Salidas, Laforet edition

Let me start, as it were, at the surface. Carmen Laforet’s Nada is the story of a young woman who moves to the big city (Barcelona) to go to college. There is some love, some lessons learned, some growing pains, the usual fare. All of this sounds like—and page after page the book reads exactly like this—a typical, flighty, and, let it be said, rewarding Bildungsroman of a very contemporary sort. There is even, additionally, a kind of nineteenth-century quaintness to it. Half of the time, you could imagine subbing a character out of St. Petersburg or rural England for Andrea, Nada’s protagonist. She frets over clothes and boys, she goes to parties, she smokes cigarettes, she furtively observes romantic moments from her balcony.

The Spanish Civil War ends six years before the publication of Nada, and, appropriately, some non-negligible urban wreckage features in the book. On the slopes of Montjuïc, the narrator looks out at the port of Barcelona, where “the rusted skeletons of ships sunk during the war broke the surface” (116). Seeing the nearby cemetry, the narrator reflects one “could almost detect the smell of melancholy” (ibid.). (Note, for later digestion, that it is melancholy, not dead bodies.)

The war is Nada’s background. Superficially, then, you could likely get away with the idea that Nada is another contribution to the idea, much-demonstrated in literature of the last three centuries, that, despite broader strife and conflict, somewhere, somehow, in the morass of collective misery, someone manages to get along, to go on first dates, to fret about their hair. But that would be too superficial, I think; too wrong here.

To get one aspect of what is distinctive about Nada, consider the campus novel. The campus novel, in short, demonstrates the false opposition between the campus and the world. An outsider (some thing or person apparently from the outside) appears on campus. Faculty infighting and sexual escapades create symbolic occasions for moral and/or philosophical dilemmas that stage dimensions of a broader conflict. Some climactic exposure converts this insular risk to real danger. And some form of departure from the insulated world of the campus resolves the matter: The university is revealed as sharing the mores of the world it shuns.

Nada is, in one way, an anti-campus novel. In a reversal of the insulated-campus trope, the university in Nada is the outside world, the world beyond, the promise. Calle de Aribau, by contrast, the dingy side street Andrea’s family lives on, is the insular world, the suffocating interior. Forces from the outside confront Andrea, in the same way as they do, actually or metaphorically, in the campus novel, but they have have virtually no impact. Andrea falls in with a group of Basque-named artists; they simply vanish, that’s all. One way the anti-campus novel typification fits is in the most extreme departure from the campus novel’s family of tropes: the fact that, ultimately, the university in Nada retains its status as a moral and intellectual beyond—unspeakably so, inarticulately. In that, Nada manages to preserve a degree of its protagonist’s idealism. Indeed, the real poison of the novel seems to emanate from within, from the house: When Andrea’s friend Ena falls in with Andrea’s uncle, the threat is the uncle, and Ena the potential victim. Then Andrea discovers Ena has been playing him all along. Nothing changes. The constant violence in Andrea’s home—her other uncle is constantly, brutally beating up his partner—is meaningless; there is no philosophical or moral dilemma being staged, as there might be in the faculty squabbles or sexual escapades of the campus novel. Nothing, Nada.

In the aptly titled Nada, everything comes to nothing. Andrea’s friend Ena describes seeing Andrea for the first time, near the university, just standing in the rain. Doing what? Doing absolutely nothing, just getting rained on. That’s Nada. Standing around, doing nothing, and getting soaked anyway.

Now, all of this may make Nada sound like angsty existentialist melodrama, and it’s not that at all. It’s a few hundred pages of Emma (and a little violence sprinkled in) with, however, no lessons, no growth, no redemption.

At the beginning of the novel, Andrea enters a house of people she’s related to, but there seem to be too many of them. Moreover, although they’re family, too many of them seem, vaguely, to wish her ill will. And this basic setup is in a sense the main (and quite compelling) idea of the book. There are just too many people around, and these people present the veneer of pleasantness, and more importantly the appearance of difference and escape; but so often, and maybe always, they fall short of their presentations. Every person who comes into Andrea’s life seems an avenue for improvement or escape, but they all lead, and in all cases literally, back to this overpopulated hovel of despair. In one of the most self-aware moments of Nada, Andrea notes that “the only desire in my life had been for people to leave me alone to do what I wanted,” and that her pre-Nada struggle to get to Barcelona had resulted, not in the freedom she craved, but in another form of constraint. She writes of:

the muffled battle I’d had for two years with my cousin Isabel until she finally let me leave her and attend the university. When I arrived in Barcelona I was fresh from my first victory, but I immediately found other vigilant eyes watching me and I became accustomed to the game of hiding, resisting. (85–6)

After her aunt leaves, providing Andrea superficially with her freedom, Andrea describes a homeless guy she “inherits” from her aunt, and who, without saying much of anything, seemingly compels her to give him whatever food she happens to have on him. Andrea describes his greeting as a “weapon” (151). Such is the antagonism even of a greeting in this world.

