The morning, the same morning over and over again, plays its little games, of course, changes the face of the city: that tomb, that greasy pole, that hive...
Lord, have mercy!
Camilo Jose Cela's novel The Hive begins with Doña Rosa, the proprietress of a cafe in Madrid after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Doña Rosa is a tyrant, abusing her workers and her patrons alike, but her brutishness seems to have no effect on the success of her cafe, which is constantly filled with the lonely, the miserable, and the poor, using what change they've been able to scrounge to buy a coffee (but not, to Doña Rosa's dismay and anger, any of the available pastries). From there, the story moves outward, into the lives of the patrons, and branching off of them in patterns that resemble a network of nerves as much as it does the insect hive of the title. The Hive has, it is said, over three hundred characters, some of whom have the same or similar names, and some of whom have no names at all; it's impossible to tell, at first glance, who will be really important to the novel, and who is shuffled onto the stage to provide a single and singular image--like the young suicide who throws himself out the window because the room smells too strongly of onions--and who will end up as a recurring character.
I'd be lying if I said I followed the novel all too well. It's the first book I read on my new Kindle, which I got for traveling, and which I feel like puts up a kind of mental-physical barrier--I could not easily, for instance, riffle through the page to find a character's first appearance. But it did allow me the ease of reading the novel in Madrid, who you might say--imagine!--is the real protagonist of The Hive, a city of the poor and beleaguered having just emerged from Civil War, and not into liberation, but an oppression that will last decades. (No surprise that Doña Rosa, unlike many of her Bohemian clients, is an ardent Francoist.) More appropriately, it might be said that the protagonist is one Martin Marco, a penniless leftist poet who is unable to pay his tab at the cafe, who lives on the equivalent of a friend's couch, and who spends his days wandering the city doing nothing but feeling deeply.
Perhaps in the wake of Franco's victory there were many who felt like Marco, whose passion and sensitivity had no outlet for action, while the brutality and the tyranny of someone like Doña Rosa turned out to be the order of the day. (It's a stretch, but there's something in the the parallel between the proprietress' Francoism and her cruelty that reminds of the way certain people are reveling in the permission now granted them by political circumstance to treat others cruelly.) But Marco is only one character, and the position of the novel seems to be that life goes on no matter what the circumstances, that different days, different political orders, have little effect on the sum totality of human activity, which adds up to something rather tedious and sordid. There's Elvira, the sad, aging prostitute; there's the young girl who goes into prostitution to earn money for her boyfriend's tuberculosis medicine; there's blackmail and cross-blackmail; there's the murder of a local woman with a terrycloth towel that turns out to be--though who has any way of knowing this?--instrumental to the conclusion of the novel's plot, such as it is. I've not mentioned several hundred characters, and those that I have I probably haven't got quite right; but I'm not sure that The Hive is a novel to be diagrammed. It's something you're supposed to hold up to your ear, and listen to the buzz.
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