Antagony

By Luis Goytisolo

This potent drama, a collected volume of Goytisolo's famed tetralogy following a Catalan family, is widely regarded as one of the most profound inquiries ever undertaken on literary creation.

Antagony surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The work, originally published as a tetralogy and now collected into one volume, follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. Its potent drama plays out through Goytisolo’s crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one’s artistic vocation. Alternately modern and historical, Antagony displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781628974188

Luis Goytisolo

Luis Goytisolo (Barcelona, 1935) ganó el Premio Biblio­teca Breve con su debut, Las afueras. Entre sus mu­chos títulos destaca Antagonía: Anagrama publicó en 2012 por primera vez en un solo tomo sus cuatro volúmenes, que lo consagraron como un autor fun­damental del siglo XX: «Un experimento que intenta renovar el contenido y la forma de la novela tradicio­nal, siguiendo el ejemplo de aquellos paradigmas que revolucionaron el género de la novela o al menos lo intentaron –sobre todo Proust y Joyce, pero, también, James, Broch y Pavese–, sin renunciar a un cierto compromiso moral y cívico con una realidad histórica que, aunque muy diluida, está siempre presente, a ve­ces en el proscenio y a veces como telón de fondo de la novela» (Mario Vargas Llosa); «Mil cien páginas de literatura en estado puro» (Darío Villanueva); «Un clásico consolidado y una novela rompedora a la vez. Dante Alighieri brinda a Goytisolo la inspiración para una construcción literaria que no solo es a la vez vasta y lapidaria, elaborada en su arquitectura y exquisita en sus detalles, sino que, más importante aún, le ha proporcionado un paradigma para el tipo de trabajo que hace justicia tanto a la integridad de la concien­cia individual como a la infinidad de experiencias e influencias que conforman su universo» (Michael Ke­rrigan, The Times Literary Supplement). En Anagrama también ha publicado Estela del fuego que se aleja (Premio de la Crítica), Naturaleza de la novela (Premio Anagrama de Ensayo), El sueño de San Luis, El atas­co y demás fábulas y Coincidencias. Luis Goytisolo, Premio Nacional de Narrativa y Premio Nacional de las Letras, es miembro de la Real Academia Española.

Book preview

Antagony

From the Prologue:

In very general terms and limiting drastically the diversity of readings that the text offers, declared Luis Goytisolo in an unpublished interview, "you could say that Recounting is the biography of a man, Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, told up to the moment when, sloughing off everything that has impeded him for years, he finally finds the adequate flow to give free rein to his vocation as a writer. The Greens of May Down to the Sea, continued Goytisolo, offers us the daily life of that same man, which he now writes, mixed with his notes, with his dreams, with his texts. The Wrath of Achilles is the book that is, perhaps, most disorienting right from the start, because it apparently seems to have little to do with our protagonist: the narrator is no longer Raúl, neither in first person nor in third person but rather a woman who is a girlfriend and lover of his, as well as his distant cousin, Matilde, who gives us her own image of Raúl’s world and who converts Raúl into an implicit protagonist. The Wrath of Achilles is a work dedicated to Raúl: it’s like the Earth seen from the moon. Finally, Theory of Knowledge is Raúl’s work, a work written by Raúl" which assumes his own biographical experience, which is simply dumped into, strewn throughout, Recounting; his experience as writer, of which The Greens of May Down to the Sea offers significant glimpses, and other elements of which one has indirect notice through the testimony of Matilde.

TitlePageSpace

Recounting originally published in Spanish by Alianza Editorial as Recuento in 1973.

The Greens of May Down to the Sea originally published in Spanish as Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar by Seix Barral in 1976.

The Wrath of Achilles originally published in Spanish as La colera de Aquiles by Alianza Editorial, S.A. in 1979.

Theory of Knowledge originally published in Spanish Teoría del conocimiento by Alfaguara in 1983.

Copyright © 1973, 1976, 1979, 1981 by Luis Goytisolo

Translation copyright © 2017, 2022 by Brendan Riley

Prologue copyright © 2011 by Ignacio Echevarría

Prologue translation copyright © 2022 by Brendan Riley

First Dalkey Archive edition of the complete Antagony, 2022.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

All rights reserved

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Interior design by Anuj Mathur

www.dalkeyarchive.com

Dallas/Dublin

Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

Prologue by Ignacio Echevarría

Recounting

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

The Greens of May Down to the Sea

I

The Old Man

Dowser? Dowsers?

Aphrodite Dialogue

Lunasol

II

Itinerary

The Bowels of Attila

Metaphor of Europe

I’ll Tell You Four Times

Royal Staircase

Tics

III

The Caesar Dialogue

Conversion, Diversion, Immersion

Aurea Incognita

Matilde Moret

The Crackpot

The Arrival of the Aphrodite

Warts

The Complete Idiot

Mobilis in mobili

IV

Veils

Observations

Air

Dionysian

Lunasol Dialogue

Recapitulation

The Cove

Santa Cecilia

Conversion

I’ll Keep Her Unless Her Owner Shows Up

May 18

Investment, Amusement

V

Inculations

One Thing I’ve Discovered

Grafts

Six Days

VI

Periplus

The Wrath of Achilles

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

Theory of Knowledge

[The Diary of Carlos as a Young Man]

I

II

[Notes by Ricardo Echave]

III

Attics

Getting the Message

IV

The Siren Effect

Dialogue with Tape Recorder

Private Diary

The Old Man with the Dogs

V

Rehabilitation of the Knight Errant

The Eye

VI

Northward, Port de la Selva

[The Old Man]

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

PROLOGUE

I suppose that, upon opening a book such as this, a volume of such intimidating magnitude, it’s best to be as direct as possible and not run the risk of encouraging the reader to plunge headlong into a journey that might become arduous, in addition to being long. So I’ll start by tackling, almost by way of promotional claims, a few weighty affirmations, leaving for later the arguments capable of sustaining them.

I will say, first of all, that Antagony is one of the great novels of the twentieth century; comparable in its scope and achievements, and in its ambition, to such works as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, or The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. These are not random examples, but ones chosen—among other possible novels—because of the parallels that can be drawn between them and certain aspects of Antagony. This is, in no short measure, a novel about a writer’s development; it offers a very revealing picture of a whole society, observed with extraordinary critical perspicacity; and it poses a subtle theory of knowledge based on the reminiscences awakened in the character’s mind, as much by the act of writing as of reading.

