Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé

Vintage, 2000, 235 p. Translated by Nick Caistor from the Spanish Rabos de lagartija.

This is a striking novel. It is told from the viewpoint of an unborn child (though as if being remembered from enough years later for that child to be able to write.) Any objections to such an unlikely story teller are forestalled by the sentence, “It’s precisely because I didn’t see it that I can imagine it much better than you.” (Imagining it is, after all, what novelists do all the time.) Scenes and times shift abruptly but always comprehensibly. Later events (even those subsequent to the narrative) are treated proleptically, but then again, to the narrator they will already have taken place. There are conversations – envisioned or hallucinated – between characters who have not met, the contents of which are not given quotation marks.

The present tense of the book is set in an area of Barcelona just after the Hiroshima bomb. The main protagonist is David Bartra, the brother of our child narrator, but the plot centres round his pregnant mother, Rosa, whose hair colour means she is most often referred to as the red-head.

David’s peculiar pastime is cutting off the tails of lizards to present to his friend Paulino Bartolet. The lizards’ diminished bodies keep on going, (which reads as a metaphor for Franco’s Spain.) David is plagued by a continual hissing noise in his ears and has conversations in his head with not only his father and our unnamed narrator but also an RAF pilot, Flight Lieutenant Bryan O’Flynn – of Irish descent via Australia – depicted surrendering (but in David’s mind maybe about to be shot) in a page from a German propaganda magazine, a photo displayed on David’s wall. O’Flynn spent a lot of time in the Bartra household and, by implication, as it is never fully spelled out, he and Rosa became close. The reader is left to conclude of this situation whatever he or she wishes.

The Bartras live in the abandoned surgery of Doctor P J Rosón-Ansio, one of whose rooms has a giant poster of an ear, which David thinks of as always eavesdropping on his conversations; an entirely understandable belief in an authoritarian state. (Big Brother is not only watching you but also listening.)

Rosa has been left behind by her husband, Victor, most likely because he was an opponent of Franco. Victor had to make his escape by sliding down a gully near the Bartra house; an escapade in which he ripped his trousers and buttocks on a piece of broken glass. In David’s (and our narrator’s) imagination he always appears with a bloodied handkerchief attempting to bandage the cut. As a result of his activities – which included helping smuggle Allied POWs out of France during the war, one of whom was that same RAF pilot who later returned to duty only to be shot down and captured again (hence the photo) the Bartra household has received the attentions of Police Inspector Galván.

The Inspector begins to ply Rosa with gifts either because he is trying to suborn her for information about Victor’s whereabouts or has really formed an affection for her. But he is a nasty piece of work as two incidents reveal. In his conversations with him, David, under the influence of films he has seen, usually calls the Inspector bwana or sahib.

David resents Galván’s attentions to his mother and his adoption of an old dog provides another source of conflict with the Inspector, who maintains the dog should be put down.

Added to all this is Paulino’s relationship with his abusive uncle and an illustration of police immunity from redress when an officer takes advantage of a girl who is trying to help David get Galván into trouble.

Lizard Tails is an example of a certain sort of literature which emanates from totalitarian societies, stories in which everything seems to be said obliquely but is all the more powerful for it.

Pedant’s corner:- smoothe/smoothes (several times; ‘smooth/smooths’,) an unnecessary line break after ‘hand’ in ‘with a hand on my backside’. There was space left on the line for ‘on my’,) atomical (just ‘atomic’,) Morris’ (Morris’s,) “Captain Vickers’ sure shot” (Vickers’s,) “‘A 12-cylinder Rolls Royce Marlin 61 engine’” (Spitfire engines were Rolls Royce Merlin ones,) “as the suns starts to set” (sun,) lungeing (lunging,) “the clothes line” (clothes’ line?) staunch (stanch,) “Señora Vergés’ backside” (Vergés’s.)

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