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Amanda Hopkinson relishes a Catalan classic.


Under the Dust
Jordi Coca
translated by
Richard Thomson

Parthian
£9.99 Paperbcak
ISBN 1854114115

Who is Jordi Coca? In Catalonia he is well known as a theatre director, playwright and drama instructor, director of Barcelona’s Theatre Institute in the 1980s and 90s. He is also known as an author and translator of some thirty books, including numerous stage adaptations of (among others) Maeterlinck, Ibsen and Sophocles. His translations of the Japanese poet and monk Matsuo Basho were the first into Catalan, and his fascination with Japan is a theme running through his novels (one of which is called La Japonesa).

   Most significantly, perhaps, he started publishing in his twenties
when Franco was still in power. Since the self-styled Generalissimo endorsed only one national language – versus the half dozen indigenous to Spain – it was an act of subversion to write in Catalan. From his first novel, Els Lluisos, to his most recent, Cara d’Angel, Jordi Coca has collected an impressive array of literary awards. And since Franco’s death in December 1975, Coca has become a media star, his Catalan credentials standing him in excellent stead in the renaissance of regional cultural identity over the past thirty years.

   This book is something different. A personal account of growing up during the dreary dark years of the 1950s and 60s, Sota la Pols won the highest Catalan prize for literature, the Premi San Jordi in 2000. It is the first of Coca’s works to be translated into English (by the highly proficient Welsh writer Richard Thomson), so serves as an introduction to an author with no previous track record in the UK. Previously unknown to us here, we will read him differently to the Catalans, and primarily for the revelations he provides of one of the most vicious and vindictive European Fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

   In a neatly ambiguous twist, the memoirs open with a famous verse of Verlaine’s: Je me souviens/ Des jours anciens/ Et je pleure, itself reminiscent of Villon’s lament, ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan? In Coca the weeping is not nostalgia for a regretted past that cannot be recovered, but rather tears of rage for lives ravaged and wasted by Fascism. The nephew of a murdered Republican and the son of a father whose bitterness at the family’s consequent ostracism alternates with exhortations to withdraw from society and ‘stay out of trouble’ (meaning politics, or anything that could be so construed and attract the attention of the Civil Guard), Jordi grew up with a vague sense of displaced guilt and disabling misery.

   The misery derived as much from the family’s extreme poverty as from actual repression. Jordi’s father was discriminated against at work, only finding a small measure of stability when he finally – and ambitiously – took on a business of his own, collecting, sorting and selling on rags and surplus fabrics. His mother’s life, deeply scarred by the death of a first son Jordi felt he could never adequately replace, was largely dedicated to pacifying the frequently drunken and violent, nearly always irrational, behaviour of her husband.
From an early age, Jordi was expected to make his own amusement and stay out of trouble.

   Yet there was an inherent contradiction between the two. In the desperately poor working-class district where they lived in two sparse rooms without heating, electricity or running water, he was alternately kept in to avoid notice and turned out to play with his mates. These were primarily school-friends who organized themselves into a gang that shifted across the years, the older ones recruiting an irregular intake of smaller boys, largely to bully them. Being a gang hanger-on does nothing to endear Jordi to his classmates, who retaliate by taunting him for being ‘one of Ramon’s arse-lickers, playing tricks on me like knocking my inkwell over, putting glue on my chair, taking the nib off my pens or throwing bits of chalk at me while the teacher was writing on the board. One day they tore a pocket on my smock.At home I said it happened by accident when we were playing outside, but the truth is I didn’t play during the breaks. I sat and watched the other kids.’

   It was this watching that was ultimately to provide Jordi’s salvation. By somehow awakening the ability to take a critical distance from his situation he finally was able both to transcend and imagine a way out of it. The precipitating factor was yet another death, following on from the untimely end of his uncle and brother. Joanet is the one close friend of Jordi’s own age, with a family as dysfunctional as his own. The two oddballs bond as they accompany one another on long and aimless walks, conducting long and inconclusive conversations. With hindsight, the profundity of Joanet’s despair lent inevitability to the brevity of his young life, but the shock – and Jordi’s reiterated sense of guilt that once again he was in some incomprehensible way responsible for it – re-opened old wounds.

   Death is thus a running theme both in the political violence of the
dictatorship years, and in Jordi’s personal life. Joanet’s horrific suicide plunges Jordi further into depression, exacerbated when the older gang members, after enlisting into the Falangist Youth movement, increasingly taunt the suspected Republican sympathiser in their midst. But one of the families picked on by the gang lives on the fringes of their barrio, in a house piled with old newspapers and novels – under the dust, and Jordi makes friends with one of the household, who invites him to take his pick. Not only does their conversation offer an alternative reading of contemporary history, but their library is his to borrow from. Having devoured Robinson Crusoe at a single sitting, he borrows a second Defoe novel from his newfound friend and fellow outcast, César. It takes Jordi months of visiting every Saturday afternoon to own up to his inability actually to peruse it. His reluctance is born of a mixture of delight at finding the opening – a description of the plague returning to Holland – so perfectly composed that he has no need to complete the text, and dread that to finish reading it would definitively deny him the anticipatory pleasures of turning the subsequent pages for the first time.

  But at last Jordi has turned a page in his own life. Having missed out on any possible benefit of a school education, he is about to become self-educated. This is a coming-of-age memoir like many others, with a voice all its own. Jordi Coca conveys the transition from oppression to hope in a memoir that is truly more of death than of a life. He convinces us even of the horrors of the infamous police station on the Via Laietana where Jordi’s father was taken under arrest (and which I well remember from the 1960s as a grim
and gloomy place). More than ever today, debates perpetuate the agonies of the Civil War; there was never any Peace and Justice Commission to allow for skeletons to be removed from hidden cupboards and allowed a proper burial. Quite the contrary: as more mass graves are finally excavated, more bitterness and resentment results. As Mrs Rosalia, César’s mother, announces: ‘The dead watch over us, don’t ever doubt that for a minute. It’s moronic to think that just because we can’t see them, they’re not there.’

   Jordi Coca’s story shows another piece of the puzzle falling into place. It pictures a childhood under Franco in which fear, misery and repression were his main and constant companions. Hardly cheerful reading, but then at last there is salvation. It befits a writer that this salvation should come through reading, and it rewards the British reader of Under the Dust that hope first arrives for Jordi Coca in the shape of Defoe, a British writer.