Montserrat Roig (1946–1991)

Longlisted for the 2022 best UK/Irish small press award presented by the Republic of Consciousness. Writer, feminist, and Catalan activist Montserrat Roig’s final work before her early death at 45, published in 1989 and now translated into English, is a collection of short stories showcasing Roig’s feminist and anti-Francoist activism. Though it would be another year before she was diagnosed with aggressive cancer that would all too quickly kill her, every one of these eight stories features dying and death, as if she knew what was coming, giving this book a bit of a haunting effect.

My two favorite stories are linked through their general outline of a deathbed scene intermingling with memory. “Song of Youth” presents the character of an old woman in hospital, recently moved into an area for patients expected to die soon, resisting the meek dutifulness expected of her by the ill-mannered staff. Her sensory inputs in this setting meld with recalled sensations from a passionate encounter when she was a young woman, the strong back of the doctor clothed in white becoming the strong back of the white-shirted stranger and lover met in the cafe. In both places in time her rebelliously independent spirit shines forth strongly, contrasting with the change to her body: her hand, “protruding bones, riddled with swollen blue rivers cut through by clods of earth coloured stains,” was once otherwise - “The skin was still elastic then. There was fat underneath it.” It’s an effective story of the spirit defying the decline of the body.

A later story, “The Chosen Apple”, comes at it differently, and is a sensitive little gem of a story. Here it is an old married couple, the man dying at home with his wife caring for him. She remembers defying his mother who told her she was not smart enough for her intellectual son, but it is the essentialness of the person that matters more. A memory of being told, “It’s no use hoping you’ll be happy with him. You won’t understand each other. He was still just a small boy and we were already speaking in Latin together,” is immediately followed by the real time, “Now he wants me to bring him a hot-water bottle. There is cold in his bones, he tells me. I check his pulse and feel the slow beats. ‘Nadiejda,’ he says, ‘I’m still holding on.’ I kiss his forehead and my lips turn ice cold.” I mean, that gets you, does it not. And again, the body withers, but the spirit does not.

“The Chosen Apple” suggests a diminishment of intellectualism in favor of emotion and lived experience, which interestingly the intellectual Roig repeats in other stories as well. “Mar”, one of two longer stories, contrasts the characters of two women who develop a close relationship, one of whom is the stereotypical intellectual and the other of whom is the more earthy, carefree Mar. The narrator asks Mar, “why the attitude all the time towards intellectuals, and she immediately stopped laughing, abandoned her jocular tone and said: ‘Because you’re always trying to demonstrate what other people experience, as if you were all stone dead or something.’” And then in the story “Division”, we read that “After coffee was served, Glòria went out onto the veranda to sit in one of the wicker armchairs and devote herself to her favourite activity of all: not thinking about anything.”

The final and longest story, “Before I Deserve Oblivion”, centers a narrator who has abandoned both intellectualism and honestly lived emotion, resulting in a warped and rambling psyche mirrored by the form of the story. A Franco-era censor, now a bad literature teacher, he is haunted by a poem by Cavafy that unlike the rest of the words he censored, he remembers, as it convicts himself:

“Like the beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old,
sadly shut away in a sumptuous mausoleum,
roses by the head, jasmine at the feet –
so appear the longings that have passed
without being satisfied, not one of them granted
a single night of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.”

Regarding intellectualism and lived emotion, then, perhaps Roig would say, as another character in “Division” says, “The perfect [wo]man is a synthesis.”

3.5*… (altro)