09.01.2014 - 09:52
We’ll be talking to Gemma Lienas—bestselling novelist, feminist, and recently chocolatier—this afternoon at 16h CET (10am EST, 7am PST) on Twitter, following the #CatalanTalk hashtag. The chat will be simultaneously translated into Catalan (#CatalanTalkCA), Spanish (#CatalanTalkES), French (#CatalanTalkFR), and German (#CatalanTalkDE). Many thanks to translators Rodolf Gimeno, Esther Roig, Patrick Roca Batista, and Monika Ferré Jordà, respectively!
For a calendar of upcoming #CatalanTalk interviews, consult our calendar.
Gemma has graciously allowed us to offer you the following exclusive English translation of her short story, Barcelona, 1964.
Barcelona, 1964
by Gemma Lienas
The day that he got sick was as if the lights went out. I thought the electricity in the apartment had gone. Of course, you can ask who am I to make such a strong statement about a situation, that, in the end, didn’t really affect me all that much. Because I kept on getting my dinner on time, my play time, and my allotment of affection… But, the truth?, nothing was ever the same as before, because when the symptoms started, the family’s mood changed, and the result was that the whole atmosphere darkened. And when I say it got dark, I mean it in a metaphorical sense, if that makes sense: life became less happy, more restrained. And that was so even though peace and quiet had always been something ephemeral that only materialized after the kids were in bed. Four girls and two boys are a lot of children if you’re hoping for some quiet in the house. But when he got sick, the kids learned to play without making a noise.
According to the two of them, the man and the woman, the beginning of the sickness was sudden and very unexpected, even though he admitted that the attacks of insomnia in the early mornings that last month should perhaps have tipped them off. He, who always slept through the night, found himself with his eyes wide open at 5am one day, and then the next day, and the one after that. Just the same, he hadn’t considered that it might be some sign of sickness, it was just an annoying bother. If they had asked me—but nobody did—I would have told them that there was a whiff in the air that something was about to happen. And when I say a whiff, I mean it literally: he smelled different. Just under his usual cologne, I noticed the faint scent of something vaguely sweet, like roasted chestnuts, that made me think he must be sick. Sicknesses do that, change the way people smell. For example, a child with a fever smells like curry, and a kid with diarrhea, like mustard. But, like I told you, my opinion was not required, so I wasn’t able to warn them and the day he decided not to get out of bed, his wife didn’t understand. On the other hand, he—who was the person in question—didn’t either. He just knew that he didn’t have the energy to do anything, that he felt unable to get out of bed and face the problems at the small workshop that he owned and frankly he didn’t care much about it right then, and above all, he just wanted them to leave him alone, for no one to bother him.
She—first out of solidarity and later out of selfishness and righteousness since the family, economically speaking, was going to pot—came into the room to try to talk some sense into him. She told him that , with the will power that he always had, he just had to make a little effort and get over that bout of laziness… Her words didn’t get any response, because he, almost catatonic, could barely move his eyebrows enough to tell her to stop bugging him. She didn’t throw in the towel just like that. She was there a good while, at his side, sitting in the small armchair that was still draped with the clothes that he had hung there the night that he had gotten into bed and didn’t get out again for a long time. She pushed his pants aside a bit to keep from wrinkling them even more and leaned against the back of the chair. Every once in a while, she would let her eyes drop, as if she were sleeping. I knew, however, that she wasn’t. When she opened them again, she stared at him and spoke. She insisted that he make an effort to get out of bed. “Just to take a shower and get a shave…!” she said.
In that respect, I thought she was totally right. He, who had always generally been quite dapper, was now a mess. With a three day old beard, greasy, matted hair that had been pressed against the pillow, pajamas that were wrinkled like a prune… The worst thing, though, was the combination of odors that he gave off. And that’s me who’s telling you, with a fine nose that’s tuned to a wide spectrum of odors. I can stand a school full of peeing kindergarteners as well as one full of adolescents with sweaty feet and too-tight sneakers. His bad smell, however, was hard to take. First, there was the smell of his sweaty body wrapped in dirty sheets. And to top it off, the mix with the smell of roasted chestnuts. The end result was not at all agreeable. Still, I didn’t leave his side, from atop the bed; I thought he needed me. Loyalty above all!
