Maletas perdidas

— Pegaso camión, the model that Gabriel drives, found via Daniel Gascón.

This is beginning to become a series of book reports about Spanish-language novels, I’m afraid, but nothing else comes to mind these days. So: today I’d like to tell you about Maletas perdidas, Barcelona writer Jordi Puntí’s first novel, published last month by Salamandra in Catalán and in a concurrent Spanish translation (done by Rita de Costa, although Puntí is, of course, bilingual).

I found it in the library when I went looking for his story collection, Animales tristes (Salamandra, 2003), which was on Milo J. Krmpotic’s list of “Ten Celebrated & Beloved Novels From Spain That Have Yet to Find An American Publisher,” and I’m just short of finished with it.

It’s very good for a certain value of history as sensation, as a feeling — in this case the feeling you get of a Spain in the 60s & 70s still under an aging Franco, borders closed off, Barcelona a sleepier town without even an airport to its name, the first tentative shipments of tourists just starting to disembark in Málaga. Just try to imagine Spain without tourists, even — impossible, these days. Semana Santa this week, & Bilbao kind of empties out — it’s still a northern working town, and everyone’s on vacation — but you do notice foreigners on the streets now, French high schoolers, people asking me for directions to the Guggenheim in broken Spanish.

In Maletas perdidas, people are still getting thrown in prison in Barcelona for having Catalán political slogans written on plaster casts. War orphans in the 40s are sent to be cared for by monks or Jesuits, who give them last names that mark them as abandoned children (in the case of the father: Delacruz & Expósito) — this earns them a certain amount of sympathy in some cases, a certain amount of suspicion in others (how were they orphaned? is there Red blood in their veins, were their parents dissolute Republicans, anarchists?). Rural Andalucíans are migrating everywhere as cheap factory labor — to Bilbao & Barcelona, mostly, and also in Spanish neighborhoods on the fringes of European capitals. Puntí references Jaén in the backgrounds of three separate minor characters (shout-out!) as a shorthand for people escaping rural poverty. In Bilbao they still talk about that influx in the 60s & 70s as being encouraged by Franco explicitly as a way to de-Basque the provinces, bring in some Spaniards.

It’s a kind of a road novel — a missing father who drove a moving truck across Europe for a Barcelona-based company whose owner in is tight with the government & has a contract to move Francoist government officials to their posts in Europe when they’re assigned there. Gabriel, our missing, orphaned protaganist, fathers four sons in four different countries, and so we have two narratives — in the past, we’re given a kind of travelogue out of that somnabulent, isolated Spain into a Europe frothing over with rebellious students, drugs, cultural effervescence, social unrest. We get a lengthy psychadelic interlude on a ferry crossing the Channel, where in addition to household objects our furniture movers are covertly transporting the daughter of a wealthy Barcelona family to a London hospital so that she can get an abortion (she takes LSD with a couple of hippies & ends up naked on a horse). We get front row seats for radical student riots in Paris. Meanwhile, in the present tense, the four sons, who have only recently found out about each other, follow the traces left by their father (missing, but perhaps alive?) and narrate in the first person plural.

The narrative voice (nosotros) certainly sounds unusual in English, & I think it probably qualifies as a formal innovation in Spanish too. Puntí’s prose style (well, in translation) is funny, colloquial & lyrical by turns— and, interestingly in Spanish, pretty punchy. Lots of sentence fragments, the rhythm much more staccato than, say, those sinuous & winding pagelong sentences in Javier Marías.

It doesn’t look to me as though this will see English publication any time soon — Puntí is pretty well critically acclaimed, but he writes in Catalán, and his 2003 story collection doesn’t have an English-language deal either. In that spirit, then, and after a too-pretentious facebook status recommending it to any of my friends who read Spanish prompted Bryan McKay to leave a two-word comment (“Translate it”), I got an itch & decided on Sunday to do exactly that, at least to the end of the first chapter, to try and give you the flavor of it.

I have some thoughts about the particular difficulties of translating it, & the piecework strategies I used, but I’ll save those for the comments. All I have to say now is the obligatory — Translation is hard! I mean fatiguing. The more you read, the more you start to think in Spanish, & the harder it is to recover whatever idiomatic English you’re trying to bring to mind.  This is just a rough run-through I patched together yesterday & this afternoon over vermouth in the Casco Viejo — if you’re interested, I’ve attached the first eleven pages in a pdf here: Translation, MALETAS PERDIDAS.

Distinctions

— Radiografía de pájaro, Graciela Iturbide (Oaxaca, 1999). Via Rare Autumn.

