Reduced to a Lego Block

The narrators​ of Permafrost (2018), Boulder (2020) and Mammoth, a triptych of novels by the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar, have much in common. They are young, and lesbian, and nameless. They live, or once lived, in Barcelona. And they are disillusioned with the expectations of modern life. Early in adulthood each woman realises that the middle-class mores of her childhood mask widespread conformity and a life of tedium. The way ahead looks bleak. ‘I was tired of inventing resumés,’ says the protagonist of Boulder, who has just taken a job as a cook on a merchant ship. She was tired, too, ‘of having to pretend life had a structure, as though there were a metal rod inside me keeping me upright and steady’. The women also have ambitions: freedom, plenitude, pleasure. Permafrost’s narrator travels to Scotland and Belgium in pursuit of low-effort jobs so that she can indulge her shameless sensuality. She spends her days reading (philosophy, art history), enjoying food (Camembert, Godiva chocolates) and having sex.

These women want to live with heat and intensity. Yet intensity can apply to pain as much as pleasure. The same narrator recounts her failed suicide attempts, her daydreams about accidental death and terminal illness. ‘Life belongs to others, it always has. I am here and I see it passing.’ Although each woman finds much that is gratifying, she isn’t necessarily happy. Loneliness is one part of this. Their tremendous capacity for language, for perception and self-awareness, is reserved for the internal monologues that make up the books. With their loved ones they lie, withhold and dissemble, rarely risking vulnerability. To establish connection, or resolve conflict, they turn to sex – ‘the easiest lie’. They are inclined to a view of human relations that pits freedom against duty and accountability to others. ‘There’s nothing worse than feeling like you belong entirely to someone else, having to hear that you’re key to their happiness or unhappiness, reduced to a Lego block,’ the narrator of Permafrost says. ‘Have we lost our minds?’ ‘Feeling like you belong entirely to someone else’ is one version of what love can be, but it’s not the only one. The investigation that each narrator embarks on is to find out what kind of responsibilities to others she can abide.

The narrator of Baltasar’s third novel, Mammoth, is 24 and single. She desperately wants to be pregnant, to feel ‘life course through my body, to create’. In other respects her identity is unknowable; Baltasar tells us nothing of her past or her family. The narrator intends to be a single mother, ‘for no father to claim his share’, and takes an unconventional approach to achieving this: on the day of her ovulation she hosts a ‘fertilisation party’ disguised as a birthday party and seduces an unsuspecting attendee. He says he’s a swimmer, and she imagines ‘broad-shouldered sperms, glorious chairlifts’. But two weeks later there’s blood on her underwear. She’s devastated, and this disappointment seems to awaken others. Dissatisfactions that were previously muted begin to feel intolerable. ‘Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime,’ she says of her work as a sociologist researching care homes. She soon quits. Her subsequent jobs – at a café, a bakery, a shop selling shoes and handbags, a grocery store and a hotel kitchen – last only a few days. They’re all scams, she thinks; they enrich the bosses and leave her exhausted. Everywhere she looks she sees images of entrapment and wasted life. The streets harbour ‘legions of larvae who had all been coerced into the same enclosed life. A sterile, impenetrable life locked in ice.’ The zoo at Parc de la Ciutadella, which she can see from her flat, is a collection of fake habitats. ‘Animals didn’t live there, they rotted there.’ She pictures herself as ‘a rodent dwelling on the forest floor, a tireless mammal designed to feed larger animals of all species’.

The narrator decides to take her exit. She rents a white farmhouse in the mountains (Baltasar doesn’t say where but it appears to be Catalonia). Her closest neighbour, a shepherd with some five hundred sheep, lives three kilometres away, down a cartway ‘strewn with rocks and rutted with furrows and potholes’. The closest town is thirteen kilometres away. There are days when she doesn’t see or speak to anyone. She’s never lived in the mountains before, and has a lot to learn: starting a fire, baking bread, wielding an axe. The house is in a bad state: ‘The walls are smudged, and the floors covered in debris: dead insects, wisps of dry grass, sand.’ Clouds of dust puff out from shaken blankets, and woodworms gnaw on the furniture. Basic amenities are lacking: the toilet is a ‘plank of wood with a hole in the middle’ and there’s no shower or bath. Her new home may seem inhospitable, but the narrator finds that focusing on the essentials banishes her ‘more trivial thoughts’. And then there’s the surrounding landscape, which ‘dips at the end of the field and vanishes into the sea, shedding everything, only to resurface a great distance later, blue mountains rising up seemingly without end’. She will live there, she thinks, ‘cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of my thoughts is worn through’.

