The Bilingual Lover 1993

Juan Marés Imanol Arias grows up in Barcelona during the 1950s, a Catalan man from a modest background—the son of a frustrated zarzuela seamstress and an illusionist known as Fu-Ching Juan Carlos Lamas. He dreams of leaving poverty behind and carving out a place beyond the limits of his upbringing. In December 1970, he crosses paths with his future wife at a photographic exhibit, and his life becomes entangled with a group organizing a four‑day hunger strike to protest the verdicts of the 1969 Burgos show trials. It is there that he meets Norma Valenti Ornella Muti, the lone daughter of a wealthy, traditional and conservative Catalan family. Despite stark differences in class, wