'The last function', by Luis Landero: the cold ash of dreams

It is not true that every past was better, nor that every illusion and hope will be destroyed or disappointed, but it is true that all human affairs, happy and unhappy, are fodder for the devourment of time.

Anyone who has reached a certain age has the realization that everything passes (and everything passes), but this certainty does not necessarily lead to melancholy or despondency but often leads to a state of stoic conformity. with the irreparable finitude of human life and even to a celebration of past splendor, to a reliving, through memory and word, of the most luminous moments of our race towards nothingness.

Luis Landero is so aware of this that he has built his latest novel, from the plot to the narrative voices, with these threads and has come out with an impeccable story, measured even in the excursions or, rather, in what seem like excursions, but essential tributaries of the story that is told are revealed: that of the last occasion in which a poor and half-empty Castilian town, San Albín, knew glory before becoming extinct.

The glory consisted of the collective staging of a medieval legend, the Miracle and Apotheosis of the Holy Girl Rosalba, which had been represented for centuries until falling into oblivion.

But the fortuitous coincidence in San Albín of a former neighbor, Tito Gil, who returns to take care of his aunt Casilda's inheritance, and the troubled Paula, who arrives at the place by mistake, leads to one last performance of the old liturgical spectacle that excites and involves all the local people.

All the neighbors participate in the assembly, each with their role, in a scenario that extends throughout the town and makes it impossible for anyone to attend the entire show as a spectator, as in life itself or as in the Swiss Festspiele. in which Borges inspired his

Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.

The locals, under the euphoric effect of pretending to be someone else, of feeling the exciting immersion in a story greater than themselves, experience the cathartic mental transport that fiction provides.

That last opportunity for greatness of the place occupies the second half of the novel and exemplifies the story that all stories tell, as it is said in chapter 9, that of the “dream that sooner or later ends up leading to merciless reality”, a theme that, although “repeated a thousand times, it is always new,” and perhaps that is why Landero always returns to it from

Games of the Late Age

(1989).

However, this novel grafts onto this thematic trunk a hopeful variation through the two central characters, Tito and Paula, to whose presentation in alternating chapters a first part of the novel is dedicated, a marvel of narrative wisdom and control.

The circularity with which Tito's life adventures are narrated (his story begins and ends with his arrival at the Pino bar, where he contemplates a photo of him in the liturgy of the Santa Niña Rosalba in 1958) opens a channel of communication between the past and the present through which the legend of his prodigious voice since he was a child, of his theatrical vocation (while maintaining an inherited agency), of his successes as a reciter and interpreter of Lorca in Madrid and the provinces circulates.

For her part, Paula's story is told through flashbacks that recover her frustrated life, her calamitous romantic relationships (Bruno and the angry Blas), her installation in routine fear before chance takes her lead to San Albín and a providential confusion.

Landero displays these two incomplete existences with insight and humanity that are as understanding as they are compassionate, highlighting the intimate ambitions of each one, their dreams doomed to dissatisfaction and ruin.

The meeting of both, woven with a skillful, very theatrical entanglement, allows the author to suggest that hope can always make its way through the cracks of defeat.

The narrators, “old and forgetful,” conspire to restore to what they experienced the radiance that perhaps it did not have.

This moderate optimism, which is nothing more than the skeptical vitalism of someone who has seen a lot, seems to contrast with the device of the voice that narrates the story, which does not belong to a single, external narrator, but to a circle of narrators who were witnesses of the facts.

It is a choir of elderly people who remember and tell each other about that happy past (or to which they inject happiness), recreating what they experienced and the oral autobiographies that Tito and Paula shared with them for three days.

From the grayness of the current reality (San Albín is already an empty town; they survive in Madrid) they conspire to return to what they experienced, with the mere force of the word, the radiance that perhaps it did not have, thus constructing the enduring fable of what happened.

Or it didn't happen, because these “old and forgetful” narrators don't even intend to be faithful to what happened;

It is enough for them that the narrative contains its own truth and resists the wear and tear of time, as happens with the prop castle that was built in the town for that great occasion and that still stands undefeated on top of a hill, while at its feet the houses of the town have collapsed.

This beautiful novel by Landero is that castle and readers can only be invited to take refuge inside.

Look for it in your bookstore

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