A Film (3000 Meters) Read online

  PRAISE FOR VÍCTOR CATALÀ

  “[I]n its evocation of landscape and myth, as well as its incipient feminism, Solitude prefigures the work of several later and better-known British women writers. Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, and Jeanette Winterson all come immediately to mind.”

  —The New York Times

  “While Caterina Albert i Paradis had little choice but to use a male pseudonym, she wrote Solitude from an intensely feminine viewpoint, delving deeply into the thoughts and emotions of a young woman caught by circumstance. It has been called ‘the most important Catalan novel to appear before the Spanish Civil War,’ when Franco took power and outlawed the Catalan language for more than thirty-five years. To find it translated into English and in print may be more remarkable still.”

  —Erica Bauermeister, author of 500 Great Books by Women

  “It is not surprising that [Solitude] has been hailed as a Catalan classic.”

  ——The Modern Novel

  ALSO BY VÍCTOR CATALÀ

  Solitude

  Translator’s Note

  God Be With You

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Sixth and Final Part

  Epilogue

  Translator’s Note

  What’s in a name?

  From the start, Víctor Català had to confront the prejudices inspired by the machismo and clericalism rife in Catalan society. In 1898, at the age of twenty-two, she anonymously submitted a poetic monologue, La Infanticida, to a literary competition in the town of Olot. The work won a prize, but the story of a mother killing her baby shocked the Catholics of Olot, and they were even more appalled when the author was revealed to be a woman, Caterina Albert. As a result of the furore, Albert decided to adopt the literary pseudonym Víctor Català, which she would use throughout her life, though it was soon public knowledge that the name belonged to Caterina Albert.

  Ramon Nonat Ventura, A Film’s central character, is hugely symbolic, and the reference would have immediately been recognized by Catalan readers in 1918. Sant Ramon Nonat was a Catalan saint born between 1200 and 1204, in the village of Portell in the region of Urgell. There are differing stories about Nonat, Catholic and non-Catholic. He was born via a Caesarean section possibly carried out by the count who fathered him; his mother, the daughter of a local farmer, died as a result. He was thus called “Nonat,” or “not born.” His father saw to his bastard son’s education, and he eventually worked for the Mercedarian Order in Barcelona helping to free Christians being held in Moorish prisons in Arab parts of Spain and North Africa. He was himself captured; his jailers made holes in his lips by using red-hot skewers and padlocked his mouth because he was always pontificating. He was eventually made a saint in 1657, and became the patron saint of orphans, midwives, victims of gossip, and silence. There are Nonnatus Houses in the UK and USA that are orphanages for children of single mothers. One such house features prominently in the popular BBC TV soap, Call the Midwife, now in its ninth season.

  Nicknames:

  Nonat earns himself the nickname of El Senyoret because he acts posh: a “senyoret” is typically the son of rich parents who doesn’t have to work.

  Maria la Gallinaire, Nonat’s godmother: Maria the Chicken Woman.

  Nas-Ratat, the street-porter: his nose looks as if it’s been nibbled by a rat. Catalan has an adjective “ratat,” meaning just that.

  Paperines, the innkeeper: plastered, implying violence and stupidity, in Barcelonan Catalan slang.

  Nadala, the apprentice seamstress: Christmassy, after Nadal, Catalan for Christmas.

  Xe, the Valencian: a jokey way of referring to Valencians, similar to “che” in Argentina.

  La Pelada, Xe’s girlfriend: someone who is a straight talker, or flat broke.

  The Catalan language is the main language as well as a feature of the narrative—Nonat feels at a disadvantage when speaking Spanish, which he sees as a “foreign” language. Upper-class characters tend to speak in Spanish, and I indicate when they do so. The working-class characters all speak Catalan though it’s flecked with borrowings from Spanish, for example the use of the Spanish “duro” for a five-peseta coin. Víctor Català was opposed to the noucentiste purists who didn’t want this hybrid Catalan to feature in literary fiction. I’ve tried to reflect this hybridity in the translation by retaining Catalan or Spanish lexis according to context, for example pesseta and peseta, or Les Rambles, the Catalan plural of Las Ramblas. This is still an ongoing polemic in Catalan literary circles and in the works of Víctor Català, a pioneer in giving literary space to different registers of her mother tongue, thus living up to her own pseudonym!

  Peter Bush

  God Be With You

  God be with you, my reader! It’s been years since you and I bumped into one another in the helter-skelter of a new book. Circumstances gagged my garrulous pen, and a long pause was opened in our dialogue. If I’m piping up again, it’s not because I have anything very riveting to tell you. My modest heading is proof I have not been overambitious. Besides, it’s not a bad idea to see a movie now and then, when there’s nothing better to do. In the rapid succession of scenes across the blank screen, one relishes the contrast, the beauty of being able to relax; the quantity and extreme nature of the violent acts on display remind you it’s only a tale, and you have no need to probe too deep; the general rule of the scant substance and psychological fetters at work in miming theater; the lethal leaps made beyond the realms of verisimilitude, the many twists and turns, tell you it’s neither an exquisite nor a fully fashioned fantasy, and you’re freed up, for a while, from the torture of straining your eyes in attempt to catch all the threads …

  That says it all, really almost all I need to say, by way of apology. I have made a film, and as an individual I like as much as I can to give everyone their due, when writing; I also like to keep to the specific rules of each genre and not confuse or mix the different terms and conditions. So, dearest reader, if you manage to get over the threshold of this book and start to follow the plot unfolding in its pages, don’t say you weren’t warned, don’t complain about what you find, don’t demand I give you more than I promised, because here and now I simply promised you a film, in all its simplicity, in all its disarray, in all its coincidences, in all its excesses … in a word, all the freedom the genre brings with it.

  The literary value, small or great, you may have kindly granted my previous work is null and void in such an enterprise; it guarantees nothing at all. The novelist on this occasion surrenders his tools to the filmmaker, and that comes with no obligations or puritanical restrictions. Like the comb of a countryman, merely cutting a parting through a thick mop of matted hair, hoping to make a straight, continuous road of it, the novelist’s pen has today tried to steer a smooth, clear path through the entangled virgin wood—woods being always virgin!—of life, of the ups and downs, thick as a head of hair, of the men and women who pullulate on this planet. On both sides, the unexplored, inexhaustible, impenetrable undergrowth endures, but a simple, straight furrow opens up and invites you to survey at leisure its gleaming, untrammeled light, its raw cruelty and elemental disposition, with no malice aforethought or hidden fancies.

  Consistent with the innocence of his aims and accomplishments, the author has serviced his plot with tales stripped of pompous rhetoric, elaborate inflections and subtle reliefs, formal elegance, hidebound purity, dazzling pyrotechnics of the pen, that would have suited him as much as Christ the pair of pistols mentioned by that proverb … No, none of that: each to his own, as we said at the beginning.

  For now, just watch the film, and if you like it, dea
r reader, don’t give yourself or me too many headaches over whatever you may find lacking or superfluous. For both our sakes, let this long, inconsequential sequence of scenes without excess dressing or substance prevail a while and relax your brain; for both our sakes, let it simply provide a small, reinvigorating oasis of calm amid the anxiety-ridden demands of more urgent tasks. And another day will be another day, when, if God grants us life and health, we will make new commitments.

  Au revoir, then, loyal reader. I shake your hands, delighted to have found you anew, after such a long absence, your friend,

  the author

  Barcelona, 2 July, 1919

  Mid-afternoon a blustery north wind whipped the sea into a roiling mass of foam and furiously swept the streets, emptying them of every scrap of trash and grain of sand.

  At twilight the cobblestones, stripped bare by the tramuntana, gleamed like whitened shells in the purple haze and a deafening whistle filled the air.

