Do you like your fiction seasoned with spicy helpings of absurdist nonsense, the ghastly macabre, the blackest humor? If so, O Grande Baro e outras histórias (The Great Baro and Other Stories) by Cuban maestro Virgilio Piñera will hit the bullseye.
Allow me to expand on what I mean here by focusing on the title story:
THE GREAT BARO
The
opening short paragraph: "The Great Baro, the revolutionary clown, made
his debut that night. And we say he debuted because until then he had
never performed before any audience whatsoever. It is true, the circus
owner found him in the last place you would expect to find someone
clowning around - that is, at a burial. There, mourning the passage of a
beloved friend, was the man whose misfortune it would be to be
transformed overnight into the Great Baro."
Oh, Virgilio, such
scorching black humor! You foreshadow by characterizing the clown as
"revolutionary" in the years of Fidel Castro's revolution; you note your
clown was first discovered when he was attending a dear friend's burial
(actually, to my eye, the above artwork captures the funereal great
clown in all his glum glory); and having your clown's transformation
turn out to be, irony of ironies, a misfortune.
It all started
with the circus owner's brainstorm: seeing this man drowning in tears,
choked with grief, this sad little man dressed in black staring down
into the grave was exactly the chap he'd been searching for, just the
gent to play a red nose clown to open each and every show this season.
Of
course the circus owner was woefully mistaken as this man hadn't even
come close to being a clown at any point in his life. Quite the
contrary, he spent an entire adulthood employed in an obscure government
office. He was fifty, devoid of ideas but full of hunger, an unloved
man whose every tomorrow will be the same as yesterday and today, a man
cut out to go to funerals where he can weep on cue. Friends, near and
dear and distant, congratulated him on his performances.
Call it
intuition but the circus owner detected great comic promise in this
drab, gloomy pipsqueak. The man, Baro by name, answered, "I know, you
want me to play the clown." Pause. "I have never tried to make a clown
of myself, but as you insist, I'll give it a try." The circus owner:
"Hey! Don't assume it's going to be so hard. Besides, a great tradition
of clowns and clowning exists." Baro: "But with my face. What makes you
think I'll be any different in the ring than I am at a funeral? Please
take another gander at the above art. I think Baro might have a point.
Circus owner: "Are you afraid of boos and cat calls? No, no, my friend, I
can see you're a born clown, the most laughable person I've ever seen
in my many years as a clown scout." Ah, black humor so thick a reader
can cut it with a bookmark.
Our future clown opens his mouth to
object but the circus owner cuts him off and says in a soothing voice,
"We have to give you a nice clown name. From this day forward, you will
be known as The Great Baro, the one and only Baro who knocks them dead
with laughter."
Beginning on opening night, The Great Baro
exceeds all expectations; he becomes an instant sensation. "Baro
revolutionized the whole great tradition of clowning, stood the ancient
technique of the clown on its head. He went beyond, far beyond, the
leaps, pirouettes, makeup, and tricks of Pierrot. Or, to be more
precise, he didn't turn his nose up at such elements but communicated
them to the audience so that each spectator might dress every act of his
life in the costume of a clown."
Wow! How would you like to see
a circus clown perform a clown skit with such power, such imagination
and ingenuity that we as spectators dress every single aspect of our
lives in a clown's costume - you know, white makeup, red hair, clown
nose, polka dot suit, oversize shoes, no matter what we might be doing,
even working in an office as a government employee.
And Baro's
influence didn't stop there. The Great Baro and his circus clown skit
possessed enough power to transform the very lives of the country's
citizens. Now that, my friends, is one powerful clown! Since we're in
Cuba, we might think of Fidel Castro wearing a red clown nose. Ah, I
might have said too much! I dare not say more. I urge you to read this
twelve-page classic for yourself.
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*Note - For readers of English, The Great Baro appears in an anthology of contemporary Cuban fiction entitled Dream with No Name published by Seven Stories Press.
Cuban author Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979)
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