Cuentos completos: 1949-1969.

Gerling, David Ross

Most literary historians agree that had it not been for his untimely death in 1969, Ignacio Aldecoa would have produced award-worthy stories and novels right up to the end of the twentieth century. Even so, he still ranks as one of the most widely read Spanish authors of the contemporary period. The present collection of his complete short stories supports his deserved acclaim.

Beginning with a chatty and insightful prologue by his wife, Josefina R. Aldecoa, the collection includes the seventy-nine short stories that Ignacio Aldecoa wrote between 1948 and 1969. A poetic sensibility infuses each story to the extent that the very short ones are quasi-prose poems. The stories also resonate with a mixture of existential anguish and social testimony. Borrowing a phrase from Catholic social teaching, one could say that Aldecoa's stories reveal a "preferential option for the poor." Taken together, his affective prose with its underlying social philosophy is both esthetically and intellectually stimulating.

"Santa Olaja de acero" should be in every Spanish short-story anthology because of the flash point produced by its carefully coordinated blending of plot and crescendo. Here, Aldecoa describes the Herculean efforts of an engineer and a brakeman to stop their runaway freight train after a roller-coaster ride in the Castilian sierra. By the time they bring the giant locomotive, Santa Olaja, to a screeching stop, sensitive readers may feel neurasthenic. Along with the excitement, Aldecoa provides a striking glimpse of Spanish railway workers who, virtually neglected by most writers, were among the most stoic and self-sacrificing government workers of the former regime.

An epigraph from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer serves as a preamble to "La chica de la Glorieta," an unsentimental look at the nocturnal routine of a big-city prostitute in the 1960s. Angelita does not have a drug habit, nor is she in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend or pimp. She is simply a country girl who has come to Madrid to make money fast for herself and her baby daughter. While she is confiding to a cigarette vendor whom she calls "Grandma" that business has not been good this particular summer evening, two inebriated men in a Seat 600 pull up to the cigarette stand and call Angelita over. She ignores the cautionary advice of her older friend and hops in. As the car speeds away we are left wondering and worrying about Angelita. In a matter of a few pages Aldecoa moves us from prurience to concern for the young prostitute as a person worthy of love and care.

In a word, Ignacio Aldecoa accomplishes what the French poet Jacques Prevert effected through his proletarian poems. Aldecoa's stories of humble people enlighten, entertain, even enrage, but they never degenerate into sentimentality.

David Ross Gerling Sam Houston State University