We present an extract from What Remains, the English-language debut of critically acclaimed Galician author Brais Lamela, translated by Jacob Rogers and published by Bullaun Press, the first Irish press dedicated to literature in translation.
Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the misty Galician mountains, What Remains follows a graduate student researching the Franco regime's vast project of forced resettlement. In the 1950s, more than half the inhabitants of the villages in Negueira de Muñiz were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to transform 'backward’ country people into modern cattle farmers. As the narrator pieces together the mysterious story of a woman who seemingly disappeared from her settlement, he confronts his own precarious status in a foreign land, uncovering the perennial struggle for a place to live, to belong, to call home.
I'd like for us all to imagine a woman performing a series of insignificant domestic tasks: washing the dishes, emptying plastic containers and throwing them in the trash, frying an egg without waking her baby, who’s sleeping in the next room. All of a sudden, everything goes white. The only thing I remember, the woman will explain days later from her hospital bed, is a loud noise, an unbelievable noise, and then nothing at all.
The woman lives with her son in a remote mountain village that is the target of an aerial bombardment, supposedly as part of an anti-terrorist operation. The missile that blows her home to bits does the same to her memory: she can recall the series of daily activities that preceded the explosion, but nothing of the explosion itself, nothing of the event. She can’t describe in any detail the noise, the intensity of the light, her position in the house when it happened. Information necessary to reconstruct the incident, maybe the exact evidence that could bring accountability to those responsible for the atrocity, is hidden somewhere in this woman’s memory, which is as bare as a tree in winter.
Let’s imagine, continues the architect, that it’s possible to reconstitute that experience, that it’s possible to gather the fragments left behind by the woman, like breadcrumbs, and use them as a path that leads back to her house: something she tells us about the layout of the living room, about the windows she closed to keep out the noise of the street, about the various hues of sunlight that filtered through the orange trees early in the mornings. Let’s imagine that we can use these fragments to construct an identical house, that we can allow this woman to walk through a phantasmagoric version of her home that we’ve created. We will find that she can suddenly remember the details of the explosion, that she has regained the right to her own experience, if you will. This is what’s known as forensic architecture: the reconstruction not of physical places but of the memories linked to those places.
After his speech, the architect rests his elbows on the podium as he awaits the audience’s timid questions, and I use the time to serve myself a second plate of lunch: quinoa salad, deli meat on skewers, and grilled vegetables that give off wisps of steam. The food is kept warm in shiny silver trays that look to me like the remnants of a Soviet space-age rocket. Because the university is far from my apartment and the restaurants around here are on the expensive side, I’ve made a habit of attending lectures where they offer free lunch. From them I’ve begun to store up useless knowledge, or, rather, loose bits of information that come to me detached from their frame: archaeologies of the industrial revolution, ethnographies of daily life, terrifying graphics about global warming.
I return to my seat with an overflowing plate. The questions have begun. A professor wants to know if the bit about forensic architecture is a metaphor, but the lecturer insists that it’s not, that it’s real, a discipline that uses what remains to reconstruct places that no longer exist. He talks about another case, the story of a man imprisoned in a secret detention centre in Argentina during the military dictatorship. When the regime fell, the military hurried to eliminate all evidence of their atrocities, to collapse the elevator that led to the attic, to demolish incriminating structures. But this man remembered everything: when his captors had taken him from cell to cell, blindfolded, he had counted each step and developed a floor plan in his head. Thanks to that, the architect says, we were able to reconstruct their actions, to reveal the phantom building they had hidden beneath the new one, to recreate their crimes.
The story makes me queasy, and I leave the last skewer uneaten. A woman asks if all the examples are so sordid. The architect smiles: No, of course not, we can also reconstruct spaces that hold happy memories and life stories, like childhood homes. We can restore the experiences of the dispossessed, the exiled, those who wander the Earth with no place to settle. The woman who asked the question seems satisfied, and I finish what’s left on my plate, then get up to serve myself another helping.
What Remains is published by Bullaun Press