Linked to this theory of knowledge, Antagony proposes one of the most exhaustive, rigorous, and profound explorations ever undertaken of literary creation, understood as a field in which language convokes meanings that it commonly conceals. From this investigation unfolds an implacable denunciation of the masking power of the word, and a radical concept of the novel and of the supposition from which questions can currently be raised about the exercise of this genre.

In the particular context of Spanish fiction, Antagony, published between 1973 and 1981, also comprises a lucid recapitulation of the historical and cultural period which was drawing to a close at that time—the era of Franco’s dictatorship—and a severe challenge to every kind of rhetoric, including literary rhetorics, which prospered during the same time. At the time of its appearance, the novel signaled directions toward which, taking advantage of the path blazed until then, Spanish literature might have been able to point itself if, by those same dates, most of the newer novelists, as well as some of the veterans, had not opted for practically the opposite direction, in which many of the conventions that Antagony relegated to a second plane or, simply considered outmoded, gathered renewed validity.

Finally, Antagony splendidly illustrates, like few other novels or literary documents, the transformations of Spanish society during the decades of the sixties and seventies, delivering, in multiple passages of extraordinary incisiveness and comedy, very illuminating glimpses of the mentality, of the attitudes, of all kinds of tendencies (including ideological ones, in their broadest sense) that determined the development of Spain’s much vaunted transition to democracy, and that, against all odds, have continued until the present, which gives one a lot to think about.

If the reader has reached this paragraph without having previously read the novel, the best thing would be, without continuing this prologue, for them to judge for themselves the success of the aforementioned achievements. What follows here are barely a few considerations that only serve to frame and orient one’s reading enough to contribute to settling the question.

Antagony was conceived and composed over a period of almost twenty years. Luis Goytisolo has explained how its broad outlines crystallized in a matter of a few hours one day in May of 1960. It was while he was serving time in Carabanchel prison, subjected during his weeks there to a severe regimen of solitary confinement, after being sentenced for his previous militant communism. The structural nucleus then created, continued to develop in the form of notes and more notes, but it did not begin to acquire its own real identity until January 1, 1963. By then, Goytisolo had the general plan of the novel clearly worked out, along with many of its details. The final lines of Antagony, nevertheless, were not written until June 16, 1980, indeed, the very same day as the annual celebration of Bloomsday.

In 1958, at the young age of twenty-three, Luis Goytisolo had won the Premio Biblioteca Breve for Las afueras (The Outskirts), his first novel. After that, there was great anticipation about him, only partially satisfied by his second novel, Las mismas palabras (The Same Words) (1963), which he has always considered a failure, and which appeared the same year when he began to write Antagony, with which he sets things to rights. It’s admirable that a writer still so young, and so promising, as Luis Goytisolo was in 1963, abstained from publishing anything for almost ten years, hard at work on a project as ambitious as Antagony. But what’s certain is that, despite having the plan for the novel very clear in mind, Goytisolo did not foresee how long the novel would turn out to be. Thus his decision, at a certain point, to publish it in sections, persuaded by the need of counting on a certain number of opportunities if he wanted to carry his journey to a good conclusion.

Thus, the novel began to be publicized long before being fully completed, which had to have important consequences on the type of reception it received, and how well it was properly understood. Although from the beginning it was made clear that Antagony was a tetralogy, the value of this concept turned out to be insufficient to suggest the types of connections that unite its different parts. These were largely read as stand-alone volumes, and, what’s worse: given the span of several years between the publication of each one of the four volumes, many people only read one volume or another, without connecting to the others. Today one still hears talk about the different books that make up Antagony as if they were truly separate, independent novels, segregated from the greater whole of which they form a part. What doesn’t get pointed out enough is that Antagony’s wide landscape contains a variety of different books, not just four. It’s really just one novel, whose intentions are impossible to appreciate without reading the whole thing, as occurs with Remembrance of Things Past (nobody really considers discussing Swann’s Way or Time Regained as independent novels), or as happens with The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell, another work to which Antagony has been insistently compared by those searching for precedents to its colossal undertaking.

The first edition of Antagony was brought out by the publishing house of Seix Barral, which published Recuento (Recounting) in 1973 (in Mexico, given that in Spain the book was seized by the Juzgado de Orden Público (Court of Public Order) and could not be distributed until 1975). Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar (The Greens of May Down to the Sea) appeared in 1976; La cólera de Aquiles (The Wrath of Achilles) in 1979, and Teoría del conocimiento (Theory of Knowledge) in 1981. In 1983 the novel was re-edited by Alfaguara as Number 100 in its literature collection, once again in four volumes, beautifully designed by Enric Satué. The four were published simultaneously, each individual volume bearing the general title—Antagonía—as well as its own. It was, in Goytisolo’s own words, the first edition, properly speaking of Antagony. This edition—revised by the author, and the basis for this present one—was followed in 1993 by a pocket edition, from Alianza, also in four volumes, and yet another pocket edition, by Plaza and Janés, in the same year. Alfaguara even went on to republish the book yet again, in 1998, this time in two volumes on whose covers appear only the general title Antagonía (I and II). This began to alleviate, quite late, the general tendency to read the novel in separate sections, something that kept happening despite the fact that, since the 1983 edition, there was no longer any doubt that all four volumes comprised a single work. The best way of dealing with all that misunderstanding, nevertheless, was to publish Antagony in a single volume, making it inevitable that readers would have to contend with its massive whole. And that is the objective which this edition finally fulfills, more than thirty years after the novel was concluded.

Reading Antagony in its entirety modifies the partial readings that have happened with its separate, successive volumes. Anyone who read it over the course of several years could only, with difficulty, fully comprehend the close-knit fabric of allusions and correspondences, some of them very subtle, that are established among the different parts of the work. This is one of the reasons—beyond its unusual dimensions, daunting for many readers, and its disconcerting title—why even though Antagony is unanimously recognized as a major work of Spanish literature, it has, for all these years, maintained a certain dislocated position within that milieu. It occurs as if the very potent charge the novel contains slowly deflagrates, having lost the chance to go off in a single explosion.