Finishing a novel, I wrote recently in the comments at zunguzungu, is a kind of amnesia. While you’re reading a novel as broad & multivocal as The Savage Detectives, you live inside of it for a while, a limitless & unexplored territory that seems to persist in an eternal present, you inhabit its digressions and its vagrancies even when you’re not reading it. Integral maybe to the experience of reading a novel, or novels of this type, is the inability to finish it in one sitting, so that you keep on reading it, keep on being in the middle of it, even while you put it down, when you sleep, when you wake up in the morning. Your sense of the novel’s scope is tied to the subjective feeling of working through it over a period of time.

And the things you notice while you’re in the middle of a novel like this are different, off-centered, tied to that feeling of living inside of it. When you write about it, not having finished, it’s from the inside out.

I’ve always read too fast — rushed through books, gulped them down half-chewed. I finished Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, for example, in two marathon sessions at the bar at Trident Booksellers last August a week before I left the States. When I finished I ordered fried chicken & waffles — one last Stateside meal, to celebrate . . . — & the server gave me a bottle of Sam Adams on the house. I’ve been noticing this feeling — this writing about novels from the inside out — more recently, since I started reading in Spanish, having to pick my way through carefully. Learning, because it’s so much harder, how to pay attention.

En fin: I borrowed The Savage Detectives in Barcelona, & bought Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in a bookstore next to the Museu d’Art Contemporani to preoccupy me in English, and over the last week & a half I’ve been living inside these two multivocal novels one after the other. Now I’m finished, & there it is — amnesia, looking back from the outside, suddenly out among the welter of critical response, feeling redundant, feeling the imperative to sum up. Harder still — both of them end in a kind of silence, in insufficiencies of language, ideograms, a literal kind of being left speechless.

All I wanted to do instead — and it’s taken me all of four paragraphs to get around & back to it — is try a kind of archeology, go back through my notes & write from the inside of the novel again, although as you can see it’s doomed from the start.

“One night he called me and recited a poem by Richard Belfer. One night I called him, from Los Angeles, and told him I was sleeping with the theater director Francisco Segura, aka La Vieja Segura, who was at least twenty years older than me. How exciting, said Ernesto. La Vieja must be an intelligent man. He’s talented, not intelligent, I said. What’s the difference? he said. I sat there thinking how to answer and he waited for me to speak and for a few seconds neither of us said anything.”

— The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño (p. 262).

This stab in passing at a distinction between intelligence & talent — touched on & put to the side, we’re already moving past it — is exactly the thing I mean, something I jotted down in the moment. It’s, perhaps, a useful one, and certainly a wonderful way of damning with faint praise. Although maybe it’s just another formulation of the artist/critic or unconscious/conscious divide, the difference between being able to create something arresting & being able to explain it.

Also, maybe (we’re already pulling back), there’s  something about the voice Bolaño is using, a kind of flat, condensed retrospect. Everything is being told to us from a remove — from removes, here Calle Colima in Mexico City, April 1979 — emotional extremes placed next to each other & recollected at a distance, multiple absences at the center that we circle around, as if the novel, like Catch-22, were a kind of spiral. Very little poetry actually reprinted between the pages, although scads of poets, (giant recited lists of them, like Homer’s catalogue of ships — I can no longer read Octavio Paz’s name after a book blurb without smiling),  & people reading poems to each other, & people writing poems we never see. (The place of the poems we do see, as a kind of revelation? Too much heavy lifting for this piece. Maybe next time.)

The Graciela Iturbide photograph, above, I found after trying to remember it (inaccurately, in some ways, inevitably) in this piece from about a month ago. More bits & pieces from the novel to come, although I have to mail the book itself to Barcelona tomorrow, so soon all I’ll have will be the traces left over in my notebook.

Born standing up

Church & bridge of San Antón, oldest in Bilbao. Via carpantillo (flikr).

Anywhere worth going to in Spain will already be crowded by the time you get there. This is partly because bars (in Basque Country, in Andalucía, in Catalunya) are shoebox-sized conflagrations of smoke (filled, depending on where you are, with bartop trays of pintxos, or forested with hanging legs of cured jamón, festooned with strings of garlic & dried peppers, or there are giant barrels of wine with metal spouts, or painted tile, espresso machines . . . ) — they’re standing room only, usually, and often people spill out in knotted groups into the narrow medieval streets, even in the light Basque rain, & stand holding beers or crianza.

But it’s mostly because eating & drinking in Spanish cities is a complicated dance that takes place on a mysteriously shifting intersection of place & time. I don’t just mean the comparative rigidity of the midday meal, la comida, when the streets empty out & the siesta is sacred, because really that’s truer in Andalucía than anywhere else (here in Bilbao, shockingly, I’ve seen stores open at 3 pm. It must be a northern thing.)

