Author

Fernando Marías (Bilbao, Spain. 13 June 1958)

Official Web:

Participate with: "The Women of the House"

Fernando Marías resides in Madrid since 1975, where he studied Cinema at the Faculty of Information Sciences. As a writer, he may have been the first winner of the Nadal Prize in the 21st century with "The Colonel Boy". In addition, he is also able to write for the children's audience and to work for the cinema. His latest novel (2005, "The World Ends Everyday") is a review of the story of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in post-contemporary Madrid. More information on your official website.

Bibliography (up to the time of participating in the Commentary-Countries): The Prodigious Light (1990) (new, short novel City of Barbastro 1991)

¬ Tonight I will die (1992, novel)

¬ Hidden pages of history (1997, stories, with John Bas)

¬ The Fabulous Men Film (1995, novel)

¬ El Niño de los Coroneles (2000) (Novela, Premio Nadal 2001)

¬ The Rif avenger (novela)

¬ The Battle of Matxitxako (2001, novel)

¬ The woman of the grey wings (2003, novel)

¬ Invasor (2004, novel. Premio Dulce Chacón de narrativa)

¬ Heaven down (2005, novel, Anaya Award for Child Literature and Youth 2005)

¬ The world ends every day (newsle. Ateneo Prize in Seville, 2005)

* see Fernando Marias in Anika Between Books

The women of the house (published in QUO magazine No. 117)

The Lambert house was built in 1616, although naturally it has not always been like you see it now. He has suffered much throughout his existence, almost three hundred and fifty years. A fire, wars... do you know a Bonaparte general slept here when he was on his way to Waterloo? Yes, sir! This house is the pride of the family. JBH News , this house is the family itself. Their foundations always resisted and resisted. Clamps, Mr. Malet! That's the key! That's why I can't give you what you ask me.

Leon Lambert, at the end, shook his wide shoulders in a gesture of impotence and the big black moustache is tied. His interlocked eyelets could be those of a laughing, relaxed, gentle man, but also those of a snake about to jump. It's rude and stubborn, primitive. It goes on shirt sleeves and riding boots, and holds on the right hand a large axe with which it cut wood when the visitor interrupted. jbhnews.com with that of Monsieur Malet, the young shy and lampy boy who just occupied the vacant place of teacher of the people, and who has come to the house to convince Lambert to allow his ten-year-old son, the little Lion, to attend the school.

- There's a world outside that the child should know - the teacher sharpens. You have to feel very lonely here, so isolated from everything. Especially since his mother abandoned them. Three years ago, right?

The cholera looks at Lambert's eyelets when he hears his wife's name. It does not escape the master’s gaze that the peasant deeply inspires and clings with strength the axe handle.

- You're suggesting I'm not good enough to educate my son? Neither I, nor my father, nor my grandfather, nor my great-grandfather, who was drunk with that general who died ten days later in Waterloo, never went to school. Our parents taught us everything that needs to be known about life and death, also about women. And the same will happen to the future lord of the house, my little Lion. Is that clear, Monsieur Malet?

Malet understands that his effort is useless. He stretches his hand toward Lambert, feeling very small and devoured when he closes it, and goes up to his bike.

The little Lion, hidden behind a pile of woods, has heard the whole conversation with the heart pumping it into his neck. He would want to leave the house, meet other children, stroll through the town longer than his father gives him when, once a year, they go down with impatience of fugitives in search of winter supplies. That's why the little Lion sees his hope reborn when, just a few meters, Malet stops and, supporting a foot on the ground, screams at Lambert:

- Beautiful lagoon - he says pointing towards the gentle mass of water located one kilometer from the house-. Do you also belong to your property?

- Yes, sir -Lambert-proclaim. In summer my son and I went up to the boat, and we spent the day fishing. There's a lot of fish. See how we don't need anything? We have our own sea!

The little Lion sees how Malet walks by pedaling as he resonates in the air the dry, regular rhythm of Lambert's ax by cutting trunks.

It's good. Soon, the shadows of the darkness are wading from the mountains, like every day. Soon it's night like every day.

The little Lion, then, places the Perol to the fire of the fireplace and has on the table dishes, spoons and bread. Also, and above all, the bottle with wine for your father.

