2 Real Deals with the Devil: A Disappointing Quarter Century of Spanish Democracy and Belén Gopegui’s Lo real

At the turn of the new millennium Spain was one of the wealthiest nations on the planet with a GDP of nearly $600 billion. The year prior it had become one of the eleven founding members of the Eurozone. Growth rates held steady at around 5%. Politically, despite continued separatist rumblings along its edges, Spain had become a stable democracy, enjoying regular, peaceful transitions of power and providing its citizens the typical rights and freedoms expected of a mature, sovereign, and modern state.

It had, of course, not always been that way. Only twenty-five years earlier, Spain languished under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco, a military dictator shackled forever to World War II-era fascism. While tremendous economic growth had marked the last decade-plus of the Franco years, the last of those years and the first years after the dictator’s death were politically heady times. The late 1960s had seen the rise of left-wing and nationalist terrorist groups, met in turn by renewed activity of right-wing paramilitary orders. In 1973, the most prominent of the nationalist groups, the Basque separatists ETA, assassinated Franco’s handpicked successor in spectacular fashion. As the dictator’s death approached, tensions were high.

For political observers, the first years following Franco’s death did not disappoint. In rapid succession Spain had, first, a new king and a new prime minister, then an even newer prime minister who rapidly dismantled the Francoist legal and governmental apparatus. Within months Democratic elections ratified the new leadership. then approved a new constitution, and later reaffirmed the same leadership within the new constitutional parameters. Not only were previously illegal parties—communists and socialists—allowed to participate in these elections, but the former group shocked observers by not only behaving themselves but garnering more votes than the official party of the late dictator.

Then just as suddenly, a little over five years after Franco’s death these heady political times ended. A failed military coup sealed the fate of the centrist leadership that had guided Spain through the democratic Transition. A fourth national plebiscite in the six years since Franco’s death followed soon thereafter. With this election, the Spanish political scene appeared to have been turned on its head. The new ruling party, with an absolute majority in parliament, were none other than the once-outlawed socialists. While the socialist triumph wasn’t Franco’s worst nightmare—that would be reserved for communist revolution or regionalist separatism—it had certainly been on few people’s radars six years earlier. Expectations were high for those seeking a real break from Spain’s past. A new, young, and idealistic generation had come to power. And if they didn’t bring ideological revolution, they at least promised, and symbolized, a powerful new political day.

Here, however, the political story ends. Within a year of their election, it was clear these new socialists were more interested in courting economic favor with the West than in bringing the social, economic, and political justice many of their supporters expected. The new, ostensibly socialist political power brokers quickly buttoned up their shirts and coats, learned to knot a necktie, and set about reversing course on a major campaign promise to pull Spain from NATO. Rather than establishing a social-welfare state, they opened Spanish markets, including breaking up the government’s mass-media monopoly, and poured energies into cultural spectacle, famously bringing Olympic games, international Expos, and world-class art museums to the Spanish state within a decade of their election. For fourteen years they embraced the neoliberal principles of free trade, the privatization of state industries, and the weakening of the social safety net. On top of all this, the once idealistic socialists showed a propensity for corruption equal to if not greater than any Spain had seen during the Franco years.

At last, in 1996, the socialists, disgraced by a host of scandals, fell from power. They were replaced by the conservative Partido Popular, a party founded by and providing a home to the vast majority of Spain’s former Francoists. The conservatives were able to win, however, thanks only to their own significant ideological softening. Whatever connection they once had to the dictator, their conservatism was, like the socialists’ liberalism, more economic than political, more pragmatic than ideological. Twenty-five years after Franco’s rule, a rule based on grand ideological truths—Spain as united, great, and free—and opposed by other equally grand ideological truths—the belief in an equal and just society for all—had been replaced on both right and left by a pragmatic and dogged pursuit of economic well-being. The quest for truth had collapsed in the face of the realities of finance and capital, of fancy homes and fast cars. A nation that three generations prior had slaughtered each other over political slogans was no longer interested in truth. They cared little for platitudes. The new focus was instead on cold, hard realities, specifically the reality of cash, the only thing, as the century and millennium turned, that any longer seemed real.

