Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos John H. Trevathan University of Montana [email protected] Abstract In Yo maté a Kennedy, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote with irony: “ecological truth drives historical truth.” Today, the direct connection between ecological and historical truths is quite serious. In his polemical essay “Four Theses on Climate History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that, in order to explain anthropogenic climate change, geological history should be included in human history. In other words, “ecological truth” should be integral to “historical truth.” What is missing in this observation is a sense of socio-political difference. What is needed is not a consideration of isolated regions, whether they are national, ecological or linguistic, but rather an analysis that investigates a constellation of social movements, objects and events. This means that transatlantic ecocriticism should consider how regions are connected, thinking in line with the logics of movements such as the indignados, vía campesina or altermundisme. This essay approaches a series of steps between Spain and Cuba, examining various texts and terrains that are stylistically and historically distinct. I focus on the tropes of the island and the archipelago in the works of Cuban poet José Lezama Lima and the Catalan writer Francesc Serés. Keywords: ecocriticism, transatlantic studies, Catalan studies, Francesc Serés, José Lezama Lima, hydroelectric dams, Francoism. Resumen V o En Yo maté a Kennedy, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán dice con ironía: “la verdad ecológica l 8 , N conduce a la verdad histórica.” Hoy en día, la conexión directa entre la verdad ecológica y la o histórica es bastante seria. En su polémico ensayo “Four Theses on Climate History,” Dipesh 1 Chakrabarty plantea que, para explicar el cambio climático antropogénico, la historia geológica debe ser incluida en la historia humana. Es decir, “la verdad ecológica” debe ser integral a “la verdad histórica.” Lo que falta en esta observación es un sentido de la diferencia socio-política. Lo que se necesita no es una consideración de regiones aisladas, ya sean nacionales, ecológicas o lingüísticas, sino un análisis que investigue una constelación de movimientos sociales, objetos y eventos. Esto quiere decir que la ecocrítica transatlántica debe considerar cómo se conectan las regiones, pensando de acuerdo con las lógicas de movimientos como los indignados, vía campesina o altermundisme. Este ensayo aborda una serie de pasos entre España y Cuba, examinando varios textos y terrenos que son estilísticamente e históricamente distintos. Me enfoco en los tropos de la isla y del archipiélago en las obras del poeta cubano José Lezama Lima y del escritor catalán Francesc Serés. Palabras clave: ecocrítica, estudios transatlánticos, estudios catalanes, Francesc Serés, José Lezama Lima, centrales hidroeléctricas, franquismo. ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 42 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos In Yo máte a Kennedy, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote with irony: “In the same manner in which a rotten apple contaminates the others in the bag, ecological truth drives historical truth” (18).1 As the Barcelona-born writer suggests, ecological necrosis infects surrounding networks and connections. Ecosystems, within and beyond human communities, are interconnected, after all. Today, the direct causal link between ecological truths and historical truths is quite serious in its scale and implications for (non)human survival, insofar as the loss of biodiversity—of species and ecosystems—will continue to have profound impacts in the long and short run for the planet. In his widely read “Four Theses on Climate History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty claims that, in order to account for anthropogenic climate change, geological history must be incorporated into human history. “Ecological truth” must become integral to “historical truth” in order to offer new alternatives to global neoliberal regimes, which have largely refused the entanglement of human and natural history. This, in turn, requires us to revise our notions of both history and ecology. If human history now dominates the geological present of at least the last several centuries, its re-telling requires the inclusion of ecological necrosis: species extinction, deforestation, hurricanes, floods or the deaths of lakes and rivers. As Édouard Glissant put it, “the woes of the landscape have invaded speech, rekindling the woes of the humanities” (196). There is a need, then, for narrative and analysis to descend into the depths, to submerge in ecological devastation in the hopes of contemplating other future alternatives. How does one begin to narrate environmental disappearance, loss and extinction during an era dominated by neoliberalism? What is needed is not merely V o a consideration of regions in isolation, whether they are national, ecological or l 8 linguistic, but rather investigations into singular histories of social movements, , N o objects and events in conjunction and, on occasion, in collision or conflict with one 1 another. This means considering how regions are connected as well as set apart in their differences in the hopes of uncovering alternative remedies frequently left out of debates on the multitude of environmental crises facing humanity today. Thinking, then, in tandem with movements such as the indignados, vía campesina and altermundisme, transatlantic ecocriticism is an important route to establish connections and to draw out differences in the complex linguistic matrices of the Iberian and Ibero-American contexts. This requires literary and cultural analysis that operates comparatively between texts and their situations. As the editors of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities have recently pointed out in their introduction to that volume, narrative and esthetic practices help shape how we understand our surrounding world (DeLoughrey 1-2). At its best, literature can 1 “De la misma manera que una manzana podrida contamina a las restantes del saco, la verdad ecológica conduce a la verdad histórica” (18). All translations in the article are mine. ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 43 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos be understood as a meeting place for different creatures, objects, actants, forces and processes. In my view, this literary meeting place allows us to imagine Vazquéz Montalbán’s reflection on the consequences of the entangled—and often rotten—historical and ecological situations. This essay takes up the task of laying out a few “stone rafts,” as José Saramago put it, to cross the Atlantic between seemingly disparate texts and situations. This essay investigates the figures of the island and the archipelago, especially in relation to the past or present threat of disappearance, and focuses on the work of the contemporary Catalan novelist Francesc Serés and the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima. Though both authors certainly come from different stylistic and historical moments, I hold that they offer up examples that engage literature as a meeting point, not only for human and nonhuman beings, but also between turbulent and violent ecological histories of empire and dictatorship that allow contemporary readers to connect and re- assemble human activity via alternative understandings of nature and culture as intricate and entangled histories and networks. In the end, these island narratives and regions come to resist the imperial and Francoist networks of power, built to centralize and control social and natural forces. Frederic Mistral’s prologue begins the 1905 edition of the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer’s L’Atlántida (1876) with an epigraph from Plato’s Timaeus: “Great earthquakes and floods fell across the land, and in the short space of a night, Atlantis plunged into the open earth” (n.p.).2 Verdaguer’s text is an epic poem emblematic of the nineteenth-century Catalan Renaixença movement, which sought, as its name suggests, to reinvigorate the status of Catalan culture and literature. Verdaguer’s poem is a descriptive epic, establishing lineage between Hercules in Iberia after the demise of Atlantis. Verdaguer then perpetuates the myth into the early modern era, utilizing Christopher Columbus as an epic hero V o tracing the lineage of this past into the Americas. What interests me here is l 8 Verdaguer’s stylistic approach to the myth of Atlantis, which places geologic , N o history as central to understanding human history. In fact, this attention to geology 1 terrified Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who wrote: I am with those that believe that the description of inanimate nature should only appear in art as an accessory, which serves as a backdrop for the human figure. This is the only or principal defect that I find in the admirable poem by my friend Verdaguer. Man is absorbed by the grandeur and catastrophes of nature, and neither Hesperides nor Hercules are as interesting as they should be. Furthermore, the great and huge physical forces of Alcides and the Titans harm the moral value of those personalities and cause one to look at them more like natural agents than like human beings, given analogous passions to our own. (n.p)3 2 “Acaecieron grandes terremotos é inundaciones, y en el breve espacio de una noche, la Atlántida se sumió en la tierra entreabierta” (n.p.). 3 “Soy de los que creen que la descripción de naturaleza inanimada sólo debe aparecer en el arte como accesorio, y cual sirviendo de fondo a la figura humana. Este es el único o principal defecto que hallo en el admirable poema de mi amigo Verdaguer. El hombre está como absorbido por las grandezas y catástrofes naturales, y ni Hesperides ni Hércules interesan como debieran. Además, las grandes y descomunales fuerzas físicas de Alcides y de los Titanes perjudican al valor moral de ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 44 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos Menéndez Pelayo is concerned about the literary absorption of humans into the “deterministic” backdrop of nature. Literature that dwells too long on the agency of nature or nonhuman, nonliving objects, turns humans into ghosts of their own “true” form, denying their apparent “freedom” as humans. Though the critic does not go so far as to claim that Verdaguer is guilty of demolishing an attitude that we would describe as anthropocentric, Menéndez Pelayo seems concerned that the Catalan poet might be on the brink of dehumanization. His style, it seems, implicitly says something dangerous about the intimate connections between human drama and its “natural” surroundings, or, as Vázquez Montalbán put it above, that turbulent ecological truth makes for rotten historical truths. More recently, critic Ludres Estruch rightly describes Verdaguer’s supposed dehumanization as a “science fiction-like” idea that geology might well be a major actant in the historical formations and disappearances of human society (59). If Verdaguer’s emphasis on geology, plants and animals makes him a science fiction author, then