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in this issue
Happiness
A Catalan Corleone
Edicions 62: La felicitat
There is a large bathtub, and in it, a girl and a seal. The movements of the two in the water are harmonious, like a dance, and the sound of splashing mixes with the applause of the audience. Some time later, when she steps out of the water, the girl is shivering with cold, her skin blue. The scene, charming and lyrical, but with that touch of pathos intrinsic to variety acts, takes place on the Paral.lel in January 1909, and is the brilliant opening of La felicitat, the new novel by Lluís-Anton Baulenas (Barcelona, 1958), winner of the 2000 Prudenci Bertrana prize. This Paral.lel in turn-of-the-century Barcelona, with its crowded cafés and variety theatres, is one of the points of the novel's geographical triangle: the other two are the brand new Eixample of the haute bourgeoisie and, above all, the old town, the centre of the city, pervaded from end to end by the dust and rubble of the Reforma, the traumatic construction of the Via Laietana.
'One day I came across the subject of the opening up of the Via Laietana, the Gran Via A, as it was known initially, and it really captured my attention,' Lluís-Anton Baulenas recalls. 'I began to collect information, and right from the start what struck me most was the fact of taking a really lively working-class neighbourhood and razing it to the ground from one day to the next.' Barcelona's haute bourgeoisie had installed themselves in Cerdà's Eixample and had felt comfortable there, in their special area, but suddenly they felt boxed in and wanted a direct route to the port and the sea, and then someone suggested the opening up of an exit channel. 'This was a period of brutal urban and political speculation,' says Baulenas, who describes himself as a narrator of simple stories, of ordinary people in exceptional situations. At this point the writer took over from the researcher, and very soon realized that the Reforma was a magnificent backdrop against which to talk about those ordinary people. 'You can draw a parallel with the present,' he says, 'with the interventions by the city council, the price of progress and so on. If you think of the Raval right now, or Poblenou before the Olympic Games, what you have is an attempt to gentrify declining, run-down districts, so the trauma that is caused is relative. In the Reforma of 1907 the project was driven through three living neighbourhoods, with a very high population density, full of people, with thriving retail activity and very long-established small manufacturers, cultural societies, minor aristocrats who had come down in the world& the Reforma is a decision that was put into practice whatever the cost.'
The project to open up the Via Laietana was carried out in record time, in just two years. 'In 1907 a deal was struck with the Hispano Colonial bank, which financed the expropriations, and it was all done very quickly. When you begin to look into it, you realize that quite apart from any considerations of cultural nostalgia this was an incredible social trauma. The occupants were tenants and subtenants, and they had to leave their homes at next to no notice because they were starting to knock down the buildings. I even found an order from the city council authorizing the demolition of buildings with people still inside them if necessary, if they'd been given notice to quit and hadn't done so.'
The main characters of La felicitat are all connected in one way or another with the upheaval of the destruction: Nonnita Serrallac, the artiste who performs in the Soriano brothers' pavilion on the Paral.lel, lives - endures - in one of the buildings affected by the Reforma. She gives shelter to some of her fellow workers - a country boy who's in love with her; Tomàs, who's a bit simple, and his parrot Trinitat, who make a great tragicomic group - and every night when they come home they make their way through this spectacle from beyond the grave, with no streetlights, a ghostly turmoil of demolition, dust, girders and pillage. And dead people. This is one of Baulenas' master strokes, that the girl talks to the dead. 'I had always wanted to write a novel with dead people in it. The device worked out very well here because, as well as being the generational link with the heroine, I was trying to make the personal histories of these dead people form part of the main narrative, so that you have reality indirectly overlapping with death. In fact, these dead people are very much alive.' The dead, then, appear every now and then in order to bear witness to the neighbourhood as it used to be: Nonnita's childhood friend who died, the barber who put a wooden egg in his customers' mouths when he shaved them...
On the other side of the scales there is Demi Gambús, a boy from a wealthy family, a fourth generation thief, a thief by vocation, who is determined to make a name for hmself in the city using whatever it takes, by legal means or otherwise. The Gambús family is from a little country town and is dominated by the matriarch, a powerful woman who is an expert at manipulating the strings of corruption. 'I'm a great fan of The Godfather and I wanted to create a character who was a Catalan Corleone,' Baulenas recalls. 'Hence the presence of the country town and moving to the city in order to exercise more power. If you set out to write about this period, as Eduardo Mendoza has done, you are inevitably going to write about people who come and go, people who arrive, who are in deadlock, and I also wanted to speak about people who are already rich when they arrive. What's more, I really did have the impression as I was writing that I was losing the upper hand, that their power was becoming greater and greater and extending further and further, to the point of absurdity.' With their delusions of grandeur, the haute bourgeoisie of the time are necessarily responsible for everything that happened then, and Demi Gambús is no exception. 'All of that growth and new construction really turned some people's heads. This was the early 20th-century bourgeoisie that set out to dazzle people by commissioning buildings from Gaudí, who was a visionary, ahead of his time, or building the Palau de la Música Catalana or, for example, taking advantage of the opening up of the Via Laietana to construct the first underground railway tunnels, without any kind of prior planning project, simply because they were convinced that Barcelona would have an underground one day.'
The novel's protagonist is involved in projects of this nature, with usury in pride of place; his great weakness is that he has his head in the clouds, and the fact that in his past there is an ill-fated night, nine years earlier, that dramatically, inexorably links him to the girl from the Paral.lel. Yes, he is one of the spectators at the cabaret number featuring the girl and the seal in the fish tank, but if I carry on in this vein I'll end up giving away the plot of the novel, something that should never be done. The fact is that for all its fascinating portrait of the period, La felicitat is first and foremost a novel in the fullest sense of the term, and free of the limitations of any genre. Baulenas doesn't like to be associated with the historical novel. 'It's an obsession of mine: I don't want to be compared with any of the historical novelists. I don't write historical novels; I care a great deal about the plot, the characters, the situations, and these things come first; after them comes the recreation of the historical setting, but that's just the background. That's what I often find lacking in historical novels: the depth. What's more, I'm a devoted reader of such minor and much-maligned genres as the thriller, which helps me hone my literary intuition.' Who is to say if this declaration of principles has anything to do with the fact that the novel ends on Sunday, 25th July 1909, only hours before the events of the Tragic Week? 'At the outset,' the author acknowledges, 'I was working on the premise that the novel was going to be set during the Tragic Week, but then I realized there was no need for that, and in the end it isn't even mentioned. It's a final landscape that is only just beginning to announce its coming. What's more, the Tragic Week is a screen that hid everything else from view, which is why the whole story of the Reforma is so little known and surprises people.'
The publication of La felicitat has happily coincided with the Ramon Casas exhibition at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. The novel and the paintings complement one another, and Casas may offer the best perspectives on that period: the social revolt repressed; Barcelona's haute bourgeoisie, lordly and despotic; the young dandies taking strychnine tablets, and the cabaret girls, livid and at the same time fatale, tainted. And happiness: both those who possess it, almost as a birthright, and those who are desperately searching for it, even though they don't really know what it is.
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