This week’s Translation Tuesday features the titular short story from Eloy Tizón’s Velocidad de los jardines (The Speed of Gardens), which was chosen by El País as one of the hundred best books published in Spanish in the past twenty-five years. A tale of adolescence, the dramatic expansion of life’s possibilities, and its accompanying disappointments—Tizón’s narrator recalls an entire class and their fascination with the luminous Olivia Reyes. All this is told through Tizón’s finely wrought sentences which itself is a kind of spellbinding music. Hear from the translators about the peculiarities and pleasures of Tizón’s baroque style.
“Eloy Tizón is one of the most important baroque writers working in the Spanish language today. In his language, where the baroque tradition reigns supreme, mastering the baroque style is tantamount to mastering the style of the Spanish language tout court. There have been no shortage of competitors for this title on both sides of the Spanish-speaking Atlantic, and in the Iberian Peninsula, we find such luminaries of the baroque register: Gómez de la Serna and Francisco Umbra, followed by Cristina Fallarás and Juan Manuel de Prada. In these writers, who are equally as prominent fiction writers as they are columnists, we find in them an affected antiquarian prose, a contrarian bravado at the level of ideas, a curated brand of O.K.-Boomerism, with sudden tinges of chauvinism, misogyny, or anti-Trumpism—depending on the day.
Tizón is a stranger to this school. He is worthy of winning the baroque pennant—not that he would care—but he might not be playing the Spanish league. Though a stylist of excess, and a habitual contributor to newspapers, he has shaken off all remnants of regional scruff. His sentences abolish the habitual linguistic ostentation of his contemporaries; there is no old fogey gesturing in his work; he is not known to indulge in that strange form of Iberian competition that consists in piling up subordinate clauses and stringing consonantic polysyllables. This has to do with Tizón’s readings of Clarice Lispector and (I venture) Virginia Woolf. Like them, his style is elastic, image-heavy, allusive rather than exact in a pseudo-philologist kind of way. Like them, he knows when to surrender style to character. Like them, he knows the purpose of curlicues and filigrees: to entertain the reader and not the author’s vanity.
Praised by many of his contemporaries, perhaps the aptest compliment comes from Alberto Olmos, who once described his style as “pouring MDMA on the dictionary.” What dictionary, he didn’t say. Certainly not The Royal Spanish Academy’s.”
— Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba
Many said the fun ended when we passed into eleventh grade. We turned sixteen, seventeen; everything gained an unsettling speed. Sciences or humanities was the first customs house, the first border crossed, separating friends like travelers commuting from one train to another, their luggage left somewhere between the snow and the porters. Classrooms disbanded. Javier Luendo Martínez broke up with Ana María Cuesta and Richi Hurtado stopped talking to the Estévez twins and María Paz Morago dumped her boyfriend and scholarship—in that order—and Christian Cruz was expelled from school after hurling a flask containing a fetus at the biology teacher.
Oh, yes; from class to class we towed Plato and something called hylomorphism that belonged to some forgettable school of thought. The Russian Revolution spread itself wide across our notebooks, and on page seventy-something the Tsar was executed between crossed-out scrawls. The economic causes of the war turned out to be complex, not what they look like by a long stretch, even if impressionism brought a fresh palette and a new idea of nature to painting. Mercedes Cifuentes was very fat and didn’t get along with anyone, but that year she came back crushingly thin and still didn’t get along with anyone.
It was a kind of hecatomb. Half the class fell in love with Olivia Reyes, at the same time or in turns. Every morning she came into the classroom, showered, barely powdered, it was a creaking and vulnerable vision that could hurt you if you dared think about it around midnight. Olivia always arrived forty-five minutes late, and until she made her appearance the syllabus was something dead, a waste, the teacher rambled on about Bismarck, as if painstakingly brushing his tailcoated corpse, the chalk repulsed. Her arrival resuscitated our desks. You couldn’t believe it, Olivia Reyes, something so sponge-like and scented, stepping into the classroom, laughing, providing us with her fabled profile, her light at the prow, you wouldn’t believe it, it hurt so much.
The first days of spring have an amazing air about them, unimaginable, you can’t tell where it comes from. This effect is heightened by the first sightings of summer clothes (the coats strangled in the closet until next year), of bare-armed students carrying decapitations and whole kingdoms inside their folders. We would walk into school through a great red-brick patio with the basketball courts outlined in white, a scrawny tree blessed us; we would jog up the double staircase, hurried on by the dean—who comprised a blonde moustache with a wholehearted dedication to cursing—and then the bell would ring, firing the starting signal to our daily race for wisdom and science.
