Chris Bambery enjoys a novel set in Toronto and Barcelona, dealing with the legacy of the Spanish civil war and Franco’s dictatorship

This is a novel about betrayal, betrayal at different levels. It’s set in two very different worlds; Barcelona in the 1950s under the heel of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and Toronto in Canada in the 1990s.

The latter is where an old Spaniard is approaching retirement as a receptionist at the rundown Hotel Regina in the city centre. We never learn his name, but we do discover he hails from Andalusia and that he had to flee Malaga when the security services discovered he was connected to the anarchist underground, leaving behind his entirely innocent girlfriend to carry the can. He flees to Barcelona to join a small resistance group, led by a former member of the International Brigades, a Canadian, Robert Rojinsky, who has gravitated to the remains of the anarchist underground.

We will learn that the old receptionist came to Toronto after nine years in jail because Rojinsky left him and a comrade some money there. Every day the old man goes into the city from his apartment in the suburbs to work the late shift. He is obviously lonely. His wife is dead, they had no children and he, it seems, has only one friend, another old comrade, Sebastián Pasos, now exiled too in Canada after long years in a Spanish jail. He dislikes everyone else who works at the hotel.

Then, into the hotel steps an old Spanish man, Luis Bielsa: ‘Everyone respected him in prison. He’d endured the waterboarding and beatings without giving up anyone’s name. When they released him into the prison yard after being held in solitary, he didn’t go up to any of the groups. He sat in a corner smoking and was friendly to any prisoner who approached him. But he never made the first move. And he got on well with the non-political prisoners too, giving them advice and cigarettes.’

Bielsa was a member of the Communist Party, but an unusual one: ‘He worked on his own slowly – his own legend. The proletarian bourgeois, the communist rebel who rejected Party discipline and helped the lost sheep of communism and former anarchists who confused their past ideology with delinquency. Robbing banks and jewellers, murders masquerading as part of the workers’ movement’ (pp.16-17).

Bielsa is old and not too well. But unlike the receptionist he has a prosperous life, living in Barcelona’s fashionable Calle Rosselló, with his antique furniture and oil paintings. He is in Toronto for the unveiling of a monument to the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades, with whom Rojinsky fought.

Rojinsky and Bielsa became friends during the Civil War, when the Canadian was fighting at the battle of Teruel. Bielsa was too young to fight, but wanted to mix with the International Brigaders to improve his languages. When Franco’s fascists won that war, both fled to France. There they met up again in 1944 at the time of Liberation.

In 1956, Bielsa was back in Barcelona and helping fund Rojinsky’s group there who were planning a spectacular operation. Its only female member is Vera, with whom the receptionist has an affair, but she will not commit, and moves onto Bielsa. The old receptionist remembers her all too well, but with a sense of bitterness.

The Alligator’s Trap is, then, set in two cities; Toronto and Barcelona. The former is both threatening, serial killers are on the prowl, and alienating; the old receptionist’s apartment block seems to be inhabited by pensioners in the ante room before death.

Barcelona in the mid-1950s is not the city of today, awash with tourists. Neither is it the city of the 1940s, the worst years of defeat, when hunger stalked it, the mass executions were of very recent memory, fascist thugs beat up anyone they heard speaking Catalan and bombsites were everywhere. Franco saw the city as the centre of communism, atheism and separatism.

It is Soler’s portrayal of the city which I like. It echoes that of the Catalan novelist, sometimes Communist and gourmand, Manuel Vazquez Montalban, who was jailed and tortured at almost the same time this novel is set (Montalban’s The Pianist, too long unavailable in English, covers not dissimilar ground).

The city is emerging from those dark years, but only to a degree. It’s still poor. It’s still under the grip of fascism. The city centre is run down; especially Raval, the old anarchist centre, with its bars, cabarets and brothels. Bielsa comes to Barcelona but is an ambiguous figure, consorting with an old family friend who’s a judge.

There is more than one betrayal in this short novel, but the dominant one leaves Rojinsky shot dead, and the others sent to the hell of Franco’s prisons. The one question is whether the receptionist will reveal Bielsa’s presence in Toronto to Sebastián Pasos. The novel ends on a note of possible revenge.

Underlying this is Spain’s flawed transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy and its failure to deal with Franco’s toxic legacy. This is not a happy read, for obvious reasons, but it’s a powerful one which I recommend. Thanks too to the translators, Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts.

Clapton Press should be congratulated for providing us with a translation of Soler’s novel, the only one currently available in English. Soler is a great Spanish novelist who deserves to be known here.