“El cuarto de atrás” by Carmen Martín Gaite

“El cuarto de atrás”, published in 1978, is a book written by Carmen Martín Gaite. Francisco Franco Bahamonde, the Spanish dictator, was already dead when that happened, and the country was in the transition to the present democracy. Though Franquism was over, its consequences were still presents in the Spanish intellectual community during the transition, and this novel is an example of that.

“El cuarto de atrás” reminds a little to “Reivinidcación del conde don Julián” (1970), because both books, far from realism, go deep into the subconscious. This one is written in first person and uses the present tense to narrate the plot. It tells a story about a woman called Carmen who can be identified as the author. She went to bed and unsuccessfully tried to sleep, and then several unusual things happened. A man in black visited her, and they started a conversation that helped her to remember the most basic things about her past.  When the book gets to an end, it is hard to say if everything that happened was a dream or something real.

Obviously the memory problems are related to a traumatic experience, such the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship. But this personal experience goes further to become a metaphor of the entire country, which will start to remember, during the transition, a part of the Spanish History that Franco tried to erase. The article entitled “Re-inhabiting private space: Carmen Martín Gaite's El Cuarto de atrás”, by Carmiña Palerm, points out that “the protagonist can be seen as the transmitter of an oral discourse, a discourse that had been confined to the private space of the household up until the death of Franco” (119). In several occasions, the book talks about using the fantasy to scape away from reality, and that is what the main character did when she was a child, imagining two fantastic places in order to ignore reality: Cúnigan y Bergai.

It is a very nice book to understand some psychological aspects of the Spanish Transition, like the struggles to remember the past, and the confusion of a society that is finally free to look back and share their experiences without fear.