Deemed one of the most formative and influential writers of contemporary Catalan literature, Mercè Rodoreda’s prolific body of work details the profundity of “essential things . . . with a certain lack of measure.” For the month of February, Asymptote Book Club presents her most recent work to be translated into English, the contemplative and timeless Garden by the Sea. Rife with sensuous detail and quiet notes of transition, this novel is the poignant result of a patient life, of time marked equally by conversation and silence.
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Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, Open Letter Books, 2020
Being someone who is unfamiliar with Mercè Rodoreda’s work, I read the description of Garden by the Sea and was expecting Gatsby-esque schadenfreude. I was wrong. Garden by the Sea is something quieter, more tender, and mournful. It has a sense of longing for a time when summers at your seaside villa could really be carefree romps and endless parties without the tragedy and trauma inherent in postwar society.
Taking place outside 1920s Barcelona over six summers and one winter and narrated by an unnamed gardener, Garden by the Sea is the story of a rich couple, Senyoret Francesc and Senyoreta Rosamaria, and their friends whose idyllic summers are rocked by the construction of a grander villa next door. (Surely you can see how it’s difficult to avoid The Great Gatsby coming to mind.) What unfolds is a collection of personal tragedy, lots of gossip, some light one-upmanship, swimming, and, of course, something of a love triangle. There are also brief appearances by a mischievous monkey and a lion cub, and a great many lush descriptions of plants and flowers. “Look at the linden trees. See the leaves, how they tremble and listen to us. You laugh now, but one day if you find yourself walking in the garden at night, beneath the trees, you will see how the garden talks to you, the things it says . . .” The book opens with the gardener saying, “I’ve always enjoyed knowing what happens to people. It’s not because I’m garrulous, but because I like people, and I was fond of the owners of this house.” However fond he was of the owners, it is clear that he is that much fonder of his garden. He takes such care in his expertise that when he looks at the neighboring villa’s garden and its bearded irises, he says he’s “really distressed.” The only times we see the gardener critical of the Senyorets and their friends are when their revelry comes at the cost of his flowers, or if his expertise is questioned by people who clearly know less.
While the class differences between the staff and the Senyorets aren’t the main point of the novel, it is hard to ignore them. Many of the stories he recounts have come to him thirdhand—usually from the cook, Quima, who heard it from Miranda, a maid. At times, it is almost comical the lengths Miranda or Quima will go in order to stay in the room during a juicy conversation—such as taking an extraordinarily long time to pack up a chess set—but most of the time they are simply standing at the side of a room, and quickly forgotten. The gardener stumbles upon trysts more than once while taking a nighttime walk around the grounds, as if the masters have forgotten about him once their immediate needs have been served. At other points the gardener is a confidante for both Senyorets Francesc and Bellum, who is building the new villa for his daughter and her husband. Though perhaps the person who most casually takes advantage of the gardener’s company is Eugeni, Senyoret Bellum’s son-in-law and Senyoreta Rosamaria’s childhood sweetheart. Despite not employing the gardener, Eugeni makes it a habit to visit him and insert himself in all aspects of the man’s life. He often enters the gardener’s house uninvited and accompanies him on his duties without asking. Throughout their interactions, it is clear that the gardener is uncomfortable but isn’t in a position to push back. Eugeni clearly believes he is entitled to the gardener’s time, and whether or not he thinks it is friendship, their interactions feel transactional.
This is hardly the only emotional labor the gardener performs as the story unfolds. The arrival of a couple looking for their lost son shifts the book toward its tragic third act. The masters of the house are away and so the gardener spends the day with the couple, waiting for Francesc and Rosamaria to come home. Over the course of the afternoon they tell him the story of their son, Rosamaria’s childhood sweetheart, and about how the two were hopelessly in love in the way that teenagers often are. However, when the son returned from the war, he discovered that Rosamaria was engaged to Francesc and ran away, insisting that in five years she will tire of her husband and return to him. Their son is Eugeni. Although this meeting functions as a version of Chekov’s gun—it is predictable that Eugeni will turn up—what is most striking is the portrait of a couple torn apart by grief. Their interactions make it clear that the husband is skeptical of his wife’s near-obsessive hope that their son will return and that he is ready to mourn, but his wife keeps insisting to the contrary, and is constantly knitting socks for her son. The result is a couple forever in limbo and hesitant to stray too far from home.
This type of understated emotional weight permeates Garden by the Sea. The book is populated by characters who simply wait out their lives, as if life is something to be endured rather than lived. It isn’t that they seem unhappy, just a bit blank. There isn’t a single character who hasn’t experienced some sort of loss or heartbreak, and one gets the sense reading that they are hesitant to fully commit to anything or anyone else, for fear it will be snapped away. Although Franco hasn’t risen to power at the time the book is set, his legacy in the time Rodoreda writes seems to be the root of this hesitancy. It speaks to a society coming to terms with the aftermath of war, and feels born of someone whose culture and language has been taken away. The history of Catalan literature is one told in fits and starts and is inseparable from oppression and denial, and you can feel this pain in Rodoreda’s characters. By the time this book was published in 1966, Catalan literature was experiencing something of a resurgence—often credited to Rodoreda’s 1962 novel The Time of the Doves—but I can imagine that it was difficult to fully trust this shift back into acceptance. It is a testament to Rodoreda’s skill that she not only packs such richness into her novels, but it is just understated enough to intrigue the reader to dig deeper.
It is not just hesitancy that clouds the narrative, but also grief. At first, when I thought about the distance the gardener tries to maintain from the family and the way he insists to Quima and Miranda that he isn’t interested in their gossip, I thought that the tone of his narration was tinged with nostalgia, but eventually realized that it is grief. The gardener briefly mentions losing his beloved wife Cecília early on in the novel but we never learn much about their relationship. Other points in the novel make clear the depths to which the gardener associates the villa with his wife and feels her everywhere; “You know the whole story, and you know that my Cecília died. Such is life. But while I’m here she won’t be gone, not completely.” This adds yet another layer of meaning to the seeming non-events of the story. It contributes weight to the monotony of the summers and the malaise the gardener seems to feel in the winter. We ultimately don’t learn much about the gardener himself, but he joins a cast of characters seemingly frozen in time, so hesitant are they to break away from their current lives.
Rodoreda wrote Garden by the Sea in exile after the Spanish Civil War, at a time when Catalan was outlawed, and one gets a sense that this is the source of the melancholia underlying the novel. Truth be told, there is not a lot of action in this book. The love triangle that takes center stage in the final act involves people who do little to change their station. Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño embrace the seeming non-events of the text and render emotional undercurrents beautifully, skillfully striking a balance between the rhythm of Rodoreda’s writing and the moments where we seem to luxuriate in the language itself. Both the translators and the author seem to know that the power of Garden by the Sea lies in the spaces between the words, in what remains unsaid, and the result is a story that settles itself in your mind, content to be recalled later on, perhaps in a garden.
Alyea Canada is an assistant editor at Asymptote and editor at Melville House. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
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