Confronting Oblivion: On Montserrat Roig’s “The Time of Cherries”
Montserrat Roig, transl. Julia Sanches | The Time of Cherries | Daunt Books | April 2024 | 299 pages
The Catalan writer Montserrat Roig came of age amid the normalized disorder and oppression of Francoist Spain. Born in 1946, she was part of a generation that bore the scars of a painful, brutal Civil War: a conflict of blurred lines, in which both primary factions — right-wing Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, and left-wing Republicans — perpetrated brutal, senseless violence. Some 200,000 people died from “systematic killings, mob violence, torture, and other brutalities” and the ordeal ended with nearly forty years of dictatorship under Franco, who devoted the rest of his days to realizing a deeply conservative, Catholic vision of Spain. His regime committed limpieza social, or social cleansing, of anyone considered an “enemy of the state,” including liberals, socialists, and other dissidents. They enforced a vast censorship program that not only suppressed liberal ideas, but sought to erase symbols of identity among the country’s culturally and linguistically diverse regions, replacing Basque, Galician, and Catalan with Castilian Spanish. In Roig’s homeland of Catalonia, Franco’s quest amounted to a near-erasure of the regional language and cultural traditions.
Under such circumstances, optimism can feel entirely out of reach. Barely 20 years old, Montserrat Roig wrote anonymously of existential dread to Spain’s preeminent literary magazine Trinufo:
I don’t want to live in a world where nothing is promised to me. I believe in hope because it is the only thing that builds the future, but there are actions, words, judgements, or simply images in the paper…that submerge me more and more in the chaos of hopelessness.
Yet from that chaos of hopelessness, Roig discovered purpose in chronicling the turmoil of the era, and began a remarkable career. She established herself, first and foremost, as a writer who worked almost exclusively in the Catalan language. She was also a journalist who appeared in print and on television; a playwright; an academic who studied and taught in Catalonia, the U.K., and the U.S.; a staunch feminist and left-wing activist who ran for office and espoused radical politics. Before her untimely death at 45 from cancer in 1991, she wrote widely, productively, and to great acclaim, leaving behind a body of work that remains beloved in the Catalan literary tradition and in feminist circles. Her oeuvre includes ambitious works of non-fiction like Els catalans als camps nazis, 900 pages of deep reporting about Catalans exiled to Nazi concentration camps after the Spanish Civil War, as well as numerous articles and critical essays. Her equally ambitious fiction includes a trilogy of novels centered around two families living in Barcelona’s Eixample: Ramona, adeu (Goodbye Ramona), El temps de les cireres (The Time of Cherries), and La hora violeta (The Violet Hour). To consider these accomplishments would be to wonder where Roig found enough hours in the day—and to consider her status as a cultural figure in Catalonia would be to wonder how it’s taken so long for her work to appear in the Anglosphere.
First published in 1976, The Time of Cherries has been brought into English for the first time by translator Julia Sanches, and embodies the transgressive optimism that animated Roig’s oeuvre. The novel opens in the Spring of 1974. Natalia Miralpeix, nearing 40, returns home to Barcelona after 12 years elsewhere in Europe. She finds a city that, on the surface, has barely changed since she left, its sky holding “the same solid, heavy gray of past springs.” The political happenings of the city, which pulsate in the background, suggest the same: the young anarchist dissident Salvador Puig Antich was just executed by the Franco regime, and the controversy permeates the daily chatter of her neighborhood in Barcelona’s Eixample. The last time the state had executed someone was 12 years prior, right as Natalia left the country.