***

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, within just a few short years of the return to power of Spain’s conservatives, authors appeared to intuit that the Transition had at last come to a final, and for many rather depressing, conclusion. They immediately set about telling its tale. In his novel Romanticismo, Manuel Longares documents the first year following Franco’s death as lived by the wealthy classes of Madrid’s Salamanca neighborhood, a group that had so benefited from his rule. In La larga marcha, Los viejos amigos, and La caida de Madrid, Rafael Chirbes brought his readers to and then through the Transition as seen through the eyes of a panoply of friends and accidental acquaintances from all walks of Spanish life. Eduardo Mendoza in Mauricio o las elecciones primarias tells a tale of the middle class negotiating the novelty of democratic elections. Ignacio Martínez de Pisón won Spain’s prestigious Critics Prize for El día de mañana (2011), the narration of the failure of one to thrive through the shifts from a police state to a democratic one. But no work so powerfully captured the experience of the long Spanish Transition as Belén Gopeguí’s 2001 novel, Lo real [The Real]). Lo real traces the journey of one Edmundo Gómez Rico from his youth in the latter Franco years to a professional adult life that evolves alongside Spanish democracy and its corresponding institutions nearly to the present day of its narration.

The novel begins in 1969, the year that a major crack appeared in what until then had been viewed as the flawless façade of Spain’s economic miracle. At the time, Spain was enjoying more than a decade of unprecedented economic growth. Following years of hunger in the 1940s, Spain in the 1950s had found a certain degree of social and political stability and then, riding a wave of global economic growth, had seen personal incomes increase to such an extent over the course of the 1960s that by 1975, personal incomes had increased nearly tenfold. For the first time ever conspicuous consumption entered the national collective consciousness, as Spaniards first imagined, then saved, and finally bought electric refrigerators, then televisions, and last but not least, new cars (Schubert 258).

The crack that exposed the dark side of this miracle—and perhaps the hollowness of it all—was the MATESA affair. MATESA, a manufacturing darling of the Franco government (“the toast of the technocrats,” per historian Paul Preston [744]), was exposed as a manufacturing mirage, a mostly ghost company with fake sales of nonexistent machines to imaginary international clients contrived with the connivance of government officials to procure real government subsidies. Gopeguí’s novel begins when the teenage Edmundo experiences the collapse of his privileged adolescent world after his father becomes a MATESA scapegoat and national pariah. While the real MATESA brainpower goes free, Edmundo’s father—powerful enough to satisfy the public’s thirst for justice but lacking the connections to evade that justice—goes to prison. From here on Edmundo will discover the precarious nature of life—and social death—among Spain’s rich and powerful.

While historians of the late Franco years are likely to point to Stabilization plans, student demonstrations, the rise of ETA, or the assassination of Carrero Blanco as key moments in Spain’s Transition, in her use of MATESA Gopegui hones in on an economic scandal to launch her tale. She appears to side with those who see the economic boom of the 1960s as creating the material conditions on which Spain’s depoliticized, consumerist culture of the 1970s and 1980s was founded (see Echevarría 27). Gopegui has suffered criticism, sometimes severe, over the course of her career for an approach to writing that is sometimes overly political and thesis driven by materialist if not explicitly Marxist readings of history.⁶ In Lo real, however, Gopegui strikes a middle ground. She hones in on an economic scandal as the source point for the postmodern Capitalist Spain to come. But she reads it through narrative filters that capture at once its gray materiality even while noting the enchanting, almost mythic if not magical effects that have so seduced and, at times, bamboozled the best minds of modern times, causing politicians, pundits, even experts to declare that there “is no alternative” even as inequality expands from endless cycles of market booms and busts. Gopegui’s choice of MATESA then is doubly appropriate. It is an economic scandal, to be sure. But it is one that historians still do not fully understand, a scandal around material goods shrouded to this day in mystery (Payne 544).

Edmundo is our guide to this world. Merely an observant and typically proud teen at the beginning of the novel, he will grow into a hyperobservant and professionally guarded adult by novel’s end. The gray fascination of his character comes out in a simple, understated observation that the teenage Edmundo makes as he loses his material and social status among the Madrileño Francoist elite following the MATESA revelation: “el salón de su casa era el resultado de multiplicar y dividir metros de garaje y número de telares abandonados” [his home’s living room was the sum of multiplying and dividing meters of garage and abandoned looms] (49). It’s the coldest of observations: dreams are merely the stuff of spreadsheets. All that we think we are can be reduced to sales—or the lack thereof—of stuff. But underlying that cutting materialist observation is an awareness that, in today’s economy, such stuff doesn’t necessarily need to exist.

