Memoir for Xoana (72 pages) is Marica Campo’s first novel. It was published in 2002 by the Coruña-based publishing house Espiral Maior, which is well known for publishing poetry, after it won the Vilalba Municipality Fiction Prize the previous year.

The novel is divided into twelve short chapters. In chapter 1, the narrator is a pregnant woman who addresses the girl in her womb – Xoana – and tells her about the lineage of women from which she descends. She starts with her own great-grandmother, Pepa the Mole, who used to sing songs at fairs in Galicia, accompanied on the violin by a man called Maricallo. Pepa had suffered a case of the smallpox when she was young, which had pockmarked her face and left her without the use of her sight. She had a beautiful voice, however. At one of the fairs, in the town of Monterroso in the month of November, after their performance she took the purse of coins they had earned and went to lie down for the night while Maricallo did the round of the local bars. However, a man came in the night and raped her. Pepa preferred to protect the child in her womb – the narrator’s grandmother, Rosa – by inventing a story that she had been made love to by Charlemagne’s chamberlain, Einhard, who lay with the emperor’s daughter and was the subject of one of the songs Pepa performed. When they returned to the family house in July, Pepa gave birth and left her new-born daughter in the house while she returned to the road. The daughter grew up, healthy and happy, looking forward to her mother’s visits, since she would bring her trinkets from the fairs she visited and also a lot of caresses.

In chapter 2, we learn that there were plenty of illegitimate children, born out of wedlock, but the problem was not the social condition of the children, rather it was the lack of men to help with the hard work of cultivating the fields. Pepa’s family had plenty of land, but the land was not very fertile and there weren’t enough hands to make it profitable, since the family also had to pay tax on the land. As a result, Rosa, Pepa’s daughter, as soon as she was old enough (but still a child), went to work as a maid in the Big House that belonged to the local aristocrat, Don Álvaro Pardo de Outeiro. Don Álvaro was a womanizer and had more than twenty illegitimate children, whom he tried to help in one way or another. Rosa was used to obeying her master in all things, and this included going to bed with him, as a result of which she became pregnant, was sent back to the family house, where she gave birth to the narrator’s grandmother, Carolina, and great-uncle, Xenxo. Pepa returned from her travels, carrying the violin that Maricallo had bequeathed to her shortly before dying. She learned to play the violin and used to sing old ballads to her new grandchildren. Don Álvaro tried to help out, but soon stopped visiting Rosa after he fell into a state of melancholy on learning that his three legitimate sons had all died at the Battle of the Ebro, the longest and largest battle of the Spanish Civil War, in 1938.

In chapter 3, Carolina grew up strong, much stronger than her mother, and worked the land, digging, looking after the cattle, planting eucalyptus trees, which the narrator didn’t like, but Carolina insisted that it was thanks to the money they made from the eucalyptus trees that the narrator could study. Carolina herself had only been able to study a little with Dona Remedios. They had been so poor that Carolina had been forced to visit the neighbours and ask for any unpaired clogs they might have. Sometimes she would be forced to wear two clogs that were both meant for the same foot. Dona Remedios, the schoolteacher, had wanted to teach the children some embroidery, for which she had asked them to bring a piece of cloth, but Carolina had been so poor she had had to steal a piece of cloth from a neighbour’s scarecrow, wash it and leave it to grow white in the sun. The narrator’s great-uncle, Xenxo, had died when he was almost sixty. He had had an ongoing conflict with a neighbour called Severiano, who had a fig tree outside his house that banged against Xenxo’s bedroom window. Xenxo had asked Severiano to pull it down, Severiano had refused. After a fall, Xenxo had been taken to hospital, where in the night a strong gust of wind came along, ripping up the fig tree and leaving it on the ground. That same day, Xenxo had died. The narrator tells her unborn daughter these things so that she will know that her family has a past that is rooted in mystery. Carolina had married, but had only been with her husband for two years before he went to work helping to build a tunnel in Asturias. The tunnel had collapsed and he had been killed. Carolina hid her sadness, always smiling on the outside, but sad within. She died of a stroke when the narrator was studying the violin in Germany. The narrator had come back to Galicia to visit her grandmother in hospital and had played her her favourite song, which was based on a poem by the Galician writer Xosé Neira Vilas and talked of lost love.

In chapter 4, the narrator’s mother – Carme – was still a baby when her father was killed. She was doted on by her mother’s brother, Xenxo, who would do whatever he could to make life easier for her. As an orphan, she had the right to a free education in a convent in Zaragoza, and Xenxo was appalled when he found out that she was to go there and he hadn’t been consulted. In the convent, there was a marked difference between those pupils who paid and those who didn’t. The former were set apart to be ladies, they learned how to play the piano, they acted and sang in a choir, while the charity cases were set aside to be their maidservants later in life and given the task of cleaning or working in the kitchen. Even during break, in the playground, the two “classes” of students were not allowed to speak to each other. Carme rebelled and ended up being expelled. Back home in Galicia, she succeeded in completing her secondary studies and gained employment in a local factory, where she met and married one of the managers, the narrator’s father, Pedro. Carme became an active trade unionist and sometimes had heated arguments with her husband, whom she accused of siding with the management.

