La Vida Loca
BOLUDOVSKY
April 15, 2007
La Vida Loca
By FERNANDA EBERSTADT
NADA
By Carmen Laforet. Translated by Edith Grossman.
244 pp. The Modern Library. $22.95.
I have to admit that, until a month ago, I had never heard of Carmen
Laforet. The idea that there might be a lone woman in what seems the
unrelievedly male pantheon of Spanish novelists of the post-Civil War
era — an era which to outsiders, as Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his
introduction to “Nada,” seems to reek of “fustiness, sacristy and
Francoism” — was like discovering an extra story built in a house you
thought you knew.
“Nada” was Laforet’s first novel. It was originally published in 1945,
when its author was 23, and it created a sensation in Barcelona. It has
now been reissued in a new translation by Edith Grossman, and more than
60 years later the book’s odd charm is undiminished.
“Nada” recounts, in coolly understated first-person prose, the
experiences of Andrea, an 18-year-old orphan from the provinces who
arrives in Barcelona to stay with her dead mother’s relatives while she
attends university.
Laforet makes us feel the force of this young woman’s long pent-up
hunger to escape the oppressiveness of village life and her convent
education. For years, Andrea has feasted on childhood memories of her
maternal grandparents’ apartment in Barcelona, a haven of sophistication
and ease from which she, because of her parents’ death and the war, has
long been cut off.+
When Andrea re-enters the family home on the Calle de Aribau, though,
she finds it nightmarishly transformed. The Civil War has reduced her
once-prosperous bourgeois relatives to penury. They live crammed into
one filthy, dimly lit, cobwebbed half of the apartment, which is crammed
with a grand piano and gilt mirrors attached to candelabra — relics of
their former wealth that they sell off in weekly installments to an
itinerant ragman in order to survive.
The apartment’s decay reflects that of its owners. Even the bathroom, we
learn, “seemed like a witches’ house. The stained walls had traces of
hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair. Everywhere the scaling walls
opened their toothless mouths, oozing dampness. Over the mirror, because
it didn’t fit anywhere else, they’d hung a macabre still life of pale
bream and onions against a black background. Madness smiled from the
bent faucets.”
Haunting this house of horrors are Andrea’s grandmother — a shrunken
innocent who prays to the Virgin Mary while her grown children threaten
one another with razors and pistols; her Uncle Román, a gifted musician
and consummate intriguer who, during the war, was imprisoned and
tortured by “the Reds” when he was discovered to be a Francoist spy; her
Uncle Juan, who works as a night watchman and spends his days beating
his wife, Gloria, a working-class beauty whom his family deems to be a
whore, but who in fact is supporting the entire household by
moonlighting as a card shark in Barcelona’s seedy Barrio Chino.
Most frightening of all is Andrea’s dark, impassioned aunt Angustias.
Angustias is a kind of grand inquisitorial figure out of the Spanish
Counter-Reformation, rabid with faith. It is Angustias who assigns
herself the task of breaking her niece’s will and “molding” her into
obedience.
Thus goes the first morning’s catechism:
“Cities, my child, are hell. And in all of Spain no city resembles hell
more than Barcelona. ... Total prudence in one’s conduct is not enough,
for the devil disguises himself in tempting ways. ... A young girl in
Barcelona must be like a fortress. Do you understand?”
“No, Aunt.”
Angustias looked at me.
“You’re not very intelligent, my girl.”
Again we were silent.
“I’ll say it another way: You’re my niece; therefore, you’re a girl of
good family, well behaved, Christian and innocent.”
When Aunt Angustias finally concludes that Andrea is neither well
behaved nor innocent but “a demon of rebellion,” she declares with
genuine regret: “If I’d gotten hold of you when you were younger, I’d
have beaten you to death!”
“Nada” depicts on the one hand the sordid collapse of a family whose
fratricidal hatreds mirror those of the Civil War, and on the other hand
the struggle of its youngest member for simple freedom. What gives the
novel its unlikely freshness is the contrast between the melodramas to
which Andrea is witness and the humorous restraint of her narration.
While the old folks writhe in a hell of their own making, Andrea
stalwartly goes about the business of being young: studying for exams,
befriending a group of would-be Bohemian student-painters, attending her
first dance, getting kissed by a boy she doesn’t like. Yet Andrea’s
difference is painful: while her university friends, the children of
rich industrialists, smell of “soft perfume,” she reeks of “bleach and
harsh kitchen soap”; while they drive their own cars and have summer
houses on the Costa Brava, Andrea is quite literally starving, reduced
to drinking the water in which her relatives’s vegetables have been
boiled. Like Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier,” this book forcibly shows
what it means to be poor and hungry.
Politics hovers here like the weather. Laforet vividly conveys the
strangeness of Barcelona in the 1940s, a city that has survived civil
war only to find itself muted by Franco’s dictatorship, riven by
economic inequalities and ground down by a peculiarly punitive form of
Catholicism. The climate is stultifying; Andrea’s artist friends’
efforts at youthful rebellion are stunted, doomed to futility.
Laforet died in 2004, having published five more novels and a book of
short stories. The seedy, lugubrious Barcelona she evoked in “Nada” is
now vanished, given way to a chic metropolis famed for its avant-garde
chefs and bijou bars. But the spirit of sly resistance that Laforet’s
novel expresses, its heroine’s determination to escape provincial
poverty and to immerse herself in “lights, noises, the entire tide of
life,” has lost none of its power of persuasion.
Fernanda Eberstadt’s most recent book is “Little Money Street: In Search
of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France.”