Vicent Usó's Les veus i la boira: A Review

Vicent Usó, Les veus i la boira (Alzira: Bromera, 2015). 352 pages.

The group of islets known as Les Columbretes between the eastern Valencian coast and the Balearic Islands, together with the beachside town of Peníscola, are the two main settings for this enticing novel by Vicent Usó. The title [The Voices and the Mist] is not only a veiled reference to the novel’s structure but also to the way dreadful stories of treason and murder are often hidden behind the mists of time, with only human voices being able, sooner or later, to bring them back to us in the present.

Panoramic view of the Columbretes. Photograph by JavierValencia2005.

Young journalist Mateu Sequeral, comes across a family mystery going back to the decades after the Spanish Civil War. In 1972 his father, Bernat Sequeral, found to his astonishment that the coffin where he had always thought contained his mother’s remains was empty. How was this possible? Who had been lying to him for so many years?

Unheeding many warnings and even threats, Mateu continues to investigate. There are many more secrets just waiting to be upturned like stones, the ugly faces of meanness, hatred and crime revealed. The journalist compiles a wide range of  testimonies, some of them as interviews, others as unsent or indeed mailed letters, yet also manuscripts and newspaper clippings. The mix is at times dizzying and mystifying, as Usó chooses to intermingle them without apparently any rhyme or reason. But a reason there is indeed.

"Have you heard about the legendary treasure? Every sailor and fisherman would talk about it in those days. There were those who would joke about it, but some did take it very seriously and believed it and even dreamt of finding it. Corball was one of the latter. When he was ashore he would scrutinise the maps of the island and would look up in ancient books and talk to all sorts of people. He always carried a folder replete with papers and, as soon as he was able, he would jump in a rowboat and started exploring the many caves he could find. It didn't matter to him whether they were on the big island or Ferrera islet or Foradada. He even went to Carallot and explored it. He had explored all of those caves. Each and every one of them. But he never found anything at all." (p. 124, my translation).
The Lighthouse on Illa Grossa. Photograph by JavierValencia2005.

Usó has created a jigsaw puzzle with many details and information. This might be somewhat demanding for a less discerning reader, but as the novel keeps piling up detail upon detail and anecdote upon anecdote, the plot keeps you intrigued, wanting to know more and, particularly, why.

What at first sight might look like a maze is not. Usó worked on this novel for close to ten years; the order in which every chapter and fragment has been set is clearly deliberate. Every step of the way, even when it takes you back to the 1930s and the dark days of the Civil War and the disgraceful attack on the POUM (so aptly narrated by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia), is moving you forward, towards an ending, even though not a one hundred percent closed one.

Another captivating aspect of the book lies in the wealth of voices it displays. Usó endows each of his characters with regional or local idioms and sayings. The many dialects and idiolects of the Catalan language are on show, and the reader is thankful for it. The only objection that could be raised has to do with the newspaper clippings, which despite being from the Francoist era, are written in Catalan. This certainly weakens the verisimilitude of the story: no newspaper in 1962 would have been allowed to be published in Catalan. Some progress has been made, no doubt, since then.

Les veus i la boira includes some hair-raising episodes, like the summary executions carried out by the Falangists when they entered Peníscola, or the ghastly reprisals against family members of their enemies.

"... when Franco's troops broke the Republican lines and reached the seaside, the rebellious army units entered Peníscola accompanied by Falangist squads, their eyes burning with hatred. Among them was Jaume Sequeral. The first thing they did was gather all of us who had shown support, as they said, for defending the Republic. They put us all in the municipal jail, and a few days later they tried us all. All of us together. The charges were simply based on the kind of rhetoric full of platitudes: in their view, it had been us who were seditious, traitors, criminals. We were to blame for all the calamities in the world. They did not need evidence or testimonies. A simple report that nobody would bother to verify was enough, if their sources suited them. We were not allowed to defend ourselves.What use would it have been? From the very first moment it became clear to me they did not seek justice but revenge. An exemplary punishment that would make everybody aware of what the new rules were: complete submission to their absolute power. The sort of power that has always been there." (p. 114, my translation). A view of Peníscola: photograph by Gordito1869.

