Cuentos - short story summaries

Un matrimonio del siglo XIX

1866

·       About a young couple, Luisa and Carlos who come from a wealthy background, end up spending their entire wealth gambling, and then take the position of a destitute couple like the one they had criticised in Italy

·        Narrator is unnamed and ungendered 

El indulto

1883

·       About a washerwoman called Antonia whose husband killed her mother and was put in prison, having threatened to return and kill her. The law system fails her, he returns, and she dies of natural causes, leaving her child orphaned.

El encaje roto

1897

·       Micaelita Aranguiz is to be married to Bernardo de Meneses but wants to test her husband’s decency. After he passes the tests, she agrees to get engaged. However, accidentally tearing the lace (his family’s heirloom), she witnessed his anger, and decided she had to reject him at the altar. Until meeting the narrator at the sauna she never explained herself.

Champagne

·       Written in 1898

·       A conversation between Raimundo Valdés and a prostitute he has solicited. She shares that she was forced into an arranged marriage with a wealthy man, but was in love with a poor infantry soldier. On the day of the wedding, she drank so much champagne that she confessed this to her husband and threatened to beat him to death. He broke the marriage and she was forced to work the streets

La Feminista

·       Written in 1909

·       Staying at a spa, the protagonist meets a couple of a chauvinistic and vitriolic male with a degenerative condition, and his caring and subdued wife, Nicolás and Clotilde. He finds out some time later that the husband has died, and his doctor tells him the story about where he forced his wife to put on his trousers, to make the point that she never would again. In a turn of events, she made him wear her lace underwear, to imply he wasn’t a real man as she had to take care of him like his little nurse.

Las medias rojas 

1914

·       Ildara lives with her debilitated father Clodio and does chores. She purchases a pair of red stockings and lies about their origin, and also has arranged payment with a middleman to be able to go to America. Clodio beats her to the point of disfigurement, thus destroying all her (naïve) desires to cross the Atlantic