A few decades ago, I put the
following challenge to someone who at the time was kind of very close: to move to a
small village and find out whether they would instantly accept you. She never
did, of course. It can never be easy to move into a rural setting and find your place
among the people who have lived there for generations. This is the challenge
the narrator of La casa de foc faces in a place called El Sallent, which
is actually a real hamlet in the middle of La Garrotxa, a Catalan district west
of Girona. The man in question is a teacher in charge of the children of
immigrants at a high school. He has recently been divorced and comes to El
Sallent hoping to find peace and move forward.
Few days after moving into a seemingly
scorpion-riddled house, the narrator meets Jordi from Can Sol, water-diviner by
trade, who is both respected and feared in the area. The narrator, who teaches Catalan
for Beginners at the nearest school, is basically commanded to help steer Jordi’s
granddaughter, Mar, towards better academic performance and more self-esteem.
There is a third member of the family, Mar’s mother Carmina, whose tragic
personal history is slowly revealed.
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| Welcome to El Sallent, Mau! |
In an attempt to make the place
his own, Mau (the nickname he is given by the locals, after the name of the mas
he has rented) refurbishes and renovates the building. The novel skilfully
explores how the relationship between Mau and Jordi, Mau and Mar, and Mau and
Carmina, grows in their idiosyncratic ways. The three characters are fully
developed, giving the reader a wonderful insight into their fears, their flaws,
what makes them anxious and what sends them into despair.
Yet it is the genuine, frank and
sometimes brazen conversations Mau has with Jordi that he’s remembering the
most; while getting Mau to know the natural and geological marvels of the
region, Jordi becomes Mau’s confidante. Some sort of authentic friendship takes
place under a cloud of uncertainty: local gossip (or slander?) has it that the
fire where Mar’s father died together with another young couple was
deliberately lit. Jordi always edges around his responsibility in the matter.
The novel begins with the news of
Jordi’s death on 8 March 2014. The narrator quotes the chaplain who is to conduct
the funeral: “The dead are like our memories: they are nowhere but everyone
needs them so they can live.” (p. 15, my translation) And so begins his
remembrance of an enigmatic person who became more than a friend.
The extraordinary beauty of Serés’
novel is how he portrays life in a Catalan village, the assorted instances of quirkiness
of its inhabitants, how they help and also interfere with the newcomer’s adaptation
to the place and how they push him into a lengthy wave of reflective self-probing
throughout the pages.
There are many worthy passages in
this book, some of them hiding genuine meditations on the art of storytelling: “Rather
than shadow-play, this is about knowing how far light can go, this light that shines
upon a primary layer of the world and of things, an extremely fine layer it
cannot pierce through. A few microns below, beneath the surface, darkness is
absolute. We find it hard to accept because it is almost incomprehensible, that
other than what we are able to see when there is light, the rest of matter inhabits
the darkness. Save for the little history we know how to explain, the remainder
of time and stories forever sleeps in total obscurity.” (p. 245, my
translation)
Apart from the Can Sol family and
Mau, there are in La casa del foc many secondary characters who provide
a rich background social tapestry and the numerous social issues that affect this
rural area of Catalonia: marihuana crops and dealing, migration, gentrification,
unemployment, to name but a few. There is also the mystery of water-divining
and how such a gift or skill is transmitted between generations. Mau cannot understand
how Mar, quite late on a gloomy evening, finds a little boy who has become lost
in the woods near the village, while he clumsily stumbles once and again on the
hillsides: “What do we do with those things we cannot explain? With those
realities we need to touch in order to believe them, I mean. I know not how to explain
it without feeling I will be harshly judged by the self who knows of scientific
certainties and who looks askance at the other self who states he put his
finger in the wound.” (p. 332, my translation)
An excellent book that has not been translated into English yet. Seres’ highly entertaining Contes russos was soon translated (as Russian Tales by Anastasia Maximova and Peter Bush in 2013). Let’s hope La casa del foc can also reach the English-language market.
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