Winds of the night

Hor­ror of daily life

In­un­dat­ing the en­tire novel is the degra­da­tion of Cat­alo­nia under the dic­ta­tor­ship. Here’s Barcelona’s Old City:

“And the river of poverty streamed end­lessly by: old women in rags, some drunk, skele­tal, bare-legged girls shiv­er­ing with cold, hunched work­ers, their tooth­less mouths suck­ing on fag-ends they had picked up off the ground.”

Cru­ells seems to be hal­lu­ci­nat­ing, yet what he sees is real. Sur­real vi­sion stems from his hunger and de­spair; and it is the only way the au­thor can draw close to de­scrib­ing the hor­ror of daily life. The novel trans­mits the pain of de­feat and fail­ure. Cru­ells fought the war on the Re­pub­li­can side and was in­terned for sev­eral months in a French con­cen­tra­tion camp. Re­turn­ing to Spain and or­dained, he is a priest torn apart by his ab­hor­rence of the Church’s sup­port for the dic­ta­tor­ship and has to put up with the gen­eral as­sump­tion that, as a mem­ber of the Church, he sup­ports Franco.

Some of the war’s vic­tors also suf­fer under the dic­ta­tor­ship. La­m­oneda is a fan­ta­sist who boasts of his bril­liant un­pub­lished nov­els (bet­ter than Stend­hal’s), his sex­ual ex­ploits and his friend­ship with Himm­ler. In fact, he is some sort of semi-em­ployed po­lice in­former liv­ing in a slum. La­m­oneda’s long, empty chat­ter par­al­lels the regime’s of­fi­cial hol­low pro­pa­ganda.

Dark night of the soul

Sales in­ter­weaves this pow­er­ful por­trait of de­feated Cat­alo­nia with his other main theme: Cru­ells los­ing his faith. Un­able to ig­nore the twen­ti­eth cen­tury’s slaugh­ters, from Kam­chatka to Franco to the Nazi camps, Cru­ells com­mits the sin of de­spair.

Cru­ells abases him­self, liv­ing for two weeks in hell with a pros­ti­tute and her pimp. The wind of the night freezes his neck. Sales is ex­plor­ing the depths of spir­i­tual an­guish, with his Chris­t­ian char­ac­ter strip­ping him­self of dig­nity. Cru­ells es­capes with a leap to free­dom: poi­son­ing the pimp’s dog and (on Christ­mas Day) giv­ing away all his money to a beg­gar. The poi­son­ing and gift are ex­is­ten­tial, in which Cru­ells rouses him­self from the pit of de­sir­ing his death and finds “the iron in my soul” , the strength to re­sist. Years later he re­flects: “The only con­so­la­tion left to me […], my life wasted, is that I am a loser among the win­ners.” Con­so­la­tion be­cause the win­ners are the tyrants and their lack­eys: he has es­caped the degra­da­tion of being such a win­ner. He has re­sisted and can pass on his mes­sage to a young, re­bel­lious gen­er­a­tion of Cata­lan priests.

Cru­ells re­flects back on the war, when para­dox­i­cally he lived “hours of in­tense peace”, the only ones in his life, and on Soleràs. For Soleràs be­trayed the Re­pub­lic, cross­ing to the fas­cist lines, then in the mo­ment of vic­tory crossed back to the los­ing side. While with the fas­cists, he killed the rapist Ibrahim. In Soleràs’ bril­liant mad­ness, Cru­ells finds rea­son and prin­ci­ple. He con­trasts Soleràs with Lluís, who went into exile, made a pot of money, takes a suite in the best hotel when he re­turns to Barcelona in 1959, yet de­ceives his wife, Trini. Lluís rep­re­sents the new Cata­lan bour­geoisie emerg­ing into the lib­er­alised econ­omy of the 1960s.

Sales’ novel is a po­lit­i­cal and re­li­gious tour de force, writ­ten in a fe­ro­cious, un­re­lent­ing tone. It is both a hal­lu­ci­na­tory (though re­al­ist) vi­sion of the ter­ri­ble years of Fran­co­ism and a jour­ney through a life­long dark night of the soul. Hell ex­ists not just in Cru­ells’ heart, but in the out­side world, blown by the wind of the night through a de­graded Barcelona.