A Visit of Charity, by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty at the Wikipedia

A Curtain of Green at the Wikipedia

A Visit of Charity, character analysis

A Visit of Charity, video

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, and died when she was 92.
Jackson is a city now with more 70 % of Afroamerican people, while in the 60s it was the other way round; so the city has experienced big changes in demography and, accordingly, in politics.
Eudora Welty lived all her life in Jackson, save when she studied at Columbia University, New York.
She had a calm life in Jackson, despite all the racial problems, so her stories contrast vividly with the stories by Faulkner or by Richard Wright.
As a child, she was an insatiable reader and she wrote her stories without any particular encouragement. She started writing for a Southern magazine and then, thanks to the persistence of a literary agent, for the Atlantic Monthly and for The New Yorker.
She won the Pulitzer Prize when she was 64 years old for her novel The Optimist Daughter. 
She wrote mainly short stories, but also novels and her autobiography. Besides, she was a photographer and published a book of photograhs about the Great Depression.

A VISIT OF CHARITY

It is a short story from her book A Curtain of Green, published when she was 32. The book includes her first published story, Death of a Travelling Salesman.

The story tells us about a Campfire Girl who pays a visit a to an Old Ladies Home, as a part or her duties as a member of the youth organization, a visit which is going to get her some points in her score. But what people live and how the live in a Home comes as a surprise for her.

QUESTIONS

Why does she compare the Home to a block of ice?
Campfire Girl: have you belonged to an organization when you were young? What do you know / think of the Boy Scouts, for example?
What do you think about the contrast between the nurse’s cold appearance and her “sea-wave” air?
Why does the Campfire Girl have to pay a visit to some (any) old lady?
Gestures: What are their meaning? For instance, the girl pushing her hair behind her ear; the nurse looking at her watch...
The “waves” appear again: “she was walking on waves”. Is there any relationship between the wave on the nurse’s head and the waves on the linoleum?
"The hall smelt like the interior of a clock": what does this image suggest to you?
There’s an identification between old ladies and sheep, but also they are compared to harpies. Why?
What is the effect of the nurse saying “there are two”?
What is the feeling created by the room’s description?
The two ladies don’t agree about the flowers: why? Did the girl know about the flowers?
What expression suggests a clog in the throat?
How does the narrator show the girl’s anxiety?
What can be the meaning of the cameo pin?
What was the matter with Addie? Why was she so angry today?
It was the first time such a thing had happened to Marian: what was this thing?
What is the meaning of “That’s Addie for you”?
What kind of magazine was Field & Stream?
Do you think the nurse’s invitation to Marian to have lunch there is for real? Why?
Why did she hide an apple before going in the Home? And why did she make a big bite out of it at the end of the story?

VOCABULARY

Home (in context), whitewashed, mittens, awry, propelled (propeller), counterpane, square smile, my (in context), multiflora cineraria, ailing, comfort shoes, rigmarole, tan (gum), crow (in context), nickel

"You can't learn a nigger to argue"

I never see such a nigger. If he got a notion in his head once, there warn't no getting it out again. He was the most down on Solomon of any nigger I ever see. So I went to talking about other kings, and let Solomon slide. I told about Louis XVI that got his head cut off in France long time ago; and about his little boy the dolphin, that would 'a' been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he died there.
"Po' little chap."

"But some says he got out and got away, and come to America."

"Dat's good! But he'll be pooty lonesome—dey ain' no kings here, is dey, Huck?"

"No."

"Den he cain't git no situation. What he gwyne to do?"

"Well, I don't know. Some of them gets on the police, and some of them learns people how to talk French."

"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"

"No, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said—not a single word."

"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?"

"I don't know; but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy—what would you think?"

"I wouldn' think nuffn; I'd take en bust him over de head—dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"

"No, dey don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man?—er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man? You answer me dat!"
I see it warn't no use wasting words—you can't learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.

