sense provide a framework for dealing with a collective trauma, and in this way decrease its viability as world literature?
ETHICAL NOSTALGIA IN MANUEL VICENT’S TRANVÍA A LA MALVARROSA
In Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, a first-person narrator, Manuel, looks back on his adolescence from present, democratic times. He describes his move from a village to the city of Valencia, his discovery of women and literature, his changing attitude towards religion – in short, his coming of age in the francoist Spain of the 1950s. The narrative, as mentioned above, is full of nostalgic sensory images; it is also enlivened with a host of witty anecdotes in which several remarkable secondary characters enter the story. A prime example of this is the series of anecdotes concerning Vicentico Bola, the immensely fat godfather of the narrator, who enjoys riding around on a little motorbike and takes his godchildren to the big city to have them deflowered in the local brothel. The story of Bola’s narrow escape from a forced marriage in particular shows clearly the anecdotal way he is described: the pregnant bride, and the entire wedding party, vainly knock on Vicentico’s door while the groom-to-be quietly sleeps and his mother and aunt tell everybody to keep quiet lest they wake the sleeping boy. There are other anecdotes, too, that interrupt the storyline for no other reason than to add couleur locale to the novel: the mention, for example, of a Valencian girl who, on being groped in the tram, tells the man in juicy Valencian: “Ja té vosté la mà en la figa. I ara qué fem? Ya tiene usted la mano en el coño. ¿Y ahora qué hacemos?” (You already have your hand on my arse. And now what do we do?) (150).
Tranvía a la Malvarrosa’s romantic stance and its setup as a Bildungsroman also help to activate nostalgia. Manuel, the protagonist, grows up in the course of the novel: the period described shapes him personally. He has his first encounters with love and literature. The pure and innocent love he feels for a girl who spends her holidays in his seaside village structures Tranvía a la Malvarrosa and adds to the novel an element of romantic quest. Young Manuel, on coming to Valencia to study, is perpetually looking for pretty blonde Marisa, whom he knows to be living somewhere in the city. The two have never actually talked, but have shared a great many timid looks during her visits to the coast. Manuel’s feelings for Marisa are thus very innocent and represent an ideal of romantic love.
This ideal, like any nostalgic image, is perfect by virtue of its very unattainability. Manuel never gets to know Marisa, and so their love can remain unspoiled by reality. Twice, however, he catches a glimpse of her as she is riding the tram towards the Malvarrosa beach (hence the novel’s title). The image of the girl dressed in pink, always riding away from her admirer, strikes Manuel as poetic: “Podía afrontar algo lírico: la pasión por aquella niña que huía en un tranvía sin que yo pudiera conseguirla jamás” (I could deal with something lyrical: the passion for that girl who fled in a tram and whom I could never seize) (138). She even serves as his muse in his first attempts in the field of literature. The pure and nostalgic nature of this first love is foregrounded by Manuel’s more down-to-earth relationships with other girls: his platonic relationship with the tragic and worldly-wise prositute La China, and, especially, his liaison with a modern, liberal French girl whose free spirit and daring behaviour contrast with Marisa’s shyness and her bourgeois reclusiveness. Marisa stands for nostalgic love, an image of perfection that can never be attained but to which other, later loves may be compared. Significantly, Manuel thinks of Marisa when he is taken to a brothel by his godfather Bola, and later on insists on calling French Juliette by the name Marisa.
Where love is concerned, then, the narrator describes a loss of innocence. In many places it becomes clear that both the narrator and the protagonist experience a nostalgic sense of time passing. As a child, Manuel was in a state of blissful innocence that is gradually corrupted by his experience of life. Young Manuel seeks to hold on to that innocence, as we see in the way he pictures his sexy French girlfriend as “una Marisa que se llama Juliette” (a Marisa who is called Juliette) (193). His attempts to maintain his innocence where religion is concerned are similarly futile. As a young boy he had wanted to become a missionary like his father, who insists he be sent to a seminary. In Valencia, however, he soon loses his faith – yet spends a long time trying to hold on to it: “Yo no creía en Dios, pero lo necesitaba todavía” (I did not believe in God, but I still needed him) (115).
The protagonist struggles with value systems that are incompatible with his own experiences. He loses faith in the doctrines of the church, and his romantic idea of love is replaced by a carnal one. He hangs out with prostitutes and even gets arrested by a soldier for making out with his girlfriend in the dunes. The time spent in prison perhaps marks the very end of his innocence: “hasta esa noche siempre había pensado que no tenía ningún motivo para la rebelión … A partir de ahí me hice un resistente” (until that night I had always thought that I had no motive for rebellion … From then on I became a part of resistance) (188-189). It is with the values of the francoist dictatorship, and especially the morals of the Catholic church, that Manuel’s discovery of life’s pleasures collides, and – as he himself acknowledges – this is what leads him to rebel.
In the story, then, we have a protagonist who starts out blissfully innocent, and whose blind belief in the values and norms of his time collapses as they come to stand in the way of his increasingly liberal and hedonistic preferences. He has trouble throwing off the yoke of this value system, afraid that nothing will replace it, and suffering from a “terror de encontrarme solo conmigo mismo” (fear of finding myself alone with myself) (126). He thus tries to cling on to it, while at the same time searching for alternative value systems – for example by attempting to become a member of Ortega y Gasset’s select minority: “Ahora yo solo quería ser guapo, atlético, sano, inteligente, tomar yogur batido, fumar Pall Mall lentamente, leer a Camus, a Gide, a Sartre” (Now I only wanted to be handsome, athletic, healthy, intelligent, drink yoghurt shakes, smoke Pall Mall slowly, read Camus, Gide, Sartre) (113).
The narrator, the older Manuel, looks back on his younger self critically. In describing his loss of innocence, he often points out its negative sides. He sees his younger self as still so inscribed in the dictatorial value system that he was quite unaware of what was really going on. He recalls, for instance, the day he first came to Valencia, which happened to be the day of San Donís, a local holiday. Coincidentally, Franco also visited Valencia on precisely that day, and for this reason anyone suspected of being against the regime was put in prison by way of precaution. Young Manuel, however, had no idea that all this was happening: “Las sirenas de la policía que sonaban por todas partes yo no las asociaba entonces al terror sino a la fiesta … Ignoraba que ese día había tantos pasteles en las pastelerías como demócratas en la cárcel” (Back then, I did not associate the police sirens that sounded all around with terror, but with the holiday … I did not know that on that day there were as many pastries in the cake shops as democrats in prison) (60).
Elsewhere the narrator gives a clear picture of his current views on Franco, and of how they contrast with his youthful blindness to the regime’s bad sides: “El enano sangriento del Pardo seguía metiendo en la cárcel a los esforzados luchadores por la libertad y el pueblo hambriento… Yo no comprendía nada” (The bloodthirsty dwarf of El Pardo kept sending to prison those who fought hard for freedom and the hungry people … I didn’t understand a thing) (122). The narrator’s description of Franco as a bloodthirsty dwarf contrasts with the image of the dictator that young Manuel once held: “Franco para mí no era un dictador sino un gordito anodino al que parecían gustarle mucho los pasteles, con aquellas mejillas tan blandas, el bigotito, la barriguita bajo el cincho” (To me, Franco was not a dictator, but rather an insignificant little fat man who seemed to like pies a lot, with those bland cheeks, the small moustache, the belly below the belt) (102). Clearly, the narrator’s democratic value system clashes with that of his younger self. At the end of the novel, when Manuel finally breaks with that value system and starts rebelling against it, he comes closer to the adult version of himself that the narrator represents.
However, innocence is still bliss to the narrator. He still longs