When she, finally tired, left the room, he looked at me as if only I could understand him. And I did, for real. Not because he explained anything to me, but because I always felt his suffering as if it were my own. I could tell that he felt as if he were stuck in a well—a fetid well, I would’ve added—that was pitch dark. If he raised his eyes to the opening in the well, he still couldn’t see the light, as if it were covered by a dense storm cloud. And if that weren’t enough, he didn’t have the slightest idea how to get out of there. On the other hand, knowing how wouldn’t have helped him at all, because he didn’t have the energy to do anything, he couldn’t lift a finger. And in order to think, make decisions, and act, it would’ve been necessary to start a machine that in his case, had stopped responding as it usually did. Suppose he wanted to turn over on his side in bed, well, the orders simply didn’t make it to his brain, or if they got there, neither his legs nor his arms would move. And after a few brief instants thinking about it, his mind wandered off—focusing on one specific idea also required more energy than he had at his disposal—and he forgot the command that had been formulated but not yet carried out. Until his left side began to hurt and the pain reminded him that he wanted to turn, and then, he started all over again. In any given moment, after the command had taken many round trips back and forth across the neurons, circulating through the synapsis at a velocity more usual in inferior primates, he finally managed to communicate the nervous impulse to the body, and, slowly, investing a few moments in the operation—at the risk of losing track of it once again—he ended up lying on his right shoulder and hip and returning to a fetal position. He would have given anything to be a fetus, to not yet be born. Because even the idea of suicide was unwelcome: taking his life felt like a hassle he couldn’t quite get up the energy for. Dying spontaneously was what he most desired, but he realized that his body had no intention of granting him that favor. So he imagined the closest thing to peace was to return to an embryonic state, when his nervous system had not yet developed.
Sometimes he talked to me. He told me, for example, that his soul was ailing. That’s how he defined his health problems. I would’ve liked to ask him how he knew, but I didn’t interrupt him out of fear he would stop talking again. He passed his hand from his chest near his heart to his forehead, and said over and over again that he had an ailing soul, which I interpreted to mean that he believed that he had his soul divided between two corporal states. I didn’t really understand the part about the soul. To me, it seemed like he had a sickness like any other, like diabetes perhaps. A diabetic has a malfunctioning pancreas and, if they want to metabolize sugar properly, have to inject themselves with insulin. In the same way, there are others whose neurotransmitters are off and have to swallow pills to regulate their moods. But neither he nor anyone else asked me then or ever to give a diagnosis, and so I just listened to him talk about his ailing soul.
Just the same, his body kept performing its bodily functions, at least some of them; others had been completely forgotten. For example, he had almost forgotten that his body needed to be fed and instead he drank only sparkling water in large quantities. It also seemed like his sex drive had been anesthetized, since he no longer had any desire at all. But, of course, so many liters of carbonated water have collateral effects that demand to be taken care of, that cannot be ignored. “I have to go pee,” he told me all of a sudden, while he looked at me with envy. “If I were only a dog…” I didn’t bother to correct him because it was obvious that in that house and most others, dogs have to wait for someone to take them out for a walk. And he got up and went to the bathroom, while she jumped at the chance to ask him to get in the shower, because he was filthy, and the smell was overwhelming.
She took advantage of the momentary truce to change the sheets and run and open wide the bedroom window to air out the room, while she asked herself how they had gotten to this point, and where the man had gone who she had met and who she had married, so hard-working, so devoted to his family, so proud of his business, so neat, and so perfectionist. And she asked how long all this was going to last and how she was going to be able to keep everything going on her own, with six kids and the workshop… Most of all the workshop! Right from the beginning, they had divvied up the jobs: she did kids, and he did money. Even now that it didn’t seem like he was going to keep his end of the deal, she didn’t feel like she could take his place in the workshop. She didn’t know anything about it: the production workflow, the names and addresses of clients and suppliers, the accounting tricks… And the kids, they were so small. The oldest had just celebrated her 11th birthday and the little one was only two.
He came back from the bathroom and covered himself up again, avoiding her desperate efforts to keep him out of bed by sharing her thoughts with him, her fears. He, before sinking again into lethargy, answered “I’m a wreck. I can’t do a thing. I’ve turned into human detritus.”
Sometimes, on the way to the bathroom, he bumped into one of the kids. If it was one of the older ones, they made sure to tell him they had stopped going to school, that there wasn’t any money to pay for it, that they were ruined. And he just kept going along, dragging his feet, while the child stayed frozen to their spot, seeing visions. They were aware that their father had stopped being interested in their studies, but would he go so far as to make them give up school? In times like those, I let him go pee by himself and I stopped next to the kids to shore them up. Those kids needed a hug really badly, and from their father, frankly, they weren’t going to get one. He probably still loved them, but, to judge by the absolute lack of outward displays of affection, I didn’t believe that he felt anything or even that he remembered.