many contemporary novels about twentieth-century rural Spain possess similar inventiveness. Several novels that share concern for the slow death of rural communities include: Jesús López Pacheco’s Central eléctrica (1958), Jesús Moncado’s El camión de sirga (1989), Julio Llamazares’s La lluvia amarilla (1988), and Juan Goytisolo’s La changa (1985). These texts tend to include contemplation about how any human manipulation of ecological circumstance—such as Joaquín Costa’s project of regeneracionismo put to work in Francoist Spain—affects agricultural production and human wellbeing. Indeed, in the contemporary geological era dominated by human activity, it is not that we wield the forces of volcanoes or fault lines, but rather the irony that, in the Antropocene, we are unable to control the sphere of our own influence on these forces. V o While the Atlantis myth is often relegated to a distant past civilization, I l 8 would like to consider the phenomenon and literary trope of disappearance on a , N o more temporally proximate scale. In fact, Antonio Benítez Rojo has already made 1 such a suggestion in the Caribbean context to consider the geographically disparate as a unified, yet fragmented cultural and political unity. In the Caribbean case, Benítez Rojo ties this to the geography of archipelagoes, which allows the insular to become contiguous, united through a shared series of colonial events and disasters (215-224). The Cuban author conceptualized “these islands” as the New Atlantis, the ultimate archipelago for a comprehensive study of “ocean territory” that would not necessarily enter into a detailed analysis of differences (217). This comprehensive study would have advantages for the Caribbean within the constraints and demands of neoliberalism because insularity paradoxically becomes a basis to consolidate identity and economic interests. The same might be said of ruined or deserted Spanish towns, left in the wake of Franco’s massive sus caracteres e inducen a mirarlos más bien como agentes naturales que como a seres humanos o dotados de pasiones análogas a las nuestras” (n.p). ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 45 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos hydroelectric makeover of the Basque and Catalan countryside. They are figurative “islands,” or fragments, that can be analytically placed into an archipelago, or constellation, to understand the common ground in their histories. My interest, however, is not to consider the economic integration of these insularities but rather to draw out the ruins of ecological histories and their “possible futures that never came to be,” as Svetlana Boym put it in her prognosis of twentieth-century “ruinophilia.” These alternative futures remain unrealized events, narratological markers that Gerald Prince has referred to as disnarrated occurrences. Moreover, following Derek Walcott, insularity should avoid the “high pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from another.” Indeed, socio-ecological insularities underscore differences in the midst of reassembling a constellation of histories across the Atlantic. To agree with Ottmar Ette, then, exploring insularities in the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero- America will be less about stable processes and equivalencies and more about “oscillating movements between various regions” (134). In this sense, insularity is neither about isomorphic difference nor about collective erasures of difference but rather, to return to Boym’s language on ruinophilia, about the “exploration and production of meaning” from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Re-considering Atlantis, in this sense, is built out of re-routing sites from one side of the Atlantic Ocean to another, to bring the disnarrated to the forefront of analysis. To repeat, then, I conceive the critical task for transatlantic ecocriticism as a process of submergence in these “oscillating,” turbulent histories of ecological ruins and disappearance with the hopes of turning to better alternatives. This approach to the Atlantis myth resonates with contemporary Catalan language author Francesc Serés’s (1972) recent trilogy of novels, Des femmes i marbles (2003). The Aragon-native seems to ask: where is it that we, as spectators V o and implicit participants in today’s world, witness or fail to witness the l 8 disappearance of human and nonhuman collectives? How do we tell the stories of , N o these disappearances? Serés documents the radical changes witnessed in the rural 1 Catalan-speaking region of Aragón, known as La Franja, a strip or borderland between Catalunya and Aragón. He has stated that these fictional terrains were efforts to get closer to his hometown of Saidí (Serés “Quién soy”). The town is situated along the bank of the río Cinca in the Ebro Valley just north of where the Cinca flows into the río Ebro. Its climate is largely dry and hot, driven by the geological depression of the river valley. These climatological factors, especially the river systems, become central actants in Serés’s trilogy. Just as William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha to capture his vision of rural Mississippi and Gabriel García Márquez invented the magical Macondo to invoke his own childhood experiences on the Colombian coast, or Juan Benet’s re-writes La Región, Serés has invented a literary world in order to convey life in northern rural Spain in the twentieth century. While reading Serés, one garners new insights about the land’s ability to dominate all aspects of those who reside there. It is, in this sense, ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 