There we were: Susana Peinado and her collar of pimples, Marcial Escribano who was held back for the third time and whose brother was a parachutist, and that other guy who had a clean copy of his notes and whose name I can’t remember; 11B in full force with all its casualties, those lost in failed assessments, those who defected to the sciences, all of us following the vicissitudes of Latin spread across the board like it was the screen of our community movie theatre and Latin was a spy or a landowner.
But 11B was something else. Besides love and its hormonal alterations, there was the strange behavior of a guy called Aubi, a sketch of his real name. We had known him since elementary school, he was our neighbour, we had eaten hotdogs together in the basements of Gran Vía, bet on blindfolded games in the arcade’s spaceships. But then nothing. He landed into 11B almost sleepwalking; he didn’t speak to us, or only grudgingly, and the first week of class he had already come to blows by the door with cross-eyed Adriano Parra, who you have to admit was a real moocher, mangling and bruising himself by falling over the hood of a parked car; the first injury of that year.
On the psychological test he turned out to be an introvert. When we had a rematch with the San Viator School he didn’t even show up. He would leave tests blank after laboriously spelling out his personal information in the spaces allocated for that purpose, and would abandon the exam’s stupefaction, toughened and haughty, going into the hallway while the rest of us wrestled with that monstrous thing against the clock of causes and consequences. Between one thing and another, 11B splintered and Ms. Cristina, who was our substitute for a month and therefore well prepared, announced one day that Aubi had a growth problem.
The second term flung itself over us with its box full of surprises; at the beginning we refused to believe it. Natividad Serrano, a second-grade girl—but still very developed—called up Angel Andrés Corominas one rainy evening to tell him that it was true, that the Estévez twins had confirmed it when the three of them bumped into each other in their tutor’s office. We found it scandalous and terrible, as out-of-place as the active intellect or applied casuistry. It just seemed like Olivia Reyes belonged to us all somehow, to the destitute mornings of eleventh grade humanities, with its round arches and its ablatives perfumed by Olivia’s laughter, to those mornings of that singular year that would never return.
Losing Olivia Reyes weighed down on the whole class, we related to it in a personal, historic manner, as if the many hours of our youth spent facing the cinema of the blackboard had finally brought a prodigious fruit, and that fruit was Olivia. To know that she would begin to drift away from us, that she was already far away though she was actually still at the desk right in front and would lend us her set square or the halo of her hands, it hurt as much as the evening when we saw her climbing onto the convertible of a suited friend, and Olivia, perfectly adaptable and tender, the fluttering of her sun-speckled skirt in the spring air streaked with pollen. And it turned out her heart belonged to someone else. We thought of that rare object, of Olivia’s heart, like a room full of pollen.
The Treaty of Versailles had just been signed, Europe was entering a period of relative calmness, having left behind the events of 1914 and the second semester, when the classroom received the news smack in the face. For beloved Olivia Reyes to pick, out of us all, that introvert Aubi, who despised everything that mattered (exams and football rematches), filled us with confusion and dismay. We meditated on this subject no less than twice per day, while Catiline was up to his same old tricks and the Kaiser squealed. Maybe, at the end of the day, powdered girls were interested in introverted boys suffering from growth problems. That only confused things more.
In eleventh grade the fun ended, many said. The thing is, up till then we had moved between simple decisions: Religion or Ethics. Handicrafts or Housekeeping. Handball with Agapito Huertas or chess with lame old Ladislao. Eleventh grade humanities was not qualified to face such a definitive decision—the most beautiful and unpunctual girl in school, with half the class head over heels in love with her, at the same time or in turns, and Olivia Reyes chasing after intractable Aubi: the worst.
And the thing was that Audi kept on not loving her back, he didn’t love anybody; he was furious with us all, he chained himself to his desk in the back and glanced through the window at dodgeball tournaments taking place on the side of the playground. Asunción Ramos Ojeda, who was a school-bus regular and stayed for lunch at school, said that it was Olivia Reyes who telephoned Aubi every evening and that his mother was the one who opposed the relationship. Aubi was a good boy. Aubi was a killjoy. Problem is you all think you get a girl and that’s it.
