Rain
Live in the moment people say, which is an indisputable fact and a horrible cliche. But it's an idea especially well-reflected upon by Henri Bergson, that great philosopher of time, and by numerous writers, often influenced by or coinciding with the Bergsonian. They became aware that time can be one of our most flexible friends or enemies.
Bergson saw that time was always in the present even if it leads us to reflect upon the past and anticipate the future. "The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory." (Matter and Memory) Many memories are what we now call muscle memory, or what Bergson calls automatic memory. We don't at all think about the action and if we did we might fall off that bike, or crash that car. But this is only part of what memory does, and rather than it being a heavy, categorical present that leaves the past distinguishable from it, for Bergson and numerous writers, the past is constantly capable of transformation and reinvigoration. As Faulkner said: 'the past is never dead. It isn't even past." Or as Proust so famously proposed when thinking of the past. "It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object", and hence, for Proust, in the famous madeleine.
This flexible approach to time allowed writers to contract it and expand it at will, as we find in what are called circadian novels like Mrs Dalloway, Ulysses and the self-explanatory Seize the Day and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. And yet looking at these titles, we may note that while Saul Bellow and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novels see time as chiefly linear; Woolf and Joyce's are closer to the Bergsonian as time is very flexible indeed.
But what of Merce Rodoreda's circadian Rain, and since stories are usually so much more compact than novels, does the notion of covering a single day have much relevance to such a short form? Perhaps so if we keep in mind the Bergsonian in a story that shows us a young woman preparing for a date, and of a couple of past events that lead to what might seem to the man Marta has invited over to her apartment an inexplicable absence. He will arrive and she will have left, despite preparing carefully for his visit. The story tells us how she stands back to look at her handiwork: "she'd washed the curtains the night before and ironed them that morning....everything had been painstakingly scrubbed, dusted, made to look just like new." She thinks about what she will wear; a "lacy tulle blouse that she hadn't worn yet", perhaps, before settling for "a brown shirtdress and a thick suede belt with gold studs." Here is a woman all dressed up with nowhere to go because somebody is coming to her. But then she does go, leaving the apartment before he is due to arrive at four.
The reader may ask themselves why. What leaves her escaping the apartment after doing so much to make it look so inviting to her guest? It would seem that involuntary memory has seized her; that the determined need to make the place look nice for an assignation draws out of her recollections that make the new lover weak next to a previous affair. "Leaning back against the easy chair, she felt lonely. Lonely and empty. As though her excitement at Albert's visit had melted away and nothing could replace it." At least nothing that is living as the narrator tells us that she was in love once and also that she had "a timely operation", one that saved her life but left her deadly afraid. It is a reflection picked up on later in the story when we're told: "she had a past. Sooner or later, she'd have to tell him she'd done something crazy. Two things: loving and preventing her child's birth. He'd be four years old by now, and she wouldn't be alone."
Here Marta is in the present living in the past, and all the while conjuring up suppositions. She imagines Albert arriving at her door: ringing the bell with a bouquet in his hand. He rings again and grows impatient she thinks as the story manages to offer a past that remains snatched and vague, a present that sees her walking through the rain wondering what she should do while wandering through the streets, and a subjunctive that proposes if Albert came he would have come with flowers and left disappointed.
There are ways into the story that offer interpretation, and the two most obvious would be the autobiographical and the symbolic, with literary scholars often dismayingly dismissive of the former and overly enthusiastic about the latter. Let us entertain both and show the limitations of each. Merce Rodoreda was a Catalan writer who left Spain after the Spanish Civil War and lost a lover during it, and Rain could be seen as partly about this lost lover Andreu Nin, who was involved in the anti-Francoist POUM, and captured nevertheless by the Communist, NKVD, who wished to reject Republican elements that weren't affiliated with Moscow. He was tortured and then executed. But Rodoreda was also married with a child before the affair with Nin. Fiction may often draw on fact but it is under no obligation to resemble it.
