"No, not me. Someone else who suffers.
Me, I could not suffer so much.
What happened, a black cloth covering it,
And that outweighs the lights ...
Night. "
(Anna Akhmatova, Requiem , translation, Jean-Louis Backes, Gallimard, 2007)
There are books that are not recovering. Placed in our way a little drive by chance, according to a meeting, sharing, they enter our lives for ever does emerge. Their reading snatches us, enchants us, transforms us: to be read another, richer experience transmitted remotely by an unknown author ... An intrusion painful and salutary. Thus, this beautiful object, thin book, however, Published by Attila, containing two stories Ram ó n Sender: Requiem for a English peasant and The Ford is a deeply moving reading, one of those we do not emerge unscathed.
Sender, whose lives have been tragically marked by the English Civil War, is a writer in exile, but the remoteness of his native country does not abandon the fight, that it has adopted since his youth, against injustice and fascism. Literature is for him a means of preserving the memory of painful years: he lost during these sad events his wife and his brother shot by the Nationalists. Her works, beautiful and pure, are a mirror of this tragedy. Between the lines of the Requiem por un campesino English ñ ol and El vado unfolds the complexities of the human soul struggling with the war.
Requiem for a English peasant is a short novel (a little over eighty pages only) strong hot. Originally entitled M ó sen Mill á n , named after its protagonist, a priest confronted with fascism and treason, it was first published in Mexico in 1953. Long forbidden in Spain - his possession was a crime punishable by death - but it circulated clandestinely before being freely circulated after the death of Franco. The work opens with preparations for a Requiem Mass said for Paco, a young man shot by the Phalange. In the sacristy, the priest, M ó sen Mill á n, is alone with the altar boy. It awaits the arrival of the villagers who are slow to appear. However, Paco is a hero on which circulates a song in which the child repeats the words:
"And now the Paco du Moulin
he has been sentenced
and he weeps over his life,
way to the cemetery. "
This recites his verse romance throughout the story, over the memories of the priest who accompanied all the key moments of the existence of Paco, of his baptism to his last confession ... The novel chronicles place This passion - a chronicle of death foretold since the existence of the young man was already completed when the text evokes for the first time. The drama was well established before, and the reader finds himself caught in a reverse chronology, dating back to childhood Paco, reasonable and imaginative child, whose vivacity and curiosity aroused the affection of the priest. The boy flourished under the benevolent gaze of M ó sen Mill á n, which remembers every episode religiously significant of the existence of the young man
"Eyes closed, M ó sen Mill á n still remembered the day of the wedding of Paco."
These reminiscences recreate the image of a young man right and courageous, standing up against the minions of the Franco regime that surround the village and engaged in this struggle of the powerful against the villagers. The story, uncluttered but dense portrait of a rural community which emerge from the amazing people and burlesque, as Jer ó nima, midwife and healer, the priest who runs it contradicts religious rituals. The village women gather around the Carasol , the wash, instead of all the gossip and ridicule. Thus the drama is tinged comedy sometimes, as in games that oppose Jer ó nima to shoemaker, the enemy cried at his murder. But the tragedy is inevitable, a procession of shadows accompanies the lives of villagers to measure the progress of the phalanges. Men are killed, those caves, too miserable to live in a house:
"A group of young people arrived at the village, the son of good family, with sticks and pistols.
They looked like little, and some were crying hysterically. There had never seen people so shameless. Normally, these boys clean shaven and smart as women, they were called, in Carasol, small cocks, but the first thing they did was spend a tremendous beating to the shoemaker without his neutrality he used to anything either. Then they shot down six farmers, four of those who lived in caves, and they left their bodies in ditches of the road leading to the Carasol. As the dogs came to lick the blood, they posted themselves one of Duke's guards to remove them. Nobody asked anything. No one understood anything. The guards did not intervene against civilians and foreigners. "
In the story fits into the story of a watermark ravaged country, d a rural prey to the threats back to the time of serfdom. Sender never explained the situation: it suggests the keys engaging the reader in the discovery phase of destruction committed by the fascists. Beyond politics, this tragedy reveals unexpected behaviors, and betrayal has just where we least expect it. Disaster staging - or rather, revealed with finesse - reveals the complexity of the human soul, led to intolerable choice ... However, humanity remains in remorse half assumed, in this regret for a priest celebrating the memory of one he loved ...
The Ford, a short novel written in 1948 and previously unpublished in French, returns to the theme of betrayal already fundamental Requiem for a English peasant . In a stunning beauty, this tale is clear and poetic also developing around the memory of the dead. Indeed, two years before the beginning of the story, Lucy has denounced the husband of his sister Joaquina, the man she loved. The weight on mine awareness, she feels the need to confess but have not found the courage. Gold person, moreover, is ready to receive the burning secret. Lucy, then, finds an echo in the nature of his suffering, and the swollen river and the ford where she found her sister, echoing his grief and guilt. Fleeing the human world, she confides to the elements, wind, water flow turbulent, and it receives a rumor ... Nature thus reverberates in his despair.
"She turned back to the orchards and the village. Half of the morning was already passed. She could not bear to have it behind the distant hill that overlooked the cemetery. The more she thought, the more it was difficult. She rose, and taking the basket, she leaned on her left hip. Then she tried the ford and crossed on dry slabs that emerged at short intervals. On the opposite bank, she saw the village and the cemetery. And she tried to capture the murmur of waters, through the ford, he spoke, saying words that she could not decipher. "
Gradually the voice of the water it becomes clear: she hears the echo of his soul: "lamperolina - lamperolana", "informer, informer." And the river, rather than the purified, confronts his ghosts. A shirt flies, the wind blow it up and the door, the man loved spectrum and denounced. And watching the madness prevails, making his confession impossible. The truth unacceptable, can not be heard by his family, the other two women who liked the man, his mother, his wife. Remains unspeakable guilt, and the lively nature is grave. Then the snow covers the landscape, and Lucia, who died seeder and death, is lost in the whiteness inhuman pace of his scythe that reaps the vacuum ...
Thus, these two short novels, carefully assembled in this book, inscribe us in the lasting tragedy. Beings face the horrors of history, M ó sen Mill á n and Lucia betray the one they liked, the national tragedy reveals the weaknesses of the human soul, but Sender, in a subtle approach and loving, do not judge. "Cookies" are also victims who must survive in the hell of guilt and, strangely, the victors are never really shown. The disaster to all men, and this situation can not arise until disaster individual and shared.
Ramón Sender, Requiem for a English Peasant & The Ford , translations of JP and JP Ressot Cortada, frontispieces Anne Careil, Attila Editions, 2010.
Thanks to Chris Martinez for this finding: it has these two novels a beautiful chronic Doge's Tavern Loredan .
A very interesting reading of this work is to discover Sender blog audio Nikola Delescluse, Marshlands (issue of May 28, 2010) .
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