When the Planeta Prize – whose 73rd winner will be announced this Tuesday – was even more than just an effective campaign marketingthe name of a woman was repeated twice in her prize list: Concha Alós (Valencia, 1922 – Barcelona, 2011), who won it in 1962 with The dwarves – Verdict annulled because he had subjected him to another sentence – and, now, practically, in 1964 with Bonfires. After the publishing house Le Couteau Suisse has recovered in recent years The dwarves (1962), The red horse (1966) and king of cats (1972), Seix Barral saves what he presents as his best novel, a story which puts on the table questions such as female desire, the independence of women or the lack of communication in marriage.
“Memory is a form of recognition; forgetting, ignorance,” says Llucia Ramis in the prologue. Concha Alós died of Alzheimer’s disease, forgotten by the publishing world, like so many people of her generation; Democratic reconstruction was in a hurry to dissociate itself from the past and establish new values, also literary. His work, however, reveals a resounding and rebellious voice, with subtle lyricism and an austere outlook. The author, from a working-class, Republican family, left her husband, regime-sympathizing journalist Eliseo Feijóo, with whom she lived in Majorca, in 1959 to go to Barcelona with the young Baltasar Porcel. These avatars are recognized in Bonfiresdistributed among its characters.
In Mallorca, in the sixties, two apparently very different women carry their growing frustration like a silent agony: Asunción, a simple teacher, single and cultured, who gives lessons to illiterate immigrants who have arrived from the rest of the country in search of opportunities ; and Sibila, a former model who took advantage of the good Parisian life and married Archibald, a rich businessman but with whom, deep down, she has nothing in common. In seemingly opposite directions, which ultimately arise from the same social pressure, both deal with the relationship with the body and the relationship with men, within the framework of a society which represses their desires.
Asunción, at first glance, may appear to be the type of pioneering and independent woman we would admire today: not only does she dare to live alone, without bowing to male authority, but she devotes her existence to education of those who need it most while occupying their free time with reading. However, in practice, precarity (of all types) cannot be romanticized: Asunción is home to deep poverty, her work provides meager wages, she restrains her appetites and, in general, she feels like “a great mother”. “. A huge incubator” who “took care of everyone and painted all the wounds with mercromine”, even if no one welcomes this “mother” with a hug at home.
Sibila took advantage of everything Asunción is deprived of: the bohemian circle, the game of seduction, material security. But sometimes you live “in a prison full of pillows”: your love for your husband has long since withered, if it ever existed; She lacks incentives to occupy her daily life and her husband, a great reader, perceives her as an “unhappy girl, without culture or curiosity”. […] with enormous confusion within his being, lost and without any intention of finding a way. There is a gulf between “this thin, adventurous, fearful girl he met in Paris” and the narcissistic, lethargic woman she has become.
Body, beauty, sexuality
Both Asunción and Sibila have a strong awareness of the body, the passage of time and the notion of beauty. The former model is now “a greedy woman” […] a little greasy. The teacher takes refuge in herself, because “outside of her everything limps and fails”, but in her room, she looks at herself in the mirror with resignation. We compare it to bees, these “asexual” insects whose only mission is to work. Providing food for others […] Asunción was what she was: a worker bee. For others, the rustling of silks, beds filled with feathers and kisses, what they called pleasure. It would always be “the cat who lies down so that it gets fat and does not run away and the woman who stays seated at the dances”.
One suffers from a marriage in crisis, the other from a not-so-voluntary asceticism (“All her life […] Asunción was desperate for someone to love. The desire to please the male gaze converges with one’s own sexual desire, even if while one represses it, the other indulges; and these choices determine your path. Two parallel scenes illustrate her discomfort through her nightgown: Asunción’s, “in flannel buttoned up to the neck”, because “she can afford not to be cold”. Nobody sees her”; Sibyl carries him short, takes off her dress “and snuggles up beside him like a cat”, but Archibald no longer sees her as “something precious recently found”.
Unchosen chastity and lack of emotional correspondence condition their identity, bringing out their darkest and most shameful side, because it is invisible (repressed) in society. “It is better to be whipped, sold in a brothel,” the former model despairs when faced with refusal. “As she must necessarily do without a man, she would prefer to be a widow. […] the term has a dignity that the other does not have,” laments the “old girl” (sic). However, Asunción “prefers to be single rather than stay tied to a man, because as the years go by” it would be more difficult for her to choose a partner for life.
The uneasiness extends to life in general: Sibila has no worries and barely flips through a magazine; Asunción reads books, but even so a friend congratulates her on having managed to “be independent.” Be aware that you are a free being. “Feeling necessary”, for her, are nothing other than “the words that we, unhappy people, repeat to ourselves so as not to sink into despair. The subjects they teach us so that we do not rebel. Becoming an “argumentative” woman only “made me mean.” “He who feels the worst bitterness: that of social inferiority, that of physical inferiority. » The boredom of the two is camouflaged in the privacy of the house, unless they dare to rebel and leave.
Broken dreams, bad paths
They are not the only ones who are unhappy. The author, even while giving pride of place to women, does not neglect the male characters. Archibald, Sibyl’s husband, is far from corresponding to the image of the self-satisfied winner: like a mediocre Montaigne, he needs to satisfy his enormous intellectual curiosity, he creates an inner life richer than his fortune, which takes him away from his carelessness. and apathetic wife. Daniel, “El Monegro”, is one of the school’s immigrants, “bearded and unshaven men, sitting on childish benches, made for children”, who, eternal “foreigners”, have arrived to break stones or work in the fields.
Both, in their own way, will connect the two women, who do not know each other. His relationship to study, to self-cultivation, one could say, has a lot to do with it: firstly, because he wants his wife to educate herself; the other, because, although lessons are offered to him, he hates them. There is a third man, Pablo, friend of Asunción, with whom he corresponds; a friendship more intellectual than passionate which generates many doubts for both. Love, the possibility of a common life and sentimental failure extend to all, women and men, neither absolute victims nor unequivocal oppressors, each with its crusts, the old timeless conflicts.
And everyone is very alone. Perhaps, more than relationships and the forging of female identity, solitude is the great theme of the novel, the different forms of solitude. There is, in everyone, the feeling of not being in the right place – this island which is just another character, with its winds and its currents, with vegetation which sometimes becomes hostile, a gothic atmosphere –, with the false company (or lack thereof). Individuals for whom dreams “are as big as a sweater bought at a discount store, full of pressure”, even if, perhaps, “what happens is that we don’t really want what we let’s call our goal.”
When she arrived at school, Asunción began growing geraniums. She watered them with the same enthusiasm with which she devotes herself to teaching, convinced of what education can do for human beings. The beginnings have that, the excitement, like that of Sibyl and Archibald in Paris; or that of Monegro when leaving the plateau. Goals, dreams which, in this gray society of the Franco regime, fade like flowers. The climate is harsh for humans and plants. Fire too; Only, sometimes there is no need to wait for a bonfire to destroy everything, since there is almost nothing left to destroy.
