Eons ago, my BFF and I were wandering through a museum in Bruges, Belgium, when we stumbled on The Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch. We must have parked ourselves in front of it for a good half hour (museums weren’t particularly crowded in those days) and yokels from California that we were, we were impressed. The details and clever use of bodily orifices was stunning. This book struck me as a secular Spanish version of same.
Cela was a Spanish Nobel Prize winner, and this book is set in Madrid in 1943. The Spanish Civil War had recently ended right before the beginning of World War II, and the repressive regime of Franco was in full swing. The story centers around hard-bitten Doña Rosa and her tavern, and a cast of more than three hundred other characters, all residents of the same few streets. It is, of course, impossible to track them all, so it is the overall effect which is more the point.
But some characters stand out. Here is Martín Marco, an impoverished insomniac, who loves to wander the streets of Madrid by night.
Martín Marco likes his solitary walks, his long exhausted strolls along the wide city streets, along those very same streets that by day, as if though by some miracle, are filled, filled to the brim like a breakfast cup of coffee in an honest café, with the voices of street sellers, the candid, slightly crude songs of the maidservents, the honking of car horns, the cries of little children: tender, violent, tame little urban cubs.
A world that both Hemingway and Orwell knew, and in many ways a prelude to WWII, just on the horizon.