From bracing winters to mild summers, in “Labros, in the old Lordship of Molina de Aragón, very close to where the provinces of Guadalajara touch those of Soria and Zaragoza,” was born Andrés Berlanga. In 1941.
In his novel La Gaznápira (1984), splendid, read it, he recounted the way of speaking and being of his hometown, which he chose to call Monchel in these pages, in seven chapters, which he also preferred to call “relatorias.” We will come back to this word later.
The novel, a verbal prodigy, full of sayings and expressions, with a tone of knowing humor, spans a story of thirty-two years divided into segments, from 1949 to 1981. Beginning when its main protagonist, Sara Agudo, is barely nine, and she watches with an open soul as the world unfolds before her, and before she goes to Madrid to test whether it is possible to savor life elsewhere, she sees Elías el Herrero die, the man who first called her “Gaznápira”, because she was always staring at something and seemed to hardly notice anything. “So entranced you always listened to him…,” is revealed in the opening paragraphs of a narrator who addresses Sara in second person and pieces together fragments of the past to see if the future remains blank. As Monchel’s twilight approaches, we come to know Sara’s ascendant story. More than the chronicle of a village in that emptied, abandoned, lost Spain, La Gaznápira is a portrait of a generation. An elegy, even.
Eight publishers rejected it, until, after two years of pilgrimage, Noguer published it. One of the editors who read the manuscript, a gentleman with the surname Benet, quite advanced in years, stayed up all night reading it. “Apparently, he fell in love with the novel,” said Andrés Berlanga. At eight in the morning they phoned the author to arrange an immediate meeting. Despite its modest diffusion, it became a sales success—eleven reissues in less than a decade—and critics highlighted its artistic merits and what it reflected. Manuel Seco analyzed this Berlanga novel in detail, along with a few short stories, in a meticulous edition that enhances the book’s value. Directed by Pablo Menasanch, the School of Theater in Cabanillas produced an initial stage adaptation under the title Yo me voy, el alma no. And it nearly became a feature film.
Berlanga had written another novel earlier, Pólvora mojada, which in 1970 nearly reached the podium at the Nadal Prize. It appeared in 1972, though cut by Francoist censorship. It narrates, focused on four university students from different backgrounds and temperaments and four days in 1969, the student unrest in the final stretch of the regime: they plot an attack on a campus building. It also speaks of loves and betrayals. And of the hustles and subjugations of the journalism trade of that era, among other stories. Two years ago an unabridged edition appeared with notes authored by the writer himself, whose presence seems discernible in the outlines of two characters and in his keen observational ear and good ear for speech.
But earlier, in 1967, he gathered in Barrunto a collection of stories that drew the attention of a pioneering specialist in the study of the short story in Spain, the Swiss Hispanist Erna Brandenberger. The ronde (“Cibeles, five in the afternoon”), Diez días desde dentro and others demonstrated the linguistic mastery of that young storyteller and his subtle inspiration for crafting stories and for the ways of being.
Two decades passed until Berlanga assembled nineteen tales in Del más acá, where everyday events—a trip, a bingo, a wedding—continued to explore, with humor and the affection of wisdom, human nature and society.
In an excellent article, Pedro Aguilar explained what relatoria signified in Ladros, Berlanga’s hometown: “the narration of a real event told with a voice of fiction, imbued with imaginative and literary resonances.” Relatories are what these Sucesos amount to. “Tatuaje” is one of them.
Writer, journalist, seven years as a professor at the Madrid School of Journalism, Andrés Berlanga Agudo contributed to the daily Ya and to the Logos Agency. From 1974 for forty years, he promoted culture in Spain through the leadership of communication at the Fundación Juan March, where he also edited the literary bulletin Saber Leer. He married the writer Enriqueta Antolín, known as Kety.
As Raúl Conde Suárez writes, Andrés Berlanga “died on February 10, 2018 in Madrid, as a consequence of liver cancer that was discovered after his admission to the palliative care unit at La Paz hospital.” He is portrayed thus: “he had the expression of a sage, the writing of a virtuoso, and the good-natured bearing of inland people.”
