In 2010, Granta announced a list of 22 authors, all under the age of 35, that it dubbed the “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.” Many of those writers’ works have been translated into English over the past decade, including two who have enjoyed a great deal of success, Andrés Neuman and Samanta Schweblin. Both authors were born in Argentina and burst onto the scene with promising debuts, Neuman in 2012 with his under-appreciated masterpiece Traveler of the Century and Schweblin in 2017 with her deliciously creepy Fever Dream.
Now Federico Falco, another Argentinian from the group, seems poised to follow in his compatriots’ footsteps, with the publication of his English-language debut, A Perfect Cemetery, in a lyrical translation by Jennifer Croft (translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Man Booker International–winning Flights).
Falco was represented in 2010’s “Best Of…” issue by a story titled “In Utah There Are Mountains Too,” about a young woman who falls in love with a Mormon missionary visiting her small tourist town in the central Argentine mountains. The piece helped Falco earn a 2012 residency at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, after which he told an interviewer that the story had begun life as a nonfiction biography of a childhood friend, later spinning into fiction when he ran into trouble putting the “life on paper.”
Sometime during the ensuing years, that story metamorphosed yet again, emerging fully formed as a truly arresting imago entitled “Silvi and Her Dark Night,” one of the five stories that comprise A Perfect Cemetery. It is worth spotlighting a few pivotal changes to illuminate Falco’s maturity as a writer and, more importantly, a storyteller.
In both works, the 16-year-old protagonist chafes at the confines of her small-town existence while confronting dual crises: a loss of faith in God and the concupiscence of summertime teens. In the old version, Cuqui declares her atheism matter-of-factly over the phone to her mom, a cook at a hotel during the tourist season; her mom is sad, but Cuqui is staying with her grandmother for the summer and that is that.
In “Silvi and Her Dark Night,” Silvi’s loss of faith devastates her mother, Alba Clara (cleverly recalling the Spanish for clear or bright dawn), a pious woman who crisscrosses the town administering last rites to those in need. Silvi’s newfound atheism stems from the fact that she is haunted by the memory of a tourist boy — “the most beautiful boy [she] had ever seen” — who died after she and her mother visited him in the ICU in the wake of a car accident. Upon meeting the Mormon missionaries, Silvi recalls the boy and notes that Steve, the one she falls for, has “his same blue eyes, the same clear nose, the open forehead, the same pale skin — very pale skin — and a breath of golden down peeking out from the cuffs of his shirt.”
Cuqui’s love manifests almost as an adolescent crush; Silvi’s is an all-consuming ardor, suffusing her every moment. Both young women buy a stick of Axe deodorant so they can summon Steve’s smell, but whereas Cuqui rubs the deodorant on her pillow and hugs it while dreaming of Steve’s white chest, Silvi “[hides] it among her winter sweaters, and each night, before going to bed, she’d brush it lightly against her sheets and on the pillow and the headboard, and then she’d put it on her wrists and legs. Then she would close her eyes. In the midst of this smell Steve would smile at her. Steve’s pale fingers would caress her cheeks. Steve would hold her tight to him, seeking out her mouth with his lips, grasping her breasts in his hands. Silvi, Silvi, Silvi, Steve would say to her, revealing his armpit. Come here, Silvi, he’d say. Come closer, lick me.”
This difference in intensity is fully realized in the disparate conclusions to the stories. Cuqui gives the two Mormons tin hearts, a child’s memento, so they will always remember her. Silvi — without spoiling anything — is steadfast and unrelenting in her desires, leading to an irrevocable decision and subsequent coda that require an extremely confident and skilled author to pull off so successfully.
While every story in A Perfect Cemetery is poignant, none lands with quite the force that “Silvi” does, though “The Hares” finishes a close second. It starts with a surreal sequence: The “king of the hares” breaks camp and heads to his altar of interwoven “honey locust pods and wildflowers, spines and scapulae.” Once there, his lagomorph subjects cautiously assemble, presenting him a leveret — one of their young — as tribute, which the king promptly kills, bleeds, and drags back for his supper. While readers are uncertain where this mash-up of Aesop, Richard Adams, and Hemingway will lead, Falco steadily and surely transforms the tale into a gentle tragedy.
