Waiting for the Barbarians (35 page)

A pervasive aura of ennui and a disjointedness that competes with persistent but ultimately fleeting leitmotifs is nothing new to Muñoz Molina’s work. Although relatively young (he was born in Andalusia in 1950), he has achieved considerable prominence in Spain: he has twice won the National Literary Prize there, along with a number of other distinctions. This hasn’t translated into recognition in the US.
As far as I can tell, only two of his many novels have appeared in English:
Winter in Lisbon
, a memory-novel that links disconnected motifs—jazz, the names of cities, a love affair—and
Prince of Shadows
, in which a professional assassin who is weary of the trade tracks down his target during the iciest years of the Cold War. Partly this author’s relative obscurity here has to do with a by-now notorious indifference to foreign literature on the part of American readers (and publishers); partly it has to do with the fact that much of his previous output, while taking the ostensibly popular forms of detective and spy novels, is dominated by an atmosphere of benumbed angst and marked by the presence of unusual technical features. (Among these are strange oscillations between first- and third-person narrators, a device that recurs in
Sepharad
.) The presence of that tone and those technical features has been attributed to the fact that Muñoz Molina is an author of
el desencanto
(“disillusionment”), a term used to describe the widespread feeling, following the death of Franco in 1975 and the failure of the Socialists elected in 1982 to fulfill their electoral call for
Cambio
, change, of crucial opportunities lost.
^*

With its dominating tone of dislocation and the overarching structure of fragmentation,
Sepharad
is, then, in many ways the natural heir to its predecessors in both tone and execution. With a postmodern self-consciousness, the narrator of this novel draws his readers’ attention to the nature of the narrative they are reading:

Sepharad
is, of course, the novel that the character hoped to be able to write. Only when we keep in mind the implications of the book’s title—the implications of 1492, which create the “patterns” that organize the book’s pieces and links—does it become clear how brilliantly he has succeeded.

The first and most important pattern is the organizing theme of an ideological oppression that results in terrible conditions of exile, and worse. As many reviewers were quick to notice, the destruction, by totalitarian regimes in Europe and elsewhere, of culture itself and the people who create it—artists, writers, intellectuals, impresarios, politicians, and political activists—is a central motif here, although to be sure it apparently has nothing to do with the private lives of its Spanish characters. The most striking of the “novels” that weave their way through this “novel of novels” are, it turns out, not fictions at all but rather the true stories of a handful of characters who, between them, lived out their lives during the harrowing middle years of the last century—stories that, as Muñoz Molina describes in an author’s note at the end of his novel, he culled, with little or no further elaboration, from memoirs and biographies.

There is the story of the flamboyant Willi Münzenberg, Stalin’s German-born “impresario of the Comintern” who, with his wife, Babette, eventually fell from favor and was pursued to his death by his former Communist colleagues, who hanged him in a remote wood during the mass flight from France in 1940. There is the bizarre and wrenching tale of Babette’s sister, Margarete Buber-Neumann, the wife of the director of Germany’s Communist Party in the 1930s, who after first fleeing from Hitler into the welcoming arms of Stalin, and then falling from Stalin’s grace along with her husband, Heinz, had the peculiar distinction, in the year 1939, of becoming the victim of not one but two regimes, each ideologically opposed to the other, as the characteristically laconic narration in the story called “copenhagen” relates:

In the death camp of Ravensbrück, Buber-Neumann met and befriended the doomed Milena Jesenska, who would sometimes tell her new friend about her dead lover and the bizarre tales he wrote.

The allusion to Jesenska is one of those tenuous threads that
connects this true story of twentieth-century oppression to the ostensibly private, Spanish world of the narrator’s life story: we recall him, as a young man, in the act of reading
Letters to Milena
in the Spanish cultural bureau. This moment and others like it begin to suggest that none of the seemingly discrete narratives gathered here, the stories of small-town Spain and the stories of refugee or deported Central Europeans, is unconnected to the others. There are, to be sure, a number of stories that patently link Spain to the horrors of the mid-twentieth century, for instance stories from the Spanish civil war: one about the ruined family of a Spanish Communist who ends up in Moscow, another about an idealistic, Germanophile Spaniard who joins Spain’s Blue Division to fight along with the Nazis on the Russian front. But these more obvious links between Spain and the European disaster of the 1930s and 1940s aren’t the ones of greatest interest in revealing the author’s subtle unifying strategies.

