Intersex, Monstrosity and the Civil War in Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Donde nadie te encuentre

Donde nadie te encuentre (2011) by Alicia Giménez Bartlett represents a significant departure from the kind of writing that the reader has come to expect from this author. Giménez Bartlett, best known for police procedurals centering on Inspector Petra Delicado, set her new novel in the post-Civil War era. Donde nadie te encuentre is based on the life of a historic figure, Teresa Pla Meseguer, nicknamed La Pastora, who was one of the most curious representatives of the post-war maquis movement in Spain. In her account of La Pastora’s life, Giménez Bartlett closely follows the extensive research offered by José Calvo in his definitive study of Agrupación Guerillera de Levante y Aragón (AGLA), La Pastora. Del monte al mito (2009). In Giménez Bartlett’s novel, Teresa Pla Meseguer explores the liberating possibilities of the Civil War and of the post-war struggle of the Republican guerilla fighters against Franco’s dictatorship. Born intersex and assigned female gender at birth, La Pastora is doomed to spend her life trying to fit into a set of constrictive gender roles. The disruption of the stable modes of existence brought on by the Civil War allows Teresa to adopt a male identity and experience a way of life that would have been otherwise inaccessible to her. Yet living among the Republican guerrilla fighters soon turns out to be as restrictive as her existence in the Nationalist territory. Since La Pastora can never fully belong to a single gender or to either side of the conflict, her body becomes a site where the clash between the Nationals and the Republicans continues to play out long after the war is over. As a symbol of the Spanish body politic that is torn between competing forces neither of which allows her to be who she is, La Pastora gives Giménez Bartlett an opportunity to explore the problematic nature of a discourse that leaves no space for anything but “Two Spains” at war with each other.

Donde nadie te encuentre is one of many novels dedicated to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath that have been published in Spain in recent years and that have been so abundant as to constitute “una oleada de libros” on this subject (Massot). These novels share not only their historical setting but also their focus on characters that exist on the margins of the war and cannot identify fully with either side. For instance, the protagonist of Almudena Grandes’s Inés y la alegría (2010), the first in a series of novels titled Episodios de una guerra interminable, is disillusioned not only with her pro-Franco relatives but also with the leadership of the PCE. During her exile in France, she tries to construct an identity that would accommodate both her Communist militancy and her bourgeois existence as a small-business owner. The title of María Dueñas’s 2011 novel El tiempo entre costuras reflects a similarly in-between status of its protagonist Sira Quiroga who is exiled in Tangiers as the Civil War begins and who struggles to find her place in the world through participating in the war from a distance. Ignacio Abel, the protagonist of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos (2009), attempts to analyze the events leading to the Civil War and the early days of the conflict as he undertakes a long and complicated journey away from Spain. In some of these novels, characters who live in the twenty-first-century Spain try to make sense of their own lives by recovering the historical memory of people whose stories could not be inscribed into the “Two Spains” mentality and who, therefore, have been forgotten. Benjamín Prado’s Mala gente que camina (2006) is narrated by a school teacher who attempts to revive his research on post-Civil War literature and, to this end, recovers from oblivion the novel by a writer who militated in the Falange while simultaneously trying to bring to light the crimes committed...