                        A bit of dialogue between Jim and Huck (from Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain)

The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov

 

Anton Chekhov at the Wikipedia

The Lady with the Dog at the Wikipedia

Dark Eyes, film adaptation

Dark Eyes, link to see it

Gurov and Anna, new adaptation

The Lady with the Dog, summary and analysis 

The Lady with the Dog audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a city on the Sea of Azov, near the mouth of the river Don, and died in Badenweiler, a spa resort in south Germany, when he was 44 years old.
In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, a reformer, issued the emancipation of the serfs and in 1881 died because of a terrorist attack. Chekhov lived in a convulsed period, but he stayed apart of the political fights.
Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf who bought his freedom. His father had a grocery, but the business went bad and he had to flee to Moscow. He was a drunkard and abused his family. But Chekhov said once he got his talent from his father and his soul from his mother; he said she was an excellent storyteller.
He had two older brothers who were studying at the University of Moscow, and had to remain three years more in Taganrog finishing his studies and selling the house. He earned money doing private lessons, writing stories for the newspapers and catching and selling singing birds. When he was 19 he went to Moscow to study Medicine.
He had to work for his family because his brothers and his father had a lot of problems with their jobs and with alcohol.
Chekhov went on publishing sketches for Alexey Suvorin, who paid much more than his previous publishers and gave him more space in the magazines or newspapers.
He had a change in his literary prospects when Dmitri Grigorovich (a very famous author in his time) celebrated his writings. So he started to consider himself a writer more than a doctor, although he went on practising medicine all his life.
At 24, he started to notice the first symptoms of tuberculosis, but he always hoped for the best.
At 27, he was stressed by overwork and went on a journey trying to get some rest. This trip was the origin of his famous story The Steppe.
When he was 30, he decided to go on a long journey to visit the island of Sakhalin, on the Pacific coast, north of Japan. The island served as a prison, and he wanted to report the situation of the prisoners there. So he got depressed.
Then he went to live in Melikhovo, a place forty miles south of Moscow, in order to improve his health and to have more tranquillity to do his writings. Here he wrote his plays. Now they are splendid pieces of theatre, but in his moment he was very disappointed with the public reception, even as Stanislavsky (the famous theatre theorist) wanted to play them.
He got worse of his TB and went to live in Yalta, a touristic and spa resort in the Black Sea, where he bought a big house, the White Dacha.
At 41, he got married to Olga Knipper, a well-known actress that performed in his plays.
In Yalta, he wrote The Lady with the Dog.
He died in Badenweiler in 1904 after drinking champagne. His body was transported for the funeral in Moscow on a railway-car... meant for oysters, and that caused indignation among the people who loved him. And when the convoy got to Moscow, there was a band playing music, and, at first, they believed that was for Chekhov, but it wasn’t, it was music for a funeral of a general, so another disappointment. As you can imagine, Chekhov's death has been fictionalized a lot of times: his was a glamorous end with a farcical colophon.
 
When talking about narrative techniques, there’s a term often mentioned: Chekhov’s gun. This alludes to a necessary principle of all short stories: you have to remove all superfluous things in a story (or in a play): “If there’s a gun hanging from a nail on the wall in the first chapter, then this gun must absolutely be fired in the second chapter.”
A very important story by Chekhov is The Steppe, because, from the point of view of literature, it is his most accomplished story, for it contains all the poetical elements he developed in his narrative, although the most known is the romantic The Lady with the Dog.
His plays were also revolutionary, because they weren’t “plot” plays, but “mood” plays, so a lot of people of his time didn’t like them because “nothing” happened in the story.
The play The Three Sisters has inspired films as Interiors, by Woody Allen.