Lambert comes in, sweaty for the hard work. She looks ferocious even when she's not in a bad mood. They eat in silence, potatoes with bacon and bread. Lambert finishes the wine and asks for more. The little Lion serves him with a serious gesture, esmering himself to hide his fear, just as he always tries and only sometimes gets.

Lambert, drunk as every night for three years, has been installed in front of the fireplace, now embraced by the cherries liquor jar, and is enchanted by the flames between drink and drink. Today it is melancholic and therefore harmless, thinks the little one, who has developed a great instinct of survival. Sold by the liquor, Lambert sleeps soon. His snoring is dry, regular, the child is reminded of the axe's blows, that rhythm that is attached to his head as an obsession.

The little Lion goes up to his room, on the second floor, and gets into bed. He curls under the blankets and hides his head under the pillow, but knows beforehand, because he tries the same strategy every night, which will be useless: the snoring of the drunken rises up the stairs, they plume down the room's slit and walk in the bed, going up to the same ears, dragging his brain and waving his heart.

Nothing can contain those reopened. They've come to him every night, ever since the child's right. Sometimes, while his mother still lived with them, they were beast bufids embisting the defenseless prey; wild animal relinquishments parallel to the sparrow of the double bed quays, which melted with feminine breath confusing and fearful, and ended with a long agonic lament of diabolical ecstasy that preceded silence. They could also be cries of angry anger and violence, insults of the man out of himself, to those who immediately accompanied the blows of the belt and the supplications of the woman, her mother, and sometimes not always, again the chirridos of the bed. Some and others were in the marriage room, to which the little Lion had strictly forbidden access. From that bedroom his mother went out one day so she never came back. He fled from the beast with which the priest of the people had united her forever, and there he abandoned him, without even saying goodbye. How could he deprive him of the last hug, deny him the opportunity to escape with her?

To leave him alone forever, terrified by his father's company, that brutal man who, as he repeated continually, did not need his wife, as they had not needed his father, his grandfather, or his great-grandfather...

- Your mother ran away from us, little Lion. He abandoned us like we were dogs, worse than dogs! When you're older, I'll teach you how to treat women, just as my father taught me and he taught Grandpa.

The little Lion, huddled under the bed linen, at the mercy of the snoring that invariably shake him, trembles in fear of thinking of his father, who, after his threat, softened the belt of heavy metal buckle. And then, with his eyes closed, the child whispers the same word that instinctively whispered the first night of loneliness and fear. The word that, like every night since then, comes to save him:

- Mother.

And his mother, like every night, appears. And his mother, like every night, is accompanied.

First, the rumour of wet cloth enters the room through the window that the little Lion has left premeditatedly open. Then a body sits on the bed, next to it, and plunges the mattress with its weight. Then open the child's eyes.

Before him is his mother, smiling at him with infinite tenderness, even though he barely adheres to some of the beef shrimps on the naked skull, which partially conceals the tangled hair. The long white shirt that wore the last night, completely soaked and with the rotten cloth in some areas, covers the dead body.

-I thought you'd left me here... - the boy said in a pig the first night of the death visit.

- No, my son, my love. I'd never leave you, let alone that wild beast. No, my love, no...

And then, that first night, the dead woman fell on the side of the little Lion as she did every night from that day; today she also calms and comforts him, and gives him warmth even though her clothes are warmed by the frost water of the lake, and what remains of her flesh has long ago the endless gelidez of death. So lying down, he told him how the bestial Lambert had beaten her the three-year-old bloody night, dumping the body to the bottom of the lagoon to spread, from the next day, that the misery had escaped.

"But I was never alone there," he continued to tell his son the dead; his voice has the sweetness of love, a softness of protective zeal. Little did they come to accompany me, the other women of the house, your grandmother and your great-grandmother. In JBHNews , they also were beaten to death by their drunken husbands, and then thrown into the bottom of the lagoon.

Then he had first seen the little Lion to the other two rotten corpses; from that first night they come to sit in the warmth of the home, until the light of dawn recommends them to return to their grave under the water.

"I don't want you to leave, Mom," the little Lion said when the first night was over, and he repeats it today. Don't leave me alone...