In chapter 5, the narrator confesses that she had her doubts about bringing a child into the world without a father figure. She wasn’t sure about her own abilities as a mother, but she remembered the chain of women from which she was descended: Pepa the Mole, Rosa the fragile, Carolina the hardworking, Carme the trade unionist. She has a series of talismans to protect her in this life: a quartz stone; Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus; a sea horse her first summer love gave her; three sonatas for keyboard and violin by Mozart that she bought in a second-hand bookstore in Paris on the day she met François; a CD by Bobby Vinton, on which he sings “Sealed With a Kiss”, the first song she danced to with Lalo; Pepa the Mole’s violin; Rosa’s portrait; her grandfather’s last letter; and a book of poems in Russian by the poet Leonid Martynov, which she assumes someone called Alexei must have left behind.

In chapter 6, the narrator is reluctant to speak about herself. She confesses to having a rather melancholy character. She was lucky in that the mayor opened a music school in the local town, where she was able to study the violin and music theory. She then continued her music studies in Santiago de Compostela and Madrid, trained with an internationally renowned violinist in Paris and became one of the best interpreters of Mozart. She gives concerts all over the world and, after Alexei left to return to Russia, she became the de facto leader of the local Philharmonia. Music for her has been as enthralling as love; it has also never disappointed her.

In chapter 7, the narrator begins to talk about her intimate relationships with the men associated with her talismans. She likens love to a flight against the wind, eventually you grow tired; perfection is a road and roads wear out the soles of the shoes you are wearing, so that in the end you feel the roughness of the road’s surface. Her first serious relationship was in Paris with François, a teacher of medieval literature from Brittany who introduced her to the city and in whose studio she stayed for eight months. On her return to Galicia, they kept their relationship going for another two years with mutual visits, but in the end the distance proved too great.

In chapter 8, the narrator met Lalo in the house of a hyperrealist painter in Oleiros who used to organize parties. He was incredibly beautiful. They danced together to the song “Sealed With a Kiss”, and then sealed their relationship with a kiss. They understood each other, but Lalo went away to teach in a school for elite sportspeople and they didn’t see each other anymore. Then, the previous leader of the Philharmonia left and was replaced by a Russian, Alexei, a sad faun, but not one who chased nymphs as in Debussy’s symphonic poem “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”. He was sad about the family situation he had left behind in his native Russia, but his Siberian ice melted in the face of the narrator’s Sicilian sand.

In chapter 9, we learn that Alexei had a wife and children in Moscow and, despite being pregnant, the narrator had no wish to hold him back when his contract came to an end and he packed his bags to return to Russia. They understood each other through their instruments, since they were both violin players, and their roots intertwined, his old Slavic songs with her Galician cantigas. The narrator has kept some photographs in case Xoana wants to see whether she looks like him or not.

In chapter 10, the narrator laments the state of the world into which she is going to introduce her daughter, the range of injustices and inequalities, but like Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities she is determined not to become part of the hell we live in, rather to make space for what is genuine or worthwhile. She advises her daughter to make space in her life for literature, which can help to give us more freedom.

In chapter 11, the narrator talks about the other good things that await her daughter: music, her grandparents – Carme won’t mind the fact the narrator is not married, but Pedro might – the lands that Carolina brought together – although the eucalyptuses have been removed and autochthonous species have recovered; some of the land has been rented to cooperatives that grow flax – the sea, love, friends – the narrator mentions one called Laura who will invent stories for Xoana at night and then not remember them the next day – and also this country where they live.

In chapter 12, the narrator laments that she travelled half the world before discovering what Galicia had to offer: its monuments, such as the Roman Wall in Lugo, castles, monasteries, its history – Galicia once had its own monarchs, who are buried in the Chapel of Relics in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral – and literature. She hopes that her daughter, Xoana, will discover all these things for herself, and for this reason she has written this memoir so that Xoana will know where she comes from. She also leaves her Pepa the Mole’s old violin, which turns out to have been a Stradivarius.

This is a very intense, short, poetic novel in which the narrator goes over her family history from its humble beginnings, a blind woman who sang at fairs, to the slightly more exalted career of a concert violinist. The narrator presents the world as she perceives it in the hope that her daughter will find her own place there and will be able to make her own memories. Memoir for Xoana is the author’s first and only novel and was awarded the Vilalba Municipality Fiction Prize in 2001.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne