Many of the eight stories in Guadalupe Nettel’s collection The Accidentals (now translated by Rosalind Harvey) revolve around family life. In the opening story, ‘Imprinting’, the narrator discovers her uncle Frank in hospital when she goes there with a friend, Veronica, who is visiting her mother:
“He was the exiled relative of my family, so to speak, a man nobody mentioned out loud, never mind in front of my mum.”
She decides to visit him without telling her mother and finds herself drawn to him by a shared passion for literature and the discovery of a version of her family she feels has been hidden from her. She confesses herself flattered by his assertion, “You’re not like the others. I could see that even when you were little.” It is Veronica who eventually informs her family who turn up at the hospital, a single overheard comment (“Twenty years, and when you find her, you try to do the dame thing to her”) enough to suggest why Frank has been cut out of their lives.
Love and danger are the two key ingredients of most of the families in the collection. In ‘The Fellowship of Orphans’, the narrator, an orphan, spots a man, Manu, he has seen on a ‘missing’ poster sitting in a café. He phones the number on the poster and Manu’s mother asks the narrator if he is sure – “in the last week more than ten people have rung me”. He sends her a photograph and follows Manu to a bench in a park, only to witness the arrival of an ambulance from which two nurses come to collect him:
“I saw how the men took hold of Manu as his eyes grew clouded with worry once more. I said to myself that, although he had a mother, his expression was exactly the same as that of all the orphans.”
In seeking to return Manu home, the narrator senses he has placed further away from happiness.
‘Playing with Fire’ is a more overtly family story as a couple take their two sons for break in the countryside. Unfortunately, one of the sons, Bruno, does not want to be there and eventually the father loses patience with him and hits him. Just moments before the narrators is “certain my husband would never dare do anything of the sort” and the story is one in which all of the characters change or are seen differently. Another family features in ‘A Forest Under the Earth’ which highlights Nettel’s use of ambiguous and complex symbols, in this case a monkey-puzzle tree:
“Whenever I felt unhappy, I would hide up in its highest branches and there I would find consolation.”
The tree, however, begins to change: first the birds leave it and then the leaves turn “a dull, indistinct brownish colour…”
“The trunk, once robust, had acquired a fragile, brittle appearance.”
The story charts the family’s reaction to the tree’s deterioration, from barbecuing under it to prove to their neighbours it is safe, to moving out of the part of the house it overlooks. For the narrator, the tree comes to resemble his life, hollow but still rooted to the same place.
Two stories which particularly stand out concern alternative lives. In ‘The Pink Door’ the narrator’s wife suspects the door of the title houses a brothel and warns her husband, “Don’t even think about showing your face here!” Intrigued, he does return but when he excuses himself by saying he must get back as his wife is baking a birthday cake for his daughter he is offered a sweet which will “sweeten your way back home.” When he returns, he discovers that his daughter’s birthday is no longer that month. Two more visits result in even greater changes in a ‘Monkey’s Paw’ type exploration of where our wishes get us. In ‘Life Elsewhere’ a building also has life-changing ramifications, though these are very much in the mind of the narrator, an out-of-work actor, who discovers a fellow drama student, now successful, rents the flat he and his wife just missed out on, living (as he sees it) the life he might have had.
Nettel has described the short story as a snapshot, and the writing process akin to cropping the frame. This is visible in the economy of her work which, in a few pages, offers the reader unexpectedly revealing compositions which shine a light on the inner lives of her characters.
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