The Snares of Memory

by Juan Marsé, Juan Marsé

Genres: Literary Fiction; Noir; City Life

Synopsis

In January 1949 on an otherwise unremarkable day in an unremarkable Barcelona neighbourhood cinema, a prostitute is murdered in cold blood in the projection booth by the assistant projectionist, one Fermín Sicart. More than thirty years later, a screenwriter resolves to determine the truth behind her murder, and seeks out Fermin, who has served his time. But though Fermin remembers killing his victim, and exactly how he did it, he cannot for the life of him recall why. The Snares of Memory, by one of the great Spanish men of letters, is at once an investigation of memory, motive and murder and a pointed dig at the Spanish film industry of the second half of the twentieth century.

Release date: September 19, 2019

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 240

Sample

1)Here it is, señorita. Take it or leave it. I only give written replies.

2)Because I’ve always put more trust in writing than in pure blah-blah.

3)Adopted son of uncertain biological origin.

4)I’d have preferred to be born at another time, in another country, with blue eyes and a dimple in my chin.

5)Let’s not waste time on nonsense. I don’t militate under any banner. Flaubert used to say that they’re all covered in blood and shit, and that it’s high time we saw an end to them.

6)I am more than merely non-religious, I am resolutely anti-clerical. Until the Catholic Church begs forgiveness for its complicity with Franco’s dictatorship, declaring myself anti-clerical is the least I can do. I have enjoyed a healthy phobia of the clergy since early adolescence.

7)The only clerics I respect are Father Pietro in Rome, Open City by Rossellini, the Nazario of Galdós and Buñuel, Chesterton’s Father Brown and the raging, dishevelled Irish priest in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter.

8)I lost this finger when I was fifteen. It was chewed up in a rolling mill.

9)Music. I’d have liked to be Glenn Gould’s piano or Charlie Parker’s sax.

10)My next novel will deal with the tricks and snares created for us by memory, that high-class whore.

11)No. If I tell you what it’s about, I’ll spoil it, because this novel is a kind of trompe-l’oeil. Nothing in it is what it seems, starting with the title.

12)Well, what I have currently been commissioned to write isn’t exactly what could be called literature. I’m working on the first treatment of a film script.

13)Yes, for money.

14)I hate talking about my work. But basically it involves an elderly murderer, apparently suffering from Alzheimer’s, who tells the story of his crime thirty years after he committed it. He can remember that he killed a prostitute but has absolutely no memory of why.

15)I don’t have a title. It might be The Killer’s Forgetfulness or The Mask and Amnesia, or something of the sort. It’s about the persistence of desire and the strategies of forgetting.

16)I intend to base the story on real events: a very famous and often fraudulent claim, I must admit.

17)With few exceptions, a film script is not written to be read as a work of literature, whose material and basic premise is language. A script is a text to be used and thrown away.

18)The producer and director are the ones in charge, but you have to consider the vagaries of our feeble film industry. The project could end up in the hands of a different producer, with a different commercial emphasis: it could end up as a spaghetti western, a horror movie, soft porn, or a farce. (N.B. Not a film that makes people laugh, but one that people laugh at).

19)During the interminable dictatorship, our nationalist-Catholic pasteboard cinema gave rise to such dire moral and artistic poverty, took such great delight in its own falsity and stupidity, that it was many years before we could raise our heads again. Things have improved, of course. But now there’s a different problem, and it’s universal: technology is killing cinema.

20)With a girl called María. I was fifteen and she was eighteen.

21)I couldn’t give a damn about national identity. It’s an emotional swindle. I’m a poor, unpaid patriot.

22)No. The writer’s true homeland is not his mother tongue, but language itself.

23)My vocation as a writer was born on the corner of Calles Bruc and Valencia outside the Barcelona Music Conservatory. I must have been about fourteen at the time. A young girl student who was standing by the entrance with a violin case under her arm asked me to go in with her and say to her teacher: “It was me.” She didn’t tell me what that meant, and I didn’t ask. “I’ll explain later,” she said with a sweet smile. I went in, did the strange favour she had asked, and left at once. As agreed, I waited for her out in the street, but she never re-emerged, and I never saw her again. I was left wondering what lay behind my self-accusation: I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so much so that I began to fantasise about a possible emotional conflict involving the two of them. I imagined a passionate love story between the beautiful girl and her handsome teacher, a secret passion encoded in the enigmatic phrase: “It was me.” I like to think that the imaginative effort I made at fourteen based on those three words was the origin of my vocation.

