None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Barcelona, 1974. Natàlia Miralpeix, approaching forty and carrying twelve years of voluntary exile in Paris, Rome, and the English provinces, flies home to a city that greets her by shrieking at its own reflection. Two days prior, the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed by garrotting, and her English friend Jimmy had to look up the method in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Natàlia is a photographer who observes life from the dry side of the glass. She returns, she says, because if she stays away any longer she never will come back. The Barcelona she finds is guttered, tarmacked, its beloved old bars replaced by banks with glacial façades. El Oro del Rhin, where she once spent whole afternoons sipping coffee with a bright-eyed communist named Emilio Sandoval, is gone.
She moves in with her widowed Aunt Patrícia, who has channelled widowhood into dyed hair, painted nails, cigarettes, and ice-creams "tall as cathedrals." Her brother Lluís, married eighteen years to Sílvia Claret, lives nearby in a flat he insists ought to look perpetually ready for a design magazine. Lluís also drove Natàlia to a clinic once, while she writhed from the aftermath of an abortion, and told her to use her head next time. She has a great deal to be coming back to.
The book moves through three generations of the Miralpeix family with elegance. The young Natàlia, still in her Roman dress and hair updo for a student theatre production of Plautus, is swept up by Emilio Sandoval, an Andalusian communist of great handsomeness, abundant conviction, and a family that owns half of Almería. He applies her stage make-up with one hand and philosophy with the other, teaches her to "scratch beneath the country's filth," and eventually gives her crabs along with his political awakening. Their love is fugitive, conducted in doorways near Santa Maria del Mar, conducted on borrowed married beds, always interrupted by a key in a lock.
Aunt Patrícia in her younger years, returning early from a documentary about German Übermenschen to find her husband Esteve and his friend Gonçal breathing like rustling leaves under a satin bedspread, has her own interrupted story entirely. And Sílvia, presiding over Tupperware parties while scrutinising nicked crystal and moth holes her husband Lluís is too self-satisfied to perceive, performs maintenance on a love that has long since worn through at the seams.
Joan Miralpeix, Natàlia's father who shed his communist past, reducing it to a couple of books still shelved in his library, is another matter altogether. He is in a psychiatric institution outside Barcelona, and Natàlia's return to the city converges, with Montserrat Roig's refusal of chronological mercy, toward the moment she goes to collect him.
The institution has its own black market, its own escaped poet who quotes Kant and Schopenhauer and resembles Miguel Hernández, its own annual festival at which patients from the men's and women's wings are allowed to mingle while security guards hunt for couples in the overgrowth with flashlights.
Joan sits in a well-lit room with a barred window and a poplar tree outside, bald and pink-skulled and chattering like a child about Judit, his long-dead wife, whom he is certain is still alive because her photograph on his nightstand says so.
The title of the book comes from a Jean-Baptiste Clément song about the brief, blazing season of contentment that follows revolution. Emilio used to say, "I can't wait for the cherries to bloom." The question Roig poses, across three generations and a country still choking on a dictatorship it keeps swallowing, is whether that season ever truly comes, or whether the song is all there is.
Montserrat Roig was born in Barcelona in 1946, wrote in Catalan under a dictatorship that preferred her silent, published her first fiction at twenty-five, conducted landmark interviews with the survivors of the Nazi camps, and died of cancer in 1991 at forty-five. She packed more into those years than most writers manage in eighty, which makes the critical long neglect of her in the Anglophone world a verdict worth appealing.
The Time of Cherries is a book about waiting, and about the costs of waiting too long. Private life and political life are the same life. Joan Miralpeix shed his communist convictions and took up Catholic authoritarianism instead, a spiritual change that cost him his children and eventually his mind. Emilio Sandoval talked revolution and billed Natàlia for the consequences. The women maintained the households, the bodies, and the silences that the men generated.
Franco has been dead fifty years and the garrotting wire is in a museum, yet women across the world still patch the nicked crystal and cover the moth holes while their Lluíses demand the flat look ready for a design magazine.