Can we pretend that, if Antagony had been published from the first moment in a single volume like the one the reader currently holds in their hands, the novel’s fortunes would have been different? Would it have had an impact superior to the one it obtained? Writing this, I consider the recent case of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a posthumous novel whose publication format—in separate books or a single volume of dimensions as intimidating as this one—remained undecided until the last minute. They finally opted for the latter possibility and there is no doubt that it was the correct choice, given the extraordinary impression that the book produced, far superior, no doubt, to the reaction each of its parts would have produced separately.

In the case of Antagony, what would have happened in 1981 if it had been published as it has now been brought out? Were Spanish readers, in general, prepared to appreciate such an effort? Possibly, given that it’s about a novel that, as has been said, transmits like few others the pulse of Spanish society of those times; also given the fact that it proposes a passionate game of mirrors that have given it an unsurpassable place at the very forefront of a trend that has, since the early 1970s, enjoyed widespread acceptance, both in Spain and abroad: what’s known as metaliterature, a genre in which the very figure of the writer and the vicissitudes of his creation claim an important role.

Considered retrospectively, however, and even with the confidence that Antagony would have had a much greater impact had it been published in a single volume, we can remain skeptical about the type of welcome that Spanish culture as a whole was prepared to offer a work like this one in those days. Why?

In 1975, when Recuento (Recounting), the first installment of Antagony, was finally published in Spain, it might have been said that a book like that, which at such an opportune time proposed an implacable recounting of the depressing reality that was starting to be left behind, would have been deeply important for a large number of readers who had lived through experiences similar to those of its protagonist or who could benefit from being offered a window into them. True enough, indeed, but only up to a certain point. That same year of 1975 saw the publication of La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (The Truth About the Savolta Case), by Eduardo Mendoza, and it was this novel, much more than Recuento, which stimulated the attention of Spanish readers, possibly those resolved to wash their hands of the recently canceled period, and enormously attracted by Mendoza’s intelligent and entertaining retelling of an early twentieth-century criminal case that happened in Barcelona, (the same city, of course, which has such an important presence in Recuento).

In 1981, on the other hand, in the same year that, with the publication of Teoría del conocimiento (Theory of Knowledge), Antagony reached its conclusion, Jesús Ferrero’s novel Belver Yin was published to great public and critical success, greeted by many as the opening salvo for what was going be known henceforth as new Spanish fiction, a label which served to name a wildly varied multiplicity of novelistic proposals whose most recurrent traits would be a certain Adamism in relation to the genre itself, the restoration of a narrative very closely bound to old conventions, the ostentation of an often rigid cosmopolitanism and the strict refusal to have anything to do with the immediate past, as well as any hint not only of politicization but of any critical incursion into the present. Exactly the opposite of what a novel like Antagony involves, whose poetics insist on the significance that inevitably come into play through the act of writing—and of reading—and the relatively accessory nature of most of the elements considered to be components of a novel: argument, descriptions, characters, dialogue.

No, from the way things turned out it seems unlikely that, despite the numerous reasons that could have signaled it as a milestone destined to spread a decisive influence in the development of the fiction soon to follow, Antagony would have managed to exercise that influence, even published under the best of conditions. It’s enough to think that, a few months before the appearance of Theory of Knowledge, Juan Benet’s other peak work, Saúl ante Samuel (Saul Before Samuel) (1980) appeared, yet this exceptional novel barely made an appreciable impact—despite Benet being, unlike Luis Goytisolo, an important rising writer well above a handful of writers younger than him, and quite prone to polemical interventions, not only in the literary field. In Benet’s case, the strenuous effort required to read his book can explain the stupor with which it was received. Regardless, right at the start of the high tide of the eighties as Francisco Rico had baptized it, Saúl ante Samuel and Antagony raised Spanish fiction to a high level, to a level of quality and of challenge, exploding many of the pretensions and resources used by many of their contemporaries, especially relating to future promotions, instead embarking on a trajectory more in accord with their own spirit than with what can be understood as the culture of the Transition, which was impregnated by a new sociability with a strong degree of commercialism.

At one point, Benet complained about the lukewarm and scattered critical reception that Saúl ante Samuel received. This is not the case, far from it, with Antagony, which, despite everything said so far, and without supposing anything to the contrary, was the object, since the publication of its first volume, of very close readings. In fact, in retrospect, what remains astonishing is both the steady number—as well as the high level—of the reviews and commentaries that the novel received, as much from professional critics as from writers and scholars in general. Barely two years after concluding its publication, Anagrama published a volume titled El cosmos de Antagonia (The Cosmos of Antagony) (1983), which collected a handful of critical essays about the novel, including splendid pieces by Ricardo Gullón, Gonzalo Sobejano, and Luis Suñén, among others. As Salvador Clotas wrote in the introduction, it was an exceptional volume, in so far as it revealed a critical capacity that is not usually, unfortunately, the most frequent in our cultural ambit. But the successive volumes of Antagony had already received, in a wide variety of media, very timely, sometimes very penetrating, commentaries, such as those from José Ángel Valente and Guillermo Cabrera Infante about Recounting; such as—specifically—those by Pere Gimferrer on Recounting and The Greens of May Down to the Sea.

Reviewing these and other commentaries makes manifest a level of critical receptivity almost unimaginable at the present time. And it makes one thing very clear: none of Antagony’s readers, however demanding, have failed to appreciate its value and its extraordinary merits.

Shortly after finishing the novel, Guillermo Carnero called it one of the richest, most complex narrative undertakings in the scope of the post-Civil War Spanish novel. A judgement that superimposes itself on the very high classification that the successive installments of the novel had been garnering as they appeared. Thus, for example, Pere Gimferrer hailed Recounting as one of the four most important works of the Spanish postwar period, alongside Tiempo de silencio by Luis Martín-Santos, Volverás a Región by Juan Benet, and Reivindicación del conde don Julián by Juan Goytisolo. An evaluation only reaffirmed a few years later by the publication of the now completed Antagony, and which deserves a note: all four of those cases are single novels that are part of a very long narrative projects. (In the case of Martín Santos, his death prevented him from continuing his planned trilogy La destrucción de la España sagrada (The Destruction of the Sacred Spain) from which Tiempo de destrucción (Time of Destruction) was posthumously rescued; in Benet’s case, we can understand Saúl ante Samuel as the culmination of the stylistic program expounded in La inspiración y el estilo (Inspiration and Style) and undertaken with Volverás a Región (Return to Región); in the case of Juan Goytisolo, Count Julian (Reivindicación del conde don Julián) is inserted into what the author himself has baptized as Trilogy of Evil (Trilogía del mal), which includes Marks of Identity (Señas de identidad) and Juan the Landless (Juan sin Tierra).

