The Wrong Blood

It was the month of May, or the month of June, in any case summer was near, and within only a few weeks the war would break out although nobody would know this at the time, and those who had premonitions couldn’t go so far as to believe them, because fear rejects what the intuition accepts, and they wouldn’t have been able to convince anybody anyway. And so it was the month of May, or the month of June, in wedding season. The midday sunlight exaggerated the radiance of the meadows on the banks of the Bidasoa River. The mountains retained their thick semidarkness, and the waters of the river were subsiding to their lowest level.  (p.3)

The Wrong Blood starts with a seemingly innocuous and bizarre incident – a wealthy businessman on his way to a wedding, suffers a stroke in the bathroom of a rustic wayside inn. It is just days before the Spanish Civil War breaks out, a war that wrecks havoc on the lives of two women – the bride, Isabel and the step-daughter of the innkeeper, Maria. Manuel de Lope has written a novel about the past encroaching on the present – haunting events and decisions with all their ramifications subtly impacting the characters today. The past concerns the bride, marrying an army officer, and the innkeeper’s daughter left to fend for herself when the war breaks out, a war which has a violent and profound effect on the two women – an effect that lasts for years. They are eventually brought together by the businessman at the Isabel’s villa overlooking the sea.

In the present, in that lonely villa perched on the hillside on the Spanish Coast close to the border of France; Isabel has been dead for some years and Maria is now the proud owner of the property. Isabel’s grandson comes to visit in order to study for a law exam and he meets the elderly doctor who lives next door – the past is ever present in the doctor’s mind – a past he goes over and over reflecting at what was. And as de Lope writes, “There could be no greater misfortune, no greater solitude, than memory.” (pg. 32)

De Lope is an expert at creating an atmosphere describing the villa on the fog shrouded coast, the resort town just across the border, and the specific details of critical events in the novel:

It was the middle of February. Rain fell in powerful gusts. The sky showed black, the color of stormy nights, but in this case an unmitigated, thick blackness that not even lightening flashes could tear. India ink had been spilled on the universe. Humans had been shut up in a box of rain, in a contraption invented by God to test his creatures’ patience, and their fear. It was one of those black nights that are recorded only in the Bible and the sacred books, precisely the kind of black night that only unlucky women choose for giving birth. (p. 189)

With a spiraling writing style, de Lope circles around the memories of his characters to the point where time becomes fluid. At first I found this slightly repetitive style of writing difficult to get into – it reminded me of the little amount of Proust I have read. However after a while, the flow becomes a rhythm that pulls you further into the story and as we go along, de Lope ties all these memories together into a satisfying conclusion. Not necessarily a neat and tidy conclusion but a real one reflective of the nature of the novel. All in all an excellent book

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