No, I mean that streets themselves change, they are modular & fluid. The steel shutters that close the stores rise & fall, the signs are lit or unlit, terraces laid out & bright or else stacked & chained, so that wandering the old towns you are even more lost at night than you used to be, nothing looks the same as it did that morning. Streets crowd to the bursting or are ghost towns, bars and cafés and restaurants too.

(And often those three places, the place you come to in the morning to read the paper & have your coffee in tranquility & the one you eat in at midday — two plates, bread, wine, coffee, dessert — & the bar you crowd around at night to shoulder around beers, are the same place, the essential unit of Spanish eating-and-drinking: the café-bar. With both its shelves of liquor & its espresso machine & its kitchen, not always open, so that not just the streets but the places themselves never stay the same, are modular & fluid themselves.)

Crowded, empty — it all depends on a kind of Spanish eating-and-drinking differential calculus: the day of the week, the time of day, summer or winter . . .

I feel like I’m drifting off into illegibility, so let me try to be specific. My friend was trying to show me around Barcelona one night, & we were accompanied by a number of impatient Swedes, and suddenly it seemed that nothing that should have been open — the cheap champagne bar, for starters — was open at all, on this Wednesday night; the plaza where normally at ten or so the young people start to swarm to drink out of bottles & skate was empty. Barcelona, she was explaining to the impatient Swedes (I nodded, we understood each other) worked by zones — you ate dinner here at 9, you had a drink over there at 11. If people weren’t where they were supposed to be, something had happened. We put our heads together.

As it turned out, we realized, it must be Ash Wednesday — carnivales had been the previous weekend, ending on Tuesday with the funeral of the sardine (Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Martes Gordo — in Bilbao it’d been on a Sunday, people wearing black & mock-crying while the sardine, giant & wearing a floppy purple hat, was burned in effigy outside the opera house on top of a bier of sticks) — and so the entire city was hungover, including the bartenders. Nobody was going out. Places were shuttering left & right around us.

Surely, the impatient Swedes said, there was somewhere to go.

No, we said. There is nowhere to go. This is how things are here. Anywhere in Spain worth going will already be crowded by the time you get there. If it’s not crowded, something’s wrong.

It’s no use peeking in & seeing the roiling cloud of smoke, the mass of dark coats, the napkins & cigarettes & broken glass mosaics on the tiled floor & saying, Too crowded, let’s try another one. You have to dive in, there’s nothing else to be done. The city is a dance, it follows a rhythm, & you are always a few steps behind. My first year in Jaén I called it the Spanish bat-signal. It was as if implanted at birth in the brain of every Jiennense was a transmitter that guided them unerringly to the right place at a given time.

I think this particular kind of crowd logic is unique to the places I’ve lived here. I don’t remember it being the same in, I don’t know, Boston.

You’ll be taken to, say, La Granja — a staid old café in the Plaza Circular with a wood bar, polished brass railings, starched old men serving coffee — on a Friday night, a particular Friday night, where suddenly it’s become a live music joint, there’s a band playing, the lights are off, everyone’s drinking cuba libres at two in the morning. Later, you’ll try to repeat the success with some foreign friends, guessing blindly, & find nothing but a quiet bar, a couple of old men sucking down vermouths.

You’ll try to plan a nice dinner in Gracía, in Barcelona, and find a couple of places via guidebooks & online reviews, only to find the two restaurants you’ve chosen shuttered, inexplicably, on an empty street. A block away, on c/ Verdi, swarms of families walking, old people, students, children, every place open & clamorous. You throw up your hands & decide to choose by sight.

And then when you finally think you’re getting the hang of the dance (ok, 8:30 & still early enough for Plaza Nueva, you think, or: 11 now, Somera will be filling up, or: Sunday noon in Sevilla, time to wander over to Alameda de Hércules and have the first beer of the day) you’ll be thrown off-balance by something big — a local saints’ day or festival, a national holiday, a change in the weather — and suddenly what was closed is open, what was open is closed, up is down and down is up, streets filling & emptying as if they were waterways with drains & sluicegates.

And everybody is standing bolt upright, leaning on the bar to eat, talking incessantly, gesturing with cigarettes. Don’t even bother looking for a table. In the winter, the doors are kept open, & the coats stay on. Some places have hooks beneath the bartop to hang them on. Or you pile them on top of the cigarette machine. Small ignitions of lighters (mecheros — I thought they were matcheros for over a year because I never had to spell it), floating ash, pintxos in Basque Country or Navarre, tapas everywhere else (the Cátalans are not big on tapas, & have banned bullfighting . . . the Basques hate flamenco & don’t drink sangria). Nothing to be done but follow the noise & see what’s going on. It’s not worth planning too carefully — you’re never sure which city you’ll be stepping into, where the crowded places will be.