The subject of the assertion contained in the title of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019) is, in the first instance, a young man by the name of Hilari who composes poems–though he does not write them down. He comes up with poems mainly for people and animals, and one of them (shades of Walt Whitman) is a song for himself, a “Poem for Me, Hilari”:
I sing to the moon when it blossoms full,
Round fang in the kindly night,
[. . .]
I sing like someone plowing a garden,
Like someone carving a table,
Like someone raising a house,
Like someone climbing a hill,
Like someone eating a walnut,
Like someone lighting a fire.
Like God creating animals and plants.
When I sing, mountains dance. (69)
But throughout this book–a book that is itself surely Whitmanesque in that it, too, “contain[s] multitudes”–we see plenty of others also carving tables, raising houses, climbing hills, and the like. Many sing, and many mountains dance.
The mountains here are the Pyrenees and we are in Catalonia (Solà’s novel is translated from the Catalan), a rural retreat for city-dwellers seeking picturesque “authentic[ity]” (62) or a respite from all the “noise” and the “cars and all the buildings and the pointy corners and the straight lines” of Barcelona (129). Here, one might imagine, is natural peace and age-old tradition, where little changes and perhaps nothing happens.
But we are also on the border between Spain and France, a pathway traipsed by refugees and soldiers fleeing the Nationalist advance of Franco’s forces during the Civil War. This is a countryside strewn with the detritus of war, such that many decades later young children can still come across bullet casings and unexploded grenades half-buried in the earth.
Moreover, this is a landscape of unquiet forces that traverse the boundary between natural and human history, between life and death, between reality and myth. There are the four women, for instance, hanged as witches in some previous century and perhaps not without reason, in that they laugh at authority and “piss upon” the crosses that are “sullying the mountainside” (19). These women are among the many ghosts or revenants that never quite go away (or always come back) as they permeate the stories and songs related and recited by this novel’s many characters.
Almost every chapter, in fact, introduces a new narrator, some of whom are human, usually residents of this precarious existence on the hostile mountainside, and others of whom are more than human. Again, however, these boundaries blur. A bear narrates its violent history with humans and its undying desire for revenge–“Wake up, ye men who hunted us. [. . .] We were here first. Long before men and women” (147). But in the very next chapter, a woman plays the part of a bear in some folk ritual of “the Bear Festival in Prats del Molló” (152), albeit adjusted to the times in answer to the question “When are we going to have a woman bear?” (151). And a little later we hear from Jaume, a man who has escaped the region (but will soon, of course, go back) and who goes by the nickname “the Pyrenees bear” (170).
This is a novel that humanizes great natural forces (even the mountains themselves, or the vast geological pressures that give rise to them, are given a voice, speaking almost sub specie aeternitatis: “Because nothing lasts long. And no one remembers the names of your children” [107]). But it also gives vent to the inhuman fears and desires that both shatter and consolidate the bonds between men and women.
If this novel has a center (and arguably it does not; arguably it is as polycentric as it is polyphonic), it is the story, told in fits and starts, of the family living in the farm or smallholding that goes by the name of Matavaques (“cattle slayer,” as we’re helpfully told [131]. The books opens as a young father, Domenèc, is killed by being struck by lightning, with the weird sisters of course in shadowy attendance. We later pick up on the story of his widow, Sió, his daughter, Mia, and his son, Hilari, he of the oral poems and songs.
Hilari, however, is struck down young, like his father before him, but in his case not by random lightning but in a hunting accident, out with friends. His killer (Jaume, known as the “giants’ son”) is the man who goes by the name of Bear who we meet much later, in self-imposed exile from the mountains after he has spent some time in jail for his crime . . . presumably manslaughter, which goes to show that it is not just cattle that are slayed around here.
It is not clear whether Jaume’s story is one of the “bad stories” that, we are told, are the stories men tell, as opposed to the tales told by the witches and other women, “stories we love because they’re never in the voice or through the eyes of those men who write the bad stories” (112). As a whole, Solà’s novel is a remarkable patchwork of ventriloquy that allows a whole range of entities to speak–and often we hear the same events retold from very diverse viewpoints.
We do not necessarily have to resolve the differences between these different perspectives, or to know how things will ultimately work out, because we know that this is merely a partial snippet from a much longer history of mountains and the people who live on or near them. Indeed the book ends on something of a cliffhanger: one revenant has returned to Mia’s (Hilari’s sister’s) life, and we do not know what will happen to her relationship with another man who has helped briefly to obscure her loss in the meantime.
There are still stories to be told. “He’ll say some things,” Mia tells us. “The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. [. . .] Then I’ll say some things. The ones that I can” (197, 198). And at the end of it all, perhaps “when we’re done, we’ll see who we are” (197). This is a song of their selves, a point-counterpoint of stories of creation and recalibration that is as unending as the tectonic forces that make and unmake the very ground beneath their feet.