As Andrea settles in, her aunt Angustias gives her the lay of things, telling her she “must be like a fortress” living in Barcelona, because of all the bad forces, presumably, out there, but she also would like Andrea to know “she [Andrea] owe[s] everything to us,” and that, “thanks to our charity, you’ll achieve your goals” (15). Her uncle Juan, clearly suffering from PTSD as a result of the civil war, has a sudden, violent outburst on Andrea’s first morning in the new house. This is the world the bright-eyed Andrea enters. Every ray of excitement stemming from the “profound freedom” Andrea feels in coming to the big city is bent back on her before she has spent twenty-four hours in the place. Even diamonds are dull in a dull mirror, an ugliness exemplified in Juan’s portrait of Gloria. Gloria is beautiful, “a miracle of God”; the portrait Juan paints, “laboriously and without talent,” looks “stupid”—but stupid in a way that reflects, too, Gloria’s facial expression (24).

The world of Nada isn’t evil necessarily; “stupid,” in the colloquial sense of pointless, is closer to the mark. An early chapter—a tempting detour for an impatient reader—begins: “So many unimportant days!” (30). But the world of Nada is a hard world, too, and the way this fact stirs quietly beneath the surface is distinctive of what Laforet accomplishes with the book.

The background of violence has at least two levels. There is, first, the most conspicuous example of it in Juan’s physical abuse—often extremely violent—of his wife, Gloria. And then, secondly, there is a historical, social, and personal background rife with instances of violence. In a chapter featuring a dialogue between Gloria and Andrea’s grandmother, on just one page, for example, they talk of one Don Jerónimo hiding from people who want to murder him; of his desire to kill a cat; of Gloria’s fear of Juan’s abuse; of Gloria hitting the family’s maid, Antonia; of Román’s torture in prison during the war; of Román’s violent personality, in turn (33). Again, all on one page, a few hundred words, almost as if nothing but violence fits here. The violence of war is a symptom of a more general atmosphere of violence, all of it circuitous, “stupid”: the tortured POW becoming the domestic torturer, violence ensnaring and surrounding everyone, valuelessly, purposelessly.

The narrator occupies an ambivalent position between victim and idealist. She desperately wants to find a better life for herself, so is tempted into seeing it better where it isn’t. She seems, for example, to find in Román a perspective on the broader world, the world beyond Calle de Aribau, and yet, when he first reveals his oddly arrogant and cruel persona to her, she runs away from him, and she has to describe and then redescribe the experience, consciously transitioning from a posture of respect and admiration to a posture of fear.

I ran down the stairs to the apartment, pursued by Román’s laughter. Because the fact is I escaped. I escaped and the steps flew under my feet. (71)

She doesn’t just get away from him, she realizes. She escapes him, is freed from him. This is a moral victory, not just a relocation.

One way to look at the arc of the first two parts, which gets the gist of the book as a whole, is like this: Andrea comes to the big city to experience her “profound freedom,” but her aunt Angustias stifles it. The aunt is like the realist, in the moral-literary sense: counseling humility in the face of a harsh world. Andrea’s rejection of her aunt is also, tragically, a rejection of her aunt’s worldview. After she summons the courage to revolt against her aunt, finding in the figure of Ena meanwhile the possibility of meaningful friendship, Ena more or less arbitrarily abandons her. Later we learn—although this isn’t the last turn in their friendship—that Ena had only taken a tokenizing interest in Andrea for, in so many words, her poverty (see 130–5).

Andrea is compelled time and again to reel in every tether she casts into the world. Fundamentally, Nada teaches the aunt’s truth. When her aunt is gone and Andrea gets her room, the best in the house, she can’t lock the door because her family needs access to the phone, and Gloria is constantly sleeping on her bed during the day. Sudden freedoms just as suddenly collapse into stifling unfreedoms. When she wanders out into the ‘dangerous’ world of Barcelona after her aunt’s departure, a boy shows up to ruin it.

The only appropriate response—the body’s response, Andrea’s body’s response—is one of exhaustion. At one point, Juan attacks Gloria, punching her in the head while she’s in the bathtub. The violence of the scene is astonishing. When he’s gone, Andrea rubs Gloria’s body to warm her up.

Rubbing her body the best I could, I began to feel warm. Then I was overhelmed by a weariness so awful my knees trembled. (105)

Andrea is “tired” all the time—specifically, on pages 7, 65, 116, 145, 146, 220, 221, and 242; she is “exhausted” on 118, 184, and 231; she needs sleep (but doesn’t sleep, or not yet) on 10, 39, 71, 105, 106, 108, 113, 146, 166, 176, 193, 226, 231, 232, and 244; she sleeps on 8, 53, 64, 73, 77, 99, 114, 171, 175, 226, and 232. The narrative aperture is constantly dim, and closing.

The sources of Andrea’s misery are manifold. And sure, there are the various, as it were, ‘spiritual’ causes, such as her aunt’s imposing administration of her life in the first part of the book. But there are also simpler physical causes. She enjoys the company of Ena and Ena’s boyfriend Jaime (“What incomparable days!”), for example, but this is upset by hunger, a symptom of her relative poverty.