More fruitful might be a reference to Dido, where the narrator tells us that a phrase passes through Marta's mind: "And on just such a night, Queen Dido called out from Carthage to fleeing Aeneas...and the lion's shadow frightened him..." Is the late lover Aeneas and the escaping and grieving central character Dido? Perhaps, but it is less the similarity with Dido that matters than the differences, and less the autobiographical than the context that might allow us to comprehend the story a little more clearly. It is useful to know a bit about Rodoreda's life, especially as that life involves the historical and the political, with Rodoreda a Catalan writer living in Spain who then chose exile after General Franco came to power. It is also useful to know that Nin was well-known not just as politically engaged but an intellectually significant figure who translated Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
But to then see this lover as the figure on the page is a leap too far, just as in a different way insisting that the lover is Aean and the central character Dido. If anything, the story suggests the opposite: that here is a secretary with none of the mythic overtones of the figure she invokes. Just after quoting Virgil, she find herself thinking of work the next day, and the shipping of sardines. If we can't not know what we know (whether biographical detail or mythic allusion) that doesn't mean we have schematically to apply it.
Better perhaps to think of the form, and what the story wishes to suggest in the meandering attention to the present and its elliptical approach to the past. What the story does is give us enough of a context about the central character's earlier life to justify why Marta otherwise impetuously deserts her home while waiting for a visitor, but not enough for us to comprehend in detail that past. When the narrator tells us that for Marta true love was behind her, or that "when she was twenty, a timely operation had saved her life", we may wish to know more, wondering whether this operation that saved her life has an actual or metaphoric dimension: that she couldn't have seen herself bringing up a child so young, or whether her life was endangered unless she aborted. Also, when we hear that her lover had died far away, we are left wondering how and when. This suggests a foreign land but the only war Spain was actively involved in during the 20th century was the civil war, and we might wonder what is meant here by far away, or may wonder if her lover was from another country. We cannot even be sure of the story's precise setting, but the flat she describes, the job she is employed in and the freedom she enjoys suggest surely a 20th century one, with tennis courts, coffee machines, cars and the cinema.
The purpose of the story isn't to understand the character's back story, nor to comprehend the tale through biography or symbolism, but to comprehend ambiguity. This might sound oxymoronic: that to comprehend is to understand while ambiguity suggests the inability to do so. But central to much modern fiction is creating a texture that allows for greater repercussive possibilities, and the reader's purpose is to work with this texture rather than make assertive claims over it. Rodoreda never tells us she is twenty-four, but she does tell us in one place that she was twenty when she had the operation and in another that her child would be four by now. We don't know for sure if this is a Sunday but we do know she hasn't been working, and that she will be the next day, and thus we can infer that it is. We have no idea who her friends are but we know she has two or three, and we know she is financially fine, with an inheritance and a secure job. Or at least the narrator tells us this and there is no reason for us to doubt it. But we don't know what Albert does though we might infer that he is comfortable enough, though probably not much of an intellectual: that the presence of Shakespeare on her table might lead him to think she is a snob.
Why does modern fiction seek such a relationship with ambiguity and inference; why doesn't it get on with telling us a good story? Perhaps because time became a vital problem for fiction; that it wasn't any longer a discrete past that could be conjured up but a submerged past reliant on the present to access it. If Hemingway could say of meaning that 7/8ths of the text remained subtextual, one could say of the temporal the same thing, and that a story like 'Rain' wishes to see the present floating on a past that can only partially be accessed. The story can convey to us why Marta won't remain in the apartment for Albert's arrival no matter all the effort that she puts into making it look nice. Marta speculates too on all that might go wrong in the future, with Albert potentially either too clingy or too careless. But the past remains only partially accessible, as if involuntary memory has been opened up as she tries to replicate feelings long since banished, and that the opening is more wound than balm.
If Proust is mentioned twice in the text, first as Swann's Way is left by the roses in the blue vase, and later when Marta thinks about the hawthorns in Proust's book, it may tell us a little about Marta's elevated literary tastes as the story also invokes the aforementioned Virgil and Shakespeare. But it indicates also that perhaps the story's relationship with memory and forgetting is closer to the partiality of memory evident in Proust's book, over the scenic specificity to be found in classic, earlier authors, no matter if one is a poem and the other a play and the texts are more than fifteen centuries apart. "There are books whose events are not plotted, but simply drift through the every day, or are knocked off course by incomprehensible blows from without; whose objects carry no meaning but their own inscrutable existences," Paul Kerschen says, adding, these "...include no heroes or villains, since every possible action hangs suspended in a neutral moral field. This is the mode of Flaubert, in most ways the mode of Proust and Joyce, and Rodoreda too makes it her own." (Quarterly Conversation) We wouldn't disagree.
© Tony McKibbin