Then we found out that, true enough, the Renaissance had buried the medieval conception of the universe; look at Galileo, what a breakthrough. Turns out nothing was that simple. We had to evacuate the school twice because of bomb threats. The corridors drained out hundreds of students, excited by the idea of the bomb and our texts blowing up mid-air, the ladies wrung their hands and begged you to stay very calm and quiet, and you could only see Mr. Amadeo, the principal, placidly smoking on the landing as if on the sidelines of it all, engrossed with his ulcer and the half year of life he’d been given yesterday. Actually, just in case, we weren’t going back in for the next two hours.
It was a year to be remembered. The alteration even reached the school staff. The inspectors took disciplinary actions against Mr. Alberto after he expelled a student for no reason. Three people had to grab Mr. Esteban who was determined to illustrate the laws of gravity by flinging himself out the window. The English teacher had triplets; two improvised stretchers carried her to the maternity ward, with a piece of chalk, it was rumored, still between her fingers, while the slack-jawed class, the pens suspended, airborne, left a line of The Pickwick Papers half-underlined. Spring light flooded the cubbies and broke the classroom up into shaded quadrilaterals; there was that human thickness which comes from bodies gathered together, hurriedly bathed, and weariness, and then Benito Almagro, who despised all nuance, made a loud and rude comment.
We noticed from the beginning that this was going to be an ill-fated love. The limpidity of Olivia Reyes was tarnished; we even liked her less. There are loves that crush those who receive them. Such was the case of Aubi from 11B humanities, from the moment when Olivia decided to replace us all in the real-estate of her heart for the silent face of an introverted rival. You could tell that Aubi didn’t know what to do with such a large space. He was all alone before that immense amount of squandered desire. He didn’t understand in the least the meaning of Olivia Reyes’s gift; he would leave the locker room stunned, bound for the vaulting box or a medical examination. Everyone standing in line in front of the X-ray screen and then they sent your breastbone home. The school director would post the lungs of every enrolled student, and thin Ibañez was worried because someone had told him that it showed if you smoked. In the mailbox, Olivia Reyes’s heart would mingle, a registered envelope, with ads for toasters and other things like that.
She called his home every evening. She had never called us. That was a mistaken script. The classroom held its breath until the final bell rang at the end of the day, as if being quiet would make it ring earlier; we would then stampede out, leaving lectures halfway finished and the bomb of Hiroshima floating in suspension, in the limbo of the school’s timetable.
But let’s get back to the air and the spring light who should really be our sole protagonists. It was an unintelligible light, adolescence being made up of such an air which can’t be explained. One could write in that light (since you can’t write about that light), could manage to leave the soft, grapefruit meat of such light inscribed, and, in some way, also “thought.” It’s still to be seen if one can do that; if I can do that. The light would explain Mr. Amadeo’s glasses and the fallen strap of that telephone operator on some Tuesday of that year; the light explains it all. Now that I remember, there was a certain uproar about the romance between Maribel Sanz and César Roldán (the student rep).
Our class tutor took the opportunity to tell us that the triplets had been born as expected, and after cutting short the clamor of applauses and whistles—no one knew whether in favor of or against the triplets—she went on to introduce the substitute teacher. I couldn’t put my finger on it, maybe it was the crossed-button jacket or the self-absorbed, lunatic air. All of a sudden, 11B lost interest in language (“lost all consciousness”), everyone fled to El Cairo café during teaching hours, to pore over their indecipherable class notes and get a good look at their neighbors’ stickers. The key was to have a good GPA, a good GPA is decisive, what’s your GPA.
The classroom was basically deserted when the new English teacher began to dust off adverbs, nervous about his pedagogical failure and the empty desks. May exploded against the picture windows, for an instant there was a rainbow in the wristwatch on Aubi’s wristwatch, who was napping in the back, the classroom blinked and daydreamed at the height of the desperate teacher’s belt; and then Olivia Reyes walked in.
It was a deplorable incident, the speed disrupting everything. But it was also a slow, dripping scene. First the teacher reproached her for her tardiness, and then he continued to blame on burning Olivia Reyes the collective lack of interest and the accumulated indifference and his own impotence as a teacher. Then he expelled her, just like that, and informed her that she would not be allowed to take the final exam. It was very dangerous, so late in the year (the year when fun ended) because expulsion meant the almost certain possibility of being held back. The new teacher knew nothing about the problems of Olivia or her heart, wholly occupied with evicting a harmful image.