Edmundo’s tale—how he moves forward, carefully navigating what he alone appears to understand to be the treacherous (if deceptively gentle) waters of modern democratic capitalism—is given shape by the phlegmatic voice of future colleague and later employee, Irene Arce. Arce, whose first meeting with Edmundo comes when she finds him stealing petty cash from a coworker’s desk, has over the course of their acquaintance gradually understood and embraced his Mephistophelean approach to life. Like Edmundo, she learns to view her life as the sum of cold, material conditions, and like him she begins to engage in a series of petty thefts, not for want of money but in order to step outside the box of received morality. With the small accumulation of stolen cash she purchases a photocopier—an unusual and rather absurd purchase given her reality—and installs it in her home. There she must witness on a daily basis her family’s regular—and for them, innocent—use of her ill-gotten gains. The point is simple: law—political or moral—is a construct. There is no magical, mysterious force underlying the things we do. “Nada es un pájaro,” she regularly reminds her reader, translated literally as “Nothing is a bird” but suggesting that nothing “just happens.”

Hoping to understand the man who first taught her this principle and who she believes puts the lie to “those stories where evil appears as a spontaneous force,” Arce sets out to tell the tale of Edmundo Gómez Risco, “un ateo del bien” (13), literally an “atheist” of the good, but suggesting intense skepticism with respect to the virtuous. While Edmundo, she declares, “no actuaba en aras del bien propio, ni por el bien de otros, ni por el bien futuro de la humanidad” [he didn’t act on behalf of his own well being, nor for the good of others, nor for the future of humankind] (13), by the same token his isn’t simply a case of psychopathy: “No se comportaba tampoco como un enfermo de los que van a parar a los tribunales, uno de esos seres sin motivos; no se podía decir que cometiera a menudo actos ilógicos” [Nor did he behave like one who has been wounded, the kind who plead their case before officials, one of those people without excuse; you couldn’t say he ever did anything illogical] (13). It’s a story, according to Arce, so out of the norm—but perhaps so actually in the norm—that it should matter to all: “creo que nos concierne” [I think it concerns us] (13).

Arce goes on to narrate, step by step, Edmundo’s journey toward this curious brand of atheism. Edmundo’s discovery of diminished social status and dissolving relationships at the breaking of the MATESA scandal shapes him into a guarded, careful seeker of power through security. That security, he concludes, will come via knowledge—specifically the very concrete knowledge of how many square meters of machine sustains the living rooms of his associates. At university he studies investigative journalism. More than learning the profession, Edmundo devotes himself to fact gathering, sitting in local bookstores for hours on end creating a personal card catalogue of readily retrievable information on every useful bit of knowledge he can find. His small bit of dabbling in the typical romantic pursuits of college life—poetry or muckraking journalism—serves more to demystify these activities than to awaken aesthetic or political passions. Poetry is built on tricks, he concludes after considering Luis Cernuda (53–59). Then, as an amateur journalist, he uncovers a housing scandal but, in attempting to lobby for justice, learns to his embarrassment that the victims he is fighting for are themselves guilty of their own kind of fraud.

Steeled again against the seductions of the working world, a recently graduated Edmundo turns down opportunities to work for government ministries and political parties in order to labor instead in a medical lab. He does so not because it is where real political action lies but because, he figures, it will simply be a better place to continue his education, a safe place to understand better how people work. Despite early success, Edmundo quits when he learns of the forthcoming sacking of a well-liked supervisor who shares with him the truth that the world doesn’t need you, just someone like you. Edmundo concludes he needs still more information, more knowledge, more grounding, and so he retreats to a fishing village on the north coast of Spain to prepare for government exams. While never actually taking the exams, Edmundo uses this time to gather yet more information, master English, and, most importantly, invent a fictional persona with experiences and degrees beyond his material, but not intellectual, grasp. At last, he uses a side job of typing up academic papers to reveal himself through editorial comments to people with connections and power.

Such coldly calculated, surreptitious behavior plots Edmundo’s course over the remainder of the novel, as our unusual protagonist pursues not what one would consider power, riches, or fame, but simply security, the security that arises from knowing just how many square meters of what material (or semblance of material) sustains the lifestyles of those around him. His journey from this point forward reads as a microcosm of the first twenty-five years of Spanish democracy. Edmundo participates in the early days of PSOE power, including playing a major role in the campaign for NATO membership. From there he parlays political connections into a position at the epicenter of national information at Spain’s national media monopoly, RTVE. When the monopoly is broken up, Edmundo becomes an early player in private television, producing and hosting programs of political and policy analysis at Antena 3, from which he manipulates the thoughts and feelings of the nation’s postmodern populace, but more importantly observes the political and business processes underlying that manipulation. In the midst of all this, Edmundo maintains his own secret information-gathering enterprise, a business limited to our narrator and copy-machine maven, Irene Arce, and later the supervisor once deemed superfluous at Edmundo’s first job. Theirs is a business of three cynics determined to keep their eyes on the prize: security by way of information.