 The Lady with the Dog

This is the story of a romance between a womanizer and a younger lady married to a dull husband, in a spa resort in Yalta. The woman felt that this was only adultery and dishonourable, and he at first thought that this affair would be the same as the others, something temporary. But it happened the other way round; they discovered what love really was and they decided to go on with their relationship, so he forgot all other women, and she mastered (somehow) her guilty feelings. This is very different from Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, where the affair ends badly for the woman. In Chekhov there is hope for them both.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters:
Dmitri Gurov
Gurov’s wife
Anna Sergeyevna
Anna’s husband
What do you think is the function of the Pomeranian dog in the story? Would the story be possible without this dog? What kind of dog is a Pomeranian dog?
What can you say about:
Yalta
Oreanda
the Black Sea
How did Gurov classify women?
What were her/his feelings after making love? What is the meaning of the water-melon?
Why “Gurov got bored already, listening to her”?
What were their feelings after visiting Oreanda?
When she went away, there “was already a scent of autumn”. Why?
“The season brings back the days of one’s youth”. Personal question: do you think our memories are always false memories?
Why did winter, evening stillness, storms, make Gurov think about Anna?
He decided to confide his love to someone: Why? In the short story The Kiss something similar happens. Why is the reason for this need?
What decided him to go to S***?
Why did he want to go away from the “fence adorned with nails” outside Anna’s house?
What do you know about The Geisha?
Personal question: do you think all that is interesting in us rests on secrecy?
Describe the meetings of the two lovers in Moscow.
Do you think theirs would be an eternal love?
“Why did she love him so much”?

VOCABULARY

amiss, staid, in the long run, eager, gait, made up, coaxing, hue, groyne, scales, flunkey, grasshopper, lofty, taunt, fix, stoop, thaw, kernel

Errand, by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver at the Wikipedia

Raymond Carver: bibliography

Errand: review

Errand: summary and analysis: enciclopedia

Errand: enotes

Short Cuts (trailer)

Jindabyne (trailer)

Birdman (trailer)

Everything must go (trailer)

A little bit of biography

Raymond (or Ray) Carver was born in a milltown in Oregon (on the West coast), in 1938 and died when he was 50 years old of lung cancer.
His father was a millsaw worker and a heavy drinker, and his mother worked as a waitress and a clerk, so they were a lower class family.
Raymond also worked with his father in the millsaw. He also learned to fish, so fishing is a theme that appears in some of his stories.
At 19 he got married to Maryann Burk, 16 years old. We have to suppose that they married because they had a baby the same year. Then they had another next year.
Both, Raymond and Maryann, had different jobs and they try to go on studying; Maryann finished her studies, but Raymond never finished any of his courses. Besides temporary occupations, he got precarious jobs as a writing teacher or university teacher, but because of his alcoholism he finished working as a janitor in a hospital and writing in his spare time.
At 34 he fell in love with Diane Cecily, editor at university, and he started drinking heavily and abusing his wife.
When he was 38 he began to date Tess Gallagher, a writer who later will become his wife. In this time he had to go to the hospital several times because of liquor intoxication. He realized that he had to stop drinking, and he started his second life thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous (but he never stopped smoking marihuana and even tried cocaine).
At 44, he got divorced (he was already living with Tess).
Six weeks before dying at 50, he got married to Tess.
He published his first short story when he was 23 and was studying at Chico Public University. It was called The Furious Seasons and bore a strong influence of William Faulkner.
His first short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published when he was 38. But although it was shortlisted for the National Book Award, he didn’t sell many copies.
He had more collections of short stories, and the most famous are What We Talk When We Talk About Love and Cathedral.
When we talk about Carver we talk about minimalism and dirty realism. Minimalism means avoiding all rhetoric, and that if you can say something in ten words, please, don’t use twenty. And dirty realism implies that in your stories you are going to use characters that belong to the lower classes of the society, that your heroes are going to be anti-heroes, e.g., isolated marginalized people, people with alcoholic problems or difficult relationships or broken families. So we have to suppose they are sad stories.
Everyone can feel the influence of Hemingway minimalism in his work, but he said his main influence was D. H. Lawrence.
It’s an irony, but the last story he wrote, before dying, is Errand, where he narrates an anecdote of Chekhov, another famous short story writer, just before his own death.

Errand

In this story, very different from his other stories because it’s almost “classical”, Carver writes about the last days of the life of Chekhov, a Russian writer revered by most short story writers. Chekhov was having dinner with Suvorin, a publisher, in Moscow, when he started bleeding from his mouth. The Russian author knows that his life is in danger and travels first to Berlin with his wife Olga Knipper, where he sees a doctor who doesn’t help him, and then to Badenweiler, a spa resort where he says he expects to get some recovery (although he doesn’t really believe it). He and his wife are staying in a hotel, and the doctor who treats him, Dr Schwörer, realizes that there’s no hope and orders champagne as the last honour to the famous writer. The author drinks and dies, and then there is a change in the way of telling the story, because we see the situation through the eyes of his widow Olga. Then, after a wake until morning, she asks a waiter who had come into the room to bring a vase of flowers to go and fetch the mortician. The story has a special ending, but I’m not going to be a spoiler revealing it.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters according what it is said about them in the story. But what do you know about them as historical people? Did they know Chekhov or his writings?