46 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos how Serés qualifies his Verdaguerian use of landscape not as a backdrop for human or literary activity, but rather as a collection of powerful actants that sway the novel’s human protagonists long after they have left the region. He seems to echo Benet’s haunting title, Volverás a Región. The land has marked “you” and your formation and you will return to it—in spite of Menéndez Pelayo’s concern. Serés himself has recently commented on the value of the Atlantis myth for considering how to write a rural novel: What did they write about, the Atlanteans? What were their stories? We do not know, we never will know. We can think that they wrote a literature that had to do with their insularity, about their relationship with the continent, with land-based literature. They would complain about their isolation and, at the same time, would celebrate it as one of their culture’s distinctive traits… There would be masterpieces that someone may have translated or copied, but most of the literature of Atlantis would have been lost. (Resina 183) Serés’s speculation about Atlantean literature and culture functions as a paradigm for disappeared literatures as well as for others potentially lost in the future. Even if there were literary remainders of Atlantis, we would not recognize these ruins today in their copied or translated forms. They are withdrawn or insulated from the reader. This conception of insularity echoes Verdaguer’s emphasis on geology as a central actor in human activity, insofar as it can “isolate” or “erase” the literature of a place from the rest of literary history. Re-considering the site of the rural as Atlantis is about speculating on what may have been lost and to consider what it means to tell the stories of a place of insularity, one that, in this case, has no literature. In other words, storytelling about such a site is, to use the metaphor again, about reconsidering the insular and then reconnecting it to a larger archipelago of futures that never came to be. V In the first novel in Serés’s rural trilogy, Els ventres de la terra (2000), one o l 8 might consider the insularity of ruined towns in two interrelated registers. There , N o is of course the specter of Francoism, which imposed a ban on the use of Catalan, 1 Galician and Euskera for public discourse. Additionally, Franco’s public works, as we will examine in depth below, drastically altered the distribution of resources and, indeed, the very composition of the landscape—especially in the Basque Country and Catalunya. For attentive ecocritical readers, such a literary project allows a consideration of how objects, landscapes and ecological histories are residues that help reconstruct memories of lost places. Els ventres de la terra approaches rural landscapes of the unnamed protagonist’s childhood, as well as other family episodes, through a series of interconnected memory pieces, which relate the family’s flight from their farm, the main character’s vocation as an engineer in Barcelona and a final return after the sale of the family farm. Each chapter is marked with a particular infinitive, such as: mirar, sentir, ser or desconocerse. The generative stance of each verb investigates a particular impression of quotidian rituals ranging from labor and love, to writing and harvesting. Additionally, the infinitives trace a sentiment or physical ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 47 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos movement with respect to the town, whose name is not mentioned in the text. The novel does not simply index the development from childhood to adulthood but works through prolepsis and analepsis, documenting leaps of 2 to 72 years. Francisco Solano points out that these sketches and short interrelated narratives are not so much written but are instead whispered to the reader (Solano). Indeed, they seem to be faint etchings of a much larger, untold story. These narrative gaps offer separate episodes while also ambivalently blurring the boundaries between each of the narrative passages ranging from the years of 1893 to 1998. In the present time of the novel, the protagonist works as an engineer near the town of Lleida. Coinciding with these time lapses and leaps, Serés moves from rural to urban settings as well as throughout the family’s genealogy and, therein, through the history of a town that has ceased to exist as it once was. Due to multiple public works projects in the Franja region, the town’s natural water supply dissipated and destroyed the region’s agricultural potential. Simultaneously, factory jobs became a more lucrative option in Lleida and Barcelona. These economic developments shifted the agricultural viability of the town and left in its wake only “those waiting to die.” The novel, moreover, also moves beyond the locale of the town and looks at the effects of public projects built on the dream of so-called regenerationism: the hydroelectric dams throughout the entire Franja region, among other areas throughout Spain. For the regenerationist proponents, including the Aragon native Joaquín Costa, water redistribution would not simply improve agricultural production on the Iberian Peninsula, but also transform rural social structures predicated on antiquated forms of latifundismo (Swyngedouw, “Modernity” 454). One moniker Franco picked up during his reign was “Paco Rana” (Franky the Frog) because of his persistent campaign to re-invigorate the countryside through a V o series of public works projects, more often than not, involving hydroelectric dams l 8 and re-distributing