Christmas is a moment when positive emotions should prevail, a reunion between all the beings that make up your life takes place, everything that has happened is remembered, and the existence of those who are no longer here is claimed. Everything we hate must be erased from our conscience, peace and solidarity must triumph… Come on, what does it mean to move to the stage of absolute goodness! While this doesn’t harm anyone, it apparently has nothing to do with desire or lust, which can attack us at any time… and of course at Christmas too.
More than twenty years ago, Luis García Berlanga came to mind the then already established thirteen (for superstition he always called twelve plus two mediums) writers (Mercedes Abad, Leonardo Padura, Javier Cercas, Eduardo Mendicutti, Ana María Moix, Manuel Talens, Luis Antonio de Villena, Andrés de Luna, Abilio Estévez, Irene González Frei (pseudonym), Felipe Benítez, José María Álvarez, Mayra Montero) will write two literary stories whose themes will be combined. Christmas and sex, as mentioned before, are something that don’t seem to go well together. As a result, Cuentos eroticas de Navidad (Tusquets, Círculo de Lectores, 1999) emerged, and of course a foreword written by Berlanga emerged victorious from this struggle.
So we will find thirteen stories told mostly by a first-person narrator, with an invented self-testimony, but with very different narrative styles, with the author’s own stamp, because we are reading texts that cover a wide range. ranging from the clear poetic will to the purest narrative tradition, covering a variety of themes and situations, such as traditions, social and political accusations, criticism of the family or historical story. There are three features that have become the common denominator in all of them: First, all the stories respect the characteristics of the literary story, because the short length puts them through a single action, following the structure of approach, middle and end. will always surprise us; Second, they all focus on a specific time: Christmas; and third, the purest sexual desire. From now on everything is valid. The collection becomes a melting pot of ways to write and approach a sexual topic, always from the personal perspective of the person writing it.
In this way, the adolescent is exposed to various variants of sexual arousal, such as having sex with his mother’s friend or his private tutor; or having sex with your ex-sister-in-law and her enviable lust; that one night stand with unimaginable consequences; homosexuality, sometimes among children, sometimes among adults, sometimes even with a hired man, sometimes between sisters-in-law; sexual impotence; or a lifetime of sex… Well, “eroticism is almost never love, and certainly not necessarily love” (p.182), and also because it is not always eternal bliss: “it was a great groan that somehow brought me back to my old days life but somehow condemned me to death” (p. 22).
Sex is conceived by all writers as a part of each of us that, more explicitly or more internally, defines us as who we are, so all heroes have narratives in their memories. Although, in these stories, sex becomes a matter of narrative when motivated by a plot need, and this can be good if its sensations and physicality are conveyed, as in these stories.
So why should you read these stories? In terms of testimonial value, since it is a thematic collection that collects a diverse and good sample of the literary work of its authors, it shows us what the literary panorama in Spanish was like at the end of the 20th century; for its uniqueness in combining two seemingly opposing themes; and since Christmas is after all supposed to be a time of joy and happiness… I won’t say any more. Merry christmas!