A beautiful, chaotic mess.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Barcelona, 1974. Natàlia Miralpeix, approaching forty and carrying twelve years of voluntary exile in Paris, Rome, and the English provinces, flies home to a city that greets her by shrieking at its own reflection. Two days prior, the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed by garrotting, and her English friend Jimmy had to look up the method in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Natàlia is a photographer who observes life from the dry side of the glass. She returns, she says, because if she stays away any longer she never will come back. The Barcelona she finds is guttered, tarmacked, its beloved old bars replaced by banks with glacial façades. El Oro del Rhin, where she once spent whole afternoons sipping coffee with a bright-eyed communist named Emilio Sandoval, is gone.
She moves in with her widowed Aunt Patrícia, who has channelled widowhood into dyed hair, painted nails, cigarettes, and ice-creams "tall as cathedrals." Her brother Lluís, married eighteen years to Sílvia Claret, lives nearby in a flat he insists ought to look perpetually ready for a design magazine. Lluís also drove Natàlia to a clinic once, while she writhed from the aftermath of an abortion, and told her to use her head next time. She has a great deal to be coming back to.
The book moves through three generations of the Miralpeix family with elegance. The young Natàlia, still in her Roman dress and hair updo for a student theatre production of Plautus, is swept up by Emilio Sandoval, an Andalusian communist of great handsomeness, abundant conviction, and a family that owns half of Almería. He applies her stage make-up with one hand and philosophy with the other, teaches her to "scratch beneath the country's filth," and eventually gives her crabs along with his political awakening. Their love is fugitive, conducted in doorways near Santa Maria del Mar, conducted on borrowed married beds, always interrupted by a key in a lock.
Aunt Patrícia in her younger years, returning early from a documentary about German Übermenschen to find her husband Esteve and his friend Gonçal breathing like rustling leaves under a satin bedspread, has her own interrupted story entirely. And Sílvia, presiding over Tupperware parties while scrutinising nicked crystal and moth holes her husband Lluís is too self-satisfied to perceive, performs maintenance on a love that has long since worn through at the seams.
Joan Miralpeix, Natàlia's father who shed his communist past, reducing it to a couple of books still shelved in his library, is another matter altogether. He is in a psychiatric institution outside Barcelona, and Natàlia's return to the city converges, with Montserrat Roig's refusal of chronological mercy, toward the moment she goes to collect him.
The institution has its own black market, its own escaped poet who quotes Kant and Schopenhauer and resembles Miguel Hernández, its own annual festival at which patients from the men's and women's wings are allowed to mingle while security guards hunt for couples in the overgrowth with flashlights.
Joan sits in a well-lit room with a barred window and a poplar tree outside, bald and pink-skulled and chattering like a child about Judit, his long-dead wife, whom he is certain is still alive because her photograph on his nightstand says so.
The title of the book comes from a Jean-Baptiste Clément song about the brief, blazing season of contentment that follows revolution. Emilio used to say, "I can't wait for the cherries to bloom." The question Roig poses, across three generations and a country still choking on a dictatorship it keeps swallowing, is whether that season ever truly comes, or whether the song is all there is.
Montserrat Roig was born in Barcelona in 1946, wrote in Catalan under a dictatorship that preferred her silent, published her first fiction at twenty-five, conducted landmark interviews with the survivors of the Nazi camps, and died of cancer in 1991 at forty-five. She packed more into those years than most writers manage in eighty, which makes the critical long neglect of her in the Anglophone world a verdict worth appealing.
The Time of Cherries is a book about waiting, and about the costs of waiting too long. Private life and political life are the same life. Joan Miralpeix shed his communist convictions and took up Catholic authoritarianism instead, a spiritual change that cost him his children and eventually his mind. Emilio Sandoval talked revolution and billed Natàlia for the consequences. The women maintained the households, the bodies, and the silences that the men generated.
Franco has been dead fifty years and the garrotting wire is in a museum, yet women across the world still patch the nicked crystal and cover the moth holes while their Lluíses demand the flat look ready for a design magazine.
A beautiful, chaotic mess.
❤️ 🇮🇱