Voices of Pamano: The Uneven Art of Interwoven Voices

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoilers: This essay discusses the novel in detail, including major plot revelations.

A burglar copies files onto five diskettes, damages what remains on the computer and takes a box of notebooks. A cat watches. Jaume Cabré opens Les veus del Pamano (Voices of Pamano) with the economy of a thriller: we can follow the operation before we know whose history is being stolen.

That question will draw us toward Oriol Fontelles, a schoolteacher in a Catalan mountain village under Franco, and Tina Bros, the teacher who discovers his notebooks decades later. Between them stands Elisenda Vilabrú, whose money and influence help determine which version of Oriol survives. He can be remembered as a fascist, recovered as a resistance fighter or promoted as a Catholic martyr. His private writing disturbs every settled account.

Conversations cross decades; a later scene completes an earlier one; an apparently incidental object becomes decisive. These connections can be satisfying even when the passages that establish them drag. A change of voice can make an event morally different. Elsewhere, it explains a relation we have already grasped or keeps us inside a distress that has ceased to develop.

What Tina cannot say

Early in the novel, a child asks Tina a geography question. Between the question and its answer, her mind rehearses a confrontation with Jordi, her husband. She imagines accusations, replies and the disclosure that would finally settle her suspicion of his infidelity. What she actually says to him is considerably less direct: domestic questions allow the quarrel to continue without becoming an encounter.

This is organized thought, however scattered it initially feels. The distance between the conversation Tina invents and the one she can bear to have gives her unhappiness a recognizable form. We know the exhausting fluency with which an unsaid argument can conduct itself.

But later returns often repeat what this device has already told us. Jordi’s suspected betrayal, her son Arnau’s withdrawal into monastic life, her agnosticism and maternal hurt keep circling with little change. Even Doctor Zhivago—the cat who watched the burglary—joins her inward conversations. His replies add another speaking voice before the shifts between Tina and the narrator have found a steady rhythm. Tina pursues Oriol’s story doggedly, but her private commentary can be prosaic and needling enough to make her wearying company.

The difficulty grows when she reads about Oriol sheltering Jewish refugees and drifts back toward Jordi. There is a credible association here: a private admission in the notebooks touches her own suspicion. Historical danger does not suspend a reader’s domestic misery. But the passage also sends us back into familiar jealousy just as the refugees’ predicament has begun to claim our attention. The juxtaposition is intelligible; its recurrence makes the scale of the interruption harder to accept. A shorter return, or a changed exchange between Tina and Jordi, could have kept the association while giving their unhappiness somewhere to go.

Names before people

The early chapters distribute family names, houses, loyalties and grievances faster than they give us memorable encounters among them. Gradually Oriol, Tina and the brutal mayor Valentí Targa become distinct enough to orient the reading. Until then, the novel can feel like homework punctuated by scenes of considerable urgency. Each new lineage seems to widen the field before the existing relations have become secure.

The Catalan names themselves are not the problem. Familiar literary names carry the accumulated life of our reading; their sound alone does not explain their hold on us. The question is how soon a new name acquires an action, a voice or a human dependence that makes remembering it more than an obligation.

Consider Rebeca’s arrival in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The letter explaining her remote kinship does not produce recognition in the Buendía household. Her parents’ bones, carried in a bag, have a more immediate presence: they rattle and are moved from place to place as the family accommodates the child. An uncertain genealogy becomes a physical nuisance within daily life. We encounter an inheritance before we can arrange its branches.

Cabré can give family history comparable material force. The decorated façade of the Vilabrú house advertises respectable pastoral occupations while omitting smuggling. Its omissions implicate the family’s public face. But a long chain of relatives does not always receive that kind of embodiment. The repeated, half-insinuated insult in Elisenda’s genealogy keeps its contempt audible, but can sound like a narrator renewing a knowing nudge after we have ceased to need it.

The resemblance to Faulkner is strongest where sexual power, property and local authority meet: Elisenda sometimes recalls Eula Varner in the power of her sexual presence, and the Snopeses in her business dealings. The difference becomes clearer in Ratliff’s telling of Mink Snopes’s predicament in The Town. Reconstructing Mink’s belief that Flem will save him, Ratliff keeps marking what he knows, supposes or cannot know. His uncertainty belongs to a man talking about people in his community. In Cabré’s more insistently explanatory passages, motive and irony are supplied with greater assurance; an interruption can annotate the story without giving us an equally particular person who needs to tell it that way.

Irony that stays too long

The parade in chapter 32 turns its dignitaries into a jazz performance. The musical conceit makes the public ceremony ridiculous, then keeps assigning instruments and extending a joke whose terms are already apparent. Elsewhere, the satire of clerical vanity can be wonderfully particular. Canon August’s mathematical preoccupations carry on through the worldly embarrassments around him: functions and algebraic structures occupy the mental space in which somebody else might be attending to another person.

That precision is less secure when the narrator repeatedly directs our contempt. The unevenness is important enough to bother us because the novel also gives Arnau’s faith a seriousness that Tina cannot simply dismiss. A religious institution’s hypocrisy, a priest’s absurdity and a son’s vocation need different distances. A switch of register does not always, as we can see, provide them.

The sexual writing often suffers from a similar surplus of direction. In chapter 26, Elisenda’s lover Quique conceals another woman, Mamen, who watches their encounter. Cruelty, voyeurism, rivalry and desire are all available. Yet the list of Elisenda’s anxieties and the repeated irony around her supposedly faithful lover keep explaining how we should read the humiliation. Several meanings coexist, but they have been laid out so thoroughly that the encounter can feel curiously dull.