The washed clean scent of Olivia Reyes still floated in the air, she hadn’t left the classroom yet, when Aubi unexpectedly stood up and asked to be expelled too. He looked ridiculous, standing up there trembling, with all that space Olivia Reyes was devoting to him and which he had rejected, rejecting us all in the process; but he still asked the teacher to expel him, to be held back, the end of his education. The passing years have blurred the scene, covering it in varnish (who is dedicated to fogging our memories with such bad taste?), but my classmates hold in memory the clash between the two, the unbearable tension while Aubi, and the three or four who joined him, gathered their shabby school folders, and left for exile and nothingness. There and then their CV ended, and it had all been because of those triplets.
Later on we got together in El Cairo, and we had to narrate it a thousand times to those who had been absent. The scene was revisited from every angle until it was completely deformed, adding at times absurd details, like the version that had the teacher threatening Olivia with a comb. Nothing unites two people more than speaking evil about a third. It was the last chance the class had to reconcile itself before sinking completely into the nonsense of adult life, into the future. It’s funny that I can only remember a few irrelevant fragments from that day. Groups of heads yelling. A large bandage over Adriano Parra’s Adam’s apple. Aubi’s legs trembling while he received our congratulations and the envy of many. He was the martyr of the lazy ones on that day, with his jacket—shining with badges and emblems—and his basketball trainers.
On the opposite side of the room, separated by a mass of excited student bodies, Olivia Reyes premiered a pair of amazed and melancholic eyes. I still remember them. She didn’t walk over to thank Aubi’s deranged challenge to the teacher (who was transferred to a different school shortly afterwards and, as to the incident, that was that, though in that moment it seemed as important as the murder of the Archduke of Sarajevo and integral calculus put together). She searched for something inside her purse that she couldn’t find and, not able to hold it back any longer, we saw Olivia walk away, carrying her grief and her new eyes, ravaged by tears.
I haven’t seen any of them ever since. Eleventh grade humanities doesn’t exist anymore. I heard that the Estévez twins work as receptionists in a microcomputer firm. Why is life so sloppy? I would do anything to know what happened to Christian Cruz or Mercedes Cifuentes. Where did they all end up, all those recently woken-up faces that I saw for a year, where are all those arms and legs, already ancient, that ran around the red-brick schoolyard, swimming among the pollen. I love them all. I thought I didn’t care about them or hated them when I had them in front of me every single hour of every single day, but now it turns out I need them.
I search for them, how they looked at roll call, with their hair hardened by perfume and their blank faces. Aquilio Gómez, present. Fernández Cuesta, on her way. A peaceful, stratospheric blush extends itself across the corridors and the wood worn by generations of elbows and bottoms and dejection. A hand distributes the sheets of the final exam, candidly divided into two groups to make cheating more difficult. General atmosphere of disaster and slaughterhouse. The voice of the teacher croons: “Group A, first question: The causes and consequences of . . .” There’s an attending calmness until the dictation is over. The exam has begun. Everything gains another rhythm, a different speed, when the door is opened and Olivia Reyes walks into the classroom.
Translated from the Spanish by Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba
Eloy Tizón (b. Madrid, 1964) has published three novels: Seda salvaje (1995), Labia (2001), and La voz cantante (2004); three short-story collections: Velocidad en los jardínes (1992), Parpadeos (2006), and Técnicas de iluminación (2013); and one book of essays: Herido leve (2019). His articles and reviews have appeared in newspapers and magazines including El País, El Cultural, Revista de Occidente, and Público. He teaches creative writing at the Hotel Kafka in Madrid. His work has been shortlisted for the Herralde, Ribera del Duero, and Crítica Awards, and has been translated into English, French, Italian, German, Finnish, and Arabic. He is regarded as one of the finest Spanish-speaking short-story writers alive.
Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa (b. Houston, 1994) is a translator and editor based in Madrid, Spain. She studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Crossroads Magazine and Cahiers d’Art and she has collaborated with various international organizations such as The Norman Foster Foundation, FABA, Porcausa, and Ivorypress.
Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba (b. Madrid, 1994), is a translator and writer based in Madrid, Spain. He studied comparative literature with film studies at King’s College London. His work has appeared in Asymptote, Zinet Media, Muy Historia, and El Estado Mental. In addition to translating and writing, he currently lectures on literature, video games, comics, and cinema.
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