Nada Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Part Two

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Part Three

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Carmen Laforet was born in Barcelona in 1921, but her family moved to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands when she was two years old. Like Andrea, the heroine of her novel, she returned to Barcelona to study literature and philosophy when she was eighteen. She was only twenty-three when Nada, her first novel, won the prestigious Premio Nadal in 1944. She subsequently moved to Madrid. Acclaimed as the great hope of the post-war Spanish literature, she wrote several other well-received novels and short stories. She died in Madrid in 2004.

  Edith Grossman is the distinguished translator of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis and Mayra Montero, among many other Spanish and Latin American writers. Her translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published to great acclaim in 2003. She is the recipient of two American Literary Translators Association Translator of the Year awards, and the PEN Manheim Medal for Translation, 2006.

  To my friends Linka Babecka de Borrell

  and the painter Pedro Borrell.

  Nada

  Carmen Laforet

  Translated From The Spanish by Edith Grossman

  With an Introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa

  NADA

  (Fragment)

  Sometimes a bitter taste,

  A foul smell, a strange

  Light, a discordant tone,

  A disinterested touch

  Come to our five senses

  Like fixed realities

  And they seem to us to be

  The unsuspected truth …

  J. R. J.

  INTRODUCTION

  Until I came to Spain in 1958, I don’t think I had read any contemporary Spanish writers living in the Iberian Peninsula because of a prejudice as widespread in the Latin America of those years as it was unjust: everything published over there reeked of fustiness, sacristy, and Francoism. Which is why I didn’t know until now the tender, asphyxiating story of Andrea, the small-town adolescent who arrives, full of hopes, in the greyish Barcelona of the early 1940s to study literature, a story that Carmen Laforet narrates in prose both exalted and icy, in which what is unspoken is more important than what is said, keeping the reader of the novel submerged in indescribable anguish from beginning to end. In this detailed autopsy of a girl imprisoned in a hungry, half-crazed family on Calle de Aribau, there is not the slightest political allusion except, perhaps, a passing reference to churches burned during the Civil War. And yet, politics weighs on the entire story like an ominous silence, like a spreading cancer that devours and destroys everything: the university purged of life and fresh air, the bourgeois families calcified in good manners and visceral putrefaction, the confused youngsters who don’t know what to do or where to look to escape the rarefied atmosphere in which they languish from boredom, privations, prejudices, fears, provincialism, and a limitless confusion.

  With admirable mastery, on the basis of sketchy anecdotal notes and very brief descriptive touches, an overwhelmingly depressing landscape emerges that appears to be a conspiracy of the entire universe to frustrate Andrea and keep her, and almost everyone around her, from being happy.

  In the world of Nada – the unsurpassable title says everything about the novel and the city where it takes place – there are only the rich and the poor, and as in any third-world country, the middle class is a thin, shrinking membrane and, like Andrea’s family, has half its being sunk into that plebeian jumble where workers, beggars, vagabonds, the unemployed, the marginalised commingle, a world that horrifies the middle class and that it tries to keep at bay by means of fierce prejudices and delirious fantasies. Nothing exists beyond the small larval world that surrounds the characters; even the little bohemian enclave that Andrea sometimes visits, created in the old district by young painters who would like to be rebellious, insolent, and modern but don’t know how, is parochial and something of a caricature.

  But it is, above all, in the area of love and sex where the characters in Nada seem to live outside reality in a mysterious galaxy in which desires do not exist or have been repressed and channelled into compensatory activities. If in almost every aspect of life the world of the novel reveals an inhumanly prudish morality that alienates men and women and impoverishes them, it is in the area of sexuality that the distortion reaches incredible proportions and, in many cases, is surely the hidden explanation of the neuroses, the bitterness, the uneasiness, the vital disquiet of which almost all the characters are victims, including Ena, the vivacious and emancipated friend whom Andrea admires and envies.

  Did Carmen Laforet, a girl in her twenties when she wrote her first novel, suspect that in it she portrayed, implacably and lucidly, a society brutalised by lack of freedom, and by censorship, prejudices, hypocrisy, and isolation, and that in the story of her poignant creation, Andrea, the ingenuous girl who is scandalised when ‘a kiss is stolen’ from her, she exemplified a case of desperate, heroic resistance to oppression? Perhaps not, perhaps all of that was the result, as so often happens in good novels, of intuition, divination, and the authenticity with which she tried, as she wrote, to capture an elusive, dangerous truth that could be expressed only in the labyrinths and symbols of fiction. She achieved this, and half a century after it was published, her beautiful, terrible novel still lives.

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  PART ONE

  I

  BECAUSE OF LAST-MINUTE difficulties in buying tickets, I arrived in Barcelona at midnight on a train different from the one I had announced, and nobody was waiting for me.

  It was the first time I had travelled alone, but I wasn’t frightened; on the contrary, this profound freedom at night seemed like an agreeable and exciting adventure to me. Blood was beginning to circulate in my stiff legs after the long, tedious trip, and with an astonished smile I looked around at the huge Francia station and the groups forming of those who were waiting for the express and those of us who had arrived three hours late.

