Two Old Friends, and Always the Sea

Translator’s Note:

The Barcelonese Esther Tusquets (1936– 2012) was already well known in Spain as director of the publishing house Editorial Lumen, when in the late 1970s and ’80s she stunned reading audiences with the publication of a highly praised narrative cycle whose daringly innovative content and prose style broke new ground for the Spanish novel and for women’s writing. Her first novel, The Same Sea as Every Summer (1978), with its controversial subject of an affair between a middle-aged woman and an adolescent girl and its highly erotic imagery, caused a sensation in early post-Franco Spain. In the following years more books appeared in rapid succession, forming a trilogy of novels about the sea, then a longer series of interrelated works that unveil an intense and self-contained narrative world. Tusquets’s works epitomize intimist literature, offering a profound and lyrical exploration of a woman’s inner life. Her books seek to undermine the cold materialist values of the social milieu she grew up in, that of pro-Franco upper-middle-class Catalonia, while inscribing her own distinctly feminine vision, both on the level of substance and style. Through her fluid musical prose, her long winding sentences that follow the logic of feeling states, Tusquets’s narrative voices reach out to the other, affirming understanding and love as the fundamental experience of life.

The stories presented here, “Always the Sea” (2008) and “Two Old Friends” (2009), written near the end of the author’s life, touch on central themes of her work: the importance of the human connection, of art and beauty, and the confrontation with aging and death as the ultimate reality. Indeed, a lifelong obsession with death permeates Tusquets’s work. The young Sara, protagonist of her story collection Seven Views of the Same Landscape, as a child lies awake at night, suddenly overcome by the palpable and horrific imagined experience of her own death. Elia, midlife protagonist of the novel Stranded, sees love as the one experience that can, for a time at least, transcend and thereby defeat death, since love embodies the fullness of life. In a feminine rewrite of Ingmar Bergman’s chess game between the medieval knight and Death, Elia speaks of her inner landscape as a battlefield wherein each piece of terrain that love abandons is immediately occupied by death. Allied to the theme of love and death is the leitmotif of the sea, symbol of female eroticism, life and death. As the author’s natural element, the sea serves as the backdrop, the perennial point of departure and return, for her entire narrative series. Thus her short tale “Always the Sea,” an account of an old woman’s final return to the sea, can be read as the last page in the book of her life.

—BFI

Two Old Friends

For a long time now, she cannot tell precisely how long but for quite a while, sadness, that peculiar, sly, fearful emotion that is unlike any other, has clung to her like a second skin. “It has been,” the woman thinks with a sad smile, “like meeting years later an old friend—or an enemy—from childhood.” One that was almost forgotten, or almost unknown by now, because she had spent many years without falling into it. In fact, all those of her maturity and prime. And now her smile becomes more pronounced, because she knows, and she is not even sure of regretting it, that strictly speaking she has never matured. Few people mature: men tend to remain in childhood, tied or not to their mama’s apron strings, whereas women, no doubt superior—and now the sad smile has an ironic touch—tend to spring gracefully into adolescence, and then remain there, the two together forming a charming world riddled with spoiled boys competing in their small or large, almost always dirty, battles, and unhappy frustrated women, because life, love, children, were not like what they had been told (except for those of the third world, of course, who were too busy struggling to...