24)I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.

25)Let’s see, I’ll try to explain it another way. The suspicion that there was a tumultuous passion between the youthful teacher and his beautiful student became an obsession, and the only way to free myself from it was to express it verbally. That was how it started, that’s how the novice writer felt the birth of a vocation: the need to tell the story. Is that clear now?

26)In my fictions, real experience is ruled by the imagination, which is more rational and credible. The invented part contains my more truthful autobiography.

27)What’s that? I’ll never write a novel about the crisis of social structures. Who do you take me for?

28)Culture? The politicians in this country don’t give a shit about culture; that’s why they leave it to decrepit old fogies.

29)What the novel needs today is fewer adjectives and more substantives.

30)The real character I most admire? Emma Bovary.

31)Fictional character? Carmen Balcells.

32)I’m very happy with my agent and would never change her for anyone else. Besides, what would be the point? At my age, changing my literary agent would be like moving deckchairs on the last night of the Titanic.

33)I turned down the offer. Like Groucho Marx, I would never want to belong to a Royal Academy of the Language that would have me as a member.

34)I only trust the logic contained in good music.

35)I don’t recognise myself in live interviews. I don’t recognise my voice.

36)Again? I detest any kind of nationalism. The homeland that nationalists offer is sentimental carrion.

37)Nietzsche predicted it: with another century of newspapers, words will become pernicious.

38)I’d exchange all this for a Cole Porter song.

39)I’d give the whole film for one shot by John Ford.

40)Pass.

41)Too verbose to be memorable, too intellectual to be moving. He’s a notable writer, but not a good novelist. In a good novelist, what shines isn’t the intellect, it’s something else. I’d swap the entire book for a page of Dickens.

42)In my novel, there is a murderer but no criminal investigation. I’m not a faddish writer recycling myself as a blasted author of noir fiction. There is no psychopath to uncover or arrest. The murderer, c’est moi!

43)The only things I regret are those I have left undone. As the poet wrote: what I haven’t done, what I don’t do, what I am failing to do at every moment. That’s what I regret.

44)What I envied at the age of fifteen was the way Clark Gable waggled his eyebrows.

45)I write to know whether I really have been the protagonist of my life, like David Copperfield.

46)When I finished writing that book I felt very depressed. I was satisfied with the different parts, but disconcerted by it as a whole. I felt as if the plot had been stolen from me, the nub of the storyline.

47)Forget that and remember what Nabokov said: “There’s no point reading a novel unless it’s with your marrow. Even though you read with the mind, the crux of artistic enjoyment can be found between the shoulder blades, a tingling of the marrow in the spine.”

48)That’s more than enough, señorita. Good night.



In mid-June 1982 I took on a commission to write a script based on a true event that had occurred years earlier in Barcelona, a horrendous murder that at the time gave rise to many different theories, a crime whose motive was never adequately explained. The fateful event took place in the projection booth of a local cinema in January 1949; it’s still remembered today as a great mystery. The murderer’s immediate confession and subsequent amnesia, the gruesomeness of some of the details, and in particular the voluptuous atmosphere surrounding the victim, a prostitute strangled with a collar of celluloid – a length of film cut from one of the two films showing that week – a film whose title does not appear in the case files I was able to consult, but which I recalled because its heady erotic perfume wafted through my adolescence – were aspects of the affair regarded as highly important by the producer and the director when they offered me the job.

Back then, both of these men enjoyed considerable prestige and solid reputations in the industry. The producer was a powerful, much-feared wheeler-dealer by the name of Moisés Vicente Vilches. The director was Héctor Roldán, a leading light in the most international Spanish cinema of the 1950s, whose black-and-white filmography was highly critical of the dictatorship and was brave and well-meaning, though I have to confess the films were also boring as hell. His ideological blinkers undermined his undoubted talent, to the point where all the protest films of his that were once so lauded now seem full of trite political drivel, textbook leftist orthodoxy and militant Communist Party resonances that set one’s teeth on edge. Roldán had always flirted with pamphleteering, and, as I could tell when he explained his new project to me, he was intent on affording himself that pleasure yet again.

In those days, the summer of 1982, the whole country was torn between memory and forgetting. Everything was shifting, and Héctor Roldán knew it. He was an intelligent man, but his raised fist had become frozen because he insisted on the same cheap political slogans that had once brought him success: he wanted the sordid story of the crime in the Delicias cinema to be a film reflecting the moral and political turpitude of the Franco regime, buried four years earlier when we embarked on the transition to democracy. An admirable proposal, but . . .

