'The Child', by Fernando Aramburu: the difficulty of narrating the world in ruins left by a dead son

At the narrative heart of this novel everything is absence. An irreparable and clamorous absence, that of Nuco, the child of the title, who died at the age of six. He was one of the 50 children who, in 1980, lost their lives in a propane gas explosion at the Marcelino Ugalde public school in the Biscayan town of Ortuella. Fifty in a town of about 8,000 inhabitants is an immeasurable topping of the community's future and a devastating flood of family tragedies whose magnitude escapes the expressive possibilities of literature. How do you tell, how do you

novel

something like that? Aramburu must have pondered a lot about this question that delves into the borders of the literary and his answer is implicit and articulated

by The Child

: he limits the focus to one of those tragedies, addressing it as a

case

and, at the same time, as a metonymy of the collective catastrophe. It is, in short, the method that has been followed in the cycle

Gentes vascas,

in which this work is inscribed and of which the stories

The fishes of bitterness

(2006) and the novels

Años slowly

(2012) and

Hijos de la fable

(2023). But if these three titles gravitated around Basque terrorism (the fracture and debasement of society, the origins of ETA, the sheepish doctrinaireism of the militants), here the axis shifts to pure and involuntary misfortune, that of an accident that shocks and destroys hundreds of lives.

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The family that Aramburu chooses has only three members, which allows him to address the consequences of the loss in each of them: Mariaje, the mother; José Miguel, the father; and Nicasio, the grandfather. One of the risks of telling such consequences is pathos, the overload of emotions or, in the worst case, tearful verbosity, with its lyrical and dramatic variants, not always unfortunate (suffice it to remember

Mortal y rosa,

by Francisco Umbral). . Another, when the traumatic event is real, consists of making literary artifice prevail over the truthful and respectful representation of what happened. It must be said that Aramburu avoids both dangers and ensures that his story runs with sobriety and decorum without losing in the maneuver of containment the ability to penetrate the reader and move him. For this to be the case, there is another important technical decision, that of narrating what happened from within, through the testimony of Mariaje, who entrusts her memories and emotions to the author, and also from the outside, through an external narrator who acts as reporter. The mother's oral narration alternates with his more literary one, which, although it complements and counterpoints it, is also infected with a certain orality (and even the occasional twist).

The story runs with sobriety and decorum, without losing the ability to penetrate the reader and move him through restraint.

The story that these two voices put together, as if they were slowly adding the tiles of a mosaic whose drawing is only revealed at the end, shows the expansion of a misfortune that reaches all those who loved little Nuco. The grandfather who, in order not to go crazy, resolves to mentally stay by the side of his dead grandson is moving, not only visiting him daily in the cemetery but also making him his silent interlocutor and even reproducing the grandson's room in his own home. But his figure is also the most predictable and serves as a contrast to those of the parents, clumsily dedicated (as if not) to overcoming an insurmountable grief.

To these two internal and external discourses, the novel adds a third that, in the initial note, the author considers dispensable but which is not. These are ten metaliterary chapters of obvious artificiality in which the text itself takes the floor as an entity independent of its creator, a younger “brother” of other children of the author who “exceed six hundred pages” (

Patria

or

Los vencejos

, among the closest). With this personification - whose remote antecedent is the peñola of Cide Hamete Benengeli at the end of Don

Quixote

- Aramburu alerts to the novelistic nature of his work, shares the principles that have guided it, among them approaching with verisimilitude the bottomless desolation that death causes of a son, for which the combination of what is documented with what is invented is inexcusable. The

text

reveals

that Aramburu set out to write a novel of short chapters limited to what is essential, clean of prolixity and "cloying psychologism", without an extra word, and in accordance with the truthful data of the woman whose transcript in Mariaje and also with his demands (that his father not appear laughable and give his approval to the final text). The

text

also reveals when he had to deviate from these data, what investigations there were and what the results were, all derived from the conviction (of Aramburu) that the subject of his writing is “the sum of details that allows a coherent representation.” of other people's lives”, far from “historiographical responsibility”.

We must thank this sneaky and talkative

text

for all its indiscretions, because thanks to them the novel acquires a reflective dimension that concerns both the broken lives of the characters and the compositional art of the novel. A dimension that does not hinder the truth of the tragedy nor mitigate its emotional tear; I would almost say that it accentuates and protects them in their inaccessible gravity. It was difficult to novelize the world in ruins left by a dead son without elegiac tones, but Aramburu has managed it.

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