  The special smell, the loud noise of the crowd, the invariably sad lights held great charm for me, since all my impressions were enveloped in the wonder of having come, at last, to a big city, adored in my daydreams because it was unknown.

  I began to follow – a drop in the current – the human mass that, loaded down with suitcases, was hurrying towards the exit. My luggage consisted of a large case, extremely heavy because it was packed full of books, which I carried myself with all the strength of my youth and eager anticipation.

  A sea breeze, heavy and cool, entered my lungs along with my first confused impression of the city: a mass of sleeping houses, of closed establishments, of streetlights like drunken sentinels of solitude.

  Heavy laboured breathing came with the whispering of dawn. Close by, behind me, facing the mysterious narrow streets that lead to the Borne, above my excited heart, was the ocean.

 
I must have seemed a strange figure with my smiling face and my old coat blown by the wind and whipping around my legs as I defended my suitcase, distrustful of the obsequious ‘porters’.

  I remember that in a very few minutes I was alone on the broad pavement because people ran to catch one of the few taxis or struggled to crowd onto the tram.

  One of those old horse-drawn carriages that have reappeared since the war stopped in front of me, and I took it without thinking twice, arousing the envy of a desperate man who raced after it, waving his hat.

  That night I rode in the dilapidated vehicle along wide deserted streets and crossed the heart of the city, full of light at all hours, just as I wanted it to be, on a trip that to me seemed short and charged with beauty.

  The carriage circled the university plaza, and I remember that the beautiful building moved me as if it were a solemn gesture of welcome.

  We rode down Calle de Aribau, where my relatives lived, its plane trees full of dense green that October, and its silence vivid with the respiration of a thousand souls behind darkened balconies. The carriage wheels raised a wake of noise that reverberated in my brain. Suddenly I felt the entire contraption creaking and swaying. Then it was motionless.

  ‘Here it is,’ said the driver.

  I looked up at the house where we had stopped. Rows of identical balconies with their dark wrought iron, keeping the secrets of the apartments. I looked at them and couldn’t guess the ones where I’d be looking out from now on. With a somewhat tremulous hand I gave a few coins to the night watchman, and when he closed the building door behind me, with a great rattling of wrought iron and glass, I began to climb the stairs very slowly, carrying my suitcase.

  Everything began to be unfamiliar in my imagination; the narrow, worn mosaic steps, lit by an electric light, found no place in my memory.

  In front of the door to the flat I was overcome by a sudden fear of waking those people, my relatives who were, after all, strangers to me, and I hesitated for a while before I gave the bell a timid ring that no one responded to. My heart began to beat faster, and I rang the bell again. I heard a quavering voice:

  ‘Coming! Coming!’

  Shuffling feet and clumsy hands sliding bolts open.

  Then it all seemed like a nightmare.

  In front of me was a foyer illuminated by a single weak light bulb in one of the arms of the magnificent lamp, dirty with cobwebs, that hung from the ceiling. A dark background of articles of furniture piled one on top of the other as if the household were in the middle of moving. And in the foreground the black-white blotch of a decrepit little old woman in a nightgown, a shawl thrown around her shoulders. I wanted to believe I’d come to the wrong flat, but the good-natured old woman wore a smile of such sweet kindness that I was certain she was my grandmother.

  ‘Is that you, Gloria?’ she said in a whisper.

  I shook my head, incapable of speaking, but she couldn’t see me in the gloom.

  ‘Come in, come in, my child. What are you doing there? My God! I hope Angustias doesn’t find out you’ve come home at this hour!’

  Intrigued, I dragged in my suitcase and closed the door behind me. Then the poor old woman began to stammer something, disconcerted.

  ‘Don’t you know me, grandmother? I’m Andrea.’

  ‘Andrea?’

  She hesitated. She was making an effort to remember. It was pitiful.

  ‘Yes, dear, your granddaughter … I couldn’t get here this morning the way I’d written.’

  The old woman still couldn’t understand very much, and then through one of the doors to the foyer came a tall, skinny man in pyjamas who took charge of the situation. This was Juan, one of my uncles. His face was full of hollows, like a skull in the light of the single bulb in the lamp.

  As soon as he patted me on the shoulder and called me niece, my grandmother threw her arms around my neck, her light-coloured eyes full of tears, saying ‘poor thing’ over and over again …

  There was something agonising in the entire scene, and in the flat the heat was suffocating, as if the air were stagnant and rotting. When I looked up I saw that several ghostly women had appeared. I almost felt my skin crawl when I caught a glimpse of one of them in a black dress that had the look of a nightgown. Everything about that woman seemed awful, wretched, even the greenish teeth she showed when she smiled at me. A dog followed her, yawning noisily, and the animal was also black, like an extension of her mourning. Then they told me she was the maid, but no other creature has ever made a more disagreeable impression on me.

  Behind Uncle Juan appeared another woman who was thin and young, her dishevelled reddish hair falling over her sharp white face and the languor of the sheets draped around her, which increased the painful impression made by the group.