Roig once said, “If there is an act of love, it is memory.” Those words have retained their power well after her death, quoted by fellow Catalans, used in political speeches, even emblazoned on coffee mugs. In The Time of Cherries, Roig performs this act of love with great urgency, scattering in references to Catalonia’s music, art, and architecture with incredible specificity. She positions Natalia as a character emblematic of a generation in danger of forgetting their heritage. In one scene, Natalia reunites with her drawing teacher Harmonia, a painter, a former exile, and passionate Catalan who has “an outsized impact on Natalia’s restless, volatile spirit.” Harmonia mentors Natalia and introduces her to great Catalan poets and writers like Salvador Espiritu and Josep Carner. Natalia carries memories of their “unfinished conversations, incomplete puzzles with pieces in desperate need of recovery”:
One evening, Harmonia announced: Riba is dead. Who’s Riba? Natàlia asked. Harmonia was furious. Carles Riba was a Catalan poet and translator. Are you post-war kids really so ignorant? Then, as if mumbling to herself, she said: This exile never ends.
There’s a dual-fold accomplishment in these passages, an activism within the storytelling. By invoking the names of these great Catalan artists, Roig illustrates generational divides while pushing back against the Francoist erasure of Catalan culture. This would become a running motif throughout Roig’s oeuvre: the use of language and literature as a political tool to recover—and preserve—collective memory.
As Natalia reconnects with friends and family over the course of several days, confronting the life she left behind, she senses something in the air—the beginnings of a paradigm shift. There’s dramatic irony in her homecoming: we’re meant to understand that Franco and his regime will be dead shortly, and that Natalia has returned to a city on the verge of a major democratic and cultural revolution. All the while, we weave in and out of timelines to become immersed in the Miralpeix lore, past and present, finding a rich cast of characters. We meet Lluis, Natalia’s brother, a successful architect with a chip on his shoulder, who wants to “pry [Barcelona] free from the grips of Gaudí” and drag Spain into a pan-European modernity. Silvia, his wife, is a former ballerina whose ambitions have been sidelined to domestic life. And their sixteen year old son, Marius, is a sensitive boy who, to his father’s chagrin, writes poetry and steals away at night to listen to music in the gritty Raval neighborhood. We learn the complicated backstory of Aunt Patricia, a wealthy, childless, alcoholic who still processes the trauma of an abusive marriage, as well of the beloved family housekeeper Encarna, who’s ready to live life for herself, and stop her constant emotional and physical labor for the Miralpeix clan. Finally, we face Natalia’s stern father, Joan, and mother Judit, whose lives and identities are subsumed by the conditions of living under the regime. Through these intertwined stories and vivid imagery, Roig offers a compelling portrait of Barcelona and of generations reeling from the scars of war, eager and desperate to move on from the senseless, repressive grip of Francoism.
In theme and substance, we can trace the novel’s lineage to the great Catalan writer Merce Rodoreda, who similarly leaned into women’s experiences and the specificity of life in Catalonia. It is also reminiscent of work by writers like Natalia Ginzburg, a master of the politically-inclined domestic novel, who centered family dynamics and shared language in works like Family Lexicon. But in form, The Time of Cherries is another beast entirely. Roig employs third person omniscient narration—deftly shifting perspectives throughout the novel—alongside a non-linear story structure. She rarely illustrates a character’s personal history in chronological sequence, instead cutting back to moments in the past that are of importance to illustrating a theme or understanding a particular character. The story of the Miralpeix family unfurls in a series of digressions. Her vivid prose feels conversational, relatable and, at many points, is sharply funny.
Roig leverages these elements to help readers fully understand the complex set of reasons for why Natalia left Barcelona. In turn, she illustrates the contradictions of her generation’s leftist politics. Part three of the novel consists of flashbacks to Natalia’s early twenties, when she begins a romantic relationship with a charismatic sleazeball named Emilio Sandoval. He appears to her one day out of nowhere, and they begin spending long hours together at cafes and local tapas bars. Emilio extols the virtues of tinto de verano as a “workers’ beverage,” but leaves Natalia to pay the tab for nearly all of their outings.
