The Lone Woman by Bernardo Atxaga

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I recently read The Basque History of the World, lent to me by my brother. Because so many Basque authors were mentioned, I decided to try to find one to read. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a book translated from Euskara in our library system. I was able to find this book, which was translated from Spanish, however, and as it has a strong connection to the Basque Separatist Movement and the resistance to Franco, it looked interesting. I think Atxaga wrote the book in both Euskara and Spanish editions, from what I can find only. The English version was translated from the Spanish version.

The Lone Woman is a novella, all about a single day in the life of a particular woman, who we eventually learn is named Irene. We find out that she has just been released after several years of imprisonment for her activities in the resistance movement. We never learn exactly what she did, and given the specifics of the time, whether she participated in terrorist activity or if she was just lumped in with all protesters, as Fascis regimes do. After being released in Barcelona, she takes a bus ride back to Bilbao, and then returns to her home. 

 

Her situation is…..complicated. 

 

Her husband divorced her. Her lover was killed, probably in a hit by the police. Her former associates with the Resistance think she informed on them. (She didn’t, but…she also has left the organization) The police think they can blackmail her into providing information. Her mother is dead and her father has disowned her. 

 

So what she is going back to is both unknown and probably not that promising. 

 

The book contains two dream sequences, which approximately reveal the past, but not exactly. Irene’s very partial accounts of her past are probably unreliable. 

 

There are quotations from popular music and poetry, including English language writers like Emily Dickinson and William Blake. These are listed at the end of the book. 

 

The overall mood is mostly melancholy, not menacing - although the policemen are pretty freaking terrifying. In contrast, an older woman and a pair of nuns turn out to be protective of Irene, which she finds ironic since Franco used the Church to come to power, making resistance anti-Church. And yet the nuns seem to be genuine Christians, intent on doing good in the world and looking after the vulnerable.

 

Much of the book is very interior. It’s all about Irene’s feelings and her attempts to re-normalize herself out in the real world again. 

 

I found it very well written, and compelling. 

 

However, I really didn’t end up writing down many lines. For the most part, the book is its own compact world, and few lines make sense without the entire context. 

 

I loved how the book leaned into the morally grey and blurry line between those outside of respectable society - the incarcerated - and those who enforce the lines - the police. The line between “good” and “bad” isn’t simple, particularly in this case. Is enforcing Franco’s cultural genocide of minority ethnicities and their languages and cultures in Spain being “good”? Is resisting that by destroying government property “bad”? Is it worse to be a prostitute and petty thief, or to assault and threaten and blackmail a woman as part of your official duties? 

 

There are two lines I wrote down not so much because of the story itself, but because of the more universal truths they contain. The two lines are in the same passage, about the way that all these “well meaning” people claimed to know how to set Irene on the “right path,” most of which were mutually contradictory and always unhelpful. 

 

The first is from a popular song by Georges Brassons, “La Mala Reputacion.” 

 

No, people never like

Those who keep their own faith.

 

It is bookended by this:

 

Woe to anyone who renounced the law of the family!

No, people didn’t like you having your own opinions, they would set themselves up as judges, judges who judged and always condemned. Because that was one of the characteristics of puppets, their judgment always, inevitably, turned into condemnations. 

 

Nothing Irene did was approved, nothing failed to be condemned. 

 

I can understand this all too well from my own family experience. Nothing fully met with my parents’ approval. There was always some sort of self-righteous condemnation in the end. It was problematic that I had my own opinions, made my own decisions. 

 

But also that first quote. I chose to keep the faith I was raised in. The one that still believes in loving one’s neighbor, helping the vulnerable, standing up to the powerful, and so on. 

 

To quote from Basque Nationalist leader Jose Antonio Agguire:

 

“I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of doctrines.”

 

That was indeed one of the reasons I was eventually cut out of my parents’ life. I stood up to the anti-christianity, the racism, the misogyny, and chose to keep my own faith. 

 

For Irene, the problem is, her faith cannot be subordinated to any ideology. She has to think for herself. She cannot simply do what any set of leaders demands, whether that is her family, one of the separatist groups, or the cops. 

 

She also has the problem of being a woman in a misogynist society. Pretty much every man she meets after being released tries to prey on her in some way. Her loneliness, her smaller size, her sexuality, her past. It is the women who come together to stand up to the men. 

 

It’s an interesting book, a short read, but one that stays with you.