Among the different itineraries opened up by Jordi Coca's storytelling, there is one that should be given close attention: that of the father figure. This is a figure that, distressed and distressing, had appeared in some texts of the 1980s and that had always left the strange sensation of a conflictive, almost impossible relationship. It was a negative relationship from the standpoint of the character-narrator. There were always more reasons for distancing than for drawing closer. If one of the core themes of Coca's early work revolved around relationship conflicts, around the complexity or fragility of human relations, or the attempts at or different ways of making them possible or not, given each person's conditions and circumstances – a clear example would be La japonesa [The Japanese Girl] – the relation was always problematic when one of the elements was the father. Hence, this figure has hovered in Coca's fiction from the condition and perspective of negativity, which then leaves open the question of the reason and explanation for this fact.

Sota la pols [Under the Dust] or the Novel of the Father
This itinerary has moved, to date, through three titles Mal de lluna [Moon Sickness] (1988), Sota la pols (2001) and, more recently, La noia del ball (2007). In Mal de lluna, a female character who had previously left Menorca returns to the island – fleeing a sentimental rupture – with the aim of seeing her father who lives in Ferreries, and of rediscovering herself. The whole of this brief novel is about the impossibility – interior, of need, of will – of picking up the telephone, of announcing the visit and then going about it. The reason for the trip was this, but the indecisiveness of the character keeps putting off the moment as other elements – re-encounters with old friends and acquaintances – are introduced, putting space and time between the intention that has brought her to the island and what she is really doing there. Ferreries is the frontier that divides the island into two halves. She circulates in one but it is impossible for her to accede to the other. There is some reason, some internal borderline of irresolution that ensures she will not be able to. Meanwhile, memory keeps constructing her past life, her relationship with her parents, with her sister, with her friends, her childhood and adolescence, until the island becomes too small and she decides to return to Barcelona. With her return the reunion has not been possible. The last sentence of the book leaves open the possibility of a call to the father to tell him that she won't be going to visit him. It is a call made from the island or perhaps from Barcelona itself. There is no particular aggressiveness shown towards the father but some reason, some inner dividing line keeps them apart.

A very different work is Sota la pols, which introduces major changes with regard to the father figure and begins with the construction of a narrator-character who sketches out a specific psychology that not only explains his personality but, in the act of doing so, provides the keys for interpreting this, let us say, to paraphrase the earlier title, "father sickness". In these two novels, the father is always seen from the standpoint of the other. The narrative voice is the active subject that perseveres in constructing the point of view around which the relationship is determined. In Mal de lluna, as we have seen, the description is more of an atmosphere of the impossibility that ensures that a father and daughter will not meet because of the vacillation of the daughter, the cause of which can only be attributed to reasons from the past that impede this renewed encounter. There is the desire, or the responsibility of filial duty but, at bottom, there is also some reluctance that gets in the way. Sota la pols is a completely different story. It is much more than this and there are many more factors. First, there is a change of narrative voice, shifting from female to male and beginning to identify an underlying possibility in this whole conflict of the relationship, explaining it in good part, or at least a significant part because, all at once, the personality of the narrative voice starts giving out hints that bring it closer to the author and then there emerges possibility of finding oneself before a narrative alter ego. Naturally, the author establishes a series of prudent narrative distances, yet this does not hinder his possible proximity or identification. The years of birth of character and author, for example, are not the same, although there is not much between them, which makes them witnesses to the same experiences and of the same historic period. If we are before a narrative alter ego, then the hypothetical father ceases to be this to become a real father while the standpoint, the relationship and the personality are submitted, of course, to all the screens that literature allows to be introduced but are always based on an underpinning of truth.

Sota la pols, winner of the Sant Jordi Prize in 2000, is more complex than Mal de lluna, not only because of this intensification of the father's personality but also because of what the book is as a whole: the chronicle of an initiation into the adult world of the youth and future writer, and the description of the grey, asphyxiating – under the dust – way of life in the years that followed the Civil War. A humble family lives in a working-class neighbourhood of the city, immersed in the wretchedness of the times. The boy, the narrative voice, sets out to reconstruct his memories and, through them, the state of the epoch and the mood of those years take shape. This novel of personal initiation in the social devastation of the post-war setting makes it possible to follow the inner processes of the child and his relations with his family.