  Seeing the door bang to and fro, flapping like a flag, and fearing it might shatter, Maria la Gallinaire slammed down the bar, and asked her husband anxiously: “Well, Jepet? Why don’t we eat early and get to bed? There’s nothing doing in this storm and we’ll only waste electricity and catch our death of cold.”

  As usual Jepet thought what Maria said made a lot of sense, and, also as usual when home at that time of night, he went to light the fire.

  Honoring their biblical names, they lived like Joseph and Mary. He worked mooring ships, and the oilskin hanging on the back of the door had been his second skin for over thirty years.

  His leathery face and hands were cracked and gnarled like rocks; his rough, ruddy, stony features seemed sculpted rather than alive, and his short, stubby fingers never altered, never fully uncurled, because they’d lost the ability to make any other movement than the one required to haul mooring timbers up and down beaches.

  Maria was fat, with the reassuring plump folds of a pillow. She’d never tolerated the torture of a corset, and her body’s ample expanses were testament to an easygoing nature. Nonetheless, despite both her size and a flexibility of mind that seemingly kept her burgeoning flesh in check, Maria was a vigorous, organized, hard-working woman.

  In the early days of her marriage to Jepet, she had found it hard to resign herself to the tame, lonely life of a sailor’s spouse, and looked for work to occupy her free time and garner some helpful cash.

  At the time, Jepet was working on a small merchant ship and was often away for days on end, if not weeks. Every morning, the moment the fishermen returned from the sea, Maria ferried dirty nets to the cleaning areas with the jenny and second-hand cart they’d bought, though she reckoned it was small beer and when her husband’s absences lightened her housework load, she went to remote farmhouses to buy eggs or hens, which she then sold in the markets of Girona, generally making a handsome profit.

  Lolling back on the cart’s backrest, holding the reins—for appearance’s sake, because her honest little jenny was never skittish, she sped down lanes and byways, outwardly placid, but inwardly a bundle of energy and enthusiasm.

  Naturally alert and observant, she had the measure of those countrywomen whose husbands gave them little leeway, those who struggled to buy a scarf or a new apron for their marriageable daughter, those desperate for chocolate or other tidbits, and, wheeler-dealer that she was, once she knew the weaknesses of her parish, she skillfully exploited them for gain. Her bag on the cart always contained roasted almonds to tempt one customer, needles and thread needed by another who was too busy to go to town herself, curling irons for a presumptuous farmer’s wife, small loans for the skint or indebted, strange herbs to cure mumps … and, at once up-front and discreet, she plied or encouraged deals that were, naturally, always to her advantage. Those countrywomen—who, when their husbands or neighbors weren’t looking, sold their wares for rock-bottom prices—breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Maria la Gallinaire approaching. In turn, when she espied them from afar coming out alone to the roadside to haggle, she smiled contentedly, convinced she’d not made a wasted journey. And, if that wasn’t enough, she found time to do the washing in her own inimitable style for the grand houses in town.

  Things being thus, it isn’t surprising that in a few years wife and husband had saved a tidy sum between them. They stopped renting and bought a house, small and white like an eggshell; they stopped cultivating the vines of others only to reap a fraction of the fruit, and bought their own; the notary gave them a profit of some three thousand pessetes and they exchanged three or four thousand more for government bonds, from which, every three months, they extracted a small amount, which their legal man—their trusted aide—took to Girona and brought back converted into hard cash.

  When they saw old age was in sight, and Jepet began to feel broken by life at sea, he stopped voyaging and became a man who helped moor and launch boats from beaches, and Maria, who couldn’t leave her husband’s side, gave up her poultry trade, and transported nets and washed more clothes than before. With such an orderly, quiet existence, you’d have thought they were completely happy if it hadn’t been for the but that never fails to show up in the unfolding of earthly life’s rich tapestry and leave its drop of bile in even the most select of hearts. The drop of bile, for our poultry pair, was the fact that there was no sign of children.