It’s the shepherd, a rosy-cheeked man in his sixties, who helps the narrator adapt to rural life. He gives her hens and advises her on what to stockpile for the winter. The two develop a friendly rapport and he hires her to clean his house, a job that supplements the small income she earns waiting tables at a bar in town. She’s grateful for the work, and doesn’t seem to mind what others might find gruelling. Baltasar’s shepherd doesn’t resemble Marlowe’s blissful young herdsman. He suffers from gout (too much lamb) and spends a lot of his time wheelbarrowing ‘shit from one place to another’. He isn’t sentimental for the old ways: to light a fire he stacks a few logs, drenches them in petrol and tosses in a match. But neither does he bother with modern indulgences such as visiting the dentist. If a tooth starts to ‘hurt like hell’, he’ll ‘fetch a small, still-burning ember from the hearth and place it in the cavity hole’. Something ‘instinctual deep inside’ the narrator responds to her neighbour’s coarse habits. ‘I want to be just like the shepherd, to seem normal but be barbaric, to eat cookies even though I don’t own a toothbrush, to cut tiny pieces of ember perfect as diamonds, inlay my teeth with them, and proclaim myself queen.’

The titles of Baltasar’s novels gesture at the link between them. In each, the title is both motif and metaphor, conveying something essential about the narrator – an icy exterior for the narrator of Permafrost, a hard, unbreakable core for the narrator of Boulder. ‘Boulder’ is the name given to the narrator by her lover, Samsa, a geologist, because she reminds her of ‘those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element’. The narrators of these two books spend a lot of time reflecting, contemplating, analysing. Action, for them, is deliberate. The narrator of Mammoth, by contrast, is all body and drives. She acts on ‘unfiltered instinct’, something so basic and intuitive that it is, as the title suggests, prehistoric. ‘I am Llanut,’ she says, referring to the name she’s given at work and also to her farmhouse, Cal Llanut. The Catalan word llanut means ‘woolly’, and it conjures both the sheep that graze on the mountain and the extinct species of the title. Being near the mountains awakens an ‘ancient version’ of the narrator, ‘a fossilised self that now beckons. Her presence is a force that proclaims itself and makes me feel alive, so that I find that I keep saying yes, again and again.’ This force can be nurturing, as when the narrator helps to nurse four newborn lambs abandoned by their mothers. ‘The lambs do nothing except bleat and cry for food’ but when they are sated and drowsy she feels serene. ‘I adore this silence – the silence of gorged, slumbering animals at rest. I get the sense important things are unfolding in this quiet.’ But the force also expresses itself in darker ways. Halfway through the novel, the narrator plots the death of some menacing cats who have taken up residence in her barn. She feeds them for nearly a week to gain their trust, then lures them into an old refrigerator and gasses them. It takes her three days to open the fridge door. The disquieting scene ends with a description both gentle and vivid: ‘The line of their closed eyes, a fine paint stroke. And their little noses seem tender as I drop them into the bag.’

Baltasar has published eleven collections of poetry, and in Julia Sanches’s translations of the novels the prose is sumptuous and musical. In the opening section of Boulder, for instance, the narrator is waiting to board the freighter:

Quellón. Chiloé. A night years ago. Sometime after ten. No sky, no vegetation, no ocean. Only the wind, the hand that grabs at everything. There must be a dozen of us. A dozen souls. In a place like this, at a time like now, you can call a person a soul. The wharf is small and sloped. The island surrenders to the water in concrete blocks with a number of cleats bolted to them in a row. They look like the deformed heads of the colossal nails that pin the dock to the seabed.

There are passages like this in all three novels, where ordinary words and short sentences are given intensity through syllabic symmetry, repetition and juxtaposition: the casualness of ‘deformed’, the unexpected image in ‘the hand that grabs at everything’. But within this stylistic continuity is also difference. In Mammoth, the sentences are leaner, with fewer extended metaphors, fewer subordinate clauses; the language is also plainer than in the previous novels. Here’s Boulder making bread:

I’m amazed by how much it’s risen, as if the whole thing – the soft, perfect dome of wheat and its nest-bowl of warmth – were a distant nephew who’s grown up, effortlessly and all of a sudden, in the silence of my absence. I knead the bread, dust it with flour, shape it and take its shape, and imagine I am a simpleminded god about to beget a new tribe.