The relationship awakens the straight-laced Natalia’s sexuality and political sensibilities. One day, Emilio confesses—with eye-roll inducing hubris—that he’s a communist who has been imprisoned for his activities: “I don’t get in deep with things, babe. If anything, they get in deep with me.” He explains to her the work of Paul Lafargue and describes the differences between xinos (communists) and left-wing falangists. He shows her a version of Barcelona worlds away from the severity of the Miralpeix household. Invigorated by the potential danger and illicit nature of dating “the most notorious xino at the university,” Natalia absconds from her obligations, skips class and work, comes home late, and ignores warnings from friends and scoldings from her father, who rightfully avoids engaging in any kind of political speech whatsoever.
When Emilio participates in a violent demonstration at the university to stand in solidarity with striking miners in Asturias, Natalia demands to come along. Both are arrested. Given the fact that she comes from a ‘good family,’ Natalia is released and Emilio remains, but shortly after, he callously breaks up with her with a self-absorbed handwritten note on a piece of paper passed over by a guard: “things look different when you’re inside … it’s a whole other world… you wouldn’t understand.” The narration immediately cuts to a conversation between Natalia and Emilio the night before their arrest. They are drinking at a dilapidated bar and the scene is chaotic. They run into unhoused people, sex workers, and drunkards all making a ruckus. Looking around, Natalia begins to despair:
When you talk about our recent history, and everything that’s happened because of Franco and his supporters, I don’t always follow. But then, when I see this — Natalia looked around her — when I see all these people and how hopeless they are, I finally understand. Do you think it will ever end?
Emilio begins humming the tune to a French song called Les Temps de Cerises by the poet J.B. Clement, a revolutionary song written during the Paris Commune. He says:
The poet knew the time of cherries would come with its own share of heartache…but he wished for it anyway. As do I. I can’t wait for the cherries to bloom.
Alongside a time of joy, comes heartache. It’s the kind of message that could feel all too cliche and earnest, if not for its messenger. Emilio and his vigor, performative politics, and infectious sense of optimism appear in Natalia’s life like a necessary disturbance. He later becomes the catalyst for Natalia’s personal pain and of her leaving Barcelona, yet the memories of that relationship anchor her own corrupted sense of hope. In allowing the core theme of the novel to come from one of its more pompous characters, Roig indulges in gray areas and suggests that sustaining hope for the future is never done perfectly or done by perfect people. In spite of everything, to hope is a radical act, done by pulling shreds of optimism out from moments of pain and chaos.
This core message of hope is juxtaposed with gripping scenes of dissolution, such as when Silvia, Natalia’s sister-in-law, hosts her close girlfriends from convent school for a Tupperware party in the “carefully considered” flat she shares with Natalia’s brother Lluis. When the husbands are sent away to watch the football game at the bar, Silvia brings out fresh custard pastries and bottles of sherry and cognac so that the women can unwind in the living room. By the time the bottles are half-empty, they’ve stripped to their underwear. The women begin to play a game of religious-themed charades, positioned as if in a prayer circle, sounding out the names of various saints, ribbing each other. When the bottles are empty, the scene devolves into anarchy: the women are fully naked and re-enacting the “time the nuns tried to burn Silvia’s hands,” a traumatic experience from convent school. It’s a deeply disturbing, multi-layered sequence that touches on gender roles, authority, and punishment, and leans into both religious and occultist imagery, all within the prism of the pristine, mid century tupperware party. Equally disturbing is the way the women snap out of their “alcohol fueled daze” as quickly as they fall into it, as Silvia remembers that she needs to change for dinner at the Tennis Club.
Roig character’s arcs also attest to this dissolution. Natalia’s relationship with her father, Joan, to whom she has barely spoken or written since she left Barcelona, becomes a central tension of the novel. Throughout the first half of the story, Joan is off-handedly framed as an imposing, stubborn patriarch; as Natalia puts it, ”kind of Catholic and very authoritarian.” When Roig finally pulls back the curtain on his story, we discover a character with hidden scars and endless nuance. We learn that he fought with the Republicans as a communist during the Civil War, “a decision that cost him three years at a concentration camp — years he would never forget.” After he is released, he chooses to stay in Catalonia, spending the ensuing years leaning on his wife Judit, abandoning his politics and adjusting their identities to avoid persecution:
They had to leave behind certain attitudes and behaviors, which had brought them so much misfortune. They needed to recast their thinking, change their way of talking, dress how they wanted, shut themselves up at home, sleep, fall into a long, deep slumber.