In any case, more than in any of these other novels, and the important projects they frame, Antagony floats above, as it were, the most recent Spanish literature, and so it is to the extent that has not ceased to question it tacitly through its own conceptions of narrative structure, according to some presuppositions that set aside, as Luis Goytisolo’s words themselves put it—written, we must say, now long ago, but still valid— all the theoretical apriorisms formulated about the novel in the last fifty years.

In this respect, if, on one hand, Recounting, the first book of Antagony, contains a severe criticism of the realist aesthetic that in such a determinant way framed Spanish novel writing in the nineteen fifties and sixties, in the successive sections of the work we see Goytisolo gradually outlining a form of novel writing that not only shelters a very powerful style but one that also proposes an ideal form through which, along with the conflicts used for scene building, the writing shows itself capable of trapping the complex and changing reality of the world.

But before continuing, it’s time to explain to the reader, who still has no idea, however superficial, exactly what the argument of Antagony is. And nobody better than the author himself to do that.

In very general terms and limiting drastically the diversity of readings that the text offers, declared Luis Goytisolo in an unpublished interview, "you could say that Recounting is the biography of a man, Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, told up to the moment when, sloughing off everything that has impeded him for years, he finally finds the adequate flow to give free rein to his vocation as a writer. The Greens of May Down to the Sea, continued Goytisolo, offers us the daily life of that same man, which he now writes, mixed with his notes, with his dreams, with his texts. The Wrath of Achilles is the book that is, perhaps, most disorienting right from the start, because it apparently seems to have little to do with our protagonist: the narrator is no longer Raúl, neither in first person nor in third person but rather a woman who is a girlfriend and lover of his, as well as his distant cousin, Matilde, who gives us her own image of Raúl’s world and who converts Raúl into an implicit protagonist. The Wrath of Achilles is a work dedicated to Raúl: it’s like the Earth seen from the moon. Finally, Theory of Knowledge is Raúl’s work, a work written by Raúl" which assumes his own biographical experience, which is simply dumped into, strewn throughout, Recounting; his experience as writer, of which The Greens of May Down to the Sea offers significant glimpses, and other elements of which one has indirect notice through the testimony of Matilde.

One passage in Theory of Knowledge offers an inverted version of this hasty synthesis. There we read how Ricardo Echave, whose notes occupy the center of that novel (the novel written by Raúl, remember), cherishes the project of writing a work composed of various books articulated according to the following scheme: starting with Story A, which presents itself to the reader as a finished whole, explore the real boundaries of Story B, the author of Story A, considering it exclusively from without, as a character seen by other characters: next, get closer to the origins of Story A, to the process of the work’s gestation, the notes taken, the previous writings, if possible in the context in which they were written—daily reality, dreams, etcetera—in order to conclude, finally, with a reconstruction of the life of Story B. Meaning: include the author in the work and, with the author, the time, the time that the work’s development gives back to the author.

Regarding Recounting, Pere Gimferrer rightly said that its style was an art of time and of structure. There is no better way of synthesizing the proceeding of Antagony in its whole, animated as it is by the proposal To include the context in the text, the author no less present among the characters than the reader, and like them involved, one and the other, in the plot.

For his part, Juan Goytisolo has pointed out that "the literary art of Antagony—the centrifugal unfolding of a text whose language expands through a group of association, similes and metaphors of probably Proustian origin—could be collated to a certain point with that of the author of Remembrance of Things Past, to the degree that both include the author in the work, and along with him, the time that the material gestation of the novel takes; but a Proust who would have inserted into that work not only Jean Senteuil but also the first babbling version of the Mass."

The entire artifice of Antagony is designed so that when the reader finally begins to read Theory of Knowledge—the novel by Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, the text that crowns and transcends Antagony’s radical undertaking, the one that opens the novel itself to directions even newer and more unexplored—they find themselves in possession of the fabric of references to which the greater part of the elements present in this book refer, in conditions of appreciating how the elements of reality are transformed into writing, and of capturing the resonances that his work gathers in the mind of the author, as well as in his own mind.

To achieve this, Luis Goytisolo not only conceived of the basic mechanism which has just been sketched out very succinctly: he also made use of, like a submerged correlative, a very ample mesh of recurring motifs that run throughout the whole novel, that establish among their distinct parts connections sometimes barely perceptible, that act almost subliminally, and that contribute to equip it with the convenient density (density of time, of accumulated experience). Within the same novel we find allusions to the form in which these motives operate in the text through a process of prefiguration and post-figuration of those things which—as it advances—are revealed as its central themes. In general, it’s about the highly charged metaphorical images that are repeated in different places in the novel—how, at the start and the end of the same, the image of that officer mounted on a white horse—but also about situations, scenes, characters who appear and reappear sometimes under different situations, under different disguises.

On another level we can locate motives—similarly recurring—that act as reflections of the novel itself, illustrating it in a certain way. Thus, for example, that map of the Ideal City (tacitly counterpoised to the very real city of Barcelona) whose design reveals the structure of Antagony. Or the references to the paintings of Velazquez (Las meninas, Las hilanderas, Las lanzas), that provide a graphic correlative to the way in which that structure is dramatized. Or the mentions of Dante and his Divine Comedy, which fulfill a similar function. And then there are, acting surreptitiously but very significantly, devices, like the subtle organization of the work around the number 9, the only number whose multiples, reduced to an inferior figure through successive sums of the elements that compose them, always give as a result the number 9 itself. Thus: 9 x 3 = 27 = 2 + 7 = 9.

It’s a question of weight, Luis Goytisolo has stated with respect to Antagony’s sophisticated scheme, "of space, of balance, that counts no less than the composition of a painting or a symphony, two kinds of works with which, in a certain way, Antagony could be compared, and in which that structural preoccupation has always been made most evident. So that then the structure is not visible, so that it seems to have been retracted, as one takes down a scaffold once the building is complete, there’s nothing special about it; that is their function, that of being assimilated by the reader without being perceived. Nor do readers usually count the number of syllables or verses of the poem they’re reading."

