All the Tales We Are Told

You can study storytelling, quiz it, analyze it, deconstruct it, summarize it, distill it into power points, bullet points, point out the five steps to make it effective, the formula to make any story engaging, or any brand, or your brand, and all that spin that leaves you spinning, with that story to tell still inside. You can even make a living out of storytelling. And yet, when it’s all said and done, it comes as a relief to be reminded that some of the best storytellers you’ll ever meet are just folks who like to spin a yarn; people with a way with words and – if you’re in luck– time to spare for a talk.

For all the content and narratives in the world, the best stories can still come to you for free, quite simply because telling stories is one of the oldest and simplest pleasures around. Though just as these stories are freely spoken, they can just as easily be lost. There’s nothing wrong with good things being ephemeral. Then again, you never know who might be listening. How many wordsmiths credit the relatives at whose knees they grew up hearing stories, for their way with words, or as the origin of he tale we’re about to hear? Likewise, the stranger unloading his conscience, though a trope, nonetheless keeps on occurring.

These storytellers behind the storyteller often go unnamed; not every corner table raconteur is aiming for a byline. “Anonymous” is one of the great bards, to whom we can credit works as varied as The Persian Nights, Beowulf, or the Popol Vuh, knowing that what mattered is that unbroken chain of words, across cultures and generations.

Some talented talkers will live on in anecdotes, sometimes through just a first name. Among the most memorable ones, it’s worth calling on “Uncle Celerino,” who owes his fame to Juan Rulfo, perhaps Mexico’s foremost storyteller. Rulfo published only three books in his lifetime – The Burning Plain, Pedro Páramo, and the belatedly edited The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings– written in a few years in the 1950s. After that brief spurt, silence ensued, filled only with some scripts, photographs, and evasive answers. From his narrow yet masterful body of work, Rulfo garnered prizes, lasting fame, and many pesky questions. First, about what he would write next; then, over time, why the next book didn’t come. Finally, the recurring question was why he’d stopped writing.

He endured this for years, until one day, in 1974, in a meeting with students from the Central University of Venezuela, he gave his flabbergasted audience his most famous answer yet:

“I had an uncle whose name was Celerino. He was a drunkard. And whenever we went from town to his house or from his house to his ranch, he would tell me stories. And not only was I going to title the stories of The Burning Plain as the Tales of Uncle Celerino, but I stopped writing the day he died. That's why I get asked a lot why I don't write: because Uncle Celerino died, who was the one who told me everything... But he was a liar. Everything he told me was pure lies, and so, naturally, what I wrote was also pure lies.”

As Rulfo famously told the students that day, those landmarks in Latin-American narrative, which he had authored, had first been narrated to him on dusty roads. In his telling, he’d heard them first as told by a man appointed by the local archbishop to confirm children from town to town, giving them God's blessing while charging for it, and all the while being a steadfast atheist.

We’ve all met or known a Celerino or had one of those acquaintances or relatives whose words lit our love for narrative with talent all their own. We can seldom retell the stories as they did. Perhaps there remains a turn of phrase, an emphasis, or a gesture. Sometimes, we get lucky, and they start talking just as we have pen and paper at hand.

Others remain with us as they were spoken, if never quite ready to be written. I can remember the story told by the son of a defeated French soldier in World War II, telling how his father had told him how he crossed the country on foot, in a modern odyssey to return home. I can still feel his shame as he left the battlefield, the nights spent in the open, and the miseries and generosity found along the way. There remains the vivid emotion as the son recited how his father, a farmer from a dry land, arrived on the edges of the Loire River, after all the bridges had been blown apart, and was torn between his terror of swimming and the fear of being captured. He returned to his land, never to leave it again, and where once in a blue moon he’d give in to his children’s demand and narrate the journey that nearly prevented them from all being there.

I often recall a taxi driver in Mexico City, the living memory of streets long gone, places lost under the avenues of modernity, who could spend all of rush hour talking about his passion for lucha libre, “the greatest sport since antiquity.” Few audiences will have been at the edge of their seats as I was as he reminisced about great battles while letting go of the wheel, transported back among the crowd, raising his arms and cheering.

Then one day he met one of those icons in the flesh, a late-night client he recognized despite it being dark out. One of those rudos, those tough guys he didn’t favor, but the most distinguished of customers nonetheless. He'd been injured for a year, had gotten into a messy fight, and was left with a tear in the abdomen. Now “the tough guy” got into the cab very slowly, gasping, moving one leg then the other. He asked to be taken someplace, for some girls, and for the taxi driver to wait for him there, he knew them. He said so and crossed his arms which were like tree trunks. He didn’t close the door. Now this model of VW Beetle had no copilot seat and only front doors. When you got in you went straight to the backseat and had to grab a cord tied to the front door handle to close it. All you had to do was bend over, stretch the arm just a little, and pull. “The door stayed open a long while,” the taxi driver said. “I thought he was doubting whether to get out. He looked quite stiff back there.”

The conclusion of the driver’s story has stayed in my mind ever since. “Imagine that, it hit me: he couldn't do it. Couldn’t even lean over to close it.” He said he wished his loyal Beetle was a limousine, not for pleasure, or driving around starlets, but so the back seat was very, very far, behind sheets of polarized glass, where pity can't reach. “I went ahead and opened and then closed the door. I kept an eye out for him at the luchas after that. Never saw him fight again.”

A stranger tells us a story and we do our best to do it justice. Try as we may, something is lost in the retelling. Words get in the way of the words as they were gifted, or don’t sound quite right when transcribed, set black on white, in digital or paper. They await their turn to be retold, though maybe their purpose was served in the shared experience.

Still, how did Juan Rulfo do it? How good must Uncle Celerino have been to inspire his nephew to write some of the best stories in his or any language?

Truth is, the best Uncle Celerino story was Uncle Celerino himself, as Rulfo admitted years later, tired of the relentless questions now focusing on that fated relative:

“I was at the Central University of Venezuela before fifteen hundred students with the condition that they ask their questions previously. And what I answered was a series of lies. I invented that there was a character who told me stories and that I wrote them and that when that character died I stopped writing stories because I no longer had anyone to tell them to me.”

So Celerino was one final tale, an oral one this time, from a man who could never again commit to publishing what he set to paper. And yet, sometimes, a story is too good not to be true. It hits a nerve that makes us disbelieve it can be imaginary. Over time, scores of reporters went to Rulfo’s hometown in search of any Celerinos that might have existed, and sure enough, they found them. There were women he’d grown up with, a neighborhood storyteller, and a real-life uncle, or simply people in town that seemed to match Rulfo’s characters. There were the voices we all grew up with and that live on inside us.

Rulfo’s son, Juan Carlos, put it best: “Uncle Celerino was Mexico and the reality he lived.”

We write in search of a voice, and along the way, we listen and learn from a whole choir. Some leave a mark and a trace of them becomes part of a tone we nurture. That gesture or turn of phrase survives in another form. These influences may be tenuous at times, or a cacophony of ideas and influences, and yet from them all, there is that single refrain, the voice that compels us to keep telling our tales.

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Camille Claudel, Les Causeuses, Wikimedia Commons