The South

Praise for
The South

“A book of sustained lyrical beauty and power.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“A highly impressive debut . . . with a haunting emotional resonance.”

—
The Boston Globe

“Tóibín’s talent is amazing . . . a stunning and very particular novel.”

—
The Washington Post Book World

“A strong and moving work of fiction about the hard truths of changing one’s life. Colm Tóibín, like his characters, never says too much and never lets us grow too comfortable. A grand achievement.”

—Don DeLillo

“A daring, imaginative feat; the world it conjures is at once familiar and strange, and strangely moving. A splendid first novel.”

—John Banville

“Tóibín’s first novel is a broad and beautifully worked canvas . . . an imaginative, deeply felt, and evocative tale.”

—
The Sunday Times

“This is a truly distinguished, beautifully written first novel which seems to well up from the author’s deepest preoccupations, becoming, on the surface at least, limpid and clear.”

—
The Sunday Tribune

Praise for Colm Tóibín

“Tóibín . . . [is] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.”

—Floyd Skloot,
Los Angeles Times

“Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.”

—
The Times Literary Supplement
(UK)

“[Tóibín writes] with a sparseness and intensity that gives the minutest shades of feeling immense emotional impact.”

—
The New Yorker

“Tóibín is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions.”

—Liesl Schillinger,
The New York Times Book Review

“Tóibín’s prose is as elegant in its simplicity as it is complex in the emotions it evokes.”

—Alex Witchel,
The New York Times Magazine

“Tóibín is an immensely gifted and accomplished writer . . . intelligent and affecting . . . Tóibín’s prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are uniformly interesting and believable.”

—Jonathan Yardley,
The Washington Post

“Tóibín creates suspense out of the simplest emotions: fear, love, and, most poignantly, regret.”

—
Time

“Tóibín has a gift that Tolstoy and Chekhov have also been credited with: a seeming ability to render real life, undiluted and unornamented, on the page.”

—Craig Seligman,
Bloomberg News

“Tóibín has as profound a sense of the shape and pace of a novel as any living writer I can think of.”

—Benjamin Markovits,
The New Statesman
(UK)

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CONTENTS

Part I

Katherine Proctor

Barcelona

The House

Barcelona: A Portrait of Franco

Pallosa

A Letter From Pallosa

The Magic Mountain

Dublin: 1955

Isona

A Diary: 1957

A Letter to Michael Graves

Carlos Puig

Autumn

Tirvia

Miguel

Part II

Barcelona: 1964

Dublin in Winter

A Letter From Faro

Home

The Sea

The Slaney

The Road to Dublin

Afterword

About Colm Tóibín

For Catriona Crowe

Part I

KATHERINE PROCTOR

24 October 1950, Barcelona

Night is coming down and there is a hum of noise from the street. I have been here for several weeks. I am grateful that the fat woman who runs this hotel and her little mouse of a husband do not speak English. I remain a mystery to them; they cannot get through to me. The man in the next room—as far as I can understand a word he says—goes to the opera every night and listens to opera on his radio all the time.

They want to know about my husband. They found a man who would act as interpreter for them and he asked me: “Where is your husband?” The fat woman was there looking at me and the opera man. I told them he was coming soon and I was waiting for him. “Where is he now?” the man asked me and I told him that my husband was in Paris.

It is difficult for me being on my own and it has been since I left. In the street sometimes I think I am being followed. I try not to move too far away from the hotel. The journey here, however, has been the worst so far. There are men everywhere watching you. I came in from France to San Sebastian and stayed there in a small hotel looking over the beach and the calm sea.

I was lonely there. I felt bad. In the greyness of the city everything was closed. The streets were deserted every afternoon.
The last few holiday-makers were trying at the end of September to wring some satisfaction from the fading sun.

I took the night train to Barcelona. I found what I was looking for in a phrase book: a
coche cama
single, for one person, no sharing. We started at seven in the evening and by eleven I felt tired enough to make up my bed and close the curtains on the small lights which the train flew past.

Barcelona. I did not know what to expect. Bigger than San Sebastian certainly and seedier with a different light coming in from the sea. The Mediterranean. The wide streets bright in the morning. The side streets offering shade. I imagined, but I did not know what to expect. Maybe the sound of the word Bar-ce-lo-na, the sense of pleasure which I caught from the sound of the words, maybe it was the sounds which exerted themselves and held me.

