Narrative Strategies in Aramburu’s Stories: Trauma and Memory

The variety of narrative strategies parallels the variety of stories and characters brought into play. In the story’s title to the volume, the narrator goes to pick up her daughter from the hospital, where she has spent half a year, accompanied by her boyfriend. Various pieces of information take us back to an event just mentioned—a terrorist attack which caused the invalidity of the girl, transforming family life. The narrative builds up trivial facts—the care of the tank, cleaning the dishes—that invade the text, one would say deliberately, leaving little space to the story’s central event, which is not discussed openly and is reduced to a brief mention without comment. Only the end of each paragraph includes, syntactically isolated, the same word – “Triste” – which, like a poetic refrain, summarizes both the narrator’s comment, her mood, and a sore resignation that does not even allow breath to scream and protest. “Mother” takes the appearance of an oral history since the first words (“this was a woman of thirty-five who was named Maria Antonia”), and immediately, as befits the narrative model chosen, there arises the knot of history: “He lived in a coastal town in the province of Guipuzcoa and her husband worked as a policeman in the town until one night, entering the fall, killed him.” Pressure from neighbors to the widow and children to leave the town is not so much due to personal enmity as the fear that its proximity makes the area an unsafe place, as in the story “The quilt burned,” where inhabitants of the house where a neighbor has been attacked with Molotov cocktails decided to invite him to “go looking for another home. Is installed in the next village or in Bilbao until the thing is settled. You must understand that we create very difficult situations” (p. 100).

In “Maritxu,” a third-person narrative of a mother’s visits to the prison where her son is in jail, monologues alternate with fragments of women, who do not quite agree with the actions of his son: “To kill guards and kids, go. But kids, do not” (p. 63). In “The best were the birds,” an adult woman decides to tell his son how, as a child, she went to get her out of school because his father had just been assassinated. Despite the time elapsed, the intensity of evocation is of such magnitude that reveals how this incident has conditioned all subsequent life of the narrator. The story evoked concludes with the installation of the chapel in the barracks while the people “as they celebrated the festivities there was music and attractions. The streets were lively” (p. 87). The story “Enemy of the People” tells how an unfounded rumor accusing sneak Zubillaga arouses disgust of their fellow, though he, wrapped in an ikurriña, is displayed for hours in the town square to demonstrate their unequivocal ideology. The jail and accusation between militants are also major reasons for “Knock on door”, where perhaps most chilling is attending the fun of some children who play with firecrackers ekintza small home fire toy cars which were introduced photographs Victims of attacks in the press. Aramburu incorporated here, perhaps without knowing it, the wonderful intuition of Goytisolo Mourning in Paradise (1955), with those children, held on a farm in the middle of civil war, war games were given to imitation of their elders.

The story in dialogue “After the Fire” offers an almost grotesque picture of women concerned about the possible visit of lehendakari, with its procession of reporters and photographers, the state hospital that her husband, victim of an attack. A careful reading of Fish of the bitterness I find indispensable.