These torrents of light pouring into my life because of Ena were embittered by the dismal hues that colored my spirit on the other days of the week. I’m not referring to events [at home] . . . but to the unfocused vision caused by my nerves, put too much on edge by a hunger I almost didn’t feel because it was chronic. (113)

After describing episodes of her own seemingly random anger, she reflects prosaically on their source: “It didn’t even occur to me that I was hysterical from lack of food” (ibid.).

Poverty is a manifold thing, too. In addition to the obvious symptoms of hunger and worn clothing, it leaves Andrea at political and cultural odds with her wealthy friends. Andrea meets a boy who is, by all signs, going to make her life better, in the usual novelistic way. There’s a party, she can’t wait for the party, the party is going to be the beginning of the next and much better chapter—the first good chapter—of her life.

The feeling of being expected, of being loved, awoke a thousand woman’s instincts in me; an emotion like triumph, a desire to be praised, admired, to feel like Cinderella in the fairy tale, a princess for a few hours after a long period of concealment. (176)

Then at the party she “felt anguish because of my shabby clothes” (179). Most of the time at the party she feels like crying. The boy she went to see introduces her to a few people and then ignores her the whole time. She stands alone at a window while everyone dances—for one or two hours, she estimates. Significantly, she overhears two men talking about a war, one of them asking the other: “[D]o you realize how much we can make in the war? Millions, man, millions!” (180). The war doesn’t impact the wealthy less; it impacts them entirely differently; it is opportunity, gain, not a dead end of meaning and autonomy. The world Andrea is attempting to leave isn’t Spain or Barcelona; it is the world of the impoverished, rich in dimensions of subjugation and restriction. Nada finds a member of the poorer class grappling with the distinct complex of forces that constrain her—not just money and clothes, but (and this is worth fully absorbing) vulnerability to the destructive impact of war, which here is revealed as an impact that is classed. Nada churns in the impossibility of escape from these conditions. Before the disappointment of the party, Andrea had noted, presciently: “[Y]ou always move in the same circle of people no matter how many turns you seem to make” (159).

In line with a thought Andrea has about her uncle and aunt, the tragic outlook of the poor in postwar Barcelona is shaped by the fact that they, or some of them anyway, just went on living after the war. Gloria shares with Andrea how, before the war, their relationship “was like the end of a movie. It was like the end of all sadness. We were going to be happy” (206). Gloria and Juan share a moment that Andrea witnesses from her balcony, in which they seem to rekindle this earlier connection. Andrea reflects:

If on that night—I thought—the world had ended or one of them had died, their story would have been completely closed and beautiful, like a circle. That’s how it happens in novels, in movies, but not in life. . . . I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. (Ibid.; emphasis in the original)

The problem is the war didn’t kill them. Their survival isn’t a stroke of luck; it’s the reason their lives suck.

As Andrea reflects on this, Gloria enters the room, asking Andrea what she’s looking at. She’s looking in the mirror, it turns out, and in the mirror she sees three people: herself, Gloria, and her grandmother—all confronted with the reality, perhaps, that there are better ways of dying than surviving.

If realism is the attempt to describe what is as it is, there is no obvious reason to suggest Nada is anything but a realist work. Nothing overtly ‘magical’ happens, and—being, say, part of the more general modern or contemporary world we still share with the novel—we might add that everything from the domestic violence to the recalcitrant class distinctions reads as plausible.

Some aspects of Nada move in other directions, however. Consider—and in an especially significant way, given the historical tendency in realism to equate “the real” with the reality of the poor—the narrator whose perception is mangled by hunger and exhaustion. She never pretends to be interested in “telling it like it is,” and she gives her reader every reason to suspect she wouldn’t be very good at it either. Episodes get glossed entirely from behind the veil of hunger and sleep. Characters come and go and leave no definitive trace of themselves behind; as if—not actually as if, but indeed functionally as if—they were just figments of Andrea’s consciousness. And Nada displays none of the moralizing typical of certain strands of the realist tradition. Indeed, the figure of her aunt may be conceived of as the specter of this sort of realism, brought in for color and then promptly dismissed. That her aunt’s departure coincides with her exploring a newfound freedom—a departure not only of her aunt but of the moralizing and determinism at the heart of much realist literature—speaks subtly against the realist vintage, or the most traditional varieties of it anyway. Relatedly, the despair of Nada works only if determinism is false; only if reality isn’t simply determined by the interplay of impersonal forces; only if the entire spectrum of the imaginative capacity, from whim to discontent, jealousy to hope, anger to grief, finds and shapes and sees fit to challenge and refuse the way things are. Half of the malaise of Nada is reality as it is; the other half is a dogged, imaginative indignation that reality must be otherwise, even when it cannot.

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Nada was translated by Edith Grossman in 2007 for Random House’s Modern Library imprint.