Cruel lovers

Trapped in Si­lence

My open­ing para­graph might make you think that this fu­ri­ous young au­thor, brought up in re­sis­tance to the dic­ta­tor­ship, was scrib­bling a di­a­tribe against her so­ci­ety. This is to some de­gree the case, for Roig is an angry nov­el­ist of ideas. But she is no scrib­bler: de­spite her youth and this being her first novel, she con­trols com­plex ma­te­r­ial with great skill. Roig dis­penses with chap­ters and al­ter­nates the voices of the three women in brief scenes, which al­lows her to high­light con­stantly the many sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences be­tween them.

Al­though Roig por­trays the three women as trapped and weak-willed, she em­pathises with them. They may be weak, but are not car­i­ca­tures. She tells their sto­ries from within, through the diary of the first Ra­mona and in­te­rior di­a­logue for the other two. Si­lence is their lot: no-one lis­tens to them and they don’t even un­der­stand each other. The first Ra­mona’s diary cov­ers 1893 to 1919; the sec­tions of her daugh­ter, the mid­dle Ra­mona, tackle the years of the Re­pub­lic, 1931-38; and her grand­daugh­ter, a few weeks in the mid-1960s. The first two Ra­monas are con­fined in mar­riages to emo­tion­ally ab­sent men: the first, in­ef­fec­tual; the sec­ond, tyran­ni­cal. Each of the two women has an­other, se­cret re­la­tion­ship that both burns and sus­tains them. The third Ra­mona, of Roig’s gen­er­a­tion, is strug­gling with the per­sonal lib­er­a­tion of the 1960s, en­twined with the po­lit­i­cal fight against the dic­ta­tor­ship. Roig draws an un­flat­ter­ing pic­ture of 1960s left-wing men, whose ca­sual cru­elty to­ward women dis­tin­guishes them lit­tle from the bour­geois hus­bands of the first two Ra­monas. This is a novel on how hard it is to break free from dic­ta­tor­ship and from cen­turies of pa­tri­archy.

Barcelona tril­ogy

The women live through 75 years of Barcelona’s vi­o­lent his­tory: from the 1893 an­ar­chist bomb in the Liceu opera-house, the mass strikes of the early 20th cen­tury, the hopes of the Sec­ond Re­pub­lic, the Civil War de­feat, to the dic­ta­tor­ship’s re­pres­sion. Roig’s ef­fec­tive method is to keep these major po­lit­i­cal events in the back­ground, though al­ways pre­sent. For ex­am­ple, the mid­dle Ra­mona, in a pas­sage last­ing sev­eral pages, is more in­ter­ested in the hot choco­late she is sip­ping in a café than in the shouts of joy in the streets as demon­stra­tors cel­e­brate the 1931 procla­ma­tion of Spain’s Sec­ond Re­pub­lic. The great ex­cep­tion is the bold and fa­mous 25-page tour-de-force that opens the novel, when the same mid­dle Ra­mona is search­ing for her hus­band after the March 1938 Col­i­seum bomb. Preg­nant, she is buf­feted in the ter­ri­fied crowd, as­so­ci­at­ing for the first time in her life with work­ing-class peo­ple other than maids or wait­resses. She talks with peo­ple she would never oth­er­wise meet. An old an­ar­chist ex­plains his life to her. She thinks of her black-mar­ke­teer pro-Franco hus­band who crushes her as “a silly girl, a nitwit”. Worse, Ra­mona usu­ally be­lieves she’s a nitwit, but here in the crowd, in the mid­dle of vi­o­lent death, Ra­mona feels alive and thinks how she’ll be able to boast of her brav­ery to her free-think­ing friend Kati. This episode and the ex­is­tence of Kati sug­gest an­other life, which Ra­mona briefly glimpses, but can­not reach.

Good­bye, Ra­mona is the first in a tril­ogy of nov­els about the linked Claret and Mi­ralpeix fam­i­lies. The sec­ond was her best-known, El temps de les cir­eres, 1976 win­ner of the Sant Jordi prize. The tril­ogy was com­pleted by L’hora vi­o­leta (1980). Each novel stands alone, but the main char­ac­ters recur, cre­at­ing a mo­saic of mid­dle-class women’s lives in Barcelona. The city is al­ways pre­sent in the tril­ogy, in Good­bye, Ra­mona from the early 20th cen­tury when the Eix­am­ple, the city’s grid ex­pan­sion, was the fash­ion­able ad­dress to the “deca­dence” (Roig’s word) of the dic­ta­tor­ship. The youngest Ra­mona finds that the city “at­tracted her with all the vi­o­lence of a cruel lover” (p.104). The loved and hated city is both ex­cit­ing and harsh, the very em­bod­i­ment of the so­ci­ety that has moulded the three women.

The trans­la­tion is agile and gen­er­ally reads very well. A small crit­i­cism: to help read­ers, the trans­la­tors have in­serted which of the three women is nar­rat­ing each sec­tion. This was not Roig’s choice. In re­al­ity, it is not hard to know which sec­tion is which; and the slight ef­fort Roig was ask­ing of her read­ers is a way of fo­cus­ing the reader on the con­tent.

Whether Roig con­ceived the tril­ogy as a whole from the start I do not know, but the re­peated themes and char­ac­ters sug­gest she did. She ex­plores women’s lone­li­ness, the fight to be free of de­pen­dence on men and the con­flicts be­tween an in­ti­mate re­la­tion­ship and po­lit­i­cal ac­tiv­ity. Fem­i­nist and some­time mem­ber of the PSUC (Cata­lan Com­mu­nist Party), Roig wanted to ex­plain her so­ci­ety. She was a writer of ideas, though this in no way di­min­ishes her pow­ers of de­scrip­tion, ex­pres­sion of emo­tions and char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. Good­bye, Ra­mona is an ac­com­plished re­al­ist and psy­cho­log­i­cal novel.