Narrative
La mano junto al muro
Not translated into English
Guillermo Meneses · 1951
Synopsis
In the port district of a coastal city, on a cabaret night, a woman whom the sailors call Bull Shit occupies a room on the upper floor of a house that was a castle facing the sea, then a merchants' residence, then a brothel; a mirror reflects the sea and the sailors' white caps. Around her pass Dutch, a man of speeches who proposes marriage to her, another with a tilted hat who might be a detective, and sailors of whom it is not known whether there were two or three. She never remembers anything, and her fingers drum on the old stone wall.
Context
The text won the short-story competition of the daily El Nacional in 1951 and in 1955 entered the anthology of the Venezuelan short story of the Ministry of Education; a separate edition appeared in Paris in 1952, with photographs by Alfredo Boulton. The narrative is fragmented and circular: the parentheses offer variants, sentences return, and the story bites its own tail like the serpent, an image dear to its author. A Venezuelan poet and critic called it the pivotal text of his work.
Who it is for
A brief story in Spanish, which can be read in about twenty minutes and asks the reader to accept the doubts and the reworkings of the narration.
Prizes and reception
Winner of the El Nacional competition, it is regarded as the turning point that brought Venezuelan narrative into the twentieth century.
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