Humbert Hernandez’s ‘Historias de Gibraltar V – La venganza se sirve fría’

Book Review By Giordano Durante

Humbert Hernandez’s fifth volume in his Historias de Gibraltar series of short stories has just been released. With a sixth volume on the horizon (El Intruso), the books will collect over 90 tales from this fertile writer who is among the few remaining local authors publishing Spanish prose.

The current volume, with 25 tales, opens strongly with a story about a widow who speaks to her dead husband through a hole in the cemetery vault where he’s buried. There is a certain “salero” to Hernandez’s characters: the women, in particular, are often bursting with life, somehow surviving—and often thriving—despite living in a world marred by disillusion, cruelty and injustice.

Hernandez’s unblushing approach to writing about the body, evident in his previous works, is in full flow here: “Además, sus encantos físicos ya no eran encantos, eran más bien desconciertos: ruedas Michelines, bultos fofos de grasa, mollas sobresalientes en las caderas, unas posaderas blandengues y caídas y una geografía de arrugas y verrugas que le hubiese facilitado su entrada en un aquelarre de brujas medievales.” This is the literary equivalent of the depiction of bodies in the portraits of Jenny Saville.

There is also a strong focus on bodily functions, taken to its extreme in ‘Anus Mirabilis’ where a communal toilet serves as a focal point of neighbourhood conflict throughout the decades.

Several aspects of Hernandez’s use of language warrant discussion. The author has settled on a way to convey the Gibraltarian and Andalusian accents of his characters, a perennial problem for local writers. Word endings are lopped off and “ch” morphs into “sh” in the following representative example: “Tu no sueles vení musho, ¿verdá?” Although a potential headache for the writer who has to maintain a consistent approach to these alternative spellings, these non-standard renditions are faithful to the language of the streets and patios of the past.

The prose is also marked by a large number of rhyming binomials like “la gente corriente y moliente”, and a relish in colourful names and nicknames: the reader meets “Irene la Grasienta”, “Mariquita la Golosa”, “Eleuteria la Tomillera” and “Paca la Remangá”; this lends the work a playful, folkloric edge.

Added to this is Hernandez’s love of earthy similes: “la cara como un chorizo asado”, “más machacona que un mortero de cocina”, “con cara de circunstancia y ojos de corderito ahorcado” and “cara de lechuza constipá”. These humorous ingredients produce writing that is streetwise, unromantic and free from pretension. This is how people speak; they are bawdy, irreverent and crude—they make lewd jokes and their daily lives often descend into farce.

Combined with this comic strain, however, are more serious tales that highlight social controversies. “Póquer de engaños” features a corrupt police officer and “Djamila” is a powerful tragedy about a Moroccan woman who lives with her son in an unsafe dwelling.

Hernandez offers no explicit moral judgements—the rough justice of the street, the extremities of revenge and jealousy in these stories are presented without authorial comment.

These tales, more solemn in tone, are a powerful corrective to nostalgia; the unvarnished past was hard, full of pain and insecurity, infidelity, petty criminality, accidental death, rampant hypocrisy and the impetuous drive towards revenge. There is no sugar coating in these tales as, in the words of one character, “La vida a menudo juega unas perrunas pasadas.”

Some sensitive readers might find this unpalatable but, free from moralising and the urge to whitewash our social history, this refreshing approach is a necessary antidote to the lure—common in small places like Gibraltar—of invented pasts that can only offer us a superficial form of comfort.

In ‘El Pasado nos persigue’, a highlight of the collection, a maid has a sexual relationship with two brothers from the rich tobacco factory-owning family that employs her. Hernandez’s tale shows how money and class serve as a cloak to cover up immoral behaviour. The story ends in a finely-paced climactic scene when past errors return to unsettle the brothers.

Other standout stories are ‘El cuento de la lechera’ which details a criminal conspiracy to steal a pearl necklace, the grim title story ‘La venganza se sirve fría’ and ‘Santo que mea’, a tale about the farcical antics of a voyeur priest.

In its monologues, in particular, Hernandez’s fiction manages to humanise the marginalised and the downtrodden. One of the most compelling monologue pieces here is ‘Rosa’, a chilling tale of loneliness, isolation and mental illness which draws attention to the sheer range of Hernandez’s writing with its fluid shifts in tone and perspective.

As another example, ‘Paralisis’, dedicated to the paraplegic euthanasia campaigner Ramón Sampedro Cameán (whose life was the subject of the fine film Mar Adentro), contains a moving plea from its similarly bed-bound protagonist: “Mi espíritu se ha secao en este desierto. Me he ahogao en mi sed de viví. Y aún peor, no siento que nadie me quiera, no sé lo que es sentí una carisia de ternura y de amó desde que murió mi madre. Aquí estoy, pudriéndome a fuego lento a esperas del fin inevitable que nos aguarda a to ́l mundo.”

Writing about the past in Spanish and writing about the working class, their concerns, their fetishes and their humble food, might not be fashionable in the increasingly monolingual Gibraltar of data centres, finance and campaigns against Spanish street signs. Well, if this is the case, so much the worse for fashion!

The volume opens with a epigraph from Horace to the effect that one should not seek the adulation of the masses but “be content with a few readers”. After having enjoyed its exposure of taboos and its gaggle of memorable characters, I think this book deserves more than the few readers modestly hinted at by the author in his first pages.

The book is now available via Amazon and at the Heritage Trust Shop and BookGem.