Sometimes, his best friends, and hers, or of both of theirs, tried visiting that badly ventilated bedroom to try to get him to get up, but none of his friends were able to get him to do it. He looked at them all with his Greek Tragedy mask, without opening his mouth, almost without blinking and with his head empty of thoughts, except one, that appeared every once in awhile, “Get out, and leave me alone.”
One of the friends recognized the intense melancholy because not so long before a relative had been through a similar period. “This is depression,” he diagnosed. And he gave them the address of a neurologist who had successfully treated the depressed patient.
He agreed to get up in order to go to the specialist for a consultation, and also, later, to take the medication according to a strict schedule because—and this must be recognized—he was an exemplary patient that never skipped a single one of his pills.
The weeks went by, then the months, and nothing changed. He stayed in bed, I lay by his side, and she came in and left the room, divided between all of her roles and without knowing what to say when the workers from the shop called to ask for direction or what they would do when the money in the bank ran out.
And one day he got up and he sat in one of the armchairs in the living room. This change caught them all by surprise, except me, who had noticed for several days that his smell had begun to change. At first, the variations were so subtle that I could only notice them intermittently. All of a sudden, the air held the fragrance of clementines, but then, just as suddenly, the whiff disappeared without a trace. Until it formed a consistency and a persistency and I realized that the bitter clementine smell came from his skin. I imagined that if the roasted chestnut smell had gone away and left this citrus perfume in its place, it was because the depression was evaporating. Now he would get better, I told myself. Still, it surprised me that he didn’t recover his old smell, but I supposed that the chemicals that he’d swallowed over those months had introduced olfactory variations. And I wasn’t worried at all. I recognize it now: I blew it.
In the living room armchair, with his robe over his pajamas—both of which were falling off of him since he had lost so much weight—he began to come out of his mute phase. Then he demanded that she sit by his side. And he talked a lot and at a vertiginous speed, so much that he didn’t have time to swallow his spit and two small amounts of white foam would form, one on each side of his lips. And one day, not content with chatting up a storm, he started to sing. It was in the shower—because at this point, he had given up the pajamas and was dressing in street clothes—and so loud that neither she nor I could ignore it. We looked at each other, we asked each other with our eyes, and we concluded, without words, that that ballad at that volume could only have one meaning: the medication was having an effect and soon the depression would be no more than a bad memory. I was really happy and I’m pretty sure she was too. And we felt even better when he said it was time he went to work. That night he came home beaming. He was full of projects. “I’ll expand the shop, I’ll diversify the business, I’ll buy a new van, I’ll hire two more workers…” She wavered. “Are you sure? Would it be better to wait a little, until everything goes back to how it was?” And he said no, that he wanted to make up for lost time and that he was full of ideas, and all of them were brilliant and all of them were continuously turning around in his head waiting to be put into action. She, even though she didn’t recognize her familiar prudent husband in that audacious soul, was happy to see things moving.
The clementine smell got stronger day by day and I began to mistrust it. Above all because the smell was accompanied by a few changes in his behavior that were more and more obvious. At night, he didn’t sleep. He said he didn’t need to, that he could live almost without rest… He made jokes and explained that maybe it was because of all the time he’d spent in bed in the last few months. And he spent the night listening to music, for my taste, a bit too loudly. She had the same opinion but she couldn’t complain at all without him overreacting badly. He yelled, “I’m in my own home! Why the hell can’t I play Tebaldi as loud as I feel like?” The neighbors said he couldn’t, that it wasn’t reasonable to have to listen to the Tannhäuser overture from three floors up at four in the morning. “Damn it to hell!” he screeched.
That he was now swearing was something new. Like the nights he spent wide awake, the unending and almost incoherent soliloquies—when he spoke so quickly that he gobbled up entire syllables and made himself almost impossible to understand—the violence of his answers, and sometimes even of his actions, because he often slapped the kids for the smallest nonsense. One day, the oldest got an actual spanking for having spilled Coca-cola on the couch. And that was when the kids started to really panic: when they heard his key in the lock of the front door, they ran to hide in their rooms. That was when she decided that what was happening had gone over the line and that they had to make a new appointment with the neurologist.
The neurologist noticed her patient’s transformation: he spoke animatedly, had plans for the future, and wanted to regain lost time, he was very happy, had recovered his self-esteem and also his sex drive, he was eating normally… “What more do you want, ma’am?” the neurologist asked. And she declared the man to be cured. But she said “Do you really think he’s cured? Because he doesn’t seem anything like my husband from before…” But the specialist, with a paternal air, answered, “Listen to me, enjoy it while you can; you know life can be very unpredictable.”
