In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman loses her hold on reality in the aftermath of her family’s personal and political turmoil in this excerpt from Valentina Maini’s critically-acclaimed 2020 novel, The Melee. Translator Sean McDonagh introduces us to the novel’s protagonists: “Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five-year-old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents.” In the following passage, we see Gorane’s dreamlike world through a powerfully-voiced omniscient narration. Childhood memories careen into present-day hallucinations as we veer further into first person—and deeper into the world of an unstable and unreliable narrator. This meandering stream of consciousness takes life through Maini’s virtuosic prose and masterful ability to warp perspective across numerous narrative threads. A lyrically stunning debut novel from an award-winning poet.
from The Melee
They say they don’t need medicine, they keep repeating that they’re healed. They look at her as if they were thirsty, but as soon as Gorane offers them a glass of water, they shake their heads and say: take us home. It’s impossible to make them stop. She signs some sort of verification form with her typically illegible handwriting. The nurse is called Robledo, she has blonde hair gathered in a bun and white latex gloves. Robledo is an open and frivolous surname that weighs a lot less than hers. It’s the surname of someone who cures. The border between Robledo and Moraza is that between Spain and her home planted in the land they call Euskadi. She moves closer to the first bed, her mother’s. As soon as Gorane comes to a halt, her mother raises herself into a seated position. The strain of that elementary motion moves her face, it seems to detach from the neck, distancing itself and fluctuating in the ether like a fish with no eyes. Gorane follows it with her gaze, she almost doesn’t speak, the fish doesn’t see but continues to swim in the air as if it knew by heart every angle of the hospital bedroom, as if its instinct was enough to give it faith, to not lose itself. This is her mother, this blind fish. Then she sees her father curled up on his side, she sees his incredibly lean and broad back and she thinks of the Oma Forest. In her poor repertoire of metaphors, her father was always a tree trunk, an oak. Gorane is a slender and dry branch that won’t break off. Gorane has spent her life fearing the foot that will break the equilibrium, split the frond; the blood of the branch that will sully the earth like an ancient tear. Her blood is now stone because of a sadistic sprite that has tested its pointless powers on her. She touches the cold shoulder of her father who wears a white t-shirt with red hand-drawn writing. The writing proclaims revolutionary words that she knows off by heart and no longer wants to hear. There’s a twisted snake that wraps itself around a badly drawn axe. They will spare her yet another political tirade, the identity that must form itself and grow through the political, which is nothing without a slogan on its backside. Eyes that shine for other people’s words in which to recognise themselves forever. To learn by heart: shout in unison, and keep the rhythm by clapping your hands. Finished sentences, in protest if possible. Without this you are nothing and you can never articulate the revival of your people towards liberty. But this time, her parents don’t attack with the usual slogans because they are tired, because the exertions don’t help to obstruct the path to a swollen body. It’s a kind of struggle that they don’t know, the one against the body that rots. She goes into the bathroom and washes her hands. The first time for Mum who, blind, slams against the furniture of the hospital bedroom, smiling still, saying everything is fine. A second splash for the back of Dad, his wooden head hidden within his jet black hair. The water will wash away all of the sins, if the job is done meticulously, if Gorane will commit herself to scrub at length, to not leave anything to chance and to the stupid belief that a handful of prayers will be enough to receive pardon. She returns to the room where her parents watch each other, smiling, continuing to talk quietly, or to sing. Gorane would like to tell them that the only reasonable option is rest, to close their eyes and await what passes, what heals, but she says it in silence, to herself, before her mother and her father disappear, engulfed by the first, then by the second swollen eyelid.
They walk side by side along the hospital corridor, Gorane keeps her right hand in her father’s left, her left hand in her mother’s right. The beaten bodies are theirs, but it is Gorane who staggers. Strength is applied to the legs, she squeezes her parent’s fingers, which barely reciprocate. The patrons, the relatives of the sick, the patients, watch only her at the centre of that human line that proceeds like an army in an on-the-ground conflict.
“We’ll need to take public transport, you shouldn’t put yourselves under too much strain.”