For what ultimately connects all of the “novels” here is the spirit of Kafka, the author who more than any of the many other authorial voices that hover over this book—Proust, Herodotus, John le Carré—presides over it in its multifaceted entirety.
Pace
those who beat
Sepharad
over the head with Sebald, there is indeed a “stunning calculus of implication and association, far-ranging and centered” that courses through Muñoz Molina’s novel. These implications and associations, admittedly so far-ranging at times as to escape easy detection, derive, ultimately, from an experience shared by all of the book’s characters—the dread Kafkaesque experience characterized by the narrator in a passage that, typically, is addressed to an unidentified “you”:

This quintessentially twentieth-century experience of sudden, seemingly arbitrary selection and expulsion is, we begin to see, the link that binds together the novel’s Spaniards and Germans, its Communists and Fascists. It is the experience typified by the life of a blond, blue-eyed, fully Austrian (or so he thought), half-Jewish youth called Hans Meyer, who, after being persecuted as a Jew, became the writer Jean Améry after the war. It is the tie that binds Spanish Republican soldiers,
desparecidos
in Uruguay, and leukemia-afflicted writers to Kafka himself, as an extraordinary summarizing passage suggests:

The unifying experience, then, is what it means to be “excluded, expelled, from the community of the normal,” as the narrator puts it.

There were critics who appreciated this important motif but were
nonetheless leery of its moral implications. “But what can such an equation mean when its terms are so different?” Michael Pye asked in his review; and he then went on to suggest that “without morality all these dark stories are just sensations.” But it seems to me that Muñoz Molina’s multiplex, honeycombed attempt to depict the very root of evil, to create a picture of mankind’s impulse to exclude and oppress that goes beyond the particularities of this or that ideology, should be seen as a profound grappling with a very fundamental moral issue indeed. And his insistence on assimilating to the vignettes of political oppression the experience of the suffering sick, particularly those who to all appearances are normal but who are doomed to pain and likely death (both AIDS and leukemia are invoked), is to my mind an effective means of reminding his readers, by means of an analogy, a suggestive narrative metaphor, of that other class of exiles, not the literal but the metaphorical exiles created by political oppressions, as 1492 taught us: the
marranos
, the internal exiles, cut off from the community of the normal to which they bear the most superficial of resemblances, stigmatized by the presence of an invisible trait for which they can bear no responsibility.

But then, to appreciate the large moral vision of Muñoz Molina’s novel, you must return, as he does, to the awkward question raised by its disturbingly allusive title.
Sepharad
ends with a grand and tragic gesture that suggests that willed acts of selection and expulsion (or worse) doom nations, as they do people, to a kind of metaphorical exile, an exile from themselves: the ultimate internal exile. This moving point is made in a finale that links the themes of illness, exile, internal exile, of museums and cultural survivals and nationalisms,
and in so doing climactically unites the unsettling multiple significances of the fateful year of 1492.

The final section of the novel is called “sepharad.” In it, the narrator finds himself living for a brief time in what he describes as a pleasant, self-imposed “exile” in New York City. His prolonged visit from Spain to the New World might put us in mind of Columbus, of “discovery” and the horizons of new worlds and possibilities; yet the same pleasant visit inevitably brings with it reminders of that other result of 1492. (While in New York, the narrator stumbles across an ancient Sephardic cemetery off Fifth Avenue.) As an expression, perhaps, of both aspects of 1492, the last thing the narrator does is to visit what may well be described as a symbol of Spain itself, of its great imperial culture—a culture that is, now, just another exile abroad: the enormous and neglected Hispanic Society, located in uptown Manhattan, a place to which the bus journey takes so much time that it feels like a voyage of discovery itself.

We have by this point been prepared, in a fashion that is typically complex and subtle, for this strange culminating collocation of the two great results of 1492—America as a refuge and Spain as the oppressor, the expeller, the exiler. Earlier on, we learn that the Mateo Zapatón whom the young narrator idolized is not only the dashing swain of their small town but the adulterous lover of many of the small town’s matrons; and indeed the lover of the young nun about whom we heard in a much earlier story. The information is typically disconcerting: hundreds of pages after we first hear about Mateo—whose handsome face, we recall, serves as the model for his namesake, the noble Saint Matthew, in the town’s Holy Week float—we are forced to revise our moral picture of this attractive but corrupt character, a fornicator whose sins make him far worse morally, after all, than was the loathed tailor, the model for Judas, whose only sin
was to have a Jewish-looking nose (a suggestion that he is the descendant of
marranos
, perhaps). There is a strong implication here that we are meant to think hard about the hypocrisies of the various regimes we’ve encountered in these tales, regimes that are always eager to assign guilt to certain “others,” and then to cut those others out.