José María Merino and Heidi [A Month of a Thousand Forests]

The second author to be featured in our overview of the new collection A Thousand Forests in One Acorn is Jose María Merino, a Spanish master of microfictions. Merino is one of the authors in this volume whose work is appearing in English for the first time.

You can read other excerpts from Thousand Forests by clicking here. And this feature will continue all month—until all 28 authors have been highlighted.

All this month, if you order the book from the Open Letter site and use the code “FORESTS,” you’ll get it for only $15.

I chose the opening of my novel La orilla oscura because it is the work in which I think my literary obsessions really start to take shape: the tension between sleep and waking, the question of the double—in this case, with Spanish America mixed in—metamorphosis, the tricks that memory plays, my taste for metafiction and for texts that are nested like Russian dolls . . . Then I include three microfictions, a form I discovered after writing several novels and about a hundred short stories, because they represent not only the flexibility of the genre, but also show different aspects of my bewilderment at reality, which is the main inspiration for my writing. Finally, I chose the first story from my latest work, El libro de las horas contadas, in which I play with the idea of composing a novel as a short story writer would, and a collection of short stories and microfictions as a novelist.

The dead whose voices I hear with my eyes? My favorite books come to mind in schools, in flocks, and I find it hard to choose just a few. I will settle for a painfully incomplete historical overview of the books that have shaped me. After my first, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, which I read when I was seven, there were the ones I read in my childhood and adolescence, over which hung the shadow of Don Quixote—_Tom Sawyer, Kim, Around the World in 80 Days, William Brown_ . . . and a few dictionaries and encyclopedias, among which Salvat’s Universitas, where I discovered Hoffman and things like the solar system and mythology, stands out.

The fly circles listlessly around the bathroom. I look at it with disgust. What’s a bug doing in my luxury hotel room—in February, no less? I hit it with a towel and it falls, lifeless, onto to the marble sink. It’s a strange, reddish fly, not very big. It occurs to me that it is the last of a species that will disappear with its death. It occurs to me that the bathroom is its refuge from the winter. That in the garden under my window there is a plant, also very rare, which can only be pollinated by this fly. And that, within a few millennia, the presence of enough oxygen to ensure the survival of our own species will depend on the pollination and proliferation of that plant. What have I done? By killing this fly I have sealed your fate, humans of the future. But a slight twitch moves its legs. Maybe it isn’t dead! Now it is moving them with more force, now it has managed to stand, now it’s rubbing them together, stretching out its wings, getting ready to take flight; now it’s circling around the bathroom. Live! Breathe, humans of the future! But its clumsy movements bring that first, repellant image back to mind. I am snapped out of my trance. What is this disgusting bug doing here? I grab the towel, follow it, hit it, kill it. I finish it off.

(Translated by Heather Cleary)