The Snares of Memory by Juan Marsé / Black spots, pink pills

Juan marsé

The Snares of Memory
by Juan Marsé

Black spots, pink pills

Post-Franco Spain is ‘caught between its transition to democracy 

and its Pact of Forgetting’ in The Snares of Memory by Juan Marsé

By Annie Mcdermott

May 15, 2020

It is 1982 in Barcelona, and the unnamed protagonist, a middle-aged novelist who may or may not be Juan Marsé himself, is commissioned to write a film script about the grisly murder of a prostitute. It is to be based on real events: in 1949, during Franco’s dictatorship, a young woman was strangled with a length of celluloid film in the projection booth of a neighbourhood cinema, by a man who remembers having done it but not the reason why. “What we are after is not a plot as such, so don’t waste your time on that”, the director, an acclaimed leftist auteur of the Franco years, explains. Instead, he says, his plan is to “replace plot with naked reality”. He is after “a truthful, non-judgemental and journalistic account”, in which ultimately “the two protagonists, the whore and her murderer, should appear clearly as victims of the political system”.

The murderer, Fermín Sicart, was released from prison twenty-five years ago and is now “a peaceful pensioner who play[s] pétanque on Paseo de Sant Joan”. Our protagonist arranges to carry out a series of interviews with him as research, and so, throughout the sweltering summer, the two men sit under a parasol on the protagonist’s terrace and discuss what happened in the “spectral, starving Barcelona of the post-war years”. Despite having vivid memories of life as a cinema projectionist – of using a soda siphon to put out the flames whenever the film caught fire, for example – Sicart struggles to remember the murder itself. He recalls Carolina, the prostitute, arriving in his projection booth, where they’d had sex several times before. He recalls her draping the film around her own neck and moving towards him, naked but for a raincoat and a pair of stockings. Then the narrative becomes hazy, and “all of a sudden I found myself somewhere else: sitting in the back row of the stalls with no idea of how I had got there or what had happened”.

The novel opens with a newspaper interview with the protagonist in which only the answers to the questions, and not the questions themselves, are printed: responses to things we can no longer see. It is a fitting image of post-Franco Spain, caught between its transition to democracy and its Pact of Forgetting. The Snares of Memory (Esa puta tan distinguida, 2016) is about looking back at the Franco era from 1982 – when the country was, in the words of the protagonist, “torn between memory and forgetting” – and as such it is full of gaps, absences and mysteries. Rolls of film in the projectionist’s booth are snipped up, thrown out of windows, or even catch fire, and Felisa, the protagonist’s cinema-buff maid, has theories about censors cutting out particularly racy sections of films before they were distributed. It’s not only celluloid that is edited by the state, however: Sicart claims his memory lapse is the result of psychiatric therapy he underwent in prison. A renowned military doctor “diagnosed” him as an anarcho-syndicalist and prescribed the erasure of his memory as treatment, as he did with many Republicans after the Civil War. Sicart was given “daily doses of forgetting in the shape of pink pills”, which have left him suffering from a kind of senile dementia.

The Snares of Memory artfully depicts a Spain for which the past is a foreign country, from which it is possible, like Sicart, to be “expelled”. Over the course of his long career, Marsé (who was born in 1933) has developed a reputation for elegant, finely wrought prose, which is fully in evidence here thanks to Nick Caistor’s energetic and well-judged translation. The novel is thoughtful, charming and occasionally very funny, but it is ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. The central image of a strangled prostitute in suspenders, bleeding around her neck, who supposedly represents “the tricks and snares created for us by memory, that high-class whore” (to quote the interview that opens the book), is a rather trite, dated and gratuitous way of exploring a theme that has, what is more, already been much explored.

Annie McDermott is a literary translator based in London

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