Gorane pronounces the words in slow motion, expanding each syllable, she makes every consonant snap as if to stamp it in the air, indelible. She continues to look in front of her, the panorama changes, the people enlarge, her body is as weak as theirs.
“We want to walk” they say in unison. “We need to walk.”
*
She transported her parents home and lay them down on the bed. The journey from the hospital to Kalea Olano was a counterpoint of phrases and proud beats, allegro, con brio. Her father tried to stay strong, struggling to stand with his legs, leaning himself in intervals against Gorane who held her mother in her arms for the majority of the time, when she wasn’t flopping to the floor, exhausted. They laugh. They’re proud to have been beaten up, they look at their bodies with a pride that Gorane knows well. That pride that has never blemished her face. Punishment is the superior form of atonement, they believe that every authentic idea has been earned, official bargaining chip: torture. They rejoice in the wound while she prepares water for the broth. The house is white, resembling an egg and every other house in Euskadi. She thinks that her parents constructed it to make her feel safe in a trap of Chinese boxes. Gorane is also an egg. When she returns to their bedroom with dinner, her parents don’t sleep, nor do they rest, nor do they sit, nor do they speak, nor do they sing, nor do they look at each other, nor do they grasp something in their hands, nor do they smile at her saying thank you. When she returns to the bedroom her father walks along the walls, along the ceiling, his head hung staring at her mother’s, which enters and leaves by the window, checking that something outside isn’t about to collapse, it would be a real shame if the sky came down — she then says — it would ruin the linen that Gorane had hung out before we came home. At this point Gorane leaves the room, closes and re-opens her eyes, returns to the kitchen and sticks her nose outside. There is the smell of rain, but the sky hasn’t collapsed yet.
*
She had the strength to leave the broth on the bookcase to the left of her parent’s door. She won’t enter that room anymore, at least not for today. They are still behaving in a strange manner, for sure, or she is very tired, it’s a lot to see parents flying, walking backwards, hanging from the ceiling. She wonders if it’s not the consequence of some torture that she doesn’t remember being subjected to. Maybe the Guardia Civil performed their duty. The altered vision would be the result of a brutality. She will return to that bedroom tomorrow, she will enter and they will be sleeping in the bed like they do every day, like every human. They will no longer do anything that’s inadmissible, anything supernatural. She will spread the butter on the bread in front of them, she will add honey for her father, jam for her mother, she will ask if they want juice, coffee or milk, her father will laugh and respond “everything,” but her mother will throw herself at the coffee thinking of what there is to do, what day awaits them, she will not even taste the drink’s flavour, she will not know how to enjoy anything. They will finish breakfast, wash their faces and they will go, to those places that Gorane knows well. They have always taken her with them, and they have always carried those places inside of her. They fed her with a red creed printed on a white t-shirt laid out on a hospital bed. It was like milk, their way of swindling her. Famished, she ingested it passively, without knowing the liquid responsible for her growth. A serious allergy will develop in adolescence with numerous social implications. But for years she sends it down with thanks, sucks with more energy than her twin because Gorane is hungry, as if she had to become enormous, as if she had to nourish every moment of that Basque, Basque milk — your mother tongue is one tongue, suck, the Basque.