Arce’s narration of Edmundo’s career path is itself exemplary of literature’s particular power over information. Because Arce is a colleague and would like to imagine—though she never appears quite certain—that she is a friend, and because her contact with Edmundo proved the catalyst to her own conversion to moral atheism, her narration ignores the minor details of the workplaces Edmundo passes through. Unlike a history manual, Lo real, doesn’t describe to us the inner workings of the PSOE nor provide background for the privatization of Spanish television. These are things Arce already understands or that simply don’t concern her. Her focus is Edmundo, particularly his experience with, and his navigation of, Spain’s political and economic epicenters.

If we don’t get Spanish history written on a grand scale here, what we get instead through this microfocus on Edmundo’s materialism is, ironically, a scale that much grander. Skipping over history, our narrator’s attempts to make any kind of sense of someone as unusual in their approach to the world as Edmundo takes us beyond history and into the realm of legend, myth, and even religion. This, as we will see below, is the great irony of the novel and one at which some readers throw up their hands in exasperation. How can a novel so focused on an extremely materialist reading of the world suddenly veer off into the space of the mystical? To be sure, some of that space is introduced ironically. Edmundo, for example, begins referring to himself in certain aspects of his professional work as that character of legend, Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles, readers of Marlowe, Goethe, and others know, is the devil’s servant who goes about collecting the souls of the damned. In the case of Faust, he collects that of one who has sold his soul for power. Like Edmundo with his information business, Mephistopheles’s job is not temptation but the sealing of the fate of those who have already embraced temptation. Like Mephistopheles, Edmundo is a reluctant servant, trapped, as it were, by possibly the same fate he seals upon others. Edmundo gathers information not because he wants to entrap others but because he knows from personal experience that those traps already abound in the corridors of business, politics, and media. As Edmundo observes the Transition from one political state to another, he understands that the mechanisms of power itself do not change. Hence he shuns idealism, instead forging ahead to gather information and then offering his services as one who is already trapped to others similarly caught up in a world of deceit and deception. Perhaps this is why we ultimately sympathize with a protagonist whose narrated behavior should be so off-putting. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence within the story showing Edmundo as sympathetic; he appears to be a well-behaved son, a thoughtful sibling, a loyal friend, a faithful boyfriend, and later a loving husband. But our narrator gives us little emotional insight into these relationships, presumably because her information source proves reluctant to share any of that with her. What we see instead is what is described early in the novel as “un vengado” [a vindicated] and “un incrédulo” [a skeptic] (19). But he is also “un hombre no libre” [a trapped man] (19). In other words, a Mephistopheles.

Edmundo’s devilish character with its contrast to the strict materialism that inspires it, ends up foregrounding what would otherwise be a relatively minor contrast within the course of the novel: Edmundo’s mother’s religious faith. Over the course of his adult life Edmundo returns occasionally to his mother’s home, where we meet a woman who has taken the very opposite approach to that of her son in response to her husband’s MATESA involvement. If Edmundo has become a strict materialist and, in Mephistophelian mode, sold his soul to that strictly secular worldview, his mother has become a kind of saint. After leaving her husband she has turned to religion, becoming an active participant in her local parish, first engaging in local social work, then taking annual pilgrimages to Fátima as a true believer. She eventually weds herself figuratively to the church, not as a nun but as the wife of the, now former, local priest. While a rather unexpected twist to her faith journey, her marriage foregrounds the contrast with her son’s utter rejection of all that might mystify. Gopegui isn’t concerned to make Edmundo’s mother traditionally religious. In her seduction of the local priest right out of his official religious calling, Edmundo’s mother demonstrates a pragmatism similar to her son’s. She too has peered, as it were, under the tents to discover the utter absence of MATESA machines. Her experience and her approach are not much different from her son’s. And yet he is secular while she is religious.

