“Special Signs” by Goytisolo in a brief summary
Alvaro Mendiola, a Spanish journalist and film director who has been living in France for a long time in voluntary exile, after suffering a severe heart attack, after which doctors prescribed rest, together with his wife, Dolores comes to Spain. Under the shadow of his home, which once belonged to a large family, from which he alone remained, Alvaro recounts in his memory his whole life, the history of the family, the history of Spain. The past and the present interfere in his consciousness, forming a kaleidoscopic picture of people and events; gradually outlines the outlines of family history, inextricably linked with the history of the country.
At one time the richest family of Mendiol owned extensive plantations in Cuba, a sugar processing plant and a host of black slaves – all this was the foundation of the prosperity of the prosperous clan at the time. The hero’s great-grandfather, a poor Asturian hidalgo, once went to America, hoping to make a fortune, and quite
Flipping through the album, Alvaro remembers his childhood, the devout senorita Lourdes, the governess who read the book about the martyr’s babies; recalls how soon after the victory of the Popular Front, when churches burned all over Spain, the exalted governess tried to enter with him into the burning church in order to suffer for the faith, and the milinosianos was stopped. Alvaro remembers how hostile the house was toward the new power, as his father left for Yesta, and soon therefrom came the news that he
Growing up, Alvaro broke up with his loved ones – with those who still survived: all his sympathies on the side of the Republicans. Actually, reflections on the events of 1936-1939, how they affected the appearance of Spain in the mid-sixties, when Alvaro returns to his homeland, pass through the whole book with a red thread. He left his homeland quite a long time after he was received with hostility by his documentary, where he tried to show not the tourist paradise in which the regime tried to turn the country, and the other Spain – Spain of the hungry and destitute. After this film, he became a pariah among his compatriots and preferred to live in France.
Now, looking back at his childhood, at close people, Alvaro sees and evaluates them through the prism of his current views. A warm attitude to relatives is combined with the understanding that they were all a historical anachronism, that they managed to live without noticing the changes taking place around, for which fate punished them. The distant years of the Civil War are coming very close, when Alvaro is going to Yeste to look at the place where his father died. The hero almost does not remember his father, and this torments him. Standing beside the cross on the site of the execution of the cross and looking at the landscape, which has hardly changed in the past years, Alvaro tries to imagine what this person should have felt. The shooting of Father Alvaro, and with him several others, was a kind of revenge: for some time before that, the government had brutally massacred the peasants in these places, who opposed the will of the authorities. On the excesses and cruelty of Alvaro tells one of the few surviving eyewitnesses of this long-standing tragedy. Listening to this peasant, Alvaro thinks that there is not and could not be right or guilty in that war, as there are no losers and winners, there is only a losing Spain.
Thus, in constant memories, Alvaro spent a month in Spain. Years that he lived away from her, intoxicated with freedom, now seem empty to him – he has not learned the responsibility that many of his friends who have remained in the country have found. This sense of responsibility is given by severe trials, such as, for example, which fell to the lot of Antonio, friend Alvaro, with whom they together filmed a documentary that caused so many attacks. Antonio was arrested, spent eighteen months in prison, and then deported to his native land, where he was supposed to live under the constant supervision of the police. The regional police department followed his every step and led the entries in a special diary, a copy of which lawyer Antonio received after the trial, a diary that is copied in the book. Alvaro remembers what he was doing at that time. His living in a new, Parisian life was also difficult: compulsory participation in meetings of various republican groups in order not to break ties with the Spanish emigration, and participation in the events of the left French intelligentsia, for which – after the story with the film – he was the object of charity. Alvaro recalls his meeting with Dolores, the beginning of their love, their trip to Cuba, friends with whom they participated in the anti-frankist student movement.
All his attempts to connect the past and the present pursue only one goal – to regain the homeland, the feeling of unity with it. Alvaro is very sensitive to the changes that have taken place in the country, the ease with which the most acute problems were covered by the cardboard façade of prosperity for the sake of attracting tourists, and the ease with which the people of Spain reconciled themselves to this. At the end of his stay in Spain – and at the end of the novel – Alvaro travels to Montjuïc in Barcelona, where he was shot by the President of the Generalitat, the Catalan government, Luis Kompanis. And not far from this place, where of course there is no monument, sees a group of tourists whom the guide tells about that during the Civil War the Reds shot priests and high-ranking officers, that’s why a monument to the fallen was erected here. Alvaro does not pay attention to the habitually official interpretation of the national tragedy, he has long been accustomed to this. Its amazing that tourists are photographed against the background of the monument, asking each other about what war the guide was talking about. And looking from the top of Montjuïc to the downstairs Barcelona, Alvaro thinks that the victory of the regime is not yet a victory, that the people’s life is still going on by itself and that he should try to capture truthfully what he witnessed. This is the internal outcome of his trip to his homeland. that the people’s life still goes by itself and that he must try to capture truthfully what he witnessed. This is the internal outcome of his trip to his homeland. that the people’s life still goes by itself and that he must try to capture truthfully what he witnessed. This is the internal outcome of his trip to his homeland.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)