the nation’s water supply. Franco’s deployment, however, , N o imposed new configurations that were meant to centralize Spain’s waterways and 1 display the power of the dictatorship. For geographer Erik Swyngedouw, reading the history of water in twentieth-century Spain offers revealing stories about the technonatures forged during Francoism (“Producing Nature” 122-23). Swyngedouw writes: “Parts of nature become enrolled in and reconstituted through the ‘networks of power’ that animate this process” (123). Under these auspices, water displays ambivalence as the source of social inequalities as well as the potential remedy. It cannot, then, remain politically neutral but rather becomes entangled in Franco’s struggle for power. Territory, then, was remade to a scale indicative of the dictatorship’s network of interest (122). Els ventres de la terra examines the islands left in the wake of these projects, suggesting that Franco’s version of regenerationism caused massive forced migrations to urban centers after towns were either flooded or cut off from their water supply. Indeed, at one ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 48 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos point Serés’s narrator explains that the history of the town’s disappearance is a history of floods and water scarcity due to “el maltrato del agua” (99). Franco puts to work the discourse of rural regenerationism as a central aspect of geologically reforming Spain as one nation instead of many. Other “regionalist desires” are drowned out through the “maltrato del agua.” Swyngedouw describes this project not simply as redistribution but rather as the birth of a violent and transformative technonature. In the Spanish post-war context, the re-making of Spain’s hydrosocial landscape was part of an effort to create a socio-culturally, politically and physically integrated nationalist territorial scale and to obliterate earlier regionalist desires. Yet, this nationalistic socio-physical remaking of Spain was predicated upon forging networked national and, in particular, transnational socio-political and economic arrangements. (“Technonatural” 11) Simultaneously, the projects abandoned the radicality of the vision, which would have supposedly redistributed resources with more equity throughout the countryside and instead perpetuated oligarchic networks solely interested in serving the needs of Spain’s metropolises and eventually, the emerging project of neoliberalism, especially after Spain began to receive money from the United States government in the early 1950s (“Producing Nature” 135-36). As Swyngedouw explores in greater detail in his recent Liquid Power, water becomes a central actant in the “repeating” story of erasure, isolation, abandonment and fugue throughout Spain’s projects of modernization. In his novel, Serés surveys this double erasure and uncovers “islands” and ruins of towns and offers up stories that help connect them through a shared ecological history of disappearance due to the mistreatment of water. Franco’s hydropolitics seep into Serés’s chapter “Beber. Cada una de las V o botellas de agua (1985).” In 1985, the narrator returns to his family’s deserted l 8 property in order to gather a few belongings including twelve bottles before the , N o final sale. 1 One accesses the terrace, which is on the other side of the attic, through a small wooden door eaten away by worms from top to bottom. Once the cord is untied, one must push with force so that that door scratches the top a quarter of a circle that, with the passage of time, has been etched into the floor, and pass with one’s head down, less because of the height and more because of the spider webs that hang from the ceiling. (82)4 Household objects are covered with markers of time passed. Though “nests” of spider webs, dust and sheets of plastic cover the daily objects, they seem to “communicate” through these layers. There is, for instance, a machine for grinding 4 “A la terraza, que está situada al otro lado del desván, se accede a través de una pequeña portezuela de madera punteada de arriba abajo por la carcoma. Una vez desatada la cuerda hay que empujar con fuerza para que la puerta rasque por encima el cuarto de circunferencia que con el paso del tiempo ha rayado en el suelo, y pasar con la cabeza gacha, más que por la altura, por las telarañas que cuelgan del techo” (82). ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 49 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos meat, pitchers, jars and bottles used for canning fruits and vegetables, a stack of old western novels and a bottle of liquor the narrator is justifiably afraid to drink. They have, according to the narrator, a strange, unaccustomed tonality to them. He taps on a railing, which, though it has “the same sound,” he only hears it as an uncanny sound as if it were a broken bell. The uncanniness arrives with fear and vertigo: “It is troubling to look through the eaves of the penthouse, a sensation mixed with vertigo and fear, difficult to describe, a shiver that wants to escape from my chest, my chest hands and jolts from me inside” (84).5 The house exhibits aspects of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny (Das Unheimliche): it is the familiar that seems most strange, causing the sensation of vertigo and dizziness the narrator references. In “On the Uncanny,” Freud teases out the semantic particulars of the word, likening it to a haunted house: “This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning” (15). For Freud, psychoanalysis interprets this familiarity as an association to the mother’s womb, to a familiar body