From this connection of the boy with his milieu emerge childhood games, his relationships with friends in the suburbs of the city, the tragic death of one of them and the progressive bonding with some of his neighbours, old anarchists who, with their advice and suggestions, open up the way of access to reading and a literary education. As for the family, the violent, authoritarian presence of the father and the unpredictability of his reactions condition all the relationships, creating a feeling of suffocation that is to blight every aspect of family life. The boy's fear of the person of his father is absolute and the ending even leaves open the ambiguity of his true feelings towards him. The father is about to come out of prison, where he has landed because of some obscure, marginal activities relating with proscribed petty business deals, and the feeling arising from his possible release and fear of his return and violent, authoritarian behaviour moves between doubt and insecurity, happiness and fear at the prospect of this possible reunion. Curiously – or not – the endings of both Mal de lluna and Sota la pols show ambivalence and wavering resolve. In Mal de lluna it is about phoning the father, when, where and how. In Sota la pols, it is the feeling of the boy faced with his possible return. The father's prison is the child's freedom. The homecoming asphyxiates him. Again, curiously – or not – both novels have title quotes by the same author: Verlaine. The first is to remind us that beneath small things great realities are concealed and, behind apparent simplicity, deeper realities are hiding. It is a philosophy that defines and orients a great part of Jordi Coca's work. The second is the sadness of past memories. Especially when that past is the one described in Sota la pols.

La noia del ball or the Novel of the Mother
The publication of La noia del ball, winner of the 2007 Carlemany Prize, closes this itinerary in a manner that verges on the surprising, while yet bestowing it with continuity and an interest that not only offer better understanding of Coca's fiction and the form and presence of the father figure, but that also make of this work an additional element and a new narrative piece for interpreting and explaining a period that runs from the nineteen-twenties through to the years immediately after the Civil War. This time the change of perspective is notable, although it is clearly at the service of the same project as that of the preceding books, especially Sota la pols, since, like a mirror of two faces, La noia del ball is the other gaze. One is the complement of the other. Mal de lluna then appears as a preamble, preparation and a getting underway of a great narrative project that is the duo shaped by and consisting of Sota la pols and La noia del ball.

If Sota la pols is the novel of the father, La noia del ball is the novel of the mother, although with some finer points that are worth elaborating because the construction of the mother figure is by virtue of her relationship with the husband and his personality. This is none other than the father in Sota la pols. Hence, to all intents and purposes, both novels speak of the selfsame male character, first in his functions as a father from the standpoint of the son, and then as a husband from the perspective of the wife, mother of the son. The two novels thus show the destructive behaviour of father and husband in the family circle, casting light on the two victims of his violent tyrannical personality: his wife and his son.

The narrative mechanism is the same in both novels and the links between one and the other – uniting mother and son – quite explicit. In Sota la pols the narrative voice of the boy is the one that tells the story. In La noia del ball, it is the mother's voice that tells the story but she does so addressing her son. It is a narrative monologue in which she tells the son her story: childhood, work, marriage, his birth, and how they experienced the years before, during and after the Civil War. Leaving no doubts as to who is who, the son, receptor of his mother's memories, is the author, as the mother recalls, of a book called Sota la pols, with which the narrative process is closed when one sees that a narrative voice – the son of Sota la pols – now receives the mother's confession so that he will put it into order and writer her novel, which is no more nor less than the process of the mother's confession. The narrator of Sota la pols is now the receiver/listener of La noia del ball, the girl at the dance. As is logical, La noia del ball is at once what I have noted above, and more than what I have noted because the novel is also an elegy to a lost world: the childhood of the character and the geography she describes: Menorca. It is the island to which the female character of Mal de lluna returns and that now, in this third novel, becomes the paradigm of the past and of happy times.

The inner time of the mother-character moves from the space of happiness to that of unhappiness, respectively identified with Menorca and Barcelona. The departure from the island on the way to Barcelona is the start of what will be a descent into hell. It is the step from the world of childhood into the adult world, into reality: from the grandmother's home, games, a free life and the sea to the world of work – which is not seen negatively – penury, illness, the death of the father and, above all, the marriage, cause and motif of her unhappiness, from which she tries to save herself and with which she struggles, drawing on an innate, hidden, fearful strength she feels, and the life of her son, who is the force and reason of her resistance. This is, needless to say, a tribute to the anonymous fortitude of a simple woman, because the woman at the dance is a one with all the attributes and conditions of normality, an anti-heroine, the only epic of whom is her being alive and her everydayness. However, it is important to note that the move from Menorca to Barcelona in itself does not necessarily imply a descent into the infernal regions.