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Suvorin

Maria Chekhov

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Olga Knipper

Dr Karl Ewald

Dr Schwöhrer (and his presciptions)

The waiter (the young blond man)

What happened at the restaurant in Moscow?
What were the characters’ feelings about the TB?
Personal question: Do you have an opinion or a belief about the immortality of the soul?
What do you know about TB?
Where is Badenweiler?
Explain the courtship between Olga and Anton.
What can you say about The seagull and The Cherry Orchard?
Why did Chekhov mention the Japanese?
Summarize in one sentence Chekhov’s death.
What do you think is the meaning of the “large moth”?
What is the meaning of “history” in the sentence “Dr Schwöhrer picked up his bag and left the room and, for that matter, history.”
What happened with the bottle’s cork?
Describe the scene between Olga and the young man at Anton and Olga’s room.
What is the meaning of the title Errand?
In the last paragraphs, there is a change in the verbal tense: the past tense has changed into “would”? Why?
What do you think is the meaning of picking up the cork in the last sentence of the story?

VOCABULARY

private, take in (took in), stanch, jest, sleet, well-wisher, out-line, junk, bearskin, numbered, reckless, on the mend, complexion, Moët, grapple, mortician

The Swimmer, by John Cheever

John Cheever at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer at the Wikipedia

Analysis, summary, characters, themes... click here

More analysis: click here

Another study guide (clear and to the point): click here

The Swimmer audiobook (from minute 3.31 on)

The Swimmer (film) at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer (trailer)

Presentation, by Begoña Devis

Biography

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. His father was the owner of a shoe factory, which went bankrupt with the crash of 29, and the family fell into relative poverty. After this fact, the father left the family, and the young Cheever lived for a time in Boston with his brother. During that period he survived by publishing articles and stories in various media.
He was expelled from the academy for smoking, which ended his education and this was the core of his first short story, Expelled, which Malcom Cowley bought for the New Republican newspaper. From that moment, Cheever devoted himself entirely to writing short stories that progressively found space in several magazines and newspapers, and finally in the famous magazine The New Yorker, with which he maintained, until the end of these days, an intense relationship.
He was called the Chekhov of the suburbs, because many of his stories occurred in the middle class neighbourhoods that were born around New York during the recovery of the economy after the Second World War.
In 1957 he won The National Book Award for his first novel, and in 1971 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his compilation of stories. He wrote primarily about the decline of the American dream, alcoholism and homosexuality, and sometimes his characters had dubious moral.
A movie was made from his short story The Swimmer in 1957, played by Burt Lancaster. At the time it was unsuccessful, but now it is considered a cult film by cinephiles.
John Cheever died in New York in 1982 at the age of 70.

The Swimmer

The Swimmer is a short story by John Cheever about a relatively young and handsome man who decides to go back to his home, 8 miles from where he is at the moment, swimming. For this he plans a tour along the pools of his various friends and neighbours, a route that he will call “Lucinda River” in honour to his wife. This wild idea will take him on a personal journey with surreal overtones. As the journey progresses, the character’s disorientation, his temporary alterations and the doubtfulness of his feat are revealed. At first his neighbours are friendly and accommodating, but there comes a time when everything gets worse, being forced to cross a public swimming pool, later when a neighbour accuses him of being  an intruder and in the last pool he sees how an old lover looks at him with disdain, and she doesn’t even offer him a drink. When he finally gets home, we do not know if a day, a month or a year, later, he finds it closed and empty
In my opinion, it is a metaphorical journey, in which the protagonist wants to return home but cannot find the way to do so. Alcoholism is always present, and the sinking in it (and not in the pools) is what increasingly disorients him and prevents him from getting where he would like. A journey on a magnificent sunny day, in which an attractive young man is about to do something heroic, but instead he finishes as a defeated man who has lost his home, family and even his memories.

