On his first night at the house in Chaneces, Martín Feito had a dream. Martín Feito didn’t tend to remember the dreams that strode across his consciousness (if he made a real effort, he might glimpse them as through a milky membrane, like the third eyelid of some mammals: camels, polar bears, seals or aardvarks, for example) and he attributed this inability to recall his nocturnal imaginings and amalgamations to the lack of an inner life. This, in turn, caused him much torment, and yet at the same time proved the existence of that very inner life.

In any case, Martín Feito hadn’t realised this: he was convinced all his feelings were fictional [they weren’t] and believed that this grim fictionality was one of his most important creative assets.

That first night, though, Martín Feito for once woke up in full possession of his dream, and not through a milky membrane, but as if it were a crystal clear, dazzling black egg: his name had been Gustav von Aschenbach, although he preferred to go by Gustav, and he was an official at the Arms Factory of the town of T. in the twentieth century, the sixties to be precise. In the dream, the Arms Factory exactly resembled the home of Gustav von Aschenbach’s parents, which is to say Martín Feito’s parents, who had died in mysterious circumstances during one of the great wars of Central Europe. Gustav wasn’t in the least surprised when he found Herr von Aschenbach’s tattered slippers in the middle of the munitions store, nor when he noticed the strong aroma of one of Frau von Aschenbach’s peppery stews as he made his way down the corridors connecting the factory buildings, and it seemed only natural that the workshop walls were adorned with the very same dour, timeworn decor that reigned supreme among the upper-middle class Prussian families of the early twentieth century.

The Gustav of the dream, as the name denotes, was a highly sensitive young man, so in his time on the payroll he naturally gravitated towards a more ‘interpersonal’ role (at this point, Martín Feito, lying on his bed and caked in sweat, had paddled frantically with his hands and feet like a dog dreaming of a hunt in which it isn’t on the winning side). As such, he was given the job of handling potential clients, showing them round the factory, organising test sessions on the firing range, taking them out for lunch and, a few hours later, ushering them to a local knocking shop by the name of Our Little Secret, which offered patrons a restorative breakfast of grilled meat and sweet wine, and where he held an account, under a false name, on behalf of the Arms Factory and its guests.

On the day of the dream, Gustav von Aschenbach had been charged with flattering, entertaining and generally mollycoddling a Ministry of Defence official with blood ties to the Imperial Family, to whom they were hoping to sell a healthy consignment of their new generation of CETME rifles—whether or not said regime insider reminded him of his father was a matter perhaps best left unaddressed, although the backdrop against which the narrative was unfolding (Gustav was in the living room of their family home, picking out the rifles for the client to try out on the firing range) spoke for itself—. The problem was that, according to what Gustav had been told, not only was this client a very bad shot, but he was also extremely disagreeable.

As such, Gustav had spent the last two weeks trying to think of ways to make sure the client didn’t miss his shot on the test range and consequently turn down the rifles produced so painstakingly by the tireless and upstanding factory workers. Failing to come up with one, the despairing Gustav on Aschenbach had barely been able to sleep, and had consumed a worrying number of some pills it was impossible to identify in the dream (in his dreams Martín Feito suffered from hypersensitivity and a notable inability to make decisions). All the hypothetical solutions that occurred to Gustav were either eccentric in the extreme or utterly unfeasible, for example quickly correcting the position of the target as the client took the shot (Gustav would have needed supersonic speed and in all likelihood a bulletproof vest); firing straight at the bullseye but from the other side of the target at the exact same moment as the client took his shot (he would run the risk of killing the client, or of dying himself (less likely)); installing a microbomb at the centre of the target with a blast radius the size of a bullet hole (no such technology yet existed), and so on.

One thing Martín Feito certainly did experience was a strong sense of impending doom, like the terror of staring head-on at an approaching train, a terror that paradoxically reduces one’s chances of avoiding said train. He looked at himself in the flesh suit of the neurasthenic ‘interpersonal’ factory official Gustav von Aschenbach, leading the client around the various workshops of the Arms Factory furnished like the house of his dear parents [it should be noted that this is a reference to the von Aschenbachs, not the Feitos]. The client had the jittery disposition typical of the later Habsburgs, he was a shade over five foot tall with a blond moustache, and as Gustav explained the functions of the various parts of the factory they passed through, he feigned a casual familiarity with the mechanics of firearms, which was, as far as Gustav was concerned, definitive proof that he would be a terrible shot.

Eventually, they reached the firing range, where the resemblance to his parents’ house had passed from the merely oneiric to the definitively ominous (‘definitively ominous’: Martín Feito chuckled to himself at this in bed) and the scene had taken on a ghostly air: Gustav von Aschenbach, who didn’t even like guns himself, was teaching the client how to use the CETME rifle, and the client was thinking of nothing but the knocking shop and the grilled meats awaiting him there, legendary among the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Defence.

All the while, Gustav’s ancestors—Prussian, Germano-Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, Baltic, etc.—were slowly emerging from the walls, foul-smelling greenish ectoplasms with guttural surnames, surrounding the two men, forming a silent corridor along which the whoremongering client would have to aim his shot. Gustav von Aschenbach couldn’t work out how this whole conglomeration related to his own genealogical duty, but in any case, by the time the client was just about to shoot, he still hadn’t come up with any bright ideas, and to top it all off, he was suddenly overcome by an irrepressible urge to cough. And yet miraculously, that cough turned out to be the very answer to his prayers; his coughing fit began at the precise second the client took his shot, which he fired straight up at the ceiling with the fright.

Gustav von Aschenbach’s spectral ancestors dissolved into the ether, muttering irritably to each other: See? What did I tell you!, while Gustav von Aschenbach himself noticed a sticky, dark, tar-like substance rising in his throat and choking him, at which point Martín Feito woke up, and after taking three deep breaths he began to recall the dream, though he couldn’t tell what it all meant, and it made little impression on him other than leaving him with an incomprehensible urge to go travelling abroad.

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This is an excerpt from La fuercia o les cuatro epifaníes de Martín Feito, translated from Asturian.

Xaime Martínez is a writer, musician and translator. His poetry collections include Fuego cruzado (Hiperión, 2014), Hibernia (Saltadera, 2017) and Cuerpos perdidos en las morgues. Una novela de detectives (2019). The Force, or the Four Epiphanies of Martín Feito is his first novel.

Robin Munby is a writer and translator. His translations from Spanish, Russian and Asturian have appeared in Wasafiri, Subtropics, The Glasgow Review of Books and The Spanish Riveter. His short story ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’ appeared in the spring 2023 edition of Asymptote. Twitter: @RobMunb