Attila - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Javier Serena was born in Pamplona, Spain in 1982. He has published Las torres de El Carpio, La estación baldía, Last Words on Earth, and Attila. He has stayed at writers residences with the Fundación Antonio Gala (Córdoba, Spain) and Les Rècollets (Paris, France).

Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Her translations include novels by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, Katixa Agirre, Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 for Lara Moreno’s In Case We Lose Power, and has been a finalist for the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Prize and the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize, and longlisted for the National Translation Award.

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HE ALWAYS REACTED in the most eccentric possible way and so, finding himself alone and disoriented, ostracized and adrift in Paris, instead of giving up, Alioscha opted to become even more entrenched in his writing obsession. I confirmed this for myself mere hours after landing in Paris. Uneasy about his state of mind and fearing he’d gone mad after being abandoned by his female companion, I searched for him everywhere, seeking any sign that he was still alive, finally locating him at last in the expanses of the Parc de Belleville. The encounter was a chance one. I’d gone on a whim to that place with it exceptional panoramic views, trying to kill time, resigned to waiting until the next day to try and talk to him, but when I reached a cluster of graffitied wooden benches at the top of the hill and looked to my right, I found myself suddenly faced with my friend’s solemn and tragic silhouette, set against the Parisian rooftops. The figure he cut revealed that, over the past couple of weeks, he’d only sunk deeper into the delirious swamp in which he already flailed. He looked like a soloist seized by a musical fever, moving his lips to a melody only he could hear, his hair whipped about by the wind and his body in the throes of a strange vibration, so abstracted and brooding that he seemed entirely indifferent to his surroundings, wholly focused on reading from a piece of paper he held inches from his face. Only when I got closer, when I could finally hear the absurd litany he was muttering, hand clenched, resembling a claw, did I realize without surprise that, there in that secluded spot, I was witnessing a kind of theatrical rehearsal: Alioscha slowly and deliberately reciting the most recent chapter of Attila, the novel he had been working on for years and whose long and chaotic discourse of impossible verses and nonsensical paragraphs he would finish just days before killing himself.

            But it would take until October fore Alioscha to finish his book, and at that time it was only February, a raw winter afternoon on which Alioscha seemed immune to the cold and the vast and naked sky, so absorbed in his words that he remained completely unaware of my presence until I tapped him on the shoulder.

            He turned, shaken, as disconcerted as if he’d just surfaced from the ocean’s depths. But seeing that it was me, he smiled and gave me a warm hug, remembering out loud that only a week before I had, in fact, let him know the time and date of my arrival.

            “I thought it was Tuesday, that tomorrow was Wednesday!” he said, pained by his mistake. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have left the house until you got in!”

            He babbled on, apologizing for his mix-up until he appeared to accept that nothing was to be done about the confusion and told me instead about the progress on his book.

            “I finished another chapter yesterday,” he said, holding up the pages, purposefully avoiding any talk about the details surrounding his new life circumstances. “In a few months, I will have written the last page.”

            That seemed to be his only aim: to finish the book as soon as possible, working around the clock, refusing to feel sorry for himself for having been jilted by Camille, taking refuge in his peculiar struggle to string together words and thereby not face the absolute isolation in which he was immersed. That he was avoiding the subject was clear as we looked for a way out of the park, for as we climbed stairs and left behind ponds and leaf-strewn dirt paths, Alioscha only wanted to talk about what he’d been reading and certain technical aspects of his book, making no mention of the despair I knew the young university student must have caused him. Nor did he confide in me when, having left the bounds of the park, we ran out of literary subjects to discuss. In fact, as we got farther away from where I’d found him, I still didn’t know whether Camille’s departure was due to a temporary and mutual agreement, or if she’d decided on her own accord that she would never again sleep in my friend’s company. Regardless of what he said or didn’t say, he did show obvious signs of having gone too long with no one to talk to: it was partly the nervous way he had of speaking, in expressions more clipped and abundant than usual, along with the worsening of his physical appearance, evidenced by his long greasy hair and obvious pallor.

            Nonetheless, despite his gruffness, Alioscha didn’t seem all bad. On the contrary, I found him in much better shape than I had imagined a week before, when my home phone in Madrid rang in the wee hours of the morning. Alarmed by the untimely sound, I grabbed the receiver and heard the voice of a sick and dying man, a voice that was slow and thick, as if he’d been drinking alone, disclosing—with no apology for waking me—that Camille had left him. “Now I don’t have to worry about monitoring her temperature or the violent coughing fits,” he mumbled ironically. “Now I can spend hours and hours writing with no other demands except remembering to breathe.” He spoke in a passionless monotone that night, muted by drowsiness, and before he hung up to drown in his own darkness, I lied and told him I already had a ticket to Paris for the following week. And I wasn’t the only one alarmed by the fateful bit of news that Alioscha had lost the young student’s companionship. When I relayed the news to him the next morning—as we were wont to do in such situations—his cousin Carlos Valls replied with a fateful prediction, a deep truth, the truest and most chilling, one neither of us wanted to accept. “It could be now or in a few years,” he sighed, making his dark prophecy, “but one of these days Alioscha’s going to jump in the Seine with an anvil around his neck.”

            It was the only plausible end for him. And yet, though Alioscha had always harbored an intense suicidal calling—over the years we could all see how he walked, unflinching, toward the brink of death—it was also true that when I set off on my rescue mission to Paris, it still seemed too soon for that fate, as my friend was so consumed by writing that he had no time think about hanging himself.

            Such was the state affairs in the early evening hours as we walked aimlessly in the vicinity of his neighborhood, Alioscha again insisting on the classical resonances in his novel, which he declared was structured according to the patterns of particular Greek myths, then referring offhandedly to his nonessential job at a nursing home in the Saint-Denis district. “Still just Saturdays and Sundays, and they’re not completely off their rocker,” he said with a complicit smile, reminding me of the afternoon I went there and found him organizing a sort of clandestine sock-hop. “I bring the manuscript with me and start revising the second I get on the bus.”

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