Perhaps the resolution of this tension comes in a most unusual presence in this otherwise materialist novel, that of the Greek Chorus. Officially called a “Coro de Asalariadas y Asalariados Medios” [Choir of Mid-Level Female and Male Employees], the words they speak reinforce Edmundo’s materialist reading of the world. In their opening salvo they sing:

Nosotros no disfrutamos. Nosotras no disfrutamos. Hacemos y seguimos. Somos periodistas y cada gesto nuestro calla y dice, sin embargo, que nunca tendremos un periódico de nuestra propiedad, una emisora nuestra, un semanario que atienda y obedezca nuestras intenciones. Somos técnicos y técnicas de empresas de producción de energía y cada gesto nuestro calla y dice, sin embargo, que nunca poseeremos una finca como residencia aparte…Somos enseñantes…subdirectores y subdirectoras de sucursal, directoras y directores de área, coordinadores y coordinadoras, somos gerentes, colaboradores, colaboradoras, empleados y empleadas de clínicas, de estudios de arquitectura, jefes y jefas de planta, empleadas y empleados de empresas de informática…que nunca tendremos libertad para tomar lo que nos pertenece…Los lunes, martes y miércoles, jueves y viernes venimos a rellenar nuestro cupón de nada y no esperamos. (19)

[We men don’t enjoy. We women don’t enjoy. We act and we keep on. We are journalists and every act of ours silences and yet says that we never have our own paper, our own stations, our weekly news roundup that respects and obeys our desires. We are male and female technicians of energy companies and every act of our silences and says, nevertheless, that we will never own a second home… we are students… male and female assistant directors of branch offices, female and male regional directors, male and female coordinators, we are managers, male and female collaborators, male and female employees of clinics, architecture studios, male and female plant managers, female and male employees of data businesses… and we’ll never have the freedom to take what belongs to us… Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays we come to punch our card of nothingness and to await nothing.]

The words, again, are materialist. But do words ever stand alone? Can a message exist outside of its form? In theory these are Edmundo’s fellow disenchanted, representatives, we might say, of the hundreds of millions of workers sustaining in their daily grind the very system from which they can never escape. Despite such proclaimed drudgery, however, there is no denying that their declamation comes in the form of a song or perhaps chant and that they are ultimately nothing more nor less than the equivalent of a modern-day Greek Chorus. If Edmundo’s associations with Mephistopheles or the contrast between this and his mother’s faith foreground tensions between the material and the metaphysical, the inclusion of the chorus stops us readers in our tracks. And with every reappearance of the chorus over the course of Gopegui’s novel, the simple flow of a story about a straightforward disenchantment comes under strain.

This strain can’t be so simply dismissed but, in fact, demands the reader’s consideration. This is because, even before we contemplate what the chorus is and what it represents in the novel, we must deal with its location within the novel, a location clearly beyond the space of Arce’s narration. While the rest of the novel is unequivocally the product of Arce’s storytelling, the chorus exists at a narrative level beyond her voice. The introduction of this second level takes reader consciousness to the level of additional authority, that of gods and authors. When we read the chorus we exist imaginatively at a level beyond Arce and Edmundo’s story. It is a level closer to our own existence beyond the fictional world of the text. The chorus signals an authorial presence, a higher power shaping our story without ever fully revealing itself. While on the one hand, this thinning of the fourth wall performs its own disenchantment on our reading—carrying out what Francisca López in her analysis of Gopegui’s novel has pointed to as a Brechtian V-effect (54)—in so doing it also problematizes once and for all the simplistic disenchantment tale being told from within. It highlights Arce and Edmundo as characters and their tale as one being told—or being facilitated (if we wish to insist on Arce as the true teller of the tale that principally concerns us)—by a higher authority. In this more complex structural context, Edmundo, the cynic and great disenchanter, is, under the watchful eye of his chorus, not merely a metaphorical Mephistopheles but a narratologically established Greek hero. The effect of the distancing chorus is to remind us that this is more than a story of simple disillusionment or, as López also argues, simple postmodern cynicism (64). Perhaps it is a bit much to read Edmundo’s journey as a struggle against the lot cast by the sins of his father in a universe governed by the caprice of the gods of the Moncloa. But unless we readers simply choose to ignore the chorus, we cannot avoid reading Edmundo’s struggle as classically heroic, the stuff of legend if not myth. His struggle, from MATESA to Antena 3, is symbolic, arguably allegoric, even perhaps performative. In short, Gopegui’s novel sets itself up as something more than mere tale. Which, of course, demands the question, to what end? And it is with this question that we keep on reading.