The stakes are high when a novelist risks so much by adopting a multi-voice approach to the storytelling. Yet with Usó, it is a win-win scenario. Not only does the narrative progress at a very reasonable pace, keeping the reader engrossed in the story; the constant shift between dialects, idiolects and points of view makes for a vibrant and entertaining novel. The characters come alive through their peculiar idioms and sayings. For example, Colauet, the old seaman who reminisces about his love for teenager Caterina Montaner while recounting the tobacco smuggling operations in the archipelago.

This is a good, aptly told and competently constructed story, a rare find. Given its many linguistic nuances and the various dialectal varieties it offers, it is definitely a great challenge for a potential translation into any language, too. Quite commendable.

Vicent Usó's La mà de ningú: A Review

Vicent Usó, La mà de ningú (Barcelona: Proa, 2011). 237 pages.

On occasions you feel like finding a book that simply fulfills its purpose as entertainment, a book that makes you enjoy the time you spend reading it, a book that frees you from the need to delve into philosophical or aesthetic issues. For many readers such an ideal is represented by the thriller. At the end of the day, all the reader needs to do is not to lose track of the plot and its threads. If the author is skilled enough and places good enough bait in the hook, the rest is usually, so to speak, a piece of cake.

Yet in La mà de ningú [Nobody’s Hand], Vicent Usó goes even further, for his take on the thriller is one that sets the reader a goal they can consider from various viewpoints and ultimately reach by taking different roads. The novel is made up of six apparently different, autonomous stories. Divided onto eight chapters, seven of those occur over two consecutive days (a Wednesday and a Thursday), while the last one is set on the following Monday. Each of the chapters is named after the key character in the corresponding section of the story.

The first one is André Labarbe, an old farmer who is stuck to his unchangeable habits. On an early morning he finds a hand, severed at the elbow, in the middle if the country track that runs parallel to the motorway. This macabre finding is to change his routine, as he decides to return home to call the police.

However, the next chapters appear to be unrelated to Labarbe’s gruesome discovery of the severed limb. This may put off readers who are accustomed to more simplistic, linear narrative plotlines. My advice, all the same, is to carry on reading: take up Usó’s challenge and find out what it is he is exactly offering you.

The novel is set in France. The set of characters comprises, apart from old Labarbe, a wacky truck driver from Eastern Europe, a Senegalese immigrant who struggles to eke out an existence on the streets of Paris, an estranged housewife fleeing her husband who finds shelter at a castle owned by a wealthy female philanthropist, a young squatter who earns her money juggling on Parisian streets and a rich doctor who lost her wife in a road crash, seemingly preoccupied with looking after their two daughters.

Should I give away any clues about the many events and their type that lead to Labarbe finding the hand that seems to have fallen out of the sky, I would be doing some great disservice to whoever wishes to read the book. I will simply say, thus, that it is a great read, that it has excellent pace, closer to allegretto than vivace, and that Usó polishes his language while being economical when making the portrait of his characters.

The dénouement is surprising because Usó has kept hidden an identity until that very moment. The well-off can easily put on a mask of bonhomie while wielding the power money gives them. But when the truth is out they become bogged down in depravity.

Vicent Usó had published nine novels before La mà de ningú, two of them shortlisted for the Sant Jordi Literary Prize. Read my review (in Spanish) of the also nicely surprising collection Subsól, by a writerly group named Unai Siset, to which Usó contributed a short story. 

I now invite you to read a brief excerpt in English.

André Labarbe

Suppose it was a Thursday. One Thursday in late November just a few years ago, not too many. The sun was not out yet and André Labarbe, 76 years of age, an officially retired farmer and decorated veteran of the Indochina war, felt an uncomfortable tickle in his belly and was suddenly afraid to face the day about to start. Even though he did not look like the type to get easily frightened and that nothing seemed to portend that this day would start in a way different from those that preceded it.  Let us say, therefore, that it was some sort of presentiment.

