A very teachable Eudora Welty story, for those who like symbolism and allegory

Eudora Welty's story Music from Spain, in her 3rd (1949) collection The Golden Apples (in "Collected Stories") is very strange, like many of her late 1940s stories, full of passages of extraordinary beauty and precision - the lengthy description of the climb along the rocky edge of Lands End on the Pacific Coast in San Francisco, for one example - but unlike some of the other stories of this era the narrative is rather straightforward, following one man, MacLain, through the Odysseyan course of a terrible and eventful day and in the process learning a great deal about him: he begins the day slapping his wife across the face for no apparent reason, then, angry at himself, mortified, he heads for work but doesn't report, keeps walking, comes across a Spanish musician whom he and his wife had seen perform (the night before) and spends the entire day walking the city with this man, who speaks no English - an extraordinary narrative feat, by the way, in that Welty completes virtually the entire narration with no dialogue between the two main characters - at end of the day MacLain almost pushes the Spaniard off the cliff, the Spaniard picks MacLain up and carries him from the edge, they share a cup of coffee, MacLain abandons the Spaniard in a remote part of the city, heads home and is more or less welcomed in by his wife, without any discussion of the morning incident - behind all this is the tension between them over the death of their young child, for which he blames her. A very teachable story, which would be better known if it were not so long and therefore rarely anthologized if ever. It did feel like a very long journey for a relatively small payoff - unlike The Whole World Knows, about the breakup of a marriage and an affair with a young woman that has a very dramatic conclusion - in Music from Spain the story ends softly and quietly. One reason story so "teachable" is because of the symbolic and allegorical aspects that, as is typical of Welty, are underplayed, almost to the point where you wonder if she's even aware of them (which of course she is): the homoerotic elements, which become quite explicit during their physical struggle on the cliff, when MacLain imagines something throbbing in his mouth!, and the Christian allegory, as in Moon Lake, a man in crisis saved by a redeemer figure.



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