  I was still standing, feeling my grandmother’s head on my shoulder, held by her embrace, and all those figures seemed equally elongated and sombre. Elongated, quiet, and sad, like the lights at a village wake.

  ‘All right, that’s enough, Mamá, that’s enough,’ said a dry, resentful-sounding voice.

  Then I realised there was yet another woman behind me. I felt a hand on my shoulder and another at my chin. I’m tall, but my Aunt Angustias was taller, and she obliged me to look at her like that. Her expression revealed a certain contempt. She had greying hair that fell to her shoulders and a certain beauty in her dark, narrow face.

  ‘You really kept me waiting this morning, my girl! … How could I imagine that you’d arrive in the middle of the night?’

  She’d let go of my chin and stood in front of me with all the height of her white nightgown and blue robe.

  ‘Lord, Lord, how upsetting! A child like this, alone …’

  I heard Juan grumble.

  ‘Now Angustias is ruining everything, the witch!’

  Angustias appeared not to hear him.

  ‘All right, you must be tired. Antonia,’ – and she turned to the woman enveloped in black – ‘you have to prepare a bed for the señorita.’

  I was tired, and besides, at that moment I felt horribly dirty. Those people moving around or looking at me in an atmosphere darkened by an accumulation of things crowded together, seemed to have burdened me with all the trip’s heat and soot that I’d forgotten about earlier. And I desperately wanted a breath of fresh air.

  I observed that the dishevelled woman, stupefied by sleep, smiled as she looked at me, and also looked at my suitcase with the same smile. She obliged me to look in that direction, and my travelling companion seemed somewhat touching in its small-town helplessness. Drab and tied with rope, it sat beside me, the centre of that strange meeting.

  Juan approached me:

  ‘Andrea, don’t you know my wife?’

  And he pushed at the shoulders of the woman with uncombed hair.

  ‘My name’s Gloria,’ she said.

  I saw that my grandmother was looking at us with a worried smile.

  ‘Bah, bah! … what do you mean by shaking hands? You have to embrace, girls … that’s right, that’s right!’

  Gloria whispered in my ear:

  ‘Are you scared?’

  And then I almost was, because I saw Juan making nervous faces, biting the inside of his cheeks. He was trying to smile.

  Aunt Angustias came back, full of authority.

  ‘Let’s go! Everybody get to sleep, it’s late.’

  ‘I need to get washed,’ I said.

  ‘What? Talk louder! Get washed?’

  Her eyes opened wide with astonishment. Angustias’ eyes and everybody else’s.

  ‘There’s no hot water here,’ Angustias said finally.

  ‘It doesn’t matter …’

  ‘You’d dare to take a shower this late?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes.’

  What a relief the icy water was on my body! What a relief to be away from the stares of those extraordinary beings! I thought that in this house the bathroom was never used. In the tarnished mirror over the sink – wh
at wan, greenish lights there were everywhere in the house! – was the reflection of the low ceiling covered with cobwebs, and of my own body in the brilliant threads of water, trying not to touch the dirty walls, standing on tiptoe in the grimy porcelain tub.

  That bathroom seemed like a witches’ house. The stained walls had traces of hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair. Everywhere the scaling walls opened their toothless mouths oozing dampness. Over the mirror, because it didn’t fit anywhere else, they’d hung a macabre still-life of pale bream and onions against a black background. Madness smiled from the bent taps.

  I began to see strange things, like someone intoxicated. Abruptly I turned off the shower, that crystalline, protective magic spell, and was left alone in the midst of the filthiness of things.

  I don’t know how I managed to sleep that night. In the room they gave me was a grand piano, its keys uncovered. A number of gilt mirrors with candelabra attached – some of them very valuable – on the walls. A Chinese desk, paintings, ill-assorted furniture. It looked like the attic of an abandoned palace; it was, as I later found out, the living room.

  In the centre, like a grave mound surrounded by mourners – that double row of disembowelled easy chairs – a divan covered by a black blanket, where I was to sleep. They had placed a candle on the piano because there were no light bulbs in the large chandelier.

  Angustias took her leave of me by making the sign of the cross on my forehead, and my grandmother embraced me tenderly. I felt her heart beating like a little animal against my chest.

  ‘If you wake up and are afraid, call me, my child,’ she said in her tremulous little voice.

  And then, in a mysterious whisper into my ear:

  ‘I never sleep, child, I’m always doing something in the house at night. I never, ever sleep.’

  Finally they left, leaving me with the shadows of furniture that the candlelight exaggerated and filled with quivering, profound life. The stench noticeable throughout the house came into the room in a stronger gust. It was the stink of cat. I felt that I was suffocating, and in a dangerous alpinist feat I climbed onto the back of a chair to open a door I could see between dusty velvet curtains. I accomplished my aim to the extent the furniture would allow and saw that the door led to one of those open balconies that give so much light to houses in Barcelona. Three stars were trembling in the soft blackness overhead, and when I saw them I felt a sudden desire to cry, as if I were seeing old friends, encountered unexpectedly.