It is a dark and desperate story, but of great narrative force and with a dreamlike and surreal component that makes it especially attractive.

QUESTIONS

Characters:

Neddy Merrill

Mrs Graham

Enid Bunker

Grace Biswagner

Shirley Adams

Mr and Mrs Halloran

Helen and Eric Sachs

Places:

At Westerhazy’s

At Levys’s garden

At Lindleys’s

At Welchers’s

At the Recreation Center

At home

Can you point out the hints the narrator give us along the story about the decline and fall of the hero?
What social class do the characters belong to?
What do they drink?
What is the National Audubon Society?
Can you find parallels between this story and the Odyssey or a Pilgrimage?
What season is the story situated in?
What is a point of no return? And what is the point of no return in the story?
Greetings: he kisses women and shakes hands to men. What do you think of this kind of greetings, one for men and another for women?
Where do you prefer to swim: swimming pools, the sea, rivers, reservoirs?

 VOCABULARY

golf link, artesian well, cumulus cloud, dogleg, hurl, choppy, saddle, hoist, portage, bony, de Haviland trainer, spigot, cordite, put sb out to board, tool (v), bask, roughhouse, cerulean

The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Wikipedia

The Thing Around Your Neck at the Wikipedia

The Thing Around Your Neck: summary and analysis, LitCharts

Chimamanda website

Chimamanda independent website

Nigeria at the Wikipedia

Biafra at the Wikipedia

Tedx talk: We should all be feminists (very easy to understand and very funny)

Half of a Yellow Sun (trailer)

Presentation, by Adriana Cruz

BIOGRAPHY

Chiamamanda Ngozi Adichie is a famous writer, teacher, novelist, playwright and feminist activist.
She was born in Agba village, Enugu (Nigeria) on the15th September, 1977. She grew up as the fifth of six children in Nsukka city. 
Her father, James Nwoye Adichie worked as a professor of statistics, and her mother, Grace Ifeoma was the first secretary of the University of Nigeria.
The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers. Her family's ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State, Nigeria.
She studied Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the Catholic University's medical students. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study Communications and Political Science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She soon transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to be near her sister Uche, who had a medical practice in Coventry, Connecticut.
 She got married to Ivara Esege, and they have one child.
From 2016 to 2019 he won several honorary titles as the Doctor of Humane Letters and the Doctor Honoris Causa, from the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland.
She was the author of many novels: Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (translated into 19 languages), and the essay We Should All Be Feminists. Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions and Notes on Grief.
Adichie divides her time between the United States and her second residence in Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops.

 The Thing Around Your Neck

This book was first published in 2009, and talks about a woman named Akunna who gains a sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle; but he molests her, and she ends up working as a waitress in Connecticut. She ends up meeting a man whom she falls in love with, but, along the way, she experiences cultural difficulties with him.
The title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected. Although falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.
The history based in Lagos and USA, and deals about prejudices and difficulties in accepting the pre-established cultural differences and prejudice of sex, ethnicity, macho and white dominant culture, and many difficulties to get a visa.

QUESTIONS

According to the family, what things do you have to get when you are in the USA, and what you don’t?

Personal question: What things do you usually buy as souvenirs when you go away?
They call “America” the USA. Is that correct?

Where is Maine? What kind of place is (or was) it? And Connecticut?
“They were desperately trying to look diverse” (where her uncle is working): What is your opinion about positive discrimination?
The story is told in the second person singular (you). Why?
In Maine they asked her about her hair: What is the best way to deal with “different” people?
Why did she leave her uncle’s house? Was he really her uncle?
How did her boss Juan treat her in her first job?
According to the protagonist, how is life back in Nigeria?
What were the brown envelopes for?
What stories did she want to tell her family about “America”?
What were the usual clichés about black people?
What things did her future boyfriend (the white costumer) know about Africa?
Why did the protagonist say white people were always “condescending” with Africa?
Talk about professor Cobbledick.
The fortune strips of paper she got in the Chinese restaurant were blank. What does it mean for the story?
Can you remember the story of her father in the raining day in Lagos?
She cooked dinner for her boyfriend: how did he like it?
What kinds of presents didn’t she like?
What do people think of them as a couple?
What behaviour and what decisions of her boyfriend didn’t she understand?
Why does she go back to Nigeria?
In your opinion, is she going to go back to the USA then?
What does the title mean?