And here’s the narrator of Mammoth doing the same: ‘I stretch out the dough, flatten it, gather it up again, give it a nice thwack. It’s looking great, and I’m having a lot of fun.’ It’s as if Baltasar has pared back her prose to match the way the narrator has pared back her life.

Baltasar’s​ stylishness makes room for humour (often black). The narrator’s pragmatic observations and unusual similes give rise to some of Mammoth’s funniest moments. Come spring, when the animals are in heat and ‘visiting the shepherd is like attending a sex festival,’ the relationship between him and the narrator shifts suddenly. ‘Something extraordinary happened,’ she reports. ‘The shepherd asked me to be his whore.’ She gives an unsparing description of their first sexual encounter. His body: ‘lard-white, with red moles and pockets of sagging skin’. His penis: ‘a small, tired, defenceless thing, like a nestling fallen from a tree’. His touch: ‘His thumb nail stabbed me on the inside, and I told him take it out, it hurts, and when he did, I remembered just how black it is. He sniffed it.’ His semen has a ‘manure-like aftertaste’, and when he ejaculates he goes soft instantly, ‘like a kid who’s just lost their mother’. Over time the narrator comes to see herself ‘as a kind of nurse’ and the job as ‘not unlike taking a patient out for a walk’. But the experience isn’t always so innocuous. There are occasions when she acquiesces to his needs when her own are quite different, when he disgusts her but she doesn’t want to disrupt the delicate equilibrium on which her new life depends.

There is a lot of sex in Baltasar’s novels. Elsewhere in the triptych the sex is between women: these scenes are often rich in metaphor, but Baltasar avoids commonplace stand-ins for body parts – the velvet petals, shiny pearls and delicate mounds. Boulder clings to Samsa ‘until she has swallowed my fingers and allowed my hand to follow and make a fist like a mad heart. Love runs down my arms and slaps her. If I stop, she shakes. If I lose her, she swears. Satisfying her is like settling a blood debt.’ Baltasar doesn’t reduce her characters to bodies alone. ‘Sex happens in the brain,’ the narrator of Permafrost says, and so there is polyphony and contradiction, volatility and doubt. Often the narrators sound a masculine key: in Permafrost the narrator describes her clitoris as ‘shockingly tripled in size, an insolent micropenis’. Sometimes they share thoughts or behave in ways that might be frowned on coming from a man. On a geological expedition, Boulder grows so bored talking to Samsa she lets her walk ahead so she can ‘concentrate on her ass’. Queer desire, in Baltasar’s novels, isn’t idealised but complex and imperfect. Lesbians can also internalise misogyny.

It’s only in Mammoth that the narrator sleeps with men (she tries on a few occasions to seduce women but her desire is never reciprocated). This sex has a purpose: to get pregnant. Aside from the shepherd and the partygoer at the start, there’s a guest at an inn and a fossil enthusiast who camps near the house. It’s odd that the narrator doesn’t worry about what being a mother might entail, or consider the men involved, but the absence of these and other considerations seems intended to emphasise the pitch of her desire. When at last her wish is fulfilled, the experience is not what she expected:

The baby has set up inside me with a bell. I open the fridge and stand there eating jam by the spoonful. Once the baby’s satisfied, I toss the empty pot in the trash can and go back to my coffee, which is now cold and bitter with a faint tang of ashtray. It makes me sick to imagine what’s happening. It makes me sick to think the shepherd’s fluids are trapped in my body. That a grafting took place, and now a horrid, disproportionate lamb is growing in my uterus.

She had wanted ‘to have life course through’ her body; instead she’s been taken captive.

Each of Baltasar’s narrators has a complicated relationship to motherhood. They aren’t ambivalent about it, or worried by the threat to creative ambition – ideas that have been explored in a number of recent novels. Rather, Baltasar is interested in the ways that women might negotiate non-traditional family roles. The narrators’ sexuality is one part of this. In Permafrost and Boulder the protagonists have no interest in becoming mothers, at least not in the conventional sense. Yet each establishes and defends a bond with a child, and finds herself in a parenting relationship based on trust and reciprocity.

Mammoth follows an inverse arc. Once the narrator learns that she’s pregnant, she stops working for the shepherd and hides the pregnancy, telling him that she has a thyroid condition. She feels ‘more and more convinced that I needed for nothing. That a day would come when I could do without everything.’ It’s only when the baby is born – when she holds ‘an enormous question mark’ in her arms – that she realises this day has arrived.