*
The bedroom remains closed until night time. Nothing can be heard, no noise, no beating of steps on the ceiling, no flights out through the window and back. They will have ceased. They will be tired. They will sleep. Gorane isn’t hungry, and yet she chews potatoes. She has boiled them too much, they are almost mush, their form no longer recognisable. She doesn’t manage to chew them, so sucks them, lets them melt boiling on her tongue. The shapes, the shapes. She thinks of the shape of the room, her tense and asymmetric body that will forever remain a mystery. The piece of glass in which one’s reflection is seen, it tells the truth or does it lie? It won’t need ten more minutes of cooking to change the flavour of those tubers, nothing to fear, Gorane, the world melts around you, you stiffen up, the egg opens up discovering its red yolk in a mush of whiteness. This is you, that was you. A cell covered with impoverished shell. Stained white, indelible mark. Even if you appear mangled now, you are always the same egg. The night blows a little rain through the window, Gorane doesn’t close the shutters, she lets the water soak the wood, the ground of that world closed by a ceiling and four pale walls. Maybe her parents’ bedroom window is still open, she’d have to check, she goes to ascend the stairs to the second floor then she remembers to be afraid. So she goes into the garden, re-enters the house, drenched, puts on a hooded waterproof, leaves again, recovers a wooden ladder from the cellar at the bottom of the pebbled path, positions it underneath the window of her parent’s bedroom, meanwhile the raindrops have become enormous and they hit on top of her like small stones, she goes up one rung after the other, maybe they creak, maybe it’s the rain that penetrates her bones shattering them bit by bit, when she finally arrives at the top she can see that she can’t see a thing, if not darkness, a frosted and humid dark, closed, a dark that she recognises and which doesn’t console her, even though the window is bolted, the silence total, even though she descends the ladder, repositions it in the cellar and re-enters the house drenched, and has fulfilled her duty. Not even a breath, or a small rustling of bed sheets. Not even father who snores, mother who breathes deeply or cries. She tells herself it’s the window’s fault, of the thick glass that doesn’t let noise pass, not even Jokin’s, when he was there with her or drumming in the cellar. Her parents therefore breathe and snore even though she can’t hear them, there is that thin sheet of glass inserted between her ears and their vital functions. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t there, it only means that their shape, for the moment, is the shape of darkness and of silence, or the shape of all those things that she does not yet manage to see.
*
Since she was little, they told her many tales, many things that aren’t true. Little for Gorane means more or less six years old. First it’s only her father who follows her on his bike then leaves her making her believe that he’s still there. She feels his big hand on the saddle, his voice of encouragement, she pedals so strongly thinking that nothing could happen to her, and in fact nothing does happen to her, her little legs continue to pedal until she turns around and her father has lied, he is far away. Gorane scares herself and falls to the ground, she scrapes both knees and stays angry for two days. First it’s her mother that pins flowers in her hair and tells her that she is the most beautiful girl in all of Euskadi and even Spain and the universe, her mother who blows her nose for her, gathers up the blood of her every wound. She didn’t know why she never managed to make things up, to keep secrets. She used to think that it was the same for all children, she thought that all children were an open pipe from which everything that entered had to exit without filters or stagnation, like going down an extremely steep descent, with no brakes. She used to think that children were threads of connection between adult and adult, those outstretched arms. She was. There was the tale of the goat that travels subterranean worlds and appears one day in the house of certain people who are sad. The goat passes through black culverts, tunnels, and trenches without light, passes caverns, climbs down precipices, faces chasms and rugged trails — always in the dark, without sight — then one evening it comes out of the fireplace of that house, materialises in the kitchen and consoles the family of its sorrows. The family is a little happier now, for that kind of magic, because that which seemed impossible has happened, and everything in that moment can feel better with a goat in the kitchen. There was the tale of the bees that knew everything, everything about you – Gorane – about Mum and Dad, it’s necessary to talk to the bees, necessary that you tell them everything that happens to you, even if they know it already, you talk to the bees. There was the tale of the wishes to write on a slip of paper and to cast in the lake or the river or the ocean. And so Gorane believed in the chimney goats, talked to the bees, cast her poor wishes into the Getxo sea, expecting them to return in the undertow, realised. They almost always returned, a fuchsia water bottle, a ginger cat to which she didn’t know what name to give, the inflatable swimming pool like Alaia’s, two words from Jokin who almost never looks at her but when Gorane wishes for him closing her eyes and staring at him in the Getxo water he moves towards her bed and they sleep together, their identical bodies that just touch each other. Gorane doesn’t remember since when the wishes don’t come true anymore. Maybe from when, instead of goats, bombs began to run underground. This her parents didn’t recount to her straight away, they wait until she is older, because this isn’t a tale that everyone can know, this tale they invented themselves. They believed in it and it came true. Gorane imagines her parents on the beach of Zarautz, they cast their crammed notes of wishes, by now she knows how to read because she is twelve years old, they write, “Kill all the bad people, liberty,” askata-suna, this dirty word, bloodied, that Gorane still isn’t familiar with.
