Memory of Cities without Light (340 pages) is the memoir of a child who is forced to flee Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with his adoptive mother, Lucía. They settle in Paris, where the boy becomes a famous actor, but is haunted by the ghosts of his past. The book is divided into five parts and an epilogue.

A five-year-old boy witnesses the death of his entire family at the hands of robbers who have come to steal his father’s money and is rescued from under the bed by a rich woman called Lucía, who takes him to live with her, claiming he is the son of a cousin in Madrid who died of tuberculosis. To avoid gossip, the two of them move from Santiago to Coruña. It is 1928. In Coruña, the boy travels to school along the beach. He also meets Lucía’s lover, Casal, a man whom he admires and who is married to a dressmaker, but comes to visit Lucía secretly. Casal is the famous Galician publisher Ánxel Casal, who directed the publishing house Nós, which published books with money from his wife’s dressmaking and, in this account, from Lucía herself. In conversations, it is Lucía who introduces Casal and others to culture from outside Galicia, Dadaism in France and Virginia Woolf in England, but all this is later forgotten.

The boy’s best friend at school is Samuel. They play at the Battle of Troy on Orzán Beach in Coruña. The boy is Achilles (though sometimes his heel becomes invulnerable like the rest of his body), and Samuel is the Amazon queen Penthesilea, so always ends up getting slain. Samuel’s mother doesn’t like Samuel playing with the boy, because she is friends with Casal’s wife María Miramontes and despises Lucía. María Miramontes herself, however, is kind to the boy, gives him sweets and rescues him when he is overwhelmed by a crowd.

In 1931, with the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic, the boy is given champagne to drink, but the fervour doesn’t last long. Casal is ashamed of his relationship with Lucía and moves the publishing house to Santiago. In the spring of 1936, the boy falls madly in love with María, the daughter of the Spanish prime minister Santiago Casares and later a famous French actress, and experiences his first kiss. Their happiness, however, is ill-fated. In July, the Spanish Civil War breaks out, and the Falange in Coruña starts to beat, rape and kill those who were sympathetic to the Republic. Ánxel Casal is murdered, and Lucía and the boy have no choice but to escape. This is the end of the first act, called ‘Lucía’.

In the second part of the book, ‘The City of Sad People’, Lucía and the boy flee to Paris. Before leaving, the boy thinks he recognizes one of the robbers who killed his family, now a prominent Falangist in Coruña. Along the way, driving through northern Spain, the two of them receive help from various people, including a priest the boy imagines is in love with Lucía. They are having lunch in a tavern when a group of Carlist militiamen come in and challenge Lucía, who claims to be the wife of an army general. They also come across a woman clutching her four-year-old son who has died of hunger. In Barcelona, they find refuge with an anarchist couple and, while Lucía goes out to obtain a false French passport for the boy, the wife of the couple, who is madly in love with Buenaventura Durruti, teaches the boy how to play poker. Finally, they make it to Paris. In Paris, they occupy a small apartment on the Rue de la Félicité, the boy learns French and reads Le Petit Prince with the most beautiful schoolteacher he can imagine (who is later shot by the Nazis for not understanding their command to ‘halt’). They take in the sister of a famous Spanish philosopher, María Zambrano, when the Nazis invade Paris in 1941, and the boy becomes obsessed with the beautiful Magda Goebbels. After a while, he begins to feel like just another French boy, with weekends outside Paris, summers in Normandy, and speaking French all the time. But Lucía, who doesn’t want to return to Spain, where she would be forced to keep silence, but also secretly abhors Paris, starts to see unicorns all over the place and to imagine she is Berenice, queen of Egypt. This is the end of the second act.

In the third act, ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’, the boy, now grown up, moves out of the apartment on the Rue de la Félicité and finds his own apartment in the south of Paris. He also studies drama to become an actor. He is lame, having been run over by a bicycle. Lucía buys a house in Tuscany, where she writes novels under the pseudonym of Marie Royal-Benhamou. She also has a successful career writing articles on politics for French and American newspapers and presenting a popular radio programme. On a visit, one afternoon in 1942, Lucía is with her French lover, Julienne, a philosophy lecturer at the Sorbonne. They have a guest, Paco Mexuto, whom the young man immediately recognizes as the other robber who murdered his family, but this time the robber fails to recognize him. The young man decides to bide his time and observe him from a distance.

The young man works in a bistro, Tout Va Bien, where he falls in love with a customer who orders a gin and tonic and has a cat’s eyes. He longs for the customer to return, but the only one who turns up in her place is Paco Mexuto, seeking warmth and a free coffee. That is until there is a raid by the Nazis as he is closing the bar, and he and Mexuto hide in a doorway, where they are joined by the woman, Armelle, who is also running from the Nazis. She escapes into the metro, and the young man follows her. Having changed trains, she waits for him at the top of a staircase. They become lovers. Armelle is a thief and steals things from the Nazis, which she then sells on the black market. Meanwhile, Lucía descends further into madness, especially when the Americans enter Paris, but Franco doesn’t die and she realizes that their exile in France is set to continue.

While acting in a play at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, the young man meets René, a Pole who was in America and then in Dachau before escaping and making it to Paris. He is a promising novelist. He starts to dine with the young man and Armelle, and the three of them become lovers. The young man is unsure who he loves more. In 1946, Armelle reveals that she is pregnant. The young man hopes that he, and not René, is the father, but cannot be sure. Meanwhile he has begun to study under the theatre director Louis Jouvet and will soon play the role of Richard III. When he meets Lucía to tell her about the pregnancy, she already knows and hands him a book for the child to read in Spanish, The Lady and the Unicorn.

