In the middle of Colm Tóibín’s new collection of short fiction, The Empty Family, there is a story called “Barcelona, 1975.” Its artistry is considerable. An erotic souvenir of the writer’s youth, it revisits the season in which Francisco Franco died and the city that he most mistrusted came to life. The slice of life that interests the author is, understandably, Barccelona’s gay community — anachronistic as that label would have been — and most of the action is set in a top-floor warren of rooms constituting apartments within an apartment. There is a painter, a literature student, an unspecified partner at an orgy, and then the narrator’s lover. The story sticks to the surface and avoids motivation; the only thing that the narrator discloses about himself is that he was very lonely until he met the painter and the student; prior to that encounter, he wished that he had never left Dublin. The painter and the literature student introduce him to a new world, one in which motivation is obvious, manifest in the form of erect penises. Several of these are seen in action. When the narrator leaves his lover, however, there is no explanation. It is impossible to say what, if anything, “happened.”

I stopped seeing my lover. Six months later, however, when I got a flat around the corner from Plaza Real, I discovered that he had moved to another flat on the same floor of the building where we had met. If he was home, the lights were visible from one of the streets betweeen Escudellers and the Plaza Real. Sometimes when I walked home I would check the light and if I was feeling in the right mood I would call in to him. He would play his old game of talking and listening as though there were no sexual charge between us. And then I would move towards him and touch him, and, just like the first time, he would remain still, in his lovely old trance. This transformation from the social to the sexual, which I could do in a split second, took him time. And then he was ready.

All these years later, I can still take pleasure in the tight, hard shape of him, his tongue, the knob of his dick, the glitter of his eyes, his shy smile. I always knew that if I did not keep him, he would go. Someone else would claim him.

And that’s precisely what happens in the next, and final paragraph of the story.

The second time I read the story, I knew what was coming, and the graphic descriptions of love-making were not as obtrusive. But I still thought that the story would be better without them. (I know that I would feel much the same if the characters were men and women engaging in heterosexual sex.) The art of fiction is concerned with the recreation of states of mind, and nothing punctures the illusion faster than the hard, physical detail that the reader finds unsympathetic or incomprehensible. Or, conversely, arousing. I do not think that the reader whose libido quickens in response to a story is capable of giving it complete attention. In the end, detailing acts of love reduces the lovers to pipes and plungers: so much plumbing. I want to know why the narrator “stopped seeing” his lover. I remain interested in motivations. I haven’t been to Barcelona, and I’d rather hoped that Colm Tóibín would take me, but that’s not something that interests him. 

In the story that concludes the collection, “The Street,” however — but that’s another story for another day.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 4th, 2011 at 1:00 pm.