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Brian Mendonça
One rainy afternoon I happened on Filisberto Hernández
-- one of the foremost story tellers of Uruguay. The story is called ‘The Balcony.’
The balcao is
something central to the Goan soul. It is from here that one looks upon the
world, and tries to figure out one’s place in it. The balcao
is a space of retreat in a dwelling. One communes with oneself and finds wings
to fly. Its Lusitanian legacy establishes the fact that the sit-out is
essential to gracious living.
So it is no surprise when we are introduced to the
man’s daughter in the story whose life revolves around the winter balcony on
the second floor in her sprawling house. Pointing to the balcony she delivers her
first sentence in the story viz., ‘He’s my only friend.’ It is only when one
reads the chilling end that one appreciates the unnatural use of the pronoun in
this sentence.
The daughter has a mental condition which causes her to
develop a relationship with objects as though they are living. The story is
told in the first person by a travelling pianist. He is invited to visit the
house by her father to play for her delectation. Slowly he is sucked into this surreal world
in this house of horror.
As he sits down to dinner the cutlery assumes a life of
its own. The all-pervasive silence is made more eerie by the dwarf maid. The
father swigs his dark drink and keeps us the charade.
His daughter is crippled by a sense of fear of leaving
the house. The father understands that music is redemptive but his daughter is
beyond the pale of its influence.
The daughter makes up stories and inhabits the world of
the characters she invents. She conjoins
her father to listen to the lives she makes up of these characters. ‘She
imagines them wearing and doing things she sees from the balcony,’ her father
explains to the bewildered pianist.
As the pianist continues to stay in the house, the
daughter perceives the balcony as getting jealous of her liaison with him. One
day the balcony goes crashing down in a storm. ‘Remember how old he was. There
are things that fall of their own weight,’ the pianist tries to rationalize as
he plays along with her.
The distraught daughter in true Gothic fashion gets out
of bed in her white nightgown and
pauses, ‘next to the door which opened into space.’ The pianist fears she may jump out. But she sits in the chair, opens her notebook
of poems with the black oilcloth cover and starts to recite:
‘To a balcony
from his widow . . .’
Dubbed ‘The Bard of Montevido,’ Hernandez (1902-64) was
a writer and pianist. He is considered the forefather of fabulism and
influenced other writers like Marquez from Columbia, Cortázar from Argentina
and Calvino from Italy.
Hernandez’s short story
‘The Balcony’ is beautifully recreated in ink, watercolour and pencil drawings
by illustrator Filipa de Chassey.*
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*
http://www.fdechassey.com/projects/the_balcony_illustrated_book.html
Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday 15 July 2018. Pix courtesy Filipa de Chassey.
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