Of all attempts to describe the complex narrative plot of Antagony, the naturalness with which it is articulated is inevitably abstracted, how agreeably it unfolds, always in the service, as it must be, of a dazzling reflection about the nature of the creative act and about the type of knowledge it leads to. It does not make much sense to try to gloss the achievements of that reflection, because it’s about something that can be picked out to a very slight degree throughout the course of the whole novel, and which finds unsurpassable formulations in passages, sometimes very explicit, about the same, like the aforementioned notes of Ricardo Echave in Theory of Knowledge, in which many of the glimpses scattered throughout the whole text are largely recapitulated.

The critic of Antagony usually feels a certain sensation of redundancy, given that they’re reflecting on a novel—because that’s what it deals with— that says everything about itself. Very summarily, and succumbing almost inevitably to the temptation of stitching together one quotation after another, we can point out that the nucleus around which the whole novel unfolds is the intense experience that the author, by projecting himself into his work, creates himself even as he is creating his work. Creative writing, whatever be the form it adopts, will come to constitute the objectified expression of the consciousness and, above all, the unconsciousness of the author. As such, meaning, as far as objectified expression, is set up in the design field not only the obsessions and the conflicts of the author, but also of the reader, given that the phenomenon of reading is the shadow, the negative of the phenomenon of the writing. Thus, the ultimate meaning of a work of fiction need not be sought in the text, nor in its author, nor in the reader, but in the relationship that links the work with one and another, a relationship through which the work comes to life, is made vivid, at the same time that it illuminates the figure of the author as well as the figure of the reader.

All of Antagony, to say it again, arises from the untangling of that golden moment when—finally, while locked in prison—Raúl, the novel’s protagonist, discovers his own vocation as a writer, feeling seized by the sensation that by means of the written word, not only creating something autonomous, alive by itself, but that in the course of this process of objectification by writing, he managed at the same time to understand the world through himself and to know himself through the world.

The emphasis placed on the written word as unleashing that process of objectification that Antagony tries to construct analogically—constituting itself in the novel about a novel—obtains all its reach and its relief in pronounced contrast with the very overwhelming criticism which, in the novel, is made from the assignative power of the word, its faculty of stereotyping daily life, of interposing itself between one and things, between one and other people, between one and oneself. While yet trying to find his path as a writer, Raúl is aware, and again and again, perplexed, of the natural tendency of language to become sclerotized, to conceal reality. And throughout Antagony, but very especially in Recounting, an imposing arsenal of resources unfolds to show how it occurs this way.

Considering the first book of Antagony, José Ángel Valente offered this spot-on assessment: "The identity of the future narrator, whose existence is announced by the final sections of Recounting, is established, really, against the ideological crystallization of language, against what in any of the aspects of the ideological occupation would constitute, with one sign and another, a totalitarian or paralyzing language."

For his part, Pere Gimferrer singled out—also regarding Recounting—the weight that what he very playfully dubbed the deadpan parody has in this book, understood as such to mean parody based not on the deformation or characterization of the facts of the case, but on their extremely faithful and succinct but decontextualized transcription, in such a way that, upon isolating it from its habitual context and comparing it to others, it becomes an example of irrational discourse, despite its appearance or, rather, pretension, of maximum rationality.

This process—continues Gimferrer—requires, on one hand, a singular capacity for observation, for recreating spoken language, something for which, as Gimferrer himself observes, Luis Goytisolo finds himself to be exceptionally gifted, along with a good part of the writers of his same generational swath, educated in the practice of behaviorism. And it requires, as well, a formidable aptitude for pastiche, be it of an existing literary genre or of the linguistic convention of a specific social group."

Goytisolo is an unsurpassed master of both things, and as a consequence, all of Antagony, and not only Recounting, contains an ample repertory of every type of verbal behavior which is put on display, generally with extraordinary comic effects, the language contributing in a great variety of ways to the stupidification of the subject, to their unconscious alignment within a previous stereotype. In this sense, Gimferrer (whose perspicacious criticism forged, during the same period in which Antagony was published, some of the most unerring reviews that have ever been written in the Spanish language) long ago indicated how Luis Goytisolo possesses, perhaps like no other contemporary peninsular writer [circa 1973] the gift of transcribing stupidity, ridiculousness or wild bizarreness, empty convention, or incoherence; a gift that he has always maintained, and which, without subtracting one iota of the profundity of his approaches, imbues the reading of his books—Antagony included—with priceless cackles of laughter.

Goytisolo’s keen ear for capturing idiotic, ridiculous, vicious, or directly aberrant verbal behavior recalls that of Karl Kraus in the Vienna of the first third of the twentieth century. Through deadpan parody, Goytisolo records, one after another, what Elias Canetti—a disciple of Kraus—denominated as acoustic masks, a name with which he baptized the particular use that people usually make of the language, and which is characteristic of the limits that they impose on their relationship with reality.

Canetti never ceased to be astonished by the rotundity, by the firm blindness and obstinacy with which these acoustic masks exclude how much remains to be said about the world (the majority of it, everything); again and again he was scandalized by the fact that, instead of being open to that richness, human beings prefer to cling to a few words, reserving for themselves one single attribute: having to repeat and repeat themselves incessantly. Well: all of Antagony, as has been mentioned, is shot through with minute and infallible recordings of this type of linguistic behavior. In this aspect it also matches Auto-da-Fé, Canetti’s one and only, and portentous, novel. Suffice to mention here, very succinctly, the pathetic image of Raúl’s father, now old, obsessed with disguising his own failure with a history remodeled over time. He was speaking—we’re told—like one who uses a tape recorder to try out different variations of the same speech; he deployed his verbal artillery against that undesirable who had fallen in with him, who had happened to be his brother-in-law, the bohemian, the disaster, the shameless one, the ignominy of his in-laws, etcetera, in order to end up invariably in that business of ‘if only your poor mother could see you,’ etcetera, etcetera, elements of a fixed and ordered sequence, by force of repetition, in a kind of litany.

The deadpan parody, on the other hand, is displayed to decidedly savage effect, especially in Recounting, in four ideological discourses that frame Raúl’s education: one on the falangism more or less similar to the triumphant Francoism, one on the communist resistance, and others covering Spanish and Catalan nationalisms. The tempestuous tirades corresponding to these last two resound with alarming familiarity in the ears of today’s reader. The same does not happen with falangist rhetoric, now completely obsolete. Regarding the speech of the communist resistance—which Goytisolo knew very closely—his incredibly faithful transcription documents something more than what might seem to many an ideological relic: it allows any reader today to understand retrospectively some of the reasons why the important capital, no less political than moral, which the Communist Party enjoyed under the Franco dictatorship came to be squandered in barely a decade.

