TELLES, Lygia Fagundes

Nationality: Brazilian. Born: São Paulo, 19 April 1924. Education: Various institutions: holds a teaching credential and degrees in physical education and law. Family: Married 1) Gofredo da Silva Telles (divorced 1961); 2) Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (died 1977). Career: Writer. Lives in Rio de Janeiro. Awards: Afonso Arinos prize, 1949; Instituto Nacional do Livro prize, 1958; Boa Leitura prize, 1961; Cannes Festival grand prize, for short fiction, 1969; Guimarâes Rosa prize, 1972; Brazilian Academy of Letters award, 1973; Pedro Nava award, 1989. Member: Elected to Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Publications

Short Stories

Porão e sobrado. 1938.

Praia viva. 1944.

O cacto vermelho. 1949.

Histórias do desencontro. 1958.

Histórias escolhidas. 1961.

A confissão de Leontina. 1964.

O jardim selvagem. 1965.

Antes do baile verde. 1970; revised and enlarged edition, 1971.

Seleta. 1971.

Seminário dos ratos. 1977; as Tigrela and Other Stories, 1986.

Filhos pródigos. 1978.

A disciplina do amor: fragmentos. 1980.

Mistérios: ficçoes. 1981.

Os melhores contos, edited by Eduardo Portella. 1984.

10 contos escolhidos. 1984.

Venha ver o por-do-sol & outros contos. 1988.

Novels

Ciranda de pedra. 1954; as The Marble Dance, 1986.

Verão no aquário. 1963.

As meninas. 1973; as The Girl in the Photograph, 1982.

As horas nuas. 1989.

Other

Telles (selected works and criticism). 1980.

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Critical Studies:

"New Fiction: Telles" by Jon M. Tolman, in Review 30, 1981; "The Baroness of Tatui" by Edla Van Steen, in Review 36, 1986; "The Guerilla in the Bathtub: Telles's As Meninas and the Irruption of Politics" by Renata R. Wasserman, in Modern Language Studies 19(1), 1989; "Fragmented Identities and the Progress of Metamorphosis in Works by Lygia Fagundes Telles" by Peggy Sharpe, in International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze, 1995.

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Although Lygia Fagundes Telles has written four novels, she is better known for her short stories. In the 1940s she published what she later called "impulses of a literary adolescence"—the volumes of short stories Praia viva (Live Beach) and O cacto vermelho (The Red Cactus). Tigrela and Other Stories, Telles's only collection of short stories in English, is a compilation of works that appeared in Brazil at different times in different books.

Telles's stories deal with the bourgeoisie and with people who have had unhappy marriages and who long for the lost joys of youth. Her characters, mostly adults, are depicted in a moment of crisis, when they have to settle accounts with their past. There are also stories, such as "Rat Seminar" and "The 'X' in the Problem," that comment on Brazilian political and social situations. One of the stories of Tigrela and Other Stories, "Herbarium," is unique in the sense that its main character is a young girl. Even in "Herbarium," however, Telles's distinguishing characteristics are present. The girl falls in love with her older cousin, who is staying in her house to recover from a long illness. He introduces her to botany and to the joys of collecting leaves. In the end, as he is about to depart with his fiancée, the girl faces a painful moment of truth when she gives him a leaf that represents death.

Indeed, Telles's stories are explorations of the themes of love and life and of the moment of death. In "The Touch on the Shoulder" the character is introduced within a dream. He is in a garden with a bench, a dry fountain, and a decaying marble statue of a young woman. All seems lifeless. There are no water and no butterflies, and the scent of the herbs and flowers is strange. The man feels the invisible presence of a stranger who at any moment will touch him lightly on the shoulder and tell him that it is time to go. The man forces himself to wake up, only to realize that his life is barren of joy or feeling. In the end he takes his car to escape his fear, but he suddenly sees himself back in the garden, and this time he does feel the touch on his shoulder.

In "Yellow Nocturne" a middle-aged woman is with her husband on their way to a party. After many years their marriage has become a succession of ready-made questions and answers. When they stop to fix a flat tire, the woman, Laura, becomes aware of the smell of a flower called Lady-of-the-Night. The smell leads her to a garden, in the middle of which stands her old family home. In the lit atmosphere of the living room, Laura is made to face her past sins—promises not kept, betrayals of her relatives, the guilt over a man's attempted suicide—and the pain over a love mis-spent. This settling of accounts, which happens in a dreamy atmosphere, takes no time in the actual world. When she comes back from the garden, the car is fixed, and they leave the place.

The sense of smell is also the trigger of memories in "The Sauna." A successful middle-aged painter goes to a sauna, where the scent of eucalyptus takes him back to a time when he was still young and poor. In the foggy atmosphere the past becomes present, and the man is invaded by memories of his first love, Rose. By the time he leaves the sauna, the man has reviewed his whole past, admitted to his sins, and cried. The story, however, ends on an ironic note when the painter says to the sauna attendant that he is clean but a bit worn-out.

Some of Telles's stories have insects and animals as characters. In "The Ants" two college students rent a room in the attic of a run-down house. The previous tenant has left a box of bones in the room, and one of the students discovers that the bones are the skeleton of a dwarf. At night a strange smell comes upon the place, and a row of red ants invades the room and goes inside the box. After two days the students find that the skeleton is being put together by the ants. The two escape the house in the middle of the night, terrified of something they cannot name. In "Rat Seminar" a group of bureaucrats from Brazil and the United States hold a seminar to discuss what to do with the rat population plaguing the nation. It is a narrative full of references to the political situation of Brazil, where the people are equated to rats and subversives. In the end the rats invade and destroy the house completely. The only survivor evades death by hiding inside the refrigerator. When he finally escapes the house, he can hear that the rats are holding their own seminar in the conference room. In another story, "Tigrela," a tigress is raised in an apartment owned by an unhappy woman who has been married many times. The story is woven around a vaguely fantastic atmosphere. The tigress, we learn at the end of the story, is a young woman. We do not learn whether she has always been a woman or if her humanity will only be revealed when she dies.

In Telles's fiction the subject matter may sometimes seem to be trivial—a family watching a TV show in "The 'X' of the Problem," a young couple's fight in a Paris garden in "Lovelorn Dove (A Story of Romance)," a young woman getting dressed for a carnival dance in "Green Masquerade," or a poor mother taking her son to a doctor in "Natal na barca" (Christmas on the Boat). There is, however, always room for a sharp commentary on human frailties, the pain of love, the changing flow of life, and the moment of confrontation with death.

—Eva Paulino Bueno

See the essay on "Rat Seminar."