- You know I love you, right? That's why I came back to you. I want to comfort you, tell you stories, talk to you and hug you until one day we can live together again, forever.

He wants to know the child, soaking his tears. And when?

- You must grow up and get strong, and when you are, you must do what I explained to you. Only then will we be together, my love.

The dawn, like all the dawn, surprises the sleeping child. But just open your eyes, your energy and resolution concentrate on getting a single, obsessive purpose. It stands up, caressing the humidity in the form of a human silhouette, already almost evaporated, which at its side still permeates the sheet.

He's out. Lambert hasn't woken up yet.

The little Lion takes the axe and begins to cut trunks with rhythmic and dry blows, without failing to look at the lagoon that gives him strength. Exercise, training... His long way to that long-stayed physical strength that will allow him, a happy day, to kill Lambert.

And then, finally, you can tell women that they can come home forever.

© Fernando Marías

COMMENTS ON THE

Travis

I have been very surprised with this story, at first it seemed the typical coastal style story of the teacher who wants to take the child to class and then pass to a history of brutality and ill-treatment in the rural environment and end in a pure history of ghosts with an extremely macabre environment. However, that end does not leave the bittersweet feeling of other trick stories, but the story gets to vary from one style to another in an elegant and natural way.

I really liked it, wouldn't it be a fantastic short of terror?

Athman

It's muuuy good, a great turn...

Just a question. Is this story published somewhere? I wouldn't want to be wrong, and if that's the way I apologize, but I just sounded like I'd read it a while ago, in some compilation of short stories or something like that...

Anyway, an excellent story...

Pilar López Bernués (pilarlb)

It seems to me an extraordinary and very well written story. Unfortunately, it also has a lot of current despite being in a distant time.

Congratulations!

Pilar

nalui

It's an impressive story, I don't understand literature, but it's the kind of narrative that captures and makes you pass through all the emotions. Even the title I loved, when you read it before it seems harmless, familiar, but gains weight at the end, it looks perfect.

Congratulations to the Author!

Travis

If there's something that captures you and makes you pass all the emotions then you do understand literature.

Caesar

I liked the story. Yeah. And a lot. He's been hooking me up as I was reading it. I was impressed by the description of the father, the father's beast and the lock he has. Even the fact that having an axe in his hands helps the description of this brutality of the character and as a result of that brutality, of that isolation, the description of the loneliness of the child and the helplessness, in the face of his reasoning, of the teacher.

The end is hidden enough from the imagination to just guess it short lines back.

I thought, as I was reading, an elegant account, in his writing, not rebusted and very natural, perhaps because everything natural is elegant. Those you learn.

Caesar

P.D. It is that I do not usually read the opinion of others until after giving mine, so I say now that I have edited after I have read them: I agree with Pilar B., it has much of the current account.

Panzermeyer

When I finished reading it I had the hair erected. Very good, as other comments have said, the turn from the interview with the rural teacher is surprising. The topic is undeniable, even if it sits at another time. Of course I'd give for a fantastic horror short. Great.

Joseph B. Macgregor

Another story in which form and content are held in perfect tune: short descriptions, very well dialogued, maintains the intrigue wonderfully and knows how to grasp the reader's attention from the beginning.

The structure of history reminds me a bit of that of some Chekhov stories: it begins with a fact that it turns out to be only anecdotal (the visit of the man who wishes to take the child to school) to, little by little, become a tale where the magical realism makes its appearance in a subtle way, without underlining or "loading the inks". The scene in which the mother makes her appearance is perfect in that sense, in knowing how to frame a magical or phantomical situation from everyday life or naturality.

That said, an excellent story told in the best possible way. A classic cutting text that knows how to transmit, excited, entertain...

Rosa Ribas

I've enjoyed reading this story a lot.

I found it excellent the turn it has given, without effect. The author handles his resources very well and prints to the story a growing rhythm and tension that drag the reader.

I especially liked the naturality with which he introduced the fantastic element into a story that initially seemed to be of a seamstress.

During the reading, I was wondering what women were talking about the story if only the mother was talking about. Since the key comes to us at the end, the entire story seemed round to me.

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