Historias y cuentos de Galicia by Emilia Pardo Bazán: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

“Un destripador de antaño” (A Ripper of Yore) opens the book. In the early years of the nineteenth century, in the village of Tornelos near Compostela, Minia, an orphan of thirteen or fourteen who resembles the martyr saint of the nearby shrine, lives as the drudge of her aunt and uncle, the millers Juan Ramón and Pepona. A year of drought comes and there is no money for the rent; on a trip to Compostela Pepona hears what is said about the apothecary Don Custodio: that he makes his miraculous remedies with “unto de moza” (the fat of a young girl).

The other stories range across Galicia. In “«La Mayorazga» de Bouzas” (The Heiress of Bouzas), a landowner’s daughter who rides like a man discovers, in the middle of a Carlist conspiracy, that her husband is cheating on her with a seamstress. In “Madre gallega” (Galician Mother), a peaceable priest lives with his mother in an Aragonese village torn by civil war; in “Nieto del Cid” (Grandson of the Cid), an old hunting priest defends his house against a gang of robbers; and in “Viernes Santo” (Good Friday), the priest of Naya tells how a local boss, Lobeiro, holds a whole district in fear.

There are stories of field and sea: “Planta montés” (Mountain Plant), about a boy from the hills who cannot get used to service in the city; “La Camarona”, a fisherman’s daughter who will not leave the boat; “De polizón” (The Stowaway), an old emigrant guarding his chest on the steamer to America; “El trueque” (The Swap), in which a ruined tile-maker notices that his masters’ baby and his own grandson look exactly alike; and two stories of the Cuban war, “Poema humilde” (Humble Poem) and “La oreja de Juan Soldado” (Juan the Soldier’s Ear). There is humour too, as in “Que vengan aquí” (Let Them Come Here), where a shrewd villager ends up with a runaway fighting bull.

The notes at the foot of each story say where it first appeared: in magazines and newspapers such as Blanco y Negro, La España Moderna, El Imparcial or the Nuevo Teatro Crítico, between 1883 and 1899. Wikipedia lists the 1900 book under the title of its first story, Un destripador de antaño, with the subtitle Historias y cuentos de Galicia. Pardo Bazán, who introduced naturalism to Spain, looks without idealizing: the hunger of peasants, greed for a scrap of land, the violence of political bosses, the weight of superstition and emigration to America.

It is still read because it tells a great deal in a small space, with endings that hit hard, and because it lets us hear Galician speech in the mouths of its characters (“¡Cómo branqueas, Mariniña!”, “How pale you’re getting, Mariniña!”). Several stories take place in Marineda, the literary name the author gave to La Coruña, or in Compostela, and many deal with violence against women, according to Wikipedia one of the most recurrent themes of her stories.

Emilia Pardo Bazán was born in La Coruña on 16 September 1851 and died in Madrid on 12 May 1921. A novelist, journalist and critic, she championed naturalism in La cuestión palpitante (The Burning Question) and wrote novels such as La Tribuna (1883) and Los pazos de Ulloa (The House of Ulloa, 1886).

She published more than six hundred and fifty short stories, fought for women’s education and in 1916 became the first woman to hold a chair, in Neo-Latin literatures, at the Central University of Madrid.