“I see,” I told him. “A therapeutic film.”

“I don’t know what you mean . . .”

“A film with a nutritious supplement of nuts and carrots that are good for the memory.” The intense film director could not see the funny side of that and did not laugh. “Well, anyway: are you sure I’m the right person to write it?”

“I have my reasons for thinking you are.”

He went on to explain that this reflection of reality would subtly underpin the plot, and suggested I would not find that strange or hard to achieve, since I had already shown I was well aware of it and, in fact, it had featured prominently in my early and best novels, the ones “of social protest that I had the chance to read in prison”. This was the backhanded praise he gave me, but in fact it was aimed at himself, a way of boasting how he had been harassed and mistreated by the Franco regime. This explained the doubtful privilege of my being chosen to write the first treatment of the script, or “narrative pretext” as he termed it. In his view, I was the perfect person to lay the foundations for the story because the crime took place in the “vivid urban setting” of my literary fictions; in other words, in the territory of my adolescence, on my streets and involving a humble local cinema that I used to frequent – one that was not even grand enough to put on re-runs – and above all because the event had already appeared, dealt with very freely and indirectly, and of course without any direct political intention (“a big missed opportunity, a real shame”) – in one of my novels published six years earlier, after originally being banned by the regime’s censorship. I saw no point in telling him that good films, like good novels, have as much direct political intent as those old comics, Hipo, Monito y Fifi, or fairy tales – in other words, none at all – so I tried to make a joke with a double-edged compliment:

“Yes, but time waits for no man, Mister DeMille.”

“Of course, of course, there’s lots of stale celluloid,” he conceded, tacitly accepting the sarcastic nickname. “Nowadays we’re living a new era, we’re inaugurating democracy and new freedoms. There’s no denying that. Which is why all we have to do is tell the facts as they are. The incontrovertible, undeniable facts. That’s enough: the demagogy of fact.”

“Well, the facts are very confused. Everything about this crime is very confused . . .”

“So much the better!” he at once replied, a sudden glint in his senile eyes. “Because everything that’s confused, complex and absurd needs to be at the heart of our story, my friend, the story we are really going to tell, the one that takes us beyond the mere plot. The loss of meaning, of any real awareness of things, that’s what I want to show in my film! And in order to tell it, the plot and montage are superfluous, if you follow me. We’re going to replace plot with naked reality.”

After making such an outlandish statement à la Antonioni, to use the kind of turn of phrase typical of my assistant Felisa, an insufferable film buff, the worthy veteran director sat back, looking pleased with himself. When I replied that reality never appears to us as naked, he retorted that there were no witnesses to the crime and that the official version established temporary insanity as the determining cause for the murder, an absurd, inexplicable fit of fury, the alleged sequel to a previous and equally inexplicable attempt by the murderer to steal money and jewels from the victim. “A load of nonsense!” he exclaimed, because the truth was that the prostitute was wearing only a pair of cheap earrings. He insisted that our script should pick up on and emphasise such a pathetic distortion by the police and judiciary, filled with unsubstantiated accusations, suspicions and downright lies, since it would be thanks to these deliberate twists to the official version that we would succeed in taking the film beyond an indictment of the regime. Because that was what it was all about, he insisted, going far beyond a simple indictment.

“Those are the illusions, the rainbow-coloured soap bubbles that the Franco regime has left us, and we’re going to pop them,” he added. “But first things first. For now, what they want from you is a detailed description of the behaviour of the murderer and the victim prior to the crime. I want more than a storyline, I want a faithful chronicle of how the crime in that booth was committed: in other words, a painstaking, minute-by-minute account, including dialogue if you think that’s necessary and if there are true and reliable references to what was said . . . In reality, and let me insist on this so that it’s crystal clear, what we are after is not a plot as such, so don’t waste your time on that. I don’t need any fictional narrative logic this time, or any stupid intrigue, a criminal investigation you can find in any thriller, because here there’s no murderer to uncover.”

He went on to say that he was well aware of my coincidental closeness to the terrible event, a geographical closeness at least, since as a boy I had been a neighbour and doubtless an acquaintance of one of the real-life characters in the drama, a deranged member of the Falange, a local councillor by the name of Ramón Mir Altamirano (who appeared anonymously in one of my early short stories and turned up again twenty years later in a novel of min. . .