  At the height of youth, both had dedicated themselves to making money and, as they had plenty of opportunities to exhaust their energy reserves, they didn’t fuss over their abnormal situation. But when they realized the years had stacked up, their barrenness reared before them like a stretch of wall, destroying the impression of infinity people love to cherish, and emphasizing the way nature had sold them short.

  “Good heavens!” Maria exclaimed sadly one day, when they were calculating their earnings after Jepet returned from a voyage. “Why push ourselves so hard if we don’t know who all the toil is for?”

  And from then on, they could only think of the child that hadn’t come and never would, and miss him sorely.

  That was as far as it went for Jepet; he was a man with little imagination and took things as they came without trying to seek out underlying causes, while Maria was the one to ponder—and ponder she did. Feeling she was strong, healthy, and all there, and knowing of no issues or faults in herself or on her side, she told herself she was free of guilt, and, unawares, deep down, was convinced the issue was with her husband. “By the Holy Virgin! Men are sealed boxes. What does a woman know when she marries, when she takes a man for life? Not a thing, and that’s the truth … Then look how it turns out!” As she went on her rounds, she’d heard many women say: “But these are crosses nobody looks for; they fall from the skies and land where they land … and if it happens to land on you, all you can do is pick yours up and bear it … that’s why you need to keep an eye out on this earth.”

  And Maria took her cross as a levy God imposed on her for the good health and prosperity He had granted, and she complained to nobody, though from then on, without doing so expressly, she adopted a watchful, warmly overbearing tone toward her husband, as if he were a big, irresponsible child, a dimwit son who must be protected and loved even more because he doesn’t have quite as many marbles as the others. And so their intimate married life took that twist. When people noticed, they smiled and used that common expression—“Maria wore the trousers”—but they never suspected the human warmth and generous forgiveness her attitude generated.

  Only, now and then, like a breath of air escaping from a vent, a thwarted mother’s remorse arose from Maria’s heart to her lips, bearing no relation to whatever had been said previously: “When I think about it, I should have kept the child I took to the orphanage …”

  “You’re so right! But who’d have thought … ?” Jepet replied, quite matter-of-fact and meek, never imagining what was going through his wife’s mind.

  And years and years passed like that until that night when that north wind buffeted.

  Th
ey had done what they’d agreed. They prepared supper in next to no time, ate it in a good, affable mood, and, for dessert, said an Our Father for the souls of the dead, and were about to clear the table, when they suddenly heard loud coughing on the other side of the front door, followed by two loud knocks.

  Husband and wife gave a start, and exchanged panic-stricken glances.

  “What on earth is that?” they wondered silently, their eyes wide-open.

  Then all was silent before they heard two more knocks. Maria stood up and strode toward the door.

  “Who goes there?” she bawled brusquely, as if that untimely visit bordered on the insulting.

  “Open your door, I beg you, my good folk …” replied another voice, that was young and modulated, between two further bouts of coughing.

  “Who are you?” repeated Maria, frowning and firm.

  “You will not know me, but I come on behalf of someone who knows you … If you’re frightened, I’ll be off, because it’s grim out here …” the voice retorted impatiently.

  Maria glanced at her husband, all nonplussed at the other end of the table.

  “What shall we do?”

  Jepet was in no state to say yea or nay.

  “Don’t know … You decide …”

  Maria did just that.

  “I’ll open up and we’ll see what … who by the Holy Mother of God it can be … ”

  And without finishing her sentence, Maria lifted the bar, but before she could open the door, it swung violently into her and something devilishly dark and icy flung itself over her, blinding her, making her stagger and lose her wits. The north wind had blasted its way inside, shamelessly sweeping her skirts over her face and top half. When she managed to disentangle herself, she was shocked to see a man standing in front of her, wrapped in a cloak, a beret pulled down over his ears, holding the door steady with his outstretched hand.