Independent woman in a hostile world

Free­dom in the Re­pub­lic

Forty Lost Years opens with Laura aged 14 in April 1931, on the day the Monar­chy falls. She and her best friend Her­minia run through the flags and cheer­ing crowds to in­hale the free­dom of the new Cata­lan Re­pub­lic. Ar­quim­bau fol­lows Laura through the Re­pub­lic, when women at­tained cer­tain legal rights such as di­vorce and lim­ited suf­frage and en­joyed greater sex­ual and so­cial free­dom. Laura’s early hopes are then dashed by Civil War de­feat, exile in France and Al­ge­ria, and then three decades of dic­ta­tor­ship. The forty lost years.

His­tory books re­port po­lit­i­cal speeches, wars and rev­o­lu­tions, whereas a novel like this shows what life felt like for one of the ma­jor­ity with no spe­cial in­ter­est in pol­i­tics. Though Laura and her friends are not por­trayed as ac­tivists in the novel, they are well aware that the Re­pub­lic of­fers a dif­fer­ent fu­ture. Po­lit­i­cal events are seen through their im­pact on per­sonal lives: for ex­am­ple, Laura is due to meet a lover, but it is im­pos­si­ble be­cause of the Oc­to­ber 1934 Gen­eral Strike. In the same strike, her best friend Her­minia’s brother is killed. Ar­quim­bau fo­cuses not on the street fight­ing, but on the dev­as­tat­ing scene of grief in Her­minia’s fam­ily’s flat.

Forty Lost Years is a de­tailed record of lost times. It is much more than the evo­ca­tion of the past, though. The novel is struc­tured through con­trasts of the for­tunes and at­ti­tudes of sev­eral women. Laura’s friend Engràcia finds a rich lover to buy her lux­u­ries. Engràcia’s at­ti­tude is to use sex to screw money out of men. Her­minia has the con­ven­tional ro­man­tic dream of falling in love, get­ting mar­ried and hav­ing three chil­dren. Laura’s mother is re­signed to a life of drudgery. She is the care­taker scrub­bing floors in a block of flats, where she, her hus­band, a CNT wood­worker un­able to af­ford the fur­ni­ture he makes, and their two chil­dren live in a “cub­by­hole” be­neath the stairs.

Sex not Love

Laura be­comes a seam­stress, ap­pren­ticed to a dress­maker, one of the few jobs al­low­ing young women a cer­tain free­dom. She dis­cov­ers that she too, spurred on by En­gra­cia’s ex­am­ple, can at­tract men. She be­comes the lover of Tomàs, a “posh slob I bent at will” who is quite happy to “shell out” for sex­ual favours. Laura is dif­fer­ent from her friends: un­like Her­minia, she doesn’t be­lieve in love; but un­like Engràcia, she is not cyn­i­cal. She uses Tomàs’s money to both help her fam­ily and set up her own dress­mak­ing busi­ness. Women, she thinks, are trapped by ideas of ro­man­tic love. Sex for Laura is to buy in­de­pen­dence, not fancy goods. The key to women’s in­de­pen­dence is to have your own money, as all strands of fem­i­nism recog­nise. But many mod­ern fem­i­nists might find Laura’s cold clear-head­ed­ness hard to take, ba­si­cally be­cause she sells her body to a man she doesn’t like to get the money to set up in busi­ness.

“Laura, be sen­si­ble. Be a good girl,” Her­minia urges her. But the de­fi­ant Laura thinks:

I’d al­ready cho­sen a dif­fer­ent style of life. I’d fol­lowed Engràcia and kicked over the traces. And, hell, I wasn’t hurt­ing any­one. At most I was hurt­ing my­self and I couldn’t care less about that. (p.58)

Ar­quim­bau is not sim­plis­tic. Laura wins her in­de­pen­dence, be­com­ing under Fran­co­ism a dress­maker for the wealthy, but she loses too. At times she feels dis­gusted with her­self and, as some­one run­ning so strongly against con­ven­tional love and mar­riage in an age of re­pres­sion, she pays a price of lone­li­ness for her sin­gle-mind­ed­ness.

This is a won­der­ful novel. Ar­quim­bau (and Peter Bush’s trans­la­tion) catches the di­rect, in­gen­u­ous lan­guage of a girl who grows to value her­self as a woman in a hos­tile world. Too in­tel­li­gent and sharp-tongued to make friends – yet every cut­ting re­mark is true –, Laura carves a soli­tary path through war and dic­ta­tor­ship.