On the level of the story that we read, the references to legends, to religion, and to myth, even if we can’t fully resolve them yet, bring into sharp relief the audacity of Edmundo’s quest. What he’s up to is nothing less than a wholescale dismantling of inherited human views and values. It’s a Cartesian quest—an attempt to start from first principles. But as opposed to the French philosopher who executed his journey from the quiet of his head, Edmundo seeks total reduction of all knowledge, power, and politics to solid measurements of square meters in the midst of an ongoing, daily battle with forces highly invested in the mystification of all things. In this light, then, the strange, skeuomorphic presence of religion and myth, finally brings into focus the actual heroism of our protagonist. In such a context there can be nothing more heroic than his utter refusal of the heroic, his disdain for the magical, mystical, or mythical that surrounds him. Seen in this light, Edmundo’s journey of disdain and disenchantment ironically becomes a thing of thrill and mystery for the reader, witnessing what feels like the magical rise of a character who insinuates his way into the halls of power while refusing to be lured in by any of its machinations. Again, this isn’t a tale of mere cold calculation in search of entrance into some high priesthood. Edmundo doesn’t believe. He is not interested in their power or their position. He simply seeks a kind of secular security that could come in locating ground zero of reality, of what is real, or, the real. But even knowing his methods, it feels heroic, the stuff of legend, if not myth.

Such a contrast between material and myth produces a curious division in the reader. On the one hand, we are immersed in Edmundo’s and his narrator’s philosophy and practice of the disenchanted world. On the other, our interest in the journey exposes our own longing for mystery—akin to that of the chorus, our colleagues who want to understand, who insist on knowing. Reading for comprehension—of our universe and of ourselves—is our religion. And we forge ahead hoping to make sense of Edmundo, of his narrator Arce, and of the extradiegetic narrator—our imagined Gopegui—tossing a Greek Chorus like some Molotov cocktail into her tale. We hope finally to understand, even while Edmundo, Arce, and our imagined Gopegui continually warn us not to hold our breath. “Nada es un pájaro.”

And so, instead of pájaros, in the novel’s concluding pages we get, appropriately, machines. Edmundo, after navigating the halls of business, political, and media power by means of little more than endless note cards filled with information and, having played a final winning hand, retires to a ranch at the most remote tip of southern Spain to live out his days growing oranges and taking in sunsets. Whatever meanings we might derive from such a move, the most obviously significant element of Edmundo’s final step is the setup of his agricultural operation. Edmundo’s move isn’t a consequence of any interest in agriculture but in the machines that, he learns, practically run the entire operation on their own: “una industria de alta tecnología. Un caldo de nitratos, árboles con sensores conectados a un ordenador. La tierra es lo de menos” [A high tech industry. A stew of nitrates, trees connected by sensors to computers. The land is only the beginning] (352). Edmundo settles down when he has at last found a way to reduce existence to what he decided long ago it truly is: measurements, fractions, and the sofa in the corner of the room (49, 63, 379). Edmundo’s journey has gone from false machines that do nothing to real machines that do everything. Thanks to phantom MATESA looms the adolescent Edmundo enjoyed a life as false as it was brief among the gods. Now surrounded by the most modern agricultural hardware and software, Edmundo will live out his life among a handful of friends producing real product from the real, hard earth he treads daily.

Hence it might seem curious that for her concluding scene of the novel, narrator Arce chooses to relate the visit of Enrique, a man Edmundo describes as his only friend. As noted earlier—and this matters even so late in our reading game—Edmundo is not without love. He’s a devoted brother, son, colleague, boss, husband, and father, at least within the decidedly secularist—bird-free—parameters he has set for himself. But Enrique is a friend from his college years, the only years when Edmundo flirted, however briefly, with a more metaphysical view of the world. Additionally, with Enrique, Edmundo has never held any business dealings, nor is he family, either by birth or marriage. He is simply a friend. And a poet.

And so the novel concludes with bird-denying Mephistopheles, the one who decided Cernuda was a trick, accompanied by his young daughter (future’s hope) and his friend the poet driving out onto a promontory at the edge of Edmundo’s land overlooking the sea at sunset. It would be hard to find a more stereotypically romantic, more bird-like, setting with which to conclude this story. Set in the south of Spain, it is, sans Sturm und Drang, reminiscent of the location of the climactic scene of Spain’s most famously over-the-top Romantic drama of all time, Don Alvaro, o la fuerza del sino. Whether we read this story as Edmundo’s life, or Arce’s narration, or Gopegui’s novel, we readers cannot escape the fact that all three have taken the conclusion of their story of disenchantment to seaside cliffs where their characters—the devil’s servant, a poet, and hope herself—gaze out across the ocean toward a setting sun.