The progressive hypertrophy and mutual overlapping of these discourses—according to a process of mutual interaction that goes far beyond that employed by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; which is, in fact, based on an ability to mimic, parody, and superimpose speech mannerisms and styles that recall Ulysses—produce the phenomenal joyous racket of Recounting, which precipitates the growing awareness, on Raúl’s part, of the redemptive power of writing. In the rest of Antagony, with Raúl now committed to his destiny as a writer, Luis Goytisolo’s parodic art is dedicated to recording, in a less overwhelming but equally incisive way, the latent discourses in the Spanish society of the late Francoist period, raised up since the nineteen-sixties to a certain prosperity and to a slight opening thanks to the boom in tourism.

Starting with The Greens of May Down to the Sea, Goytisolo’s gaze centers, above all—but not uniquely—on the attitudes of a new and emerging affluent bourgeoisie, ideologically evolved, sexually liberated, and progressively engaged in a consumerist lifestyle. Goytisolo’s accurate portrait of this sector of society offers special interest in so far as it corresponds, in broad measure, to the sector that led the Spanish transition toward democracy, as much from the political point of view as the cultural, and that ended up lighting the way to a new plutocracy. It deals with a sector legitimized by its militancy in the anti-Franco resistance, from which it opportunely wriggled away, and which permitted it to wash its hands, at the right moment, of its progressivist ideology, or rather: to promote neoliberal politics from an imperturbable sentiment of representing the left. Reading Antagony now, after thirty years, turns out to be highly instructive, showing how well Goytisolo’s portrait of this social sector hold up, a very eloquent index of both its persistence and its inertia. No less instructive are the perspectives that the novel traces about the influence that nationalist ideologies have had upon this sector.

The gradual irruption, during the development of Recounting, of the deadpan parody, runs simultaneous to that of another stylistic recourse which, even more so, ends up being the most characteristic of Antagony. I refer here to Goytisolo’s use of broad comparisons whose terms, very disparate among themselves, are juxtaposed with such a prolixity of details that the reader’s attention tends to be distracted from the supposed nexus that would have to justify the comparison, in order to remain absorbed in the interest of each one of the terms by itself.

Gonzalo Sobejano has made an excellent analysis of this stylistic resource, emphasizing how it constitutes a way of exemplifying the spectacle of reality configured by the writing through a fabric of latent correlatives. A procedure aligned—underscores Sobejano—with the conviction, expressed by the narrator of The Greens of May Down to the Sea, that alongside one thing there is always another, and another counterposed to another collateral and another anterior which contradicts and denies it, which alters and confuses it to the point of obliging us to reconsider the initial hypothesis, the question about whether the structure is really an instant of the process or the process merely one line of the structure. The supra-tale and the infra-tale, the two authentic levels of a work, in relation to which the tale in itself functions as a simple vehicle.

Regarding the progressive enormity with which this stylistic resource is deployed, Sobejano has referred to Luis Goytisolo’s style as an emanative style, alluding thus to the form in which the emanation of similitudes through the assembly of comparative frames set one within the other (así como [just as; as well as]; así también [as well as]; de modo semejante [in a similar way]) reaches a point where, among so many associations, the comparison is lost to sight.

Both Sobejano and Gimferrer, among others, have pointed out the Proustian sign of these comparative series, which Sobejano contrasts with those of Juan Benet’s style. Gimferrer, for his part, hastens to emphasize how, in Goytisolo’s case, the comparisons have an inverse sign to the Proustian ones, given that, "instead of fulfilling a function of synthesis, of raccourci, as in Remembrance of Things Past, they are translated into amplification and insistences, and in the last place into rhythmic delays."

Once more, the best characterization of this practice is found in Antagony itself. Referring to the diary of Carlos junior, which occupies the first part of Theory of Knowledge, the aforementioned Ricardo Echave observes how, when it comes to style, it’s not difficult to discover the influence of Luis Goytisolo: those long series of sentences, for example, those comparisons that begin with a Homeric Just as, in order to conclude by connecting with some so, in a similar way, not without first inserting new extended metaphors, secondary metaphors that, more than centering and sharpening the initial comparison, expand it and even invert its terms, not without first laying the foundation for new subordinate associations, not without first establishing new conceptual relationships not only similar to one another, and new associations with the same colloidal appearance as the mercury and brimstone that alchemists mix together.

The passage is indicative of the self-referentiality—replete with mistakes—that, in its own unfolding, Antagony assumes; from the way that the novel constitutes all by itself a system of autonomous references in which reality appears subjected to different levels of fictionalization, including the author himself, Luis Goytisolo.

In this point, the "Family reading of Antagony" that Juan Goytisolo made in his day and which led to an unusual exchange of articles between the two brothers remains of particular interest. Unusual because of the improbability of the fact that two narrators, both very notable, tackle the same family scene, the one—Juan, in Coto vedado—in an openly autobiographical tale, and the other—Luis, previously, in Antagony—in a novel whose protagonist presents abundant traces that invite the reader to take it as a likeness of the author himself. The confrontation between the two memories facing off against each other constitutes a passionate document that illuminates Antagony’s deep treatment of memory as the way toward knowledge; a way, that is, replete with traps, voids, and false appropriations.

The paths of memory one reads toward the end of Recounting. Something similar to visiting one of those cathedrals built atop an older one, constructed in its turn from the remains of pagan temples, stones belonging to that other city excavated beneath the present-day city, subterranean ruins that one can visit contemplating what were streets and houses and necropolises and protective walls, pieced together almost always from the remains of earlier cities. A tour, however, that one usually finds not only in the base of one’s self-knowledge, but also in the full realization of all creative impulse.

It’s been said above that Antagony floats above the course of Spanish fiction. This has continued to circulate in recent decades along many of the ways opened up by that fact. One of these ways is, precisely, what has been called from then until now autofiction, a term whose proper understanding contributes magnificently to this novel—as farther on, expanding its important glimpses in this field plagued by misunderstanding, Estatua con palomas (1992), by the very same Luis Goytisolo.