The moment I awoke I knew someone was in the compartment. The train was moving fast. It was still dark so I could see nothing. I stayed still and tried to keep breathing as though I were asleep. There was no question of this being a dream. I knew I was awake; I knew what was happening. This was the night train to Barcelona, some hours before the dawn. This was 1950, late September. I had left my husband. I had left my home. I was not clear about where I was going. I did not wish to be disturbed.

There was a figure standing close to me beside the bed and the door was closed behind him. I had locked the door before I went to bed.

First the hand settled on my wrist for a moment, holding it softly, then harder, then pinning it down. When I stirred and tried to sit up he held my shoulder. He whispered something I didn’t understand. I scratched his hands with my nails. I could smell beer on his breath when he put his mouth near mine.

It was a while before I began to shout, I don’t know why I waited. He moved back for a moment as though startled but it did not put him off. He was almost on top of me. I tried to scratch his ears and his face. I shouted “Go away” as loudly as I could over and over.

I was almost free of him and standing on the floor in my nightdress but he still had a firm grip on my wrist. From his voice I could tell that he was thirty, maybe forty, but no more than that. I was still shouting “Go away” and I could sense that he was becoming afraid, and that scared me even more because I was worried about what he would do to me before he left—that he would try to hit me or hurt me.

I managed to open the door with my free hand. He tried to pull me back in but I shouted out into the corridor. He let me go and I ran down the corridor. I don’t know how but I was still calm enough and clear enough in my mind to remember where the toilet was and I went in and locked the door.

He did not take anything from the compartment. I must have been calm and clear-headed because I checked that immediately; everything was there. He had hurt my wrist and later I would find a bruise on my shoulder which would take a week or two to disappear. I locked the door again by turning the dangling clasp around into its metal holder. It was easy to see how a piece of cardboard or wood or even a nail file held from outside could have pushed the little clasp right around again and unlocked the door. Still, I locked it and I left it locked.

For a week I felt as though I had jumped through glass, as though every bit of me had been cut or broken or beaten. I walked in a daze through Barcelona in the early morning: the shops pulling up their steel shutters to start the day, children going to school. I noticed the grey blue light softening the stone. I came to a corner, this corner, the corner I am looking
out onto now, and I saw a fat woman with tightly permed black hair looking down at me from a balcony. The sign said
pensión
and I shouted up at her and pointed to my luggage. She made a sign with her hands that I was to wait and soon the little mouse, her husband, scuttled down and carried my suitcase up to the first floor. When I gave her my passport she showed me into this room.

For days I stayed in bed marking the time by the sound of the steel shutters of the shops in the street being pulled up and down. First at eight, half eight, nine. That was the morning. Then at one, half one, two, then a few hours later when the siesta was over when it was time for me to get up and even then I was wrecked, pummelled. Even then I only wanted to lie there.

I found a bar just down the street and as the light began to give, at six o’clock or so, I would go there and have a huge milky coffee and a sandwich made of rough bread and ham or tuna fish. I have to point my finger at what I want. For those early days I wanted nothing but this walk from here to the café and back.

On my first Sunday there were no shutters opening or closing so I was guided only by the cathedral bells. I got up and walked down to the square for my coffee. The sky was warm blue and the sun gave off a surprising heat for late September in Barcelona.

I was careful not to move too far away from my
pensión.
I knew I would have to steel myself. I had bought a map so I knew that I lived close to the cathedral, in the small cluster of streets just up from the port.

I knew that I would have to push myself. I had bought a white cotton dress and a white cotton jacket and a red hat. I was wearing them for the first time. I would have to stop
being afraid. I would have to make a decision to go into bars, cafés, restaurants. I would have to be brave. I would have to do as I pleased.

I knew too that there was nothing seriously wrong with me and that I would be all right. I knew that the panic caused by a man I didn’t know coming into my compartment in the middle of the night had left a small mark like the bruise on my shoulder which was fading.

The bar was busy this Sunday morning and the square outside was bright, as though specially lit for Sunday. There were paintings on display all around the centre of the square. I was curious. I had been thinking for days about paint; I had avoided letting anything form in my mind. I just knew that I wanted to use paint here. I had known this feeling before and it had always led to intense disappointment and bitter regret. I was having dreams of paint.

I am absorbed in myself most of the time. Sometimes I don’t see things around me. I think about myself all the time. What I’m going to do now; how in God’s name I’m going to survive.

Plans and fantasies take up most of my waking time. I have all day to think about the future, to plot it out, to dream it, to imagine everything.

The past has happened: it is grey and empty like the narrow streets of San Sebastian at four in the afternoon with the shops all closed and their shutters pulled down. The future is wide open.