I CANNOT FIND THE BOOK and the two or three people to whom I might have lent it have no memory of it, have never heard of it. But I have a clear memory of a Saturday in the summer of 1990, during a year when I tried to live one month in Dublin followed by one month in Barcelona and managed not to live much at all, but spent my time oddly disentangled, disengaged, suspended. And the book hit me hard. I remember late on a Saturday night, in a tiny room in a flat near Santa Maria del Mar realising that if I did not put this book down I would finish it that night, and when I woke in the morning I would not have it.
I put it aside and slept and then woke with the absolute and uncomplicated pleasure you normally get from finding a delightful and half-forgotten bloke in bed beside you. I started reading again and I am still recovering, in certain ways, from what I learned.
The book is Juan Goytisolo’s memoir Forbidden Territory, which was published in hardback by Quartet in England. I don’t know if it ever made it to a paperback. Goytisolo was brought up in bourgeois Barcelona, where the upper middle classes have remained undisturbed for a hundred and fifty years. Neither world war nor the Spanish Civil War have had much impact on them, except to make them conservative in ways that are almost exquisite. As a child, Goytisolo was sexually interfered with by his grandfather, and as an adult, he is determined that the sort of sexual repression which led to this will not govern his life, but rather become the source of his liberation. His mother Julia Gay was killed by a bomb during the Civil War when he was a small boy (he was born in 1931) and that sorrow and a strange guilt, as anyone who has lost a parent in childhood will know, follow him everywhere.
He goes, as all good Catalans go, to Paris and there he meets Jean Genet, who asks him straight out if he is a homosexual. Goytisolo is a provincial; his editor Monique Lange, who will be his lover for many years, is also in the room. He cannot answer; he hesitates. Maybe he is a homosexual. And later he tells us that at the time of writing the book he spends half the year with a working-class Moroccan man. It is complicated, so he cannot answer straight, but he feels shame about this, and Genet has no more time for fear and shame and prevarication.
I love the dark truths which Goytisolo is prepared to explore in the book. He is the boy who suffers alienation from family and Catalan society, who suddenly realises that, elsewhere, alienation—it is Paris in the 1950s—has become the new enlightenment. But this is not a cure, merely an explanation and, at times, a comfort. The damaged self is alone in this book; the aim of the journey is to know and explore the damage because it cannot be repaired. Things must be faced, and this is something I wish I could come to terms with.
Goytisolo realised that the enemy lingers in the language itself, and that language remains, no matter who else has used it, a soft wax when you are alone in a room with it. His novels are a great roar against the Spanish tradition since 1492, against grammar and syntax, as much as inherited boundaries and notions of culture and civilisation. The first volume of his memoirs set the context for this: he is uncompromising and honest not about the things which it is easy to be uncompromising and honest about—Franco’s Spain, bourgeois life—but about the forbidden territory of the self, the things we wish to keep hidden.