We might propose a reading of Antagony superimposed upon the development of Spanish fiction in the thirty years that have passed since its publication. In doing so, one would notice how the novel lucidly explores and integrates narrative uses that have since become relatively common, such as the tendency toward digression, toward fragmentation, toward branching or fractal structures, toward autobiographical impostures, overlapping planes of fiction and reality, mixtures of essay and novel. Not to mention Luis Goytisolo’s so very uninhibited and explicit treatment of sex. Or the register of a hybrid tongue—the Castilian Spanish spoken in Catalonia—at the margin of all normative orthodoxy.

As a result of the conception of narrative writing that moves through Antagony, the novel itself radically questions conventions of every sort, beginning with those related to typographical markings such as italics, quotation marks, hyphens and dashes, with the evident intention of underlining the indistinct nature of what happens to integrate the material of the text. Previously, the treatment that can be given to descriptions, argument, characters, dialogues, to the very figure of the narrator had been redefined little by little, elements that are subordinated to the fact that the real value of the writing is found at deeper levels—deeper than those that serve as a background.

Antagony itself speaks of "Novels that in no way seek to imitate reality, that are in no way mimetic, nor offer any insubstantial rejection of all reality, as they so vainly pretend at times; no, none of that: novels that are a metaphor for reality, meaning, that proceed by analogy, the only way of approaching the proposed goal, a goal that, as in the case of the thinker, is more about the journey than the destination, or rather an objective whose goal is precisely the journey itself, a creative impulse that, at the same time as it reflects itself in the works that it generates, may be the analogous reflection par excellence of the creative process."

Antagony proposes itself as one of those very novels. Like all great works of art, it invents its own form. A form in which the reader participates as an active element in the plot. A plot that traps it in an adventure of knowledge destined to move deeply the relationship that it maintains with language, with the world, with itself.

Thirty years after its conclusion, Antagony not only preserves intact its literary payload but also its capacity to question the entire system of fiction writing in the Spanish language, driving it to a reconsideration of its own premises.

Beyond the legend that has been woven around it all this time, and beyond the misunderstandings of every type which it has caused (or precisely because of that), Antagony continues offering itself to the present moment with all the novelty that it supposed in its day. Thus this edition, the first that finally presents the entire text in a single volume, imposing without disguising its compact unity and its imposing stature, must be hailed as an important event, as the recognition of a work about which there still remains much to discover, to learn, and to come to terms with.

Ignacio Echevarría

Barcelona, November 2011

Translated from the Spanish by Brendan Riley

BOOK I: RECOUNTING

Space

For María Antonia

Space

I

The rolling thunder of the detonations came booming back down the valley, and above the hills, amid the smoke that seemed to be rising from the woods, you could just glimpse the flash of cannon blasts. Two motorcycles and several dun-colored trucks came advancing slowly along the highway, and at the crossroads, a group of soldiers was maneuvering an artillery piece. There was also an officer mounted on a white horse, prancing, galloping back and forth with his saber unsheathed; an officer mounted on a white horse.

Ramona wound up the gramophone and put on a record, but Aunt Paquita immediately removed it, making the needle screech. Once set in motion, the gramophone couldn’t be stopped and the turntable kept on spinning until the spring wound down. They were all there in the front part of the house, in the drawing room, with the shutters half-closed. Whispering. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. The dining room, by contrast, gave onto the back porch, where there was plenty of light. La Quilda was with her family, downstairs on the first floor, and Felipe said that they had used their mattresses to cover the windows.

The rumor is the Committee members have left town, they said.

When they went outside they could still hear some cannons firing in the distance, some random shots. They’d opened the windows wide, laughing and crying, embracing one another, and out in the street they shouted and sang and everybody raised their arms, ran, pushing and shoving, running after the soldiers toward the plaza. The soldiers were tall and they walked very quickly, with blanket rolls, soft rope-soled shoes, and cooking gear hanging from straps, a flood of rifles, and the slow, measured rocking of their elbows. La Quilda caught Ramona in her arms and Ramona began to cry, too, but no one paid her any mind. There were tons of things scattered everywhere, old clothes, books, crockery shards, and the school building was deserted with straw strewn about the floor. Nor was there anyone to be found in the militia headquarters, where Felipe and Padritus scrounged up some tins of sardines and condensed milk, and in an abandoned car in the yard they found a pair of binoculars. At the fork in the road, a column of brown trucks followed the highway, leaving the town behind. Mira los moritos, they said. There go the Moros.

Felipe was also marching. And Padritus. Really quite well, said Papa. They were drilling on the soccer field, with wooden rifles, and at last they all marched in red berets and blue shirts. Behind the soccer field was a line of bare gray poplars without leaves. Really quite well. The chubby sergeant was barking orders at them, and Papa went to see him in the mornings and they chatted sitting out in the sun, in the yard outside the militia headquarters. The garden was spacious and damp, labyrinthine, and the branches of the shrubbery formed a sort of shady cote over the dark smooth ground.

This hand grenade is a bomb.

Pere Pecats was killed by a bomb. There had been many deaths. There were stories, a little boy twisting up a fuse or playing with some ammunition or pointing a pistol at another one or fiddling with a grenade, etcetera. The hiding place was underneath the steps in the orchard where there were two bayonets, a rifle without a bolt, a Russian cap, a helmet with a bullet hole, a gas mask, gleaming artillery shells, and especially, bullets, bullets for pistols, for rifles, for machine guns. The town children also had their own and they’d had to dig trenches. People said they went hunting toads, they’d fill them with gunpowder and blow them up. Felipe had learned to remove the powder from the rifle shells. Blowing up fuses in the Valley of the Riders of the Purple Sage was more fun than picking cabbages and beets for Pere Pecats.

A lot more fun. But raw beets tasted very good, eaten in bites, a little prickly, very juicy. They pulled them up from alongside the road at the edge of the field, fat and pale like bacon, and waving them over their heads, Felipe calling: Pere Pecats! Pere Pecats! Or he ran ahead through the winding rows of cabbages, mature and densely whorled, all of them calling Pere Pecats. And Pere Pecats came out shouting and swearing, but he was twisted and hunched over and couldn’t run. In other gardens you had to post a lookout; Padritus and Felipe climbed the trees, and Ramona gathered pears and apples in her skirt. Chestnuts could be carried in hand baskets, but you had to hide them underneath mushrooms picked in the woods. La Pilate and Nieves would thread the strawberries on really fine blades of grass so that when they ate a whole string of them together they tasted more delicious. The water at the falls shone in the sun and Pilate took off her shoes and waded along the bank. Felipe fished for crabs with a butterfly net. Nieves wasn’t there. The stones were slippery, and in the quiet pool the water floated still over a bottom carpeted thick with brownish leaves. At dusk those still pools were frightening, the water opaque. Pilate was going to the militia dance.

