A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #463 - Review - The Memory of the Revolution and the Defeat of Today: Don't Cry by Lydie Salvayre. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Montse is fifteen years old on July 18, 1936, when her mother takes her 
to work for a noble family in a small village in Catalonia. After 
carefully assessing her, the master declares, "She looks truly humble." 
The next day, the Spanish Revolution breaks out, and Montse will pursue 
other paths, but she will never forget that affront, that feeling of 
being treated like an object. "[...]I, on the other hand," my mother 
tells me, "can't see anymore with rage, I take it as an insult, like a 
kick in the ass, my daughter, a kick in the ass that makes me jump ten 
meters, that turns my brain that had been asleep for over fifteen years 
inside out and helps me understand (me: helps me understand), helps me 
understand the meaning of the words my brother has been saying since he 
returned from Lérima. And so when we go out into the street, I start 
shouting. He looks truly humble, do you understand what he means? Lower 
your voice, for heaven's sake, he implores my mother, who is a docile 
woman. It means, my daughter, my eyes were bloodied, it means I'll be a 
stupid and obedient servant!"

We are in the very first pages of the novel by Lydie Salvayre, a French 
writer of Spanish origins, Don't Cry, republished in Italy in 2024 by 
Prehistorica Editore. And it immediately becomes clear how the novel is 
structured across timescales and diverse perspectives. There's Montse, a 
daughter in 1936, angry with her mother for her submissive attitude 
toward the powerful, and it's still ninety-year-old Montse who, in the 
present, recounts her wonderful summer in Barcelona at the outbreak of 
the revolution and the vicissitudes that followed, her abandonment of 
Spain with the triumph of Franco and her arrival in France, to her 
daughter, the writer herself. We are therefore faced with a hybrid 
novel, part memoir, part historical novel, and part essay. To convey the 
interweaving that ties Montse's story, past and present, the struggles 
of the writer Georges Bernanos, known for his closeness to the 
nationalists and the Falangists, and the writer's own observations and 
reworkings, Lydie Salvayre employs various narrative devices. First and 
foremost, the linguistic aspect, which, to give strength and 
authenticity to Montse's character, adopts with great care and restraint 
a mixed language, a mixture of Spanish and French, which the writer 
herself calls franiol. In this case, we are not faced with a simple 
mimetic or coloristic intent, but rather the need to fully convey a 
vital and determined character who, from the height of her ninety years, 
recalls her adolescence with a certain detachment and casts a scathing 
judgment on a present that is certainly not exciting. Then there is the 
constant dialogue between mother and daughter, which is never explicitly 
expressed in the narrative except in passing references. For example, 
the parenthesis in the quoted passage, a device that will recur 
frequently throughout the story. At times, these two voices seem to 
merge, overlap-that of the mother remembering, that of the daughter 
specifying, specifying-but they always remain clearly distinguishable, 
and the daughter's clarifications don't serve as a counterpoint to a 
faulty and vague memory; rather, they testify to complicity, affection, 
and sometimes playfulness.

Let's return now to Bernanos, who enters the novel as another character, 
or rather, as Salvayre writes: "In the story I am about to tell, I don't 
want to introduce, for now, any fictional characters." The author has 
stated that the inspiration for this novel came from reading Les Grandes 
Cemeteries sur la Lune, the pamphlet written by Bernanos in 1937 to 
distance himself from the atrocities committed by the Falangists under 
the concrete and ideological cover of the Catholic Church. He had been a 
militant in Action Française, proclaimed himself a monarchist, Catholic, 
and nationalist, and had welcomed his son's enlistment in the Falange 
(from which he later distanced himself). Between Montse's adventures and 
the plight of Bernanos, who in Palma de Mallorca helplessly witnesses 
the atrocities of the Falangists, the novel establishes a sort of 
long-distance dialogue, without following a precise pattern. Another key 
character in the novel is José, Montse's slightly older brother, whose 
brief arc is retraced, from his encounter with and enthusiasm for 
anarchist principles, to his doubts and torment over what is happening, 
up to the epilogue, in which he reaffirms his desire for freedom without 
second thoughts. All this is narrated with a sense of involvement that 
doesn't lapse into celebratory eulogy.

Therefore, anyone seeking in this book some sort of heroic 
representation of the Spanish Revolution, even in the sense of a 
superficial celebration of the sacrifice of thousands of young people, 
will be disappointed. Instead, there is the drama of the many young and 
not-so-young Spaniards and foreigners who see their aspirations for 
freedom and a better world shattered by the brutal violence of the 
established order and its armed wing. There is also the bitter 
realization that countering this violence with more violence is likely 
to lead to a dead end. Two mirrored episodes in revolutionary Barcelona 
illustrate this. One told from Montse's point of view and the other from 
José's: a group of men destroying money withdrawn from a bank and two 
militiamen boasting of having brutally murdered two priests. One joyful 
and liberating, the other repugnant and filled with a sense of futility. 
Don't Cry tells the story of a Spanish revolution full of 
contradictions, conflicts, contrasts, exaltations and disappointments, 
fantasies and cruelties, but always with the clarity to denounce who the 
criminals are - Franco and his acolytes - and those who dream and fight 
for a more just and more humane society.

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