In the castle episode of Bolaño’s 2666, Reiter and Wilke watch Entrescu and the baroness having sex. The obscenity, extravagant spectacle and surrounding wartime world do not settle into one stable response. Reiter recoils from Wilke’s masturbation, then begins to masturbate himself. In Cabré’s scene, the continuing commentary chiefly reinforces a humiliation already apparent.

Depending on the translation, a sentence that feels clichéd or an awkward tonal turn cannot confidently be assigned to Cabré’s Catalan wording. The larger repetitions, the lists of motives and the placement of explanations can be judged more securely and applied to the Catalan original.

A voice can change the event

The interrogation of fourteen-year-old Ventureta shows what Cabré can do with a change in the terms of a conversation. Targa offers and withdraws small courtesies and controls how the boy may address him. Oriol is present as a clerk; Targa will not let the boy appeal to the teacher he knows.

After the intimidation, Targa dictates minutes that turn coercion into willing attendance and an overnight stay into hospitality. We have heard the exchange from which this record is manufactured. The official voice gives the violence a second existence, one that can circulate as evidence against the experience it erases. In Tina’s later interview with Elisenda, a conversation about the past similarly becomes testimony for a future canonization. The person arranging the account is already imagining its authorized use.

Oriol’s notebooks are not exempt from this struggle. His recurring appeal to the daughter who may remember him as a fascist initially asks us to sympathize with a father deprived of recognition. After he participates in a prisoner’s torture and feels relief that the dead man cannot betray him, the appeal bears a different burden. He needs forgiveness as well as correction.

Alongside this moral complication, Cabré can give suffering an almost noiseless duration. Lieutenant Marcó remembers his dead son asking when he would be grown up. The ordinary question retains the future the child will never have. Here a small remembered exchange does more than another declaration of paternal grief could do. These passages make the flatter repetitions elsewhere harder to excuse: the novel possesses more than one way to give pain a voice.

What goes beyond the closing of the loops

Cabré’s facility with scenes is unmistakable. In chapter 58, conversations among restaurant tables interlace business, private desire and local power; the exchanges make a social world audible across its separations. Then the narration explicitly gathers the historical convergence that the arrangement has already let us hear. The added explanation reduces the pleasure of making the connection ourselves.

Calling this cinematic identifies a real strength, but it cannot finish the commentary. Cabré, an experienced screenwriter, has himself distinguished a novel’s language from the practical instructions of a script in an AELC conversation with Xesc Barceló. The relevant question is what the prose contributes around the cut. In the mountain sequence following the revelation of Marcel’s parentage, the narration repeatedly points out where his sexual adventures cross the site of Oriol’s earlier ambush. The parallel is clear, but the return to already established traits slows the story just when the revelation had accelerated it.

Marcel’s discovery is nevertheless one of the novel’s strongest reversals. The child Oriol has addressed as his daughter is a son, raised under another name in Elisenda’s household. When Marcel finally receives the writing, he shreds it and uses its contents to bargain for control of the family business. The writing reaches the person for whom it was intended without producing the recognition that seemed to justify it. The plot closes a loop and defeats the emotional expectation attached to it.

The books Oriol carries at his death undergo an equally exact change of use. A borrowed-books pretext conceals his visit to Elisenda. The devotional volumes remain in his coat. Later, with Oriol dead in the church, August sees one of them protruding from his pocket and accepts a fabricated story of martyrdom. An object need not be forged to serve a lie. Its genuine presence, joined to a false account of why it is there, can be more persuasive.

In his 2005 Critics’ Prize address, Vicenç Pagès praised the novel as a symphony whose interwoven parts are prepared and resolved. There is substantial justice in that description. The refugee strand also acquires consequences beyond its first appearance; connections that initially seem to disperse the book often prove necessary to its construction. My reservation concerns the time spent reaching that necessity. A later convergence can explain why an episode belongs even without making its earlier telling more absorbing.

The Serrallac stonecutters offer the most sustained answer to my skepticism. Their work joins names to bodies, public commissions to private remembrance. Across generations, the family cuts false honors, preserves a murdered boy’s memory and produces the imposing monument demanded by a successful version of Oriol’s life. Craft survives changes in what a community is prepared to commemorate. So does the capacity to put a lie into durable stone.

Each new commission asks the Serrallacs to put their skill to a different use. The notebooks offer a different resting place for Oriol, one vulnerable to theft, suppression and the indifference of his own child. That struggle between a life and its accepted inscription gives Pamano its deepest continuity. Its most compelling changes of voice occur when somebody is trying to secure a version of another person’s life—and when a conversation, a notebook or a simple commission disturbs that attempt.

For the family and business relationships behind the Faulkner comparison, see the Snopes trilogy character map.

Sources

Jaume Cabré, De stemmen van de Pamano, translated by Pieter Lamberts and Joan Garrit, Signatuur/Utrecht, ebook edition April 2010; translation ©2007. Original: Les veus del Pamano (2004). The discussion paraphrases the Dutch text; chapter numbers follow that edition. Official work and title information.

William Faulkner, The Town (1957), chapter 4, Ratliff’s account of Mink and Flem; Vintage Books, January 1961 edition, consulted in the Faded Page text.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, chapter 3: Rebeca’s arrival and her parents’ bones.

Roberto Bolaño, 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, Part Five: Reiter and Wilke in the castle.

Vicenç Pagès, address presenting the Critics’ Prize for Les veus del Pamano, Palau Robert, Barcelona, 2005; reproduced on Jaume Cabré’s comments page.

Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana, “Les veus del Pamano”, en la veu de l’autor i el guionista, reporting the conversation with Jaume Cabré and Xesc Barceló.