What’s the message? Has the momentary sleep of the secular produced unexpected monsters? Or can birds not be kept at bay? Will there always be—at least the appearance of—mystery, magic, and belief? Are humans simply too prone to mystify and be mystified? Have Arce, even Gopegui, fallen into the very trap they thought their protagonist had sprung? Perhaps.

But as readers we always have at least two choices. We can speculate about authorial, even narratorial intentions. Or we can attempt to describe as honestly as possible the reading experience. With the former already accomplished (see the first lines of the previous paragraph), let’s conclude with the latter. The enigma of the final scene? Well, it’s just that. Arce and Gopegui give their narratee and their reader, respectively, exactly what they want (at least what traditionally we have come to expect): a tidy and even romantic conclusion to a hero’s journey. But they do so knowing that such delivery will certainly and hopelessly confuse us, because, as they trust, Edmundo’s journey and their narration of it have been simply too complete, too devastating. And so, they know, for one final time in one final stunning scene, they have foregrounded the phenomenon against which Edmundo has fought and against which we continue to do battle, that between the human desire for blind faith and the increasing human understanding of cold, hard reality. More than a hundred thousand years of human evolution aren’t wiped away in a secularizing instant. We will have our heroes, our gods, and our sunsets. But the real beauty in that sunset—the one we witness at the conclusion of Arce’s narration and Gopegui’s novel—are its secularized witnesses: Edmundo, the poet, and we, their readers. Each of them attests to the truth. That reality is the sum of the “resultado de multiplicar y dividir metros de garaje y números de telares abandonados” [the result of multiplying and dividing meters of garage and abandoned looms], that there is always a connection between “las tuberías de una barriada y el hogar de un político” [the pipes of government housing and the home of a politician] (49). That is the truth. And if truth is beauty, then beauty is truth—or at least “Lo real.” For now, need we know more?

Over the forty-year period covered by Gopegui’s novel, the Spanish economy continued to grow. From a GDP of $36 billion the year of the MATESA scandal, Spain’s economy generated $626 billion the year of publication of Gopegui’s novel. Today Spanish annual GDP rests comfortably beyond the trillion dollar mark as the world’s fourteenth largest economy. In terms of pure gross capital, the system that once humbled Edmundo appears as strong as ever. And yet, such growth has, of course, not produced peace and prosperity for all. Unemployment remains unusually high for such a large economy. And while inequality has not increased in the way it has in other Western countries over the same period, this is principally because it was already high. It certainly has not noticeably decreased. It could be noted that over the same period covered in Lo real, the US economy expanded from one to eighteen trillion. While the gap between the two nations’ economies was three-fold at the time of MATESA, it is now eighteen (World Bank statistics, Google). Not everyone wins equally in the new world order.

In the meantime, those who know better have retreated. Privileging stability over democracy, wealth over ideas, and ultimately consumerism over real change, Spanish politicians forged a Transition that has come to be celebrated across the world as a model of smooth political transition. But for many, it has represented little in the way of real social change. A Spanish culture that once defined itself in opposition to the state, now falls in line (Echevarría 34). Meanwhile, Spain’s most celebrated novelists debate the memory of a war fought seventy years ago while the national media obsesses over the always imminent collapse of Spain. “España se rompe,” [Spain is coming undone] they cry, as Basques, Catalans, and other privileged national minorities lobby for greater political autonomy. “España se rompe.”

“Y los españoles?” we’d like to ask. Instead, the once oppositional artists and media follow the lead of the politicians they are meant to critique. In the aftermath of the Transition—now always written with its capital T, like some historical monument captured in solid granite for all posterity—all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. We’ve worked for the one side, and we’ve worked for the other. And now we gaze out at the setting sun while our machines do the work behind us. It’s all a question of what you know. Meanwhile somewhere on a Spanish street corner, someone else keeps searching for that elusive job. Meanwhile somewhere in some Spanish housing block yet another home is placed in foreclosure. Meanwhile somewhere in some Spanish plaza the people sit. There’s nothing heroic, mythic, or mystic about it. It’s a mere meter squared. Multiplied by nothing. And it’s the only space left.