The flowering of his secret

This selection of stories and personal recollections by Pedro Almodóvar was put together at the instigation of his assistant, Lola, a scenario that could belong in one of the Spanish director’s films. One imagines Lola, probably in a neon pencil skirt and high heels, and with a stylish lisp, announcing her discovery of this cache of tales, some of them written decades earlier, when Almodóvar had not long left school and still lived with his parents. Cue a flashback to La Mancha, where the proto-film-maker grew up in a house with beaten earth floors and no electricity.

Even the earliest stories in this collection are unmistakably Almodóvar’s. His signature blend of outlandish characters, sexual daring and mundane settings – B-movie meets the barrio – pertains in most of them. In “The Mirror Ceremony”, a vampire from Transylvania visits a monastery and seduces the rector. In “The Visit” a sex worker who looks like Marlene Dietrich storms into a seminary brandishing a photograph of her dead brother: abuse at the hands of priests has apparently brought about his suicide, though the story turns out not to be so simple. Just as this vignette became the basis for the film Bad Education (2004), other tales here circle ideas that were later developed into films or never got quite that far, thanks to funding or creative obstacles. It is probably just as well that the story in which Jesus and Barabbas share a cell and end up having sex was never greenlit. Whatever the tone and theme, Frank Wynne proves an adroit translator throughout.

On the screen the tangible realness of Almodóvar’s characters lends even his wildest stories credulity. (One thinks of Chus Lampreave playing classically Spanish old ladies in bottle-bottom glasses.) On the page, without his colour palette and clever casting, they tend to fall flat. The account of a porn star getting wasted is more boring in print than in Almódovar’s brand of saturated Technicolor. And if it’s hard for a reader to supply the visuals, what about the music? Those carefully chosen tangos and boleros direct viewers to find gravitas and tragedy in a scene that could otherwise be ridiculous.

The stories’ failings serve to show what a great director Almodóvar is. Having once hoped to be a novelist, he soon realized that his stories looked more like rough drafts for scripts. He is interesting, all the same, on the difference between writing for readers and for viewers, and draws revealing parallels:

The director is a man of action and has to be ruthless in cutting out dialogue, reactions, scenes, sometimes whole characters – because the director is a slave to the story he needs to tell, and to do this he has to field hundreds of questions (I’m not exaggerating) from the cast and crew … The job of the novelist, on the other hand, is sedentary; you can spend as many hours as you like in front of the computer, you can go for a walk if you feel like it. You don’t have to talk to anyone, let alone answer questions during the writing process. You can have cats, and you can stroke them. And drink booze. And chain-smoke. The novelist is free …

Many novelists might call that freedom isolation – ergo the booze and fags. But he is right about the technical freedom. A character in a book can summon up past lives while sipping her coffee. In a film that would require levering in a flashback and, much as he loves them, Almodóvar cautions against using too many. The best pieces in The Last Dream are (or appear to be) nonfiction. “Bitter Christmas” describes, with horrifying immediacy, a weekend-long panic attack. “The Last Dream” elegizes Almodóvar’s mother, who supplemented the family income by reading and writing letters for her illiterate neighbours (as portrayed in the film Pain and Glory, 2019). As she read the letters, his mother often embellished them, but “our neighbours never caught on because her fiction remained always a perpetuation of their lives, and when the reading was over, they were delighted”.

These improvisations were fundamental to Almodóvar’s understanding of story. “They set out the difference between fiction and reality, and how reality needs fictions in order to be more complete, more pleasurable, more bearable.” The key, though, is to make the fiction feel like a perpetuation of life. At a certain point in a film, he says, the plot and the genre have been established and shouldn’t change. “I am very keen on mixing, but not on mutations”. He attributes the mixing of genres to the failure of his film Kika (1993).

In these more personal texts the director comes across as honest, modest, thoughtful – and very lonely. “My solitude is the result of never having cared for anyone except myself”, he writes in a regretful piece about being alone in Madrid during the Holy Week holiday. In recent years Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema has become progressively more sombre, resulting in some of his best work. It is poignant, though, to think of the famously colourful director living life in shades of grey.

Miranda France is a consultant editor at the TLS

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