VOCABULARY

visa, to get in one’s feet, self-tanner, gawp, Greyhound bus, community college, course syllabi, hawk, preemie, shantytown, maudlin, Jeopardy, root for, throw up, MSG, Nawal El Saadawi

Summer of '38, by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín at the Wikipedia: click here

Colm Tóibin In the Pyrinees: LRB

Summer of '38: The New Yorker

Colm Tóibín at the Vall Ferrera: El punt Avui

Brooklyn: the movie

Presentation, by Àngels Gallardo

Biography

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955.
Some of his family were members of the old Irish Republic Army.
His father belonged to the Fianna Fail party.
He studied in a private boarding school, after that, he studied in the College University of Dublin. When he finished, he went to Barcelona for three years, from 1975 to 1978.
He was a publisher from 1982 to 1985.
He was a good literary critic, teacher at Stanford University, University of Texas in Austin and Princeton University.
Also, he got a Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Ulster for his contribution to the Irish contemporary literature.

Summer of ‘38

This story is about the life of Montse. A man who works for the electric company named Fecsa asked her daughter Ana that he wanted to talk to Montse. He told Ana that he was writing a book about the war in his spare time and he wanted to collect information in this valley and the mountains.
Montse was a person that liked to have all in control and she had become protective of her own space and she disliked surprises.
The man that works in Fecsa Company was waiting for her at the front door of her building and he told her that he wanted to come up to the apartment with her. The man said that he had talked to Rudolfo Ramírez, a general in the army, and that he said he would like to see her and if it was all right to see him.
She remembered situations that happened between them. She didn't forget the sweet smell of his breath, his eagerness and his good humour.
Rudolfo went away and Montse was pregnant. But Montse knew a man called Paco from the town festivals, and she married him five months pregnant with a girl whose father was Rudolfo. Paco took care of the daughter of Montse as if she was his daughter. The name of the baby was Rosa and she looked like Rudolfo.
Montse and Paco had two more daughters.
Rosa went to live in Barcelona, and she studied medicine. She holidayed with her own family in Santa Cristina.
When Paco was dying, Rosa looked after him.
When the man from Fecsa Company came again, she told him that she was not feeling well, and she didn't want to have lunch with him and Rudolfo.
At the end of the story, Montse showed several photos about her family before the war to her daughter Rosa.

QUESTIONS

There’s a feeling that the writer has a point of view of the place, the time and the situation a bit different from a native: Ana (not Anna), fecsa (not FECSA), maiden name (here is the same as married name), Rudolfo (not Rodolfo), Loyalists (not reds; and he never says the others were the fascists => does the author betray any political sympathies?), granja, Rosa travels to Barcelona to the village and back in one day... 

Talk about the characters:
            Montse
            Ana
            Rosa
            Oriol
            The man from fecsa (sic)
            Paco Vendrell
            Rudolfo
Explain the war situation in the village in the summer of 1938.
What things did Montse like in Rudolfo?
How do the village people behave to the soldiers in the summer? And from September on?
Explain Montse-Rudolfo’s courtship.
“It was the change of weather that changed everything.” What did she mean?
What did Montse do when she knew she was pregnant?
Describe the time Montse went to the Mass.
What options did Montse have if Paco didn’t marry her?
Explain Montse-Paco’s courtship.
After they were married, what kind of love did Montse have for Paco?
What kind of love did Paco have for Rosa?
What did Montse do when Rudolfo was in the village with the man from fecsa (sic)?
What do you think of the end of the story?

VOCABULARY

walk (sb) to, mix (sb) up, easygoing, fix, chart, dugout, no one any the wiser, makeshift, swagger, antic, mist, demurely, in the reaches of, withdrawn, stickler, impervious, outing, blow up