Pilate whistled furtively to Padritus, and to Nieves and Felipe and Lalo. At night.

The light bulb glowed dimly, reflected in the window glass, isolated and radiant beneath its opalescent platter. El Mon had brought two squirrels and a skinned rabbit; he was a large, red-haired man, with a goiter. La Quilda bent over the hearth, black and big-nosed as a witch. Papa said that was no rabbit. It’s a fox, he said. He traded some soap for a hen from a woman who came with La Quilda. The woman haggled, saying the soap was not very foamy. She pulled the hen out of a basket, by its feet, but it had a fine-looking head; she laid it on her forearm caressing it, all puffed up like a feather duster, furled crest, furious eye. The kitchen gave onto the porch and the fields were covered in snow. La Quilda sank her shears into the hen’s body, she singed the feathers, laughing; she felt around in the entrails until pulling out a yellow, nubbly, clustered, botryoidal lump of flesh. There was also the decapitated duck staggering round the kitchen, silhouetted against the reddish black of the hearth.

La Quilda came upstairs to help Nieves when she had to butcher some animal. She lived downstairs, on the ground floor. She came heavily dressed, and when a package of food arrived she ate the thickest slab of ham. El Mon was her sweetheart, el Mon-Jamón; he had a rifle and a balaclava.

Snow. They walked obstinately, small and red, with chilblains, their necks retracted, shoulders stiffly squeezed together, hands in pockets, scarves hanging down their backs, socks slipping loose down their calves. The schoolhouse was alongside the road, and Felipe had to pass by the house of Señor Daunis. Señor Daunis was really skinny and he wore a long overcoat, cinched tight, with the lapels turned up. He was tubercular and you had to keep away from him. From Pere Pecats, too; Padritus said that Pere Pecats threw a stone at him, in the plaza. He often went to the bar. He cursed at the children and threatened them with his fist. He talked to himself and limped, and everybody teased him.

Señor Daunis stayed hidden and he managed to avoid being seen by the Committee members. Like the priest who lived above the tobacco shop and the two nuns from Can Vidal. Papa said that in Barcelona they wanted to shoot him because he attended Mass and he owned a factory. He had many kids of his own that nobody wanted to play with, because they had tuberculosis, and they were often very hungry. He was a widower. They said that the river had frozen over.

The divine Mozart, said Aunt Paquita.

And Ramona put on a record. She was seated on the wicker sofa, next to the gramophone, swaying her legs. Aunt Paquita wondered what that pain could be. She came over at night, to listen to the radio, sometimes accompanied by Miss Lourdes, blonde and thin, with plucked, painted-on eyebrows. They were studying a Michelin road map, tracing along with their fingers, taking off their eyeglasses, hunched over the map. They were chatting: the Reds, checkpoints, avenues, the jail, in disguise, devoutly Catholic, words spoken in undertones. A table lamp topped by a shade with amber flecks. Let your cousin sit in the rocking chair, she said.

Grandfather wasn’t listening to the radio. He was still at the table eating, methodically, indifferent as a cactus, as a lichen-furred stone. Grandmother, on the other hand, was moving about, helping; she was wearing a flowered dress, black and white. They got off the bus, in the plaza, and they walked together slowly, arm in arm: Grandfather came out of his room in his pajamas, his face creased by the pillow, his eyes squinting, his hair white and tousled, clearing his throat. For dessert there was watermelon, enormous slices of red watermelon, and grandfather spat the black seeds out onto his plate, one by one. The dining room was fresh, luxuriant with plants, the shadows of the leaves quivering on the ceiling. Ramona danced in the parlor and everyone applauded. She wound up the gramophone, put on a record and danced. Dance with Ramona, they said.

My lovely darling, said Papa.

The parlor window opened onto the street; the sunlight came in only during the morning. The furniture was dark, wicker, and the records had to be stacked atop the console, neatly ordered. There were many: Ramona, Matonkiki, the Jupiter Symphony, etcetera. The record sleeves were mostly alike; gray paper, with a dark blue drawing of a Negro band playing for several couples.

Does Ramona belong to Ramona?

The Valley of the Riders of the Purple Sage was very green, with rows of poplar trees running down the hillside. Beyond, the gully was choked with brambles and bushes. You crossed over the creek on a footbridge of logs thick with dark moss. Padritus was unbuttoning his fly; he had to drop his pants. Ramona took off her underpants, she lay down in the grass. Look how it gets big and hard, she said. They examined Ramona’s little hole, compared themselves and all that. They took turns masturbating. Lalo, going last.

Following the creek led to the river. There the meadows widened out, smoothly extended, and there were piles of wet logs stripped of their bark. Downstream the river flowed swollen and foamy, and you had to shout over the sound. Pilate was there; she hiked up her skirts and stepped in to wet her feet in the shallows. Cold, cascading waters, of melted snow. The slow quiet stretches lay further down. The water sounded throughout the valley and the sun shone resplendently on the dew, oh my dew. The slopes were covered with beech trees, and higher up, above the shadowy fern-covered slopes, on the talus scree slopes, the mountain peaks stood out, sharp, naked. Crabs eat the dead.

Pilate was ironing on an ironing board set up in the kitchen, in Aunt Paquita’s house. She was singing absentmindedly to herself, sometimes answering, wondering aloud. Soñar dientes, muerte de parientes, she said. Soñar muelas, muerte de abuela. Teeth gnashing, cousins passing. Molars grinding, grandma dying. She brushed on rouge, singing softly to herself, she curled her hair, daubed on eye shadow, lipstick, the butterfly blossomed from the chrysalis. She danced in the militia men’s house. Nieves had a sweetheart and didn’t go. The music could be heard from out in the street, but to see them you had to go into the dark garden, lie in wait in the hedges, crawl through; the iron gate was open. They were dancing in a brightly lit room, with crystal chandeliers, and some couples were leaning over the railing, shouting and laughing, jostling one another. Thinking about your desires I’m going to lose my mind; it takes my breath away. Ramona stumbled, dazzled by the windows.

Felipe spoke with one of them. The day was cold with