*
The morning is a badly drawn sunrise, there are clumps of light to the left of the scene, the canvas is lacerated in several points. It is from those scratches that the dead enter and leave. Gorane opens her eyes and doesn’t stay in bed another second longer, she gets up on her feet and she gets dressed, she grabs the dirty cup of tea and she washes it, the dirty halo doesn’t want to go, so she loses a bit of time. She prepares breakfast, puts on the table what is needed, makes herself a cigarette, little leaves of tobacco fall to the ground, two filters roll under the sink, she takes the broom and gathers everything, she throws the remains of her daily vice in the bin and sits down. She waits for them. She doesn’t want to go and wake them, she wants them to come down smiling and say good morning to her. She demands it. She desires more than anything else that they show themselves in some way. From the window the scratches in the canvas seem less deep, Gorane struggles to catch sight of them now. You can see the blood on the ground, take in the colours of the houses, of the lawn, of the cars sticking out on the grey of the road, but the lacerations in the canvas are less visible now, because the morning is already at a good point, because the day serves to mask them, to make them disappear. And so you only see the blood, that coloured tempera that covers everything. No one imagines walking everyday on the vital liquids of those who have vanished, of those who call them through the scratches in the sky. Gorane has put a finger in that broken canvas. She cannot yet say what she felt. There is no sound from the bedroom above. She drinks coffee while the cigarette begins to extinguish itself in her mouth. Let’s finish something today. Gorane is twenty-five years old. She quickly scans the list of main tasks — wash herself, groceries, deadlines — then she reviews all the other possible jobs for the day, but she doesn’t manage to stop herself on anything. She finds herself on the ground again, sat with legs crossed, head between her long extraterrestrial hands. She is sat between rubble that she cannot see. She stays in the kitchen to clean for at least an hour and it seems to her that something finally has worked; the sensation doesn’t last very long. She doesn’t want to hear the silence of the floor above anymore, she puts on the radio but the silence is stronger than the words of the journalist who announces new chaos in the city, it’s stronger than the word “terror,” than the word “arrested,” and when Gorane tries music, the silence is stronger than even the music. Gorane would need Jokin, now, the racket of his drumsticks, but Jokin hasn’t been found for weeks. She tries to imagine him, she tries to cast a note in the ocean using the strength of her twisted and crystal-clear thought, but she doesn’t know how to believe anymore, she isn’t able to have any faith. Not even Jokin will return. This, thinks Gorane, means being alone.
*
She has written a letter to her brother with the usual mirrored writing. To write mirrored means to write back to front and make sure no one understands. Gorane is difficult to understand, for the majority of people who set themselves this sort of goal in life. To understand, to explain, to do sums, to count. In the letter she recounts everything that has happened after the hospitalisation. Almost everything starting from year zero of the white hospital bedroom. The rest she would like to write it and not remember, then destroy the letter and invent a story. Dear Brother, here we are all well, Mum and Dad had a little car accident but they have recovered grandly. How are you? Where are you? All the fault of that old piece of junk, in the end it happened, they crashed, it had to happen, the other driver didn’t ask for damages, the important thing is that everything was fine. Where are you? If you come back this evening I can cook for all four of us, I also thought that I don’t want to argue anymore about the noise of the drums, I don’t want to fight with you anymore, in general. In the end it makes me happy if you play, the important thing is that I love you. Where are you? I’ll begin to cook in an hour more or less. I told some lies. Gorane.
