From “The Origin” to “The Treasure Chest”: The Short Stories of Soledad Puértolas

The thematic universe and constellation of motifs of Soledad Puértolas’s short stories remain constant, from her first collection, Una enfermedad moral, published thirty years ago, to her most recent, Compañeras de viaje, five collections comprising seventy-three stories. Apart from Puértolas’s short stories, in the following pages, I will also refer to two of the three loosely connected episodes that compose her second novel, Burdeos.

Fortuitous encounters produce meaningful connections that relieve the loneliness of modern urban life, epiphanies ensue upon the dispelling of self-doubt and the reaffirmation of identity, and Michel de Montaigne’s themes of friendship and self-knowledge hover over Burdeos and extend to Puértolas’s most recent stories.

A long line of travelers culminates in Compañeras de viaje. The astonishing diversity of locations—France, England, California, Venice, Rome, Norway, Spanish North Africa, Tunisia, seventeenth-century Naples, and Central Europe—abates as the author sets more of her stories in an urban Spain; she newly evokes, in Compañeras de viaje, the last decade of Franco’s Spain, a context that did not appear in the early stories.

Travel both instigates and parallels the inner journey. In “Gente que vino a mi boda,” from the collection of the same title, the confined space of the narrator’s dwelling only highlights how far she has come in her attainment of self-esteem, embodied in her mastery of a skill that eluded her as a child: “porque ya mi vida se limita a coser, a sentarme en este rincón del cuarto tan bien provisto de todo lo que necesito, tan cerca de este mueble de cajones en el que se contiene mi universo, los hilos, las telas, las agujas, esta butaca en la que me hundo suavemente . . . y la música de la radio llena el cuarto, la música y la voz del locutor” (206). She is self-contained, but not isolated, mindful of the community of women: “[A]l escuchar esa voz, me siento unida, desde mi rincón solitario, a todas las otras personas a quienes la voz del locutor se dirige también. Somos muchas, me digo” (207).

Motifs and descriptions recur. A penchant for the evocation of luminosity: from the sunset reflected on the Pacific in the last episode of Burdeos to the sense of well-being infused by the sunlight of the Galician shore in “Regattas” in Compañeras de viaje, the author’s works celebrate the enjoyment of life as a value in itself.

Light as inner clarity, the glimpse of change, an affirmation of the self. The narrator of “Camino a Houmt Souk,” from Adiós a las novias, revels in the light of the Tunisian landscape: “[M]e invadió una gran alegría, una sensación de plenitud, de saberme capaz de recrearme en cada matiz de la luz, la tibieza, la dulce caída de la tarde” (190), enabling the revelation, like the one that dawns on Lilly in the last episode of Burdeos, that she should forge her fate without depending on any man. And so, Enric’s card was lost forever: self-discovery punctuated by the searing light visible from the airplane window on the return trip: “brillante luz blanca, hiriente, entre las nubes” (196).

Though the narrator of “Los sueños no son sueños,” also from Adiós a las novias, sought to recreate in her home the light-filled rooms of her childhood, she has yet to shed the insecurities and fears represented by the dark corridor of her nightmares. In a dream, her husband’s rebuke, “Tienes que aprender a vivir sola” (147), motivates her upon waking to place herself in front of the window to receive the sun’s first rays that normally fall upon him, representing her awakening from passivity to action.

The motif of wine, central to Burdeos, is highlighted in Pauline’s episode, as she savors the wine sent to her by a woman she barely knew: “Aquel líquido rojo oscuro, lleno de luz, de sombras y matices...