In the fourth part of the novel, ‘Flexible Clocks’, the child, Artur, is born, but rejected by his mother. When, three years later, the actress María, daughter of the Spanish prime minister Santiago Casares, reappears in the man’s life, Armelle is so afraid of losing him that she strangles and kills the child. The man explains how he met up with María again, rediscovered the world of their childhood, wondered what on earth could have happened to Samuel, as they dined in a restaurant in Montparnasse each Friday. He arranged for María to meet his family as a way of declaring his love for them, but Armelle killed the child out of jealousy and, while waiting for the police to come, he speaks to María on the phone, having decided not to take revenge on Armelle by killing her or shutting her in the apartment. After the murder, René wants the man to go and live with him in his apartment, but the man rejects this idea and buys a house in Censier, an area of Paris.

In 1950, after the death of María’s father, the man goes back to playing poker, which he hasn’t done since he stayed with the anarchist couple in Barcelona. He is, however, very successful, and this helps him to make some money and to take his mind off recent events. María gets him a role at the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) under Jean Vilar as Molière’s Tartuffe. The man becomes a famous actor in Paris, sleeps with women and mistreats René, who ends up disappearing. Little by little, his relationship with María becomes closer. In 1957, they travel with the TNP to Buenos Aires, where, after a performance, they are met by María Miramontes, the wife of Casal, who regrets not dying at his side in 1936 and reproaches the man for claiming not to know Casal when he and Lucía fled Spain. María is received with great applause by all the Galicians who have emigrated to Argentina, as the daughter of Santiago Casares, a Galician who became prime minister. The man wonders why he has never called Lucía ‘mother’. He misses René and almost has a meeting with him, which María says she has arranged, but René doesn’t come and, on his return to Paris, the man realizes he must confront his own ghosts. This is the end of the fourth act.

In the fifth and final part of the novel, ‘The Show Must Go On’, Lucía reveals that she is the real person behind the pseudonym Marie Royal-Benhamou, which has intrigued the whole of Paris. In 1960, Albert Camus dies, who was France itself for María and one of her lovers, together with Gérard Philipe and Jean Marais. The man and María travel with the TNP to New York, where the man feels a distinct lightness and is not pursued by the ghosts of Artur, the child, or of his family’s murderers. He agrees to act in an American film and stays on for a couple of months after María leaves. At the end of 1967, he returns to Paris, but only to reject an important role in a play with Louis Jouvet and decide it is time to revisit Galicia. The night before travelling to Spain, he opts to play one last game of poker. The others, an ugly woman and two Russians, accuse him of cheating and start to beat him up. He manages to throw off the woman and smash a glass in the face of one of the Russians before taking to his heels, a fugitive once more.

In Santiago, the man searches for news about his father, Marcelino Martínez, who committed suicide after the robbers entered his house and murdered his family, forgetting he had another son hiding under the bed. He rediscovers their house in the district of San Pedro, where he finds a photo of his parents’ wedding and also papers from the bank where his father worked, indicating that his father had been siphoning funds from the accounts of rich customers, which is why the robbers had seen him as a target. He also discovers that they had owned two apartments and a car, whereas he had thought they were poor. He arranges with a police inspector to falsify a document in which the inspector’s mother recognizes him as the long-lost heir to this property. In return, he promises the inspector one of the two apartments, but asks that he locate Paco Mexuto, who has since returned to Spain.

In Coruña, the man revisits their house, which was occupied by the civil governor’s brother-in-law during the Civil War. They removed all of Lucía’s furniture and belongings, except for the books, which they burned in a pyre in the middle of the street. The man rings on the doorbell, but is met by a little girl who informs him that the civil governor’s family has left. He is walking through the district of Papagaio in search of a hotel when he comes across a transsexual prostitute who turns out to be his long-lost friend Samuel. He has had a breast implant and has only one breast, like the Amazon queen Penthesilea. The man gives him enough money to get a second breast implant. Samuel now goes by the name of Greta, after the actress Greta Garbo. The man phones Lucía in Paris and explains that he has visited the family home in Santiago. Lucía admits that she had to pay a Civil Guard not to denounce her for taking the missing child from under the bed, since the neighbours were searching for him. A week later, when the man calls again, Julienne answers and explains that Lucía has committed suicide in her house in Tuscany.

At the end of the book is an epilogue from beyond the grave, ‘Light, More Light’. The author cannot bear to stay in Coruña, because of the memory of Lucía, but nor does he want to return to his privileged life in Paris. In the end, he settles in the apartment left to him in Santiago. He adopts the name of Marcel Royal-Benhamou in honour of Lucía and his father, and lives as a French retiree. After ten years, in 1978, he finally locates Paco Mexuto, who has been caught shoplifting. He is being held in a police cell. The man reveals that he is the child they didn’t kill, but Mexuto insists that he made a mistake when he thought he’d seen the other robber in Coruña in 1936 because he killed the other robber himself. The man makes sure Mexuto spends the rest of his life in jail, in the worst possible conditions, and finally prepares to return to Paris. In Paris, he continues to see María each Friday for lunch, but falls in love with his Portuguese housekeeper, Nélia. One day, she arrives with Armelle, who has been released from prison. Armelle explains that Artur was René’s son, not his. She also hands over the novel that René finished and sent her in prison. The man explains that he doesn’t want to see her again. At the end of the novel, the man, who is grateful for the chance of a second life in the company of Nélia, goes blind.

Memory of Cities without Light is one of the most successful Galician novels of recent years and continues the tradition of Galician novels set in or around the Spanish Civil War. It is written in the style of a memoir (we never discover the real name of the narrator, only his pseudonym, Marcel Royal-Benhamou) and fluently relates the events of this person’s life until its final outcome. It was awarded both the Blanco Amor and the San Clemente Prizes for best Galician novel, and was voted best work of fiction by the Galician-Language Writers Association in 2009.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne