Once a Storyteller…
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            The opening story, “The Visit,” brings us to an all-boys school run by an order of Spanish monks, where a flamboyantly dressed woman visits the headmaster and reveals that she knows what went on between him and her pious, deeply insecure ten-year-old brother—now deceased—when he was a student there. The priest tries to defend himself, however unconvincingly: “If, in your actions, you do not intend to offend God, there is no sin, because your actions have another purpose.” The story takes some bizarre turns before climaxing in a gory denouement.

            In another story, a successful stage and film director narrates the difficult life he has with his lover León, an actor with an eating disorder and drug problems, whose personality is a combination of vanity and rebelliousness. After years together, their relationship, and the director’s artistic passion, are fizzling out, but when León suggests that they make a new film together, an adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire with a gender-bending Blanche DuBois, the project rekindles the director’s fire of inspiration, if not his ardor for the narcissistic boyfriend.

            Many, perhaps all, of these stories contain autobiographical elements. In the introduction, Almodóvar writes that the book might be best described as a “fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little cryptic.” He goes on: “Still, I believe that the reader will end up getting the most information about me as a filmmaker, as a fabulator (as a writer), and the way in which my life makes things blend together.”

            He acknowledges that he has “appropriated everything that has ever fallen into my hands or flashed before my eyes and made it my own.” Here, in a nutshell, Almodóvar gives us a peek into his creative process: everything in his life—events and fantasies, the quotidian and the outlandish— becomes grist for artistic creation, whether in these stories or in his films. As the narrator of one story, “Confessions of a Sex Symbol,” says: “Why invent a character when I am a character, and why dream up an entertaining, exemplary story when I could tell MINE?”

            Almodóvar’s bag of entertainments includes a vampire story (with a Catholic twist); a memoir of his deceased mother; the story of a man who lives backwards in time; the confessions of a porn star (with a Catholic twist); and an homage to Chavela Vargas, the celebrated Mexican ranchera singer whose voice appears in a number of his films. Underlying all is Almodóvar’s outrageous sense of fun and queer waywardness.

            Catholicism—a colorful, excessive, and twisted Spanish version—permeates these stories. Indeed, “the tenebrous religious education” that he received from the Salesian brothers is one of the “three places” that Almodóvar says formed him as a person and, I would add, as an artist. In “Redemption,” a city jailer is tasked with guarding two prisoners, Jesus and Barabbas, who fall in love. Despite the scant hours they spend together, each comes to terms with his attraction to the other. “Through you,” Jesus tells Barabbas, “I am discovering the wonder of what it is to be human.”

            Almodóvar has always been about discovering—and revealing to his audiences—the wonder of what it is to be human. That wonder goes well beyond the sentimental. For him, there is wonder in every aspect of human behavior—transgressive love, baroque excess, outrageous histrionics, sublime madness. For example, in “Joanna, the Beautiful Madwoman,” he retells the story of Juana la Loca, the mad queen of Spain who decked her dead husband’s body with flowers and jewels and set him up on a throne next to hers. “The entire people and the court accepted this lifeless king,” he writes. As for mad Joanna, she became an adored queen, a “symbol of all that is sublime and irrational in the Spanish soul.”

            It is Almodóvar’s delight in this conjunction of the sublime and the irrational that makes him such a compelling filmmaker. This collection of stories, while never quite coming up to the exquisite, campy, impassioned, and poignant delicacy of movies like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, High Heels, Matador, or Pain and Glory, is a valuable resource for anyone who wants another angle on this master of the art of the queer cinema.