Despite the difficulties of a humble family in the convulsed society at the time, the destructive crux that will break the character's life into two separate parts is meeting the man who is to be her husband. It is an imposition – his presence – that comes about without her being able to do anything about it. From the very first, he acts as if he is the proprietor of her will and keeps doing so through to the end of the novel. He achieves this through arbitrary violence – what would have to be called gender violence today – which brings about the constant terror of living in fear of any unanticipated reaction of the physical force and psychological ill-treatment that lead to unremitting humiliation. Hence the possibility of gaining the space of the lost dream is the possibility of returning to the island. Dream, reality, dream seem to reign over the mother-character's thoughts. Nostalgia for the past, the longing to recover a paradise lost, to flee from the present reality are constants in the life of this female figure and a possibility that, very vaguely, closes her tale. One thinks that when it does come to an end, the character is only twenty-four, with a whole future ahead of her. Again, as with Mal de lluna or Sota la pols, the ambiguity of the ending remains open. To phone the father or not to phone him. Happiness for the father's freedom or fear of his return. The possible recovery of happiness or definitive loss respectively represented by the return journey to the island or not returning. All of this marks the closing feelings of each of the character-narrators who tell the stories, always in first person, of all three novels. In the three cases, a sense of the perplexity and fragility of human relations prevails while, especially in the last two novels – the first, as noted earlier, was a kind of harbinger or preamble to the theme – the psychological make-up of the three characters is being constructed: father, mother and son. Again, like Mal de lluna and Sota la pols, as one further example of the links and relationship between the three titles, La noia del ball has a new citation from Verlaine as its title quote, this time taking one back to the pain and the lament of the character over the events of life.

However, the characters are also living in historic time, which is the other staple of the book although it does not explain the narrative project concealed behind the novels Sota la pols and La noia del ball, which, as noted earlier, are two faces of one and the same mirror. Sota la pols was the greyness and dead weight of the post-war years, the poverty and struggle to survive, a description of the way of life in the working-class suburbs of the city. It was a chronicle of a time marked by needs, in which the character sets out on his apprenticeship into the adult world and defines his vocation as a writer. As I have remarked, too, the historical period of La noia del ball runs from the nineteen-twenties through to the sixties. Agitated years. In this regard, La noia del ball represents an ideological intensification in comparison with Sota la pols.

Viewed from the simplicity of the voice of the narrator, of the mother, we are given descriptions of moments in the pre-war period (killings in the street), in the war itself (the events of May 1937 and the bombing attacks), and the post-war years (the repression of the Franco regime). The description of one of the characters of the husband's family, his father and her father-in-law – grandfather of their son – grandfather Diego, opens up the way into the world of anarchism, of CNT-FAI and its activities throughout the war. These are contrasted with the humanist, idealist goodness of Joan, the anarchist friend and the possible feeling he arouses in the female character, which is nipped in the bud by the possessive irruption of the husband. Joan is the other dream she has, the man at whose side she might have found happiness. Joan is the boy at the dance because the dance, in her youth, is the moment of happiness that is rudely shattered as, according to the husband, "only whores dance". Symbolically, his irruption on to the scene will mean leaving the dance and also ceasing to see Joan, a possible space of happiness always moved by the best ideals of libertarian anarchism, like that represented by his family and the old neighbours who initiate the child narrator, the voice of Sota la pols, into culture and literature. The other face of this anarchism, the violent side and cause of much of the destruction of the war, is that identified with the actions of the husband and his family. It is as if the arbitrary violence happening on the street is also dealt out at home. She, the girl at the dance, is a character that is prisoner to and victim of this violence.

Nonetheless, an ideological reading of La noia del ball also underpins an idea that becomes a cornerstone of the last part of the novel: the repression of the Franco regime against Catalonia. Vehement and clear in its political line – which is another of the possible itineraries of a reading of Coca's work, both fiction and plays – the novel is a denunciation of this repression, of its extremely active desire to stamp out nationalism in Catalonia, and of its hatred for anything Catalan. From the ingenuity of the mother's voice emerges a description of attitudes and situations that implicitly bear both a denunciation of the events that come to pass and a vindication of a primary sense – given the condition of the character – of her Catalanness in opposition to the evil deeds of the victors of the war. In this sense, La noia del ball is the final definition of the father figure in Jordi Coca's story, yet it is also the description of some characters who live in a well-delimited historic time and who serve the author in his telling the story of a particular period and recounting facts and circumstances that, in La noia del ball, end up as a grim indictment of the Franco regime and its repression against Catalonia. It is one way of giving an account of a key, determinant moment in the post-war years in Catalonia. Memory pitted against the oblivion of history. Bearing witness in favour of historic memory.

Copyright © 2008 Àlex Broch