Almost 100 years of Spanish history in one book. A fragment of the novel by the winner of the Prix Grand Continent

Prix ​​Grand Continent is a young literary distinction awarded annually for a “great European story”. A year ago, the international jury, which included, among others, Agata Tuszyńska, it was awarded to the Spanish writer Aroa Moreno Durán. While accepting the award she said:

This novel is about women and girls at the rear of the war. It brings to mind everything they did when history was a difficult sound for them to bear. These are intimate biographies entangled in the gears of great history. Politics that touches what is deepest and most intimate: education, childbirth, brutal silence at the kitchen table. It is for them that I wrote this book: for mothers (especially mine), daughters, grandmothers, for those who changed history, resisted, for those who rebelled, and for those who were unable to do so.

Below we publish an excerpt from the book “Tide” by Aroa Moreno Durán, translated by Katarzyna Okrasko, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in 2023:

This is a story you won’t record: mine. We had been living in our grandparents’ house for two years. I was left without a job. I couldn’t hold us any longer. My grandmother would buy small essentials for me and give them to me in plastic bags from the supermarket. She put boneless veal, yogurt and biscuits in them. Sometimes also chocolate and chewing gum for you. Sometimes folded banknotes fastened with a yellow rubber band. But it couldn’t be done. That’s why we moved in with them again.

These were terrible years, not only lead, not only hera. Brutal years. There was darkness in the air, even though the sun was rising. I thought you didn’t notice. That your hand in mine is enough for you. But it was here and nothing was invisible. These years are also a part of you. Not as a metaphor, not as empty words. The air was polluted and we were breathing it. How many times have you told me things related to that era: always running home, don’t touch anything if you don’t know what it is, don’t take candy from anyone, don’t go anywhere with strangers. I’m tired and sleepy every day, making you dinner, my mouth automatically tells a story, while my consciousness is already heading towards another darkness. Thinking whether it would be better to change the place, move deeper into the interior. But for us, only children, it costs a lot to be away from home. Did it cost you?

The port quay was full of men who had nothing to do. They tried to work on cutters. They were standing in line at the tin pipe factory. They came to the door of the waste paper collection center and waited. But nothing was like before here. Fishing had declined severely a few years earlier. There was a shortage of work. There were plenty of drugs. Violence. Photo of a car set on fire on a downtown street corner. Day after day and after another. Bombs exploded in people’s hands, and there were painted shooting ranges with the names of work colleagues who did not take part in the strikes. We knew each other very well. Son-in-law of so and so. That one’s brother. That woman’s son.

‘Tide’ book mat. promotional items from Wydawnictwo Literackie

Grandpa wanted me to continue studying, but I didn’t want us both to be a burden to them like two daughters. He finally relented and, through a friend, got me a job in the steel mill’s office. Before admission, they took an exam for me. And I passed. They sent me to the office of the aluminum smelter. I had no idea about aluminum parts. But I learned. I only made it halfway through my studies in Philosophy and Literature. Because you showed up before graduation.

We worked in a cage overlooking the workshop. The noise was terrible. First, parts were made in sand, and then in iron. I still remember the smell of sand pressed with oil. I never smelled anything like that again. The machines were making a lot of noise next to the stove and spoons. I often had headaches. The fire burst like fireworks.

Some men were burned. Their limbs were amputated. Their bronchi were destroyed. They left the house in the morning coughing, and in the evening they returned home coughing. But it just happened. It’s always been like that. In the office, I kept time sheets for all workers. If they had downtime because they were out of materials or the machine broke down or they went out to eat, I had to make a note of it. And they had to be punished. When one of the workers got angry at the boss and sent him to hell, he had to be severely punished, but he was not fired because there was a shortage of workers.

I started at half past eight and worked an hour longer than everyone else, because it was an office next to the workshop. So I had to eat there. There was a bar outside the factory. Always full of workers. Not only from the steelworks, but also from the refinery. It was all a creation adjacent to the town. With its smoke and inhabitants in blue overalls. I didn’t like going into that bar. But I almost never had time to prepare something to eat the night before.

And even though drinking was forbidden during working hours, we drank.