The “king of the hares” is a man named Oscar who has forsaken society, though we don’t learn why. He occasionally steals into town for provisions, and after one botched resupply run, Cristina finds his camp. Realizing Oscar has been there “all this time,” she bursts into tears. All Oscar can answer is two words, “Forgive me,” and we know he left behind more than society. “Don’t you miss the house? Cristina asked. The king shrugged.” By writing “the house,” instead of “our house” or “a house,” Falco’s precise text opens a vista of possible pasts for the two. That night, clearly ashamed when they go to lie down on his bed of pelts in his cave, the king apologizes again, saying, “I am filthy.” From that moment, Falco has the “the king” recede, using only “Oscar” in the text. “Tickles, Oscar stopped her, and Cristina pulled back her hand. Almost right away, Oscar said, I’m sorry. I’m not used to that kind of thing anymore.” The next morning, Cristina asks if he needs more shotgun cartridges, and the spell is broken, Oscar is thrust back into his exile; he has “plenty,” he answers, and for the remainder of the story Falco refers to him only as “the king.” It is a richly open-ended piece that could, in theory, be an excerpt from a novel, but that would be a shame, because it is flawless.
Like Oscar, all of Falco’s characters exist intimately with their environment, the hills, mountains, plains, flora, and especially the pine trees cradling and supporting their actions. When Un cementerio perfecto was published in Argentina in 2016, Falco told an interviewer that he, too, feels close ties to the environment, a trait acquired partly from his grandparents who were campesinos who farmed and worked the land. Falco highlights the pine forests of the Calamuchita Valley, in Córdoba Province where he was born, as “una de mis favoritas.” But, he adds, while those forests are “hermosos de ver y recorrer” — beautiful to look at and wander through — “son cultivos.” They are a crop, a plantation forest.
This dichotomy between a native environment and one that results from human action or choice is tangible on every page of “Woodland Life,” the fourth story in the collection. Old Wutrich and his adult daughter, Mabel, have grown so comfortable in their longtime forest home that they unconsciously avoid the loose floor board rather than repair it. Now, however, loggers are harvesting the timber and will soon demolish their home. Mabel decides she must find a husband, one who can support her and her father, but since she was raised on the hill, none of the townsmen have any interest. Sakoiti, a Japanese immigrant who lives at a plant nursery along with eight other families — he grows carnations, the others all roses — makes her an offer. Mabel knows it is the only chance she and her father have for a future. As they leave the mountain for perhaps the last time, Old Wutrich bids farewell to the pines he had planted decades earlier, “stroking their bark.” From the forest to the greenhouses to the reservoir just beyond Sakoiti’s immigrant community, the natural environment strives to incorporate the cultivated, the native to integrate — and at times to subjugate — the outsider or the other.
Similar themes are addressed in the title story, “A Perfect Cemetery,” where the famous designer Víctor Bagiardelli sets out to manufacture the ideal resting place for the citizens of a town who don’t share his vision. The mayor commissioned the project due to his father’s supposedly imminent death, but Old Man Giruado informs anyone who will listen that despite being 104 years old, he isn’t going anywhere, unless it is to tend to his neglected garden.
In the final story, “The River,” another untended garden plays a critical role, as the recently widowed Señora Kim, very much still grieving, worries about her husband’s beloved plants as they sink deeper beneath the falling snow that is intensifying her isolation.
A Perfect Cemetery is a brief collection, no story stretching beyond 45 wide-margined pages, and can easily be enjoyed in a single sitting. But try to resist such temptation. Every word and sentence, including those of Croft’s sincere and illuminating note “On Conversation” that concludes the volume, should be savored, consumed in a rush only during those moments when you’re flying down the summer streets with Silvi on her bicycle as she searches for the boy she believes she loves.
[Published by Charco Press on April 6, 2021, 175 pages, $15.95 paperback]