In this negotiation for survival, Joan sets aside his passions, becomes an architect and starts to make money “because making money was a kind of sleeping.” The desire for rest—the search for rest and refuge—becomes a recurring motif throughout Joan’s narrative arc. All he wants is to sleep, but the weight of his experiences and his profound personal losses compound throughout the decades of his life. And like Silvia’s tupperware party, it results in dissolution, as Joan starts to engage in increasingly eccentric—and then disturbing—behavior. By the time Natalia faces her father, in a dramatic reunion with a formidable, destabilizing twist, he is a shell of himself, a “smiling old man with childlike eyes” stewing in the past, teetering toward oblivion. It’s this debased version of Joan who offers one of the novel’s most profound takeaways: “Life is a circle and we all wind up back at the beginning.”
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I finished The Time of Cherries on a severely delayed Amtrak train, at the very moment when I felt something akin to Roig’s “chaos of hopelessness.” The summer was off-kilter, with an endless deluge of ‘unprecedented events’ playing out on newsfeeds and televisions. Flashes of abnormality, lighting up phones, tickering across widescreens, punctuated the dullness of long, excruciatingly hot days. As they burrowed into factions and all-encompassing, binary ideologies, no one could agree on anything. We grappled with the possibility of contending with a catastrophic natural disaster, of another pandemic, of total economic collapse, of disagreement devolving into extreme violence. The most natural reaction to turbulence might be resignation, numbness. We sink into fear or feelings of despair, but just as quickly, return to day jobs, kid pick up, trips to the grocery. We tune out, forget, and repeat the cycle all over again. While I would be remiss to fully compare a bout of summertime sadness in present-day America with the mood of Francoist Barcelona, I saw universal relevance in Roig’s warnings about the dangers of oblivion and all of the ways in which it can occur. While we can confront oblivion through the horrors of systematic erasure, Roig’s stories also remind us of the kind of collective disremembrance that takes place when we negotiate our own priorities amidst ever-present catastrophe. In these moments, one story may prevail over another, and it may become all too easy for inconvenient narratives to be set aside or rewritten altogether. The novel challenges us to think about our own histories in such honest, uncomfortable terms. Roig reminds us of the role we play in remembering the injustices of the past—and of our responsibility to hold ourselves accountable to it.
Upon Franco’s death in 1977, Spain began a peaceful transition to a democratically elected government, which ultimately ushered in that longed-for time of cherries, a social and cultural revolution remembered as La Movida. Fueling the transition was an agreement by parties on both the left and right, called the Pacto del Olvido (The Pact of Forgetting), in which everyone shrugged their shoulders and received a hall pass in the name of building a new democracy. Political prisoners were freed, those remaining in exile were allowed to return to the country, and quite notably, the atrocities committed by Franco’s regime were swept under the rug. Spain has yet to fully come to terms with this dark past — to compensate the people who suffered or were tortured by the state, to punish instigators, to dig up mass graves. There have been no reparations for victims of Franco’s regime, very little closure for the people who lost loved ones, and most importantly, no laws against the public veneration of Francoism. The issue continues to animate Spain’s contemporary politics, with regional governments, civil society organizations, and activists fighting for laws to codify historical memory and shed more light on the injustices and crimes of the Franco era. Within this context, Roig’s stories—with their focus on untold narratives, individual experiences, and the recovery of collective memory in Catalonia—remain urgent and necessary. The Time of Cherries springs forth to readers as not just an act of love for country and culture, but also an affirmation of survival. To navigate the vivid details, the antics, the banality, the pain of the novel, is to participate alongside the writer in her fight against silence and oblivion and, as Roig puts it, to “discover that there is something, that there is someone, on the other side, that still beats, that still exists.”