Medardo Fraile" />
  • ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Fiction, LiteratureMay 1, 2015

Time

Bazicha by Jamal Shah.

Bazicha by Jamal Shah. Image Courtesy: ArtChowk Gallery.

By Medardo Fraile

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

(Click here to read the original Spanish text)

Tomorrow was today and yesterday; the watch, a Christmas or birthday present that lent one a certain prestige, but did not measure time. The warm or hot morning sun would pour in through the classroom windows and paint us young, with mocking smiles and tender glances, among notebooks and satchels and one desperate, rebellious hand scribbling notes. The girls had more watches than the boys and were more colourful and more beautiful. Many of us boys wore ties and some sported a dandyish, melancholy, futile handkerchief in our top jacket pocket. Another piece of good fortune: we had no money. Time flew by in the Literature class and the Art class and dragged minute by slow, laboured minute in Philosophy. When the caretaker opened the door to tell us it was time, we would stretch and ease ourselves out of the mental gridlock into which we had sunk and would once again fill our eyes with the light of day, of which no mention was made either in the notes or the text.

Philosophy, or perhaps something else, had transformed the philosopher’s face into a mask, filled it with hollows and wrinkles, his face taking on the dull, unfeeling texture of tree bark. He seemed to be a man incapable of failing anyone or, indeed, of loving anyone. He never raised his voice, almost always wore a black suit and a rather worn, grubby, white shirt, and his dark, smooth hair formed an opaque, greasy helmet. We had him on Mondays and Thursdays, and his was the final class of the morning, when it was hardest to think or, at least, to follow him down dark philosophical corridors. At two o’clock, we all crowded onto the trams to go home.

In the last fifteen minutes of the class, torpor and impatience overwhelmed us.

That Thursday was no different from any other, but, instead of talking to us about Platonic myths or the Aristotelian theory of potentiality and action, he began explaining St Thomas Aquinas’s five ways a posteriori of proving the existence of God. Our teacher had something of the plain-clothes priest about him, and on that Spring Thursday, the class smelled of incense, of church, or perhaps it was the scent of rosemary and lavender wafting in from the nearby fields.

He went on and on ad nauseam about the contingency of human existence. We were doubtless all of us contingent, but we didn’t know what this meant. Then he said: “Some things exist only contingently, they can exist, but could also not exist.” Well, there we were, cupped in the Creator’s hand, and not one of us was necessary – we wrote in our notebooks – but there was no doubting that we enjoyed being together and, above all, talking, and that we were all different, like the notes in a disparate score entitled Second Year, Group A, Room 24. It seemed absolutely necessary to me to admire Begoña’s eyes or to laugh at Lauro’s jokes regardless of their contingency or lack of it.

In the last fifteen minutes of the class, torpor and impatience overwhelmed us. We listened out for the approach of Aniceto, the caretaker, to announce that class was over, and just when we thought he would never come, the door finally opened. That Thursday in early April, was just like any other. Either he was late in coming or the clock, some clock somewhere, was moving very slowly. Suddenly, we saw the handle move, and Aniceto poked his bald head round the door, looked at the teacher, who, in turn, looked at him and, raising his voice, shouted: “Time!”

Two o’clock – at last.

At that moment, we heard a thud at the back of the room. Someone had probably dropped a satchel. No, it wasn’t that. It was Ricardito. A thin boy, with blue eyes and a face half-innocent, half-old-before-his-time. A nice lad. Friendly. Whenever he smiled, he looked rather frightened and always raced off to do his homework because, according to him, time was ticking. It was time, his time, and he was dead.

Ricardito’s contingency was an extreme example. We knew he was in love with Matilde. We knew that, one day, small, chatty Matilde would say “Yes”. But we will never know for sure if, by dying on that Thursday afternoon, at that precise moment, he caused us all to remember for ever Aquinas’s third argument, or if, years later, his death had anything to do with Elena and Milagros becoming nuns or with Seve crashing his car one night on a road in Ciudad Real.

 

Medardo Fraile (b.1925) grew up in Madrid, and lived through the siege of the city during the Spanish Civil War. He first achieved literary recognition for his work in experimental theatre, becoming part of a group that included Alfonso Sastre and Alfonso Paso, and writing the acclaimed play El Hermano. During the Fifties, his focus moved to short-story writing, and he left Franco’s Spain to eventually settle in Scotland as Professor of Spanish at the University of Strathclyde. His stories brought him many awards, including the Premio de la Crítica, the Sésamo and Estafeta Literaria prizes as well as the Hucha de Oro. He is widely thought of as Spain’s finest exponent of the genre. He died in 2013.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated novels and short stories by such writers as Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Javier Marías and Bernardo Atxaga. She has won many prizes, most recently the 2012 Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão, for which she was also runner-up with her translation of António Lobo Antunes’ The Land at the End of the World (Os cus de Judas). Her translation of Medardo Fraile’s stories, Things Look Different in the Light (Pushkin Press) has been longlisted for the 2015 Best Translated Foreign Fiction Award.

Tags

fictionMargaret Jull CostaMedardo FraileSpanishStory of the Weektranslations

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleBecause everyone needs a roomy place
Next articleLa hora

You may also like

Billy Luck

To the Depths

Dearly Departed

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Layers

“This is for those of us who cannot afford rent/ but also cannot afford to wait…”
A Pacific climate change poem, by Terisa Tinei Siagatonu.

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
Whatever Happened to Verse Drama?

Richard O'Brien examines the history of the verse drama, and asks whether the decline of blank verse has to be...

Close