once inhabited to which one cannot return. “Un” as a prefix is a sign of “repression” of the memory of this place. In terms of the novel, this repression arises as an inability to return to a previous environment or ventre. The reader follows as the narrator goes inside the site of memory, creating a palpable yet absent recollection of what has gone before. The remnants of the ventre, then, points back to Serés’s above conception of Atlantis as an insulated place, withheld from participation in literary history. The narrator works to decipher these “nests,” “empty containers” or ruins of a place transformed by Franco’s hydropolitical mechanisms. Being inside the house, the site of memory, gives faintly recognizable yet distant sensations. Take, for instance, this olfactory description: V o The environment of a mix of gasoline smoke and dust, a smell that I will l 8 never forget. I still want it, even more, I still love that distant odor, the , N o solid, greasy dust on top of the engine block, dust mixed with earth from all 1 the fields that are cultivated, from all the roads wind around the town, from the pollen of all the trees, the plants on the mountains, dust hardened by all the heatwaves and coldspells from November to March. (90)6 These smells are indicative of a certain terroir that unavoidably comes from a particular environment of trees and plants, soil and engine oil. Moreover, the house’s uncanniness exhibits senses of insularity. The narrator gestures at this when he reflects “the attic looks at the attic, the memories look at the memories, 5 “Me da reparo mirar por el alero, una sensación mezcla de vértigo y de miedo, difícil de describir, un escalofrío que quiere salirse del pecho, de las manos y que me empuja hacia dentro” (84). 6 “El ambiente de una mezcla de humo de gasóleo y polvo, un olor que nunca olvidaré. Todavía quiero, aún más, todavía amo aquel olor, el polvo sólido y grasiento encima del bloque del motor, polvo mezcla de tierra de todos los campos que se cultivaban, de todos los caminos que salen y vuelven al pueblo, del polen de todos los árboles, y plantas de los montes, polvo endurecido por todos los calores y por todos los fríos de noviembre a marzo” (90). ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 50 Author: Trevathan, John H. Title: Submergence: On Transatlantic Ecocriticism, Islands and Archipelagos the house looks at the house” (108).7 It is as if, even without their use value for humans, the objects persist on their own insular timescales. These impressions are incidental to the narrator’s purpose for making the trip, which is to find his mother’s collection of bottles for transporting water from the nearby spring to the house. The bottles contain their own faint etchings of past experiences. Twelve glass bottles are wrapped in newspaper and six sit in two different wooden boxes. Their history began during his mother’s work as a maid for a republican colonel who, in the last days of the Republic, offered compensation in objects instead of money because the Republic’s currency, with the foreseeable victory of nationalist troops, would soon be worthless. The colonel had acquired them from his trips throughout Europe: “Each bottle has a different origin, geography engraved on the glass that years later I would recall in classes, maps and atlases” (96).8 The bottles come from places such as Brittany, Clermont- Ferrand, Scotland, and Perrier. The narrator’s favorite piece of the collection came from Eastern Europe: “The bottle is well worn, engraved by hand with grooves that still maintain their sharp borders. I do not know what it says yet I identify characters and symbols but I have never been able to translate them” (96).9 The etchings, though never translated by the protagonist, always conveyed a memory of ice native to Eastern Europe. His mother explained that the climate was so cold that even the wine would freeze. The bottles, then, contain recordings—or messages—of various histories occurring inside and outside of Spain; however, as indicated earlier, these histories are not readily told and instead remain embodied as “empty bottles,” which contain residues of this larger and frequently forgotten history of water. The bottles also work as metonyms for the larger story of water under Franco and his particular implementation of hydropolitics. The sight of the bottles V o conjures a history that swells over the memory of selling his parents’ house and l 8 into the history of why they left the town in the first place: a water crisis. Though , N o they always had running water in the house, the family used the bottles for fresh 1 spring water, which was better to drink. However, the construction of a local highway cut off the aquifer “that gave life” (98). The highway led to a new gas station built directly over where the water reservoir resided. While the town had traditionally used wells and springs, these local developments of industry eventually made this practice impossible, creating, as the texts notes, the beginning of the end for the town. The narrator reflects: “Memory does not fail anyone when even today everyone understands the decline of the town in relation to the death 7 “El desván mira el desván, los recuerdos miran los recuerdos, la casa mira la casa” (108). 8 “Cada botella tiene una procedencia diferente, geografía grabada en vidrio que años después yo recordaría en las clases, en los mapas y los atlas” (96). 9 La botella está labrada, grabada a mano con surcos que aún mantienen los bordes afilados. No sé qué dice, identifico caracteres y símbolos pero no los he podido traducir nunca” (96). ©Ecozon@ 2017 ISSN 2171-9594 51