This is Ada noticing on her tongue the translucence of the word escriure and the word novel·la, to write and novel, respectively. The coffee tinting them, melting them, like ice cubes. Ada who is ex-plaining that now that she’s returned from England, and while she looks for work, she wants to write. Escriure. A novel. Una novel·la. Lluís who says: “Great” and “You’ve always been a marvelous writer, sweetheart.” They are in a restaurant. Lluís asks: “What do you want to write about?” And Ada responds: “The divorce.” And this is Lluís who says:
1. What?
2. I don’t understand.
3. Between your mother and me?
4. Why?
“The idea is to write a novel with real characters. I’ll leave your names as is too. And I’ll ask permission from everyone who appears in it. I’ll change the names of anyone who wants me to. It won’t only be about the divorce, it will be about everything. And it will be partly fictionalized and turned into a novel because it’s a story, but the gist is to make a novel out of us.”
Lluís opens his eyes without looking anywhere. Ada adds: “I want to write about things I know.” And this is Lluís looking at the window, the sidewalk, the pregnant lady on the other side of the street. And this is Ada who says: “So do I have your permission?” And Lluís who responds without directing his gaze at her: “Yes, of course, you always have my permission.”
And this is Ada who drives home and thinks that it is a gigantic error to talk to anyone about something you want to write before you’ve written it. She thinks about Holden Caulfield at the end of Catcher in the Rye. How did he put it? “Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” But it’s not the same.
And this is the unfinished opening of the novel. That went like this:
Victòria put her fingers in front of her mouth, like thick bars through which she repeated: “It’s hard, it’s really hard.” She in-haled and drew her hand heavily along her chin, jaw, and neck. Like a snowplow. She said: “We’re getting divorced. There’s another woman.” She swirled her wine glass and took a sip. She had found some small pleasure in saying it. Relief, in the prag-matism of the words. The concepts had been laid over the pain like a sheet. She thought how she’d used the words woman and another a thousand other times, and that she would use them a thousand times more. And they would speak of other things. Gentle and simple things. Completely unrelated to Lluís or that woman. Hundreds of people were using those same words right now: another, woman, mothers who started stories by say-ing: “Once upon a time there was a woman” and kids who said, pointing to the window: “There’s another spider.”
They didn’t say anything. Quim put a hot hand on hers, Ada stood before her, Nàdia asked: “How long have you known?” The reply came out of her mouth, painless, like a fish. It had started about a year and a half ago. Her name was Teresa. She was also a professor. She didn’t know her person-ally, but she’d seen her once. She said that it took her months to realize, and that when she did, in March, they talked about it. After thirty-two years of marriage, they could talk about things before throwing it all away. The years make you see things in perspective, less viscerally. Lluís said that he would stop. Victòria said that if he stopped, she’d forgive him. He stopped. Or he said he’d stopped. He stopped. He must’ve stopped. But he went back to her and now they were getting a divorce.
And this is Ada saying out loud: “Fucking hell.”
__________________________________
Excerpt from Dams. Copyright © 2017 by Irene Solà. English translation copyright © 2026 by Mara Faye Lethem. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org
