Si no hubiese leído las historias de Felisberto Hernández en 1950, hoy no sería el escritor que soy. Gabriel García Márquez No es casual que la abrumadora mayoría de sus relatos haya sido escrita en primera persona (pero Las Hortensias, gran excepción, parecería volcarlo igualmente en el personaje central del cuento en lo que toca a las pulsiones más hondas, acaso las más inconfesables dentro del contexto de su ambiente y de su tiempo). Basta iniciar la lectura de cualquiera de sus textos para que Felisberto esté allí, un hombre triste y pobre que vive de conciertos de piano en círculos de provincia, tal como él vivió siempre, tal como nos lo cuenta desde el primer párrafo. Pero apenas lo reconocemos una vez más –buenos días, Felisberto, ¿cómo te irá ahora, tendrás un poco más de dinero, las piezas de tus hoteles serán menos horribles, te aplaudirán esta vez en los teatros o los cafés, te amará esa mujer que estás mirando?–, en ese reconocimiento que sólo ha tomado unos pocos párrafos se instala ya lo otro, el salto fulgurante a lo único que vale para él: el extrañamiento, la indecible toma de contacto con lo inmediato, es decir con todo eso que continuamente ignoramos o distanciamos en nombre de lo que se llama vivir.

Julio Cortázar

Felisberto Hernández es un escritor que no se parece a ninguno: a ninguno de los europeos y a ninguno de los latinoamericanos; es un “atípico” que escapa a toda clasificación y encasillamiento pero se presenta como inconfundible con sólo abrir la página.

Ítalo Calvino

As I've read a series of books by Felisberto Hernández over the past year and a half, I've also spent some time searching the internet for more information on the author. The Centro Virtual Cervantes has a good tribute page (http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/fhernandez/default.htm), and the Fundación Felisberto Hernández has an Official Site with a wealth of information on the author and his works in Spanish (http://www.felisberto.org.uy/) and also in English (http://www.felisberto.org.uy/ingles.html). And, in a 2007 article published in La Nación entitled "Felisberto Hernández y la espía soviética," I learned more about Felisberto's bizarre and turbulent marriage to the Soviet spy África de las Heras, which in turn led me to this collection of his short stories, one of which is titled Las Hortensias. The story is dedicated "to María Luisa, on the day she ceased to be my fiancée." María Luisa is the assumed name of África de las Heras. The story, as described in La Nación, is about a man, his wife and his collection of extremely detailed and life-sized dolls; according to the article, it really makes one wonder just how much the author might have known, or intuited, about his wife and her secret Soviet connections. Felisberto had an odd way of looking at the world, finding life and consciousness in strange places, so I was especially intrigued by how life and art may have interacted in this story, and how his written words might have related to any doubts, hunches or premonitions he might have felt about his marriage to María Luisa. The author of the article, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, concludes that: "Felisberto, in 'Las Hortensias,' discovered the essence of the plot in which he was involved without understanding what the plot itself was, palpating it with his dozen eyes habituated to semi-darkness." This all seemed very intriguing.

The story begins with Horacio and María Hortensia living in a large home with some loud machinery. Horacio has a team of workers set up different still scenes in which life-sized dolls represent moments in the lives of women. Some members of the team write brief descriptions of each scene that Horacio reads after spending a sufficient amount of time in the room. Sometimes the descriptions please him and fit with his conception of the representation; other times they leave a bad taste in his mouth and he tells himself he'll have to have a word with his staff. There's one doll, a Hortensia model made by the expert dollmaker in town, that occupies a special place in their home: it sits at the table with them, they take it for walks in the garden, and it even sleeps with them. Eventually Horacio decides it's time to take things up a notch and he gets his dollmaker to install a hot water bladder in the Hortensia, so that she seems more real. Soon he takes things to another level, and eventually there is a violent confrontation involving the lifelike doll. Then there are other marital problems and other dolls in the life of Horacio, and he continues to observe pre-prepared scenes of other dolls in his home.

I'm inclined to go along with the idea that Felisberto may have known something was up, without knowing exactly what. All the female dolls, all the fighting between man and wife over the dolls, written while the author was entering into a marriage with a woman who was really a Soviet operative, it all seems to point to something, and while I think it's possible that the author realized that his beautiful wife was not who she claimed to be, it's more difficult to imagine that he could have known the whole story. Whatever he knew, on whatever level he knew it, I thought the real-life implications of this story of people and anatomically correct dolls added an extra layer of oppressiveness to what was already a strange, brutal story.

Along with Las Hortensias, this collection had a couple of stories I'd never read and wasn't overly impressed by (Lucrecia and La casa nueva), and two I'd read before and loved: La casa inundada (The Inundated House) and El cocodrilo (The Crocodile). In the former, a down-on-his-luck pianist gets a job rowing a boat for an obese, lonely woman around the waterways of a mansion she has filled with water, possibly in homage to a husband she lost during a trip through Europe. In the latter, another down-on-his-luck traveling pianist starts selling women's stockings as he travels from town to town. One day, a woman observes him crying, and later that day, as he's being rejected by another middling department store owner, he wonders what might happen if he were to cry right then and there. Pretty soon, he has a new and powerful weapon in his repertory. The Crocodile hadn't overly impressed me when I read it in the context of another collection of Hernández's stories, but this time it blew me away. The premise is unique and compelling and the story is fun to read and imagine; just as importantly, in the author's hands the inner world of the pianist, the moment in which the thought of crying crosses his mind, his worries and justifications for his behavior, they all grant the reader entrance into that separate, interior world that interacts with the people who laugh and beg him to cry like he always does. Many of his stories are like this. It would also probably be fair to say that they are at least semi-autobiographical. It seems like three out of every four feature a piano player who gives concerts in provincial cities (three out of five do in this collection), and as I read more and more of his stories, I feel as if, given the privilege of entering the minds of his characters, I'm learning more about the author's world and his memories, seen through his eyes superimposed onto fictional, or not so fictional, men.

In browsing the internet in search of information about Felisberto Hernández, you run into quite a few people who enthusiastically proclaim that he should be more famous, because, why does an author whom Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar all cite as a major influence on their own fictional creations remain lost in an obscurity of occasional translations that nobody buys and fan sites scattered across the internet? I'm more than happy to join them in their enthusiasm, and I'm thankful I have access to a really nice college library that owns pretty much every book by or related to him. I'm nearing the time when I'm going to have to start asking myself: what will I do when I've read all his stories? I think I'll take a step back in time from the Uruguay of Felisberto Hernández to the France of Marcel Proust. In some of the stories of this book, and even more so in some of his novellas, the author investigates a land of memories that has piqued my interest in the work of the French man whom many cite as one of the fundamental inspirations of the Uruguayan pianist-turned-author. ( )