The thing is that André’s fears were not unwarranted, and in a few more minutes, at exactly eighteen minutes past six in the morning, already the victim of a remarkable upheaval, he was going to bend over double to vomit, by the side of a dusty road, the white coffee and the two pieces of toast his wife, Delphine Sainthuile, housewife and part-time farmer, had so lovingly spread with two layers, one of creamy soft butter underneath, and one on top, a thick flavoursome layer of their homemade tomato jam, the kind you cannot find in shops. But it was still forty-four minutes before that moment, and for the time being the alarm clock had just started to shatter the silence with its daily, rusty and bitter vibration. Like an indecisive snake, the man’s hand crawled from under the flannelette blanket that covered the married couple’s bodies towards the bedside table and, after feeling for it once or twice without success, found the origin of the noise and pressed the lever that put an end to the hammering of the two cracked bells. The silence restored, André lazed about for a while, as it was his habit, and finally turned on the bedside light and carefully got up. First he put down his legs on the floor, and then he pushed himself up on his elbows to avoid placing the strain of the manoeuvre on his back. He washed his face with cold water, as he had always done, and reacted to its biting contrast with noisy spasms, not realising that every morning he sprayed the mirror, the basin and the floor, but those were details he had never noticed before, and Delphine, probably too indulgent with him, had never thought it necessary to point them out to him. After making sure he had totally washed the sleep out of his eyes, he returned to the now empty bedroom, still feeling an immense weight behind his eyelids, and slowly began putting on the clothes that Delphine had purposely left on the radiator, so that he could feel the nice warmth of the fabric on his skin. At one end of the dresser, beneath the frame from which the pale faces of his two grandchildren watched him, was the letter he did not quite know how to assimilate. He looked at it for a second, but did not grab it. He knew what it said by heart, having read it and reread it scores of times, but hesitated to make a decision, and his indecision caused him to feel a tickle of unease in his belly. He tightened his belt and then put on his dark green overalls.

The lights were on when he went into the kitchen. He said good morning, turned on the radio to listen to the news and sat down to eat the breakfast ever-so-kind Delphine was already preparing for him. He took notice of her slowness, the vacillations that now affected his wife’s hands, and thought about how the years had already begun to be considerably onerous for her, although fortunately old age had not yet altered their loving devotion for each other and the reciprocal affection they had observed for who knows how long. A lifetime, so to speak. The idea comforted him, and he was even able to overcome the cramps still rumbling in his stomach. He heeded the radio announcer, who was updating details about a police investigation following a raid two days before on a Paris-based mafia network dedicated to the human trafficking of Sub-Saharan women, who, having being recruited by the criminals in a range of ways, were being forced into prostitution on the Parisian streets and brothels all over the country. The number of those arrested exceeded seventy, including pimps and prostitutes, claimed the announcer –whose voice was remarkably firm and clear so early in the morning– but the police were investigating whether one of the ringleaders had vanished thanks to an internal leak. Oblivious to any kind of self-criticism, a Parisian politician made the most of the report by declaring in his baritone voice that the fight against human trafficking was one of the priorities the government had set its sights on, and they would not spare any effort. When he finished his coffee, André went to the radio and turned it off, which did not give an NGO representative the chance to ask a (markedly rhetorical) question about what sort of fate would await those women captured by the officers, who apparently saw no distinction between a prostitute and a criminal. While his wife took the plate and the cutlery and began washing up, André returned to their bedroom. He opened a drawer in the bedside table, grabbed his wallet, his keys and a clean handkerchief, his initials elegantly embroidered in gold on a corner, and he distributed the lot in the many pockets of his overalls. When he was about to go out, he retraced his steps and stretched his hand to seize the letter, but his fingertips remained for a second on the soft white paper, without clasping it. He observed the happiness of the two children in the photograph and let his finger slide down the glass, fantasising about caressing their gentle, soft cheeks. He lifted the frame with care, took the envelope and put it in his pocket.