Voices en Español

This week’s podcast is a reading of a short story written by Horacio Quiroaga, one of the best short story writers in Latin American history.

I originally planned to only podcast “Las medias de los flamencos” on my other blog, Cody’s Cuentos, because it is a children’s story. But because Horacio Quiroga is such an interesting writer, I thought I would podcast the story here as well.

Just a little background about Quiroga. He had a very tragic, some would say a cursed life. Both his father and stepfather were killed in gun accidents. Later on, when he grew up, Quiroga accidentally killed his best friend with a gun while the two of them were inspecting it. It turns out that the friend had challenged another man to a duel and Quiroga offered to clean the gun for his friend. While Quiroga was handling the gun, it went off and shot his friend in the face.

Then Quiroga got a temporary dream job, at least for him, taking photographs in the jungle. He loved the jungle and even bought some terreno out in the wild with the intention of living off the land. But his young wife, who was from Buenos Aires, hated the living conditions and wanted to go back to the city. Quiroga refused. The situation between them got so bad that one day after they had a huge fight,  his wife poisoned herself. It took her a week to die.

Later on in his life, Quiroga became very ill and checked into a hospital in Buenos Aires where he met another patient who seemed to be in much worse condition than he was. This other patient was kept in the basement of the hospital and was suffering from “Elephant Man’s disease” which causes terrible facial disfigurement. Quiroga demanded that the patient be moved upstairs, with the other patients, and the two men became roommates in the hospital.

Quiroga, who had been diagnosed with terminal, inoperable cancer, committed suicide, in front of his hospital roommate, by taking cyanide. Like I said, he had a rough life.

Not surprisingly, a lot of his stories are very intense and dark in their themes and subject matter.  Both Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad, author of the Heart of Darkness, were influences in his writing. But after Quiroga’s first wife died, he wrote a collection of children’s stories  entitled “Cuentos de la selva” and this podcast features one of those stories.