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.
