people. Some had once been something else and had another soul (the ones with legs had once had branches, the piano key had been tusks). But her balcony had first gained a soul when she started to live in it.”