When the cancer was discovered, Berlanga himself communicated it in a mobile message to family and friends, requesting that they not call or visit him.
In Tatuaje there are elements of detective fiction, black humor, a certain suspense, and a well-paced social critique. In this narrative that runs to almost five hundred words—there will be those who frown at its length—composed in 2013, a car and a sticker on its rear window appear. Sometimes, identity symbols appear when license plates and cars do not bear provincial letters: the Osborne bull designed by the Portuense Manolo Prieto, the Catalan ruc, the latxa sheep… Here a drawing pasted on the rearview mirror of the Audi is one of the keys.
The opening, striking, direct: “The stranger in a swimsuit enters the hardware store very nervously….” A move already in progress. The rhetoric calls this in medias res. It captivates attention from the very first moment. The background, the characters, and how the situation has come to be will come afterward, as the narration moves backward. But in Tatuaje the events keep unfolding. The narrator of Berlanga’s relatory plays with focalization: with what gaze and whose testimony the story advances. And with a register of language in different modes and from diverse interlocutors. In addition to challenging social prejudices and distrust, to confirming deceptive appearances, the strange path that justice sometimes traces… The insecurity, the violence, the psychological consequences of criminal acts… Our vulnerability.
Juan Gamba, actor, storyteller, and oral narrator, son of Andrés and Kety, has recalled—also with a heart on the stage—that his father used to hum, especially after his wife’s death, one of the family’s favorite songs, Víctor Jara’s “Te recuerdo, Amanda.” They knew from inside that “Life is eternal in five minutes.”
I invite you to read Andrés Berlanga’s work. His five books endure as five eternities.
*****
Tattoo
The stranger in a swimsuit enters the hardware store very nervously, signs for a punch with gestures, moves stealthily toward a burgundy metal Audi parked on the seafront, and, with the delicacy of someone administering injections to a baby, punctures each of the four tires, letting out four little sighs. The deflated car bears a Spanish registration with its plate dented, the doors altered with a sticker showing a snail in the rearview mirror, dusty but still smelling new. Then the tourist sits lost in thought on a nearby bench: he waits, does nothing, except compulsively gnaws a fingernail. Until the Police arrive.
The sergeant believes the tourist is suffering a transient disturbance. The officer cannot understand what he mutters, nor what is happening: the Audi cannot be his own as suggested, because it bears a Spanish plate and, besides, why would he puncture his own car? The tourist seems Belgian, but he does not speak French. A street sweeper informs the sergeant that the tourist has looked at the cars along all four streets in the town in a way that seemed highly suspicious to him. “I followed him discreetly,” he testifies. “When he found this Audi and saw that snail sticker, I noticed his face change color: he went into the hardware store and you can see what happened next.”
It seems his name is Johan, and he landed here ten days ago with his wife in this small southern Alicante town. At the hotel where they stay, the desk clerk confirms to the officer that the car cannot belong to them: the couple arrived by plane from Ghent. “No, sir; the hotel hasn’t noticed any unusual behavior, they are very friendly guests, they said they came seeking peace, to recover from a scare, a robbery or something similar. She has her arm in a sling, and they are very discreet and leave good tips.”
Johan tells the sergeant where he left his wife and signals that he has no intention of leaving the bench. The wife is found on the beach, quite unsettled. The sergeant speaks haltingly in French to the wife, telling her that her husband suffered a fit and attacked a car with a knife. She screams hysterically, and the sergeant asks for reinforcements, with two straightjackets. After calming her, she explains that her husband had been lying on a towel, face down, when, between the ankles of the sunbathers strolling along the shore, she believed she recognized the tattoo she had seen before—the snail—on the man’s ankle, and that was enough to identify him as the one who had, at gunpoint in Belgium, robbed them of the burgundy Audi, newly acquired.
The wait ends when someone comes to collect the Audi, and the sergeant does not ask for documents but shows him the ankle. The snail tattoo appears, and that stops the matter. Thus ends a story that happened exactly as told. ■
In Sucesos, Salamanca, Amarú Ediciones, 2013, pp. 101-102