Back then, some women got married and disappeared from the factory. Not because they wanted to. The company gave you a poisoned gift. When you got married: you had, I don’t know how many thousand pesetas, and you were gone. They knew that they would all have children and would miss work to put a thermometer under their arm, go to a nativity play, or run out and pour iodine on their knees. Some of us started fighting for it to end. We gathered during breaks. Eventually, the company changed its policy and severance pay and layoffs disappeared.

Then the bosses congratulated us by kissing us twice on the cheek. That razor-prickly feel of beards sprayed with aftershave and growing during the workday. But we didn’t need congratulations, we wanted money to buy a coat, a backpack for the children, T-shirts, so that there would be enough milk in the fridge.

During these years I met Sebas. He was a hired hand at a construction site in the city center, but he was from Salamanca. He lived in a workers’ hotel, the only one in the city at that time. He worked in Rutina, where the pay was the best, but it was the hardest. He came here and that’s what he did. His family had land and wanted him to come back, but he wanted to see the world, sail on ships. The endless sea, Adriana, I want to see it. Adriana, the one who comes from the sea, he called me.

But he ended up here, in this town divided into four, stranded in this port and never getting on a ship. He was a “loaded” man in every sense of the word, with a thick nose and the shining eyes of an intelligent animal. He worked from Monday to Saturday, and on Sundays he went to the city to further his studies. In the bar, black from head to toe with metal dust, he invited me to go with him to the mountains one Sunday afternoon. If he could, he preferred spending time outdoors rather than indoors. That’s what he told me. And I, I don’t know why, said yes.

I didn’t even think that I could ever be with someone again, if with you this part of my life was erased. But I wasn’t really thirty yet.

Cover of the book ‘Tide’ mat. promotional items from Wydawnictwo Literackie

Sebas showed up, walked me home and looked at me like I’m going to tear off everything you’re wearing. But: good evening, good night, sleep well, Ariadna. A dirty knight smeared with soot all week, spotless on Sundays. And I smelled of cold cologne from his chest under his shirt, hair from his beard stuck to his collars, and when he came to me all I could see were his hands moving tons of parts.

I returned to my body. I felt primitively and at the same time safe with him. This was blowing my mind. I was reuniting with something inherited that I had lost before, and I couldn’t deal with it. I liked how irrationally he got angry and I didn’t take it seriously. I allowed myself to get a little excited every time we raised our voices. And then I felt guilty. The more time I spent with him, the harder it was to remember another face, another voice, another texture, as if there had been no other man before. And slowly I stopped thinking about your father.

Sebas was the complete opposite of your father.

One afternoon you and I went for a walk around the old part of town. And he led you by the hand and showed you things and told you stories. I looked at this picture as some absurd betrayal. As if I was the lost daughter of a territory falling into the hands of the wrong person. Was it luck? There was a physical bond between us, between me and him, so traditional, so close to what it should be, that I didn’t have time to realize that we had nothing in common. They sent Sebas to another factory and at some point I missed him, but we never saw each other again. He showed up at my grandparents’ house about two times, but I didn’t go down to see him.

When they closed the factory, I found myself on the streets again. They kicked us out and it was to no avail that the men had attached themselves to the machines that April night. The women’s trade union we had created was of no use. The building fell into disrepair and eventually turned into a ghostly museum of an entire era. You have its remains there, still standing like a sunburned banner. That night, after everyone had been kicked out and we were out of work, my grandparents sat me at the kitchen table and made me promise to go back to college. I kept my word.

You were ten years old.

That evening, when you came back from the street, dirty and happy, still so small, so funny and confident, even though you couldn’t see him, Sebas was standing opposite, leaning against the wall of the building, waiting for me. I got ready and was ready to talk to him, not knowing exactly what I should tell him, when you rang the doorbell. And I stayed to bathe you, wash your hair, put you into your pajamas, and make those orange fish for dinner, which I kept checking for bones with my fingertips before I popped a piece into your mouth.

I don’t know if I felt sad that evening, I probably did. And in the following days too. And you must have noticed something, something that was always there with us, tangled in your clothes scattered in the damp bathroom, in the spines torn from the fish and in their open mouths on the plate. You looked at me, stared at me with eyes like the sea and asked: Who is daddy? And I tell you that your voice was very sincere and you never asked too many questions. You sat in the same place as you do now, over thirty years later, looking out over the bay while I recalled it all.

I would like to touch her head, wash her hair again with that shampoo.

Tell her: No more tears.