Maria Barbal - Stone in a Landslide

History has a way of sweeping people up as it relentlessly marches along its way. Tolstoy, in a long essay found as the epilogue to War and Peace, goes to great lengths to explain that the force of history is the accumulation of a million different happenstances, and not the directed will of a single person or group of people. Napoleon, he argues, was as swept along as the rest, with the primary difference being that we remember his name because he led the French, as opposed to the tens of thousands of faceless (though not, of course, to their families!) men and women who died. Maria Barbal's Stone in a Landslide captures the essence of this argument well, showing us a single, very ordinary, woman, as she is buffeted by history, her life shifting and turning on the whims of others.

Conxa is a young girl when she is given by her parents to her aunt and uncle. Their reasoning is utilitarian, which is to say it makes economic sense, but leaves much to the matters of the heart. Conxa's family cannot afford another mouth, and particularly another girl, while her aunt and uncle can use the help. Thus, a family is shifted and already Conxa's life is less than she had expected. She admires her mother's ability to work, commenting that she knew 'only two things: how to work and how to save':

By the time we got up, she would have been working for ages already or even have gone off to the meadows with my father and Josep. When we went upstairs to bed, she used the time without us to prepare the next day's meal or tidy the house. She was always the last to go to bed and sometimes she'd say a rosary. But for all her devotion, I'm sure she didn't even get to half a mystery. Her tiredness must have held her trapped, like a sparrow in a snare.

From the start, Conxa's capacity for empathy is evident, and it is something we will see strengthened as her life continues. Rather than blame her mother, she instead recognises the difficulty of her life, and makes of her new future as much as she can.

I learnt to do everything, outside the house as well as in. Exactly as they had shown me, without any touches of my own which they might think showed a lack of respect.

This is in the Pyrenées of the early 1920s and 1930s, a rural, very poor time and place in Spanish history where, to the peasants, places like Madrid and Barcelona seem so fantastic that they surely must be fake, or a dream, or at the very least, only slightly bigger than the place they live now. For Conxa, these faraway places and the names known to history are fairy-tales, at home with the ones her uncle shares at the end of a long day. At any rate, we soon learn the height of Conxa's expectations from life, and they are very small – a home, a husband, children, a sense of place, familiarity and family.

To that end she meets Jaume, a handsome young tradesman. He is the first person who is nice to her because of who she is, and less because of her ability and willingness to work.

...Jaume told me that saying my name was like eating a sweet, that it was the name of something small and delicious that he liked very much. It was if he'd been born to take away my fears, to bring light where I saw darkness and to flatten what felt like a mountain to me.

There is, about forty pages in, a rather telling slip in the narration that alters things sufficiently that, it of course, is not a slip on Barbal's part but a tell, a showing of the hand to further increase the connection with Conxa. At this time, she is upset because Jaume's proposal was not accepted by her guardians, who believe that Martí Sebastià, who is richer, is a better proposition. She doesn't like him, and there's a lone sentence which read as follows:

We've already talked about the son.

The use of we where there has always been an I or a they or a him, indicates to the reader that Conxa considers this extended statement about her life as a conversation between two people, and as a confession. She is examining her life in front of us, and explaining herself and the other people she has known. It is more intimate than simply a first-person narrated text, because the reader is implicitly drawn into the situation. We've already talked implicates us within the text, suggesting that there is a give and take between the reader and Conxa.

From the point the 'we' is used, our early feeling of connection with Conxa have deepened into an intimacy of feeling. We know this girl – now almost a woman – and though she isn't educated, she has a capacity for deep thinking and a predilection for introspection. Jaume's political concerns – for, remember, we are in the middle of those turbulent years between the World Wars, and in Spain, which means the encroaching malignancy of the Civil War – go way, way above her head, but she's happy with that because it is his interest, and doesn't overtly affect the doings of her family.

He had joined the Republican Left, which was the party of the Generalitat government. He had explained all this to me. It was a government in Barcelona which made deals with the one in Madrid. The president was from Lleida and was Lluís Companys. He was a man who loved the workers and above all those who worked with the land. Like us, he said. When I listened to him, it was easy to understand, but what he had joined was strange to me...and I must admit it worried me a little.

What we have, then, is the measure of a woman. She is not an everywoman, or at least not in the sense that she has been crafted to represent the mythical Woman. But she is wholly realised and roundly created. She is not an excessive personality, but one suspects that walking a day in her shoes is a possibility, and that indeed many women have done so. She is neither glamorous nor exotic, instead she is homely, caring, nurturing and family-oriented. But why be so reductive? Let's ignore what she isn't for a moment. What Conxa is, is a mother and a woman, confused about the world but willing to work at it, devoted to her family, in love with her husband, and selfless with her children. She has flaws, but they diminish in comparison to her good qualities. Conxa has the earthy, organic good wisdom of wholesome peasant stock, reflective and empathetic, but quiet, and she knows to keep one's thoughts to one's self.

And now, halfway through the novel, Barbal has created her character. We know Conxa. Her ignorance might infuriate us, but that is only because we know her future – she doesn't, yet. Barbal has put all the pieces in place, and now it is time to knock them over.

The Spanish Civil War begins.

Little by little news comes. Some people talk about fighting and deaths in the south of Spain...others talk about atrocities in Barcelona. They say that the priests have gone into hiding. Ours hasn't been seen for two days. Jaume is exultant. He keeps saying that what the people have decided freely cannot easily be set aside, not even with guns. What does he mean, the people?

There is talk of killing, but it is far away. There are whispers of uprisings and rebellions, but the news is hazy and indistinct. Names are mentioned, but Conxa doesn't know who they are. And then, one day, the civil war comes to her region, and Jaume, along with many other men, is killed.

When I realised that we were alone, like a flock without a shepherd, perhaps with the wolf circling, a great sense of abandonment came over me. It broke my heart that I didn't feel like I had the strength to be a mother. I was stunned behind a wall of sadness and since I couldn't scream or lost control, I wanted to stay still, unmoving, unthinking.

Conxa's sense of identity was formed very young, and though she doesn't every say it, we soon learn that what she has always wanted is a husband, a family, and a home, all wrapped up in what we'd call, I suppose, a life. That for her is all, and is in fact more than enough. Her first blow comes early, when she is given away by her parents to her uncle and aunt, and though nothing bad happens to her there, the foundation of what she has always expected from life receives its first crack. Twenty years later, with a dead husband, no real house of her own, and her country breaking apart during the Civil war, and these cracks have expanded until there's no foundation left. Here, Conxa comes into her own, because now she has to examine life to determine what else could be worthing having and experiencing.

There is a very sudden shift in her character during the war, and particularly when she returns home. Previously, Conxa accepted life as it came, because she had her children, her work, her God, and most of all, her husband. Afterwards, with some gone and others altered, she has – what? Her intellect. Left alone for so long, Conxa uses her deep sense of self and her ability to internalise and examine everything that occurs. Older now, not needed by anyone, or at least not as much, she has nothing to do but pause and reflect, to capture in her mind the person who mattered, Jaume, and the time that mattered, with Jaume. She

couldn't believe that these two women with little children and the man marrying that day were my own children. How time had flown! I had to be a middle-aged or even an old woman. I'd never thought about it until that moment. The years after the war were a fixed point, immobile, all the same. I had stopped moving the morning the soldiers had knocked on the door.

Conxa's life is very much a Before and After. By the time her life is close to over, she has become useless to others, a relic, a walking piece of history to people who don't care about history. For them it's the past, distant and unknowable. For Conxa it's the present, or she wishes it was. She spends her time remembering, and talks ravenously with anyone who has a connection to those halcyon days before the war, drinking information from them the way a man dying of thirst drinks from a well.

Maria Barbal's novella is short, but it contains magnitudes. She has refracted through Conxa the time of her time, which is to say that Conxa acts as a sort of prism through which the light of her history bends. As the title suggests, Conxa really is a stone caught up in a landslide, and small stones have very little influence on the path of a collapsing mountain. But neither do the bigger stones, if we remember Tolstoy's epilogue in War and Peace. For some of us, we can ride atop a horse and make commanding speeches. For others, we can die in prisons, killed by our own countrymen. For still others there is famine, captivity, death, torture, disease, flooding, the affliction of the many against the many – the general turmoil and turbulence of life. Most of us can only live it, and take from life what little it will give us. Conxa is such a person, an ordinary person, she is believable in the way another person's mother is believable – a real human being. She is not of history but is caught up in it; she is uneducated but is forced to live through times that will later be studied by intelligent men and women at comfortable universities. Conxa is genuine, and wonders about her life with simple language and a direct sense of 'what does it mean?' Her wonderings make up this rather lovely book.

Author	Maria Barbal
Title	Stone in a Landslide (Original Title: Pedra de Tartera)
Translator	Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell
Nationality	Spanish (Catalan)
Publisher	Peirene Press
Published	2010 (English) 1985 (Catalan)
Pages	126
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK)

See Also

List of titles by Peirene Press under review

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