*
A blue music blasts through the headphones that at times softens into a more intense hue without a name. Not a bright colour. Fifteen is the amount of steps it takes to arrive in the bedroom, the rainbow of the convicted to death, but now Gorane is lying down on her back and she is thankful. It is still possible to find peace. It is possible that everything enters through the wound, even peace. If it won’t last — because it won’t last – Gorane will be able to know at least that it was there: the precedent that she needs. They come down as it’s almost time to eat. They enter the kitchen, Gorane hears the creak of the glass door that opens and slams from the wind. But it isn’t the wind, this time it’s them. She rushes out of the room and she sees them fly. But fly isn’t what they really do. They are suspended a few centimetres off the ground and they walk on air. They prepare food, they splash each other with water to play around, Mum has a wooden spoon in hand to stir the sauce, they move from one place to another without ever touching the ground, what’s the point, Gorane asks herself, why continue to behave like angels or ghosts, place your feet on the floor, she tries to implore. You are normal. But she doesn’t say it loudly or they are the ones who don’t listen. The communication is impeded, there’s a minimal but insurmountable distance, the same that separates the feet of Mum and Dad from the ground. This is the gap that makes her suffer, an almost imperceptible deviation between them and her, a missing adherence between her world and the one in which her parents move. The bare feet of mother, small like those of a dancer, still dance. Those long ones of father, so similar to hers, plant themselves on nothing as if they were stepping on a humid topsoil of moss. She can feel the fresh air, that sensation of light tickling on top of her. She can’t smell the aroma of what they are cooking nor can she hear their voices. Are you or aren’t you here? She continues to observe them cooking, she tries to move closer to give them a hand, but her mother smiles at her telling her that it’s better to let them do it, you were always a disaster Gorane, you only make a hash of things. It’s true. Gorane doesn’t know how to do a lot of things including cooking. Granny Leire says it’s important to hand down the recipes of her land, but nothing of her land matters to Gorane. The flavours of her land are like the flavours of any other land, the language of her land is a dead corpse that relatives and friends persist in picking up, brushing down, grabbing by the hands and feet, placing the lips in a smile, and moving the legs like a puppet to give the illusion that it still walks. And if Gorane doesn’t believe it, if Gorane laughs in front of that corpse dragged here and there, the face strewn with make-up, the maggots that devour the body underneath the brand-new clothes, then Gorane is bad and deserves to be punished. Gorane is immature, full of problems, she will change. Gorane is too sensitive for her age, she feels the need to go against her family in order to feel alive. Automorphic attitudes are present in her, for example, she used to run away from home you said, she had this need to sanction her presumed independence, and from her sex life you know, I imagine she lost her virginity very early, which has little to do with the emancipation and the genitality, intended obviously in an evolutionary sense as the crowning element of deep internal upheavals — of course! — the responsibilities are from both parts, in you and in her, the family cannot stand as supreme educator, and I refer also to one of the more evident symptoms that I was able to ascertain in this month and a half of therapy, an ancient disorder and fairly widespread, above all in infancy, known as left-handed writing or more commonly mirror writing, and which instead persists in Gorane, by now eighteen years old, like a manifestation of profound unease, of a pathological distortion of the relationship that the girl maintains with everything that is outside of her — the wooorld — now, have you ever been asked, have you ever tried — as parents, family, friends and in a certain sense, as tutors — to interrogate yourselves on the profound motivations that conceal themselves underneath this bizarre, and somewhat worrying perpetuation of the infantile symptom, a will scarcely concealed to stoke a fire that should be already extinguished within the embers of a new one, firm and conquered maturity. When Gorane manages to shut up the old voice of the doctor, the plate is already empty, her parents have to go out for some errands, the world is still outside, immobile, raw, filled with blood.
© 2020 Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino
Translated from the Italian by Sean McDonagh
Valentina Maini was born in Bologna in 1987. After studying in Bologna and Paris for her European research doctorate in comparative literature, she works as a translator into Italian from French and English. She has published short stories in a number of reviews, among which Inutile, Atti impuri, Effe, TerraNullius, Cattedrale and Verde, and in Germany, Horizonte. Some of her articles have appeared in reviews such as Poetiche, La Deleuziana and SIMEN, and in 2018 an article of hers about Samuel Beckett was published in a volume in the Classiques Garnier Library. In 2016 she published Casa rotta (Arcipelago Itaca), her first poetry collection, winner of the “Premio Anna Osti” literary award. La mischia (The Melee) is her first novel.
Sean McDonagh is a literary translator who translates from Italian. Hailing from Birmingham, he is based in London where he works in publishing, and has been pursuing literary translation projects since participating in the Warwick Translates Summer School 2019. His translated work has been published in Asymptote and Translators Aloud, and his poetry has been published in Allegro, Rockland and Foxtrot Uniform. Sean holds a BA in English, has lived and studied in Turin, and also studied at the Italian Cultural Institute in London.
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