They left the office, she depressed and he glowing. He told her that he wanted to go out to buy some things to celebrate that he was well. Three hours later, he appeared at the door, he made us all sit down in the living room—the wife, the four girls, the two boys and me—and he handed out a pile of presents. There were huge things: a doll house, a globe, a three-story garage… The kids went crazy. That was better than Christmas! And their father, as cheerful as Santa Claus! He gave her a very small box. She wasn’t sure if she should open it. “Come on, girl, you know you’re going to love it,” he said. She sighed and unwrapped a small sky blue velvet box. For a few seconds she just stared at it as if she were afraid and finally, sighing again, she opened it. Inside there was an emerald the size of a chick pea. It was set in a ring, surrounded by diamonds. “Come on, put it on,” he urged her impatiently, and you could tell he was expecting a different reaction. The kids, hearing his tone of voice, got up and stealthily headed for the door. She put the ring on her finger. It fit. “You’re not going to say anything?” he thundered. She, with a weak voice, said, “It’s pretty, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
Sense was not plentiful in that house and there was even less of it as the summer wore on, during which time he reached total hysteria.
It was paramount to move, and he moved: a couple of trips to France and a couple more to the South, always driving much faster than was allowed, and much faster than a family car—which wasn’t exactly the latest model—could go. Packed inside, we were all terrified.
There was a need to buy things and he bought without thinking: a lawn mower even though we had no lawn, a German encyclopedia even though no one at home knew that language, a zodiac that no one could ever use because there would never be any chance of sailing…
He needed to have ideas and he had buckets of them. “We’ll paint the house, enroll the kids in piano lessons, this winter we’ll go skiing, we’ll put a stereo in the bathroom…” Of course, as soon as the ideas were announced they disappeared without a trace. Fortunately, she thought.
And though it wasn’t necessary, he did it anyway: fought with everyone, especially when he drove and when he got home. He let loose the most vulgar expressions that anyone could imagine. He whacked and slapped the children, who were absolutely terrified of him. He ate sausages and cheeses at a frantic pace. And in general, he considered himself the most ingenious and attractive guy for miles around, and didn’t bother to ask anyone else’s opinion in the matter. As for my opinion, it was probably better that way.
Until one day, when I thought: this is almost over. Because the truth is, he had started to smell like roasted chestnuts again. And of course he still spoke incessantly and was hyperactive, but I believed it was only for a short time now. A few days later, it was she who noticed the transformation. “Something’s going on,” she announced when she saw him and he was rubbing his hands constantly and had turned into a statue who looked obsessively off into the distance which happened to be beyond the window in the living room. And he didn’t realize that he was sliding dangerously off the path that went into the pit. Until one day, he fell in all at once, and put himself to bed mumbling that he was human detritus and wasn’t good for anything.
Then she looked for a psychiatrist and she found a young doctor, who still believed in many things, and who decided to come visit him at home. Two months after the first session, and given that the antidepressants had the same effect as water from Lourdes, he decided to administer electric shock treatment.
That afternoon, the doctor came in with a machine in his hand that looked to me like a car battery. He left it on the dresser and said, “Now I’ll give him curare to control the spasms and so he doesn’t break any bones.” I was intimidated and went under the bed because I thought he wanted to poison him like the Indians in the Amazon who tipped their arrows with this poison. I didn’t know that now curare was a synthetic medicine manufactured by western laboratories.
For a few seconds, I didn’t hear anything and I got scared. I climbed out from under the bed. He had his eyes closed. The young doctor put two electrodes covered with white gauze on his temples and pressed a button on the machine on the dresser. He began to tremble violently. My hair stood on end. That was horrible. We should never have let them do it.
When it was all over, he was calm again. He seemed like a lost child. I wanted to bark to him, “Don’t lose hope! I’m sure medicine will make great progress and in the future it will be able to help you.” Because I—I hadn’t told you yet—have practically unlimited confidence in science and progress.
Finally, he opened his eyes, but he didn’t seem like he saw me. I decided to make a short bark to attract his attention, but without scaring the psychiatrist. That guy used the electrodes so easily that it bothered me.
As soon as he heard my bark, he reached out his hand to caress my head.
“Star?” he said.
“Star?” I thought, confused.
I sat next to him so that my back was very close and he didn’t have to stretch too far to reach me. Meanwhile, I pretended to be calm, even though I was far from it. How would you feel if they had called you by the name of a dog that had been dead for 10 years? I wanted to believe that it was just a momentary confusion. He couldn’t be mixing me up with my predecessor, that had disappeared from that home many years before…
Then, she came back in the room, and when he spoke, I couldn’t keep pretending that nothing was happening.
She said, “Are you OK, love?”
And he said:
“Who are you?”
