Narraciones inverosímiles by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

The first and longest tale is “El amigo de la muerte” (Death’s Friend): in Madrid in 1724, Gil Gil, raised as the son of a cobbler, has lost his protector, the Count of Rionuevo, and the girl he loves, Elena de Monteclaro. One rainy night, penniless, he raises a bottle of oil of vitriol to his lips, and a cold hand touches his shoulder: “¡HOLA, AMIGO!” (“Hello, friend!”). It is Death, who offers to make him a doctor: one who can see her and tell, from where she stands, whether a patient will live or die. With this gift he presents himself to Philip V at La Granja, while the king’s son Louis I lies dying of smallpox.

In “La mujer alta” (The Tall Woman), told in 1875 beside a spring in the Guadarrama mountains, the engineer Gabriel sets out to prove to his friends that supernatural things still happen: his friend Telesforo, who since childhood had feared women alone at night, met a towering, gap-toothed old woman with a tiny fan in the small hours, and both times he saw her news of a misfortune followed at once. In “Los seis velos” (The Six Veils), Rafael glimpses a girl at dawn behind a white curtain and spends his life looking for her; each encounter comes with a veil of a different colour, on which the author comments with humour.

“Moros y cristianos” (Moors and Christians) is a black comedy: in 1821 old Juan Gómez Hormiga, mayor of Aldeire, pulls down a Moorish tower and finds a parchment in Arabic that passes, from swindle to swindle, from a lawyer in Ugíjar to a choirmaster in Ceuta and on to a Moroccan egg-and-chicken seller. The book is completed by “El año en Spitzberg” (The Year in Spitsbergen), the diary of an exile in the Arctic; “Soy, tengo y quiero” (I Am, I Have, I Want), a poor poet’s conversations with his muse; “Los ojos negros” (The Black Eyes), a tragedy of jealousy in a castle beyond the Arctic Circle; and “Lo que se oye desde una silla del Prado” (What You Hear from a Chair on the Prado), a mosaic of remarks overheard on the Madrid promenade in the summer of 1874.

In the dedication Alarcón says these stories were “escritas casi todas en mi niñez o en mi primera juventud” (“written almost all in my childhood or early youth”), and the dates at the foot partly bear it out: “El amigo de la muerte” is signed in Guadix in 1852, but “La mujer alta” and “Moros y cristianos” date from 1881. Wikipedia notes that the fantastic dominates this collection and calls “El amigo de la muerte” a story “a lo Edgardo Poe” (in the manner of Edgar Poe); there are also Romantic echoes of Espronceda, Byron and Garcilaso, whom the author himself quotes.

It is still read because it brings together things that rarely meet: the modern ghost story that leaves readers to decide whether anything supernatural happened (“cada lector habrá de juzgar el caso según sus propias sensaciones y creencias”, “each reader must judge the case by their own feelings and beliefs”, ends “La mujer alta”); the moral legend; the satire of greed; and experiments such as the mosaic of voices on the Prado. And “El amigo de la muerte”, with its journey round the world and its leap of six centuries, still surprises.

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was born in Guadix on 10 March 1833 and died in Madrid on 19 July 1891. A journalist, politician and storyteller, he made his name with his Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África (Diary of a Witness to the War in Africa, 1859) and above all with El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874).

He joined the Royal Spanish Academy in 1877, and in 1881 and 1882 he gathered his stories into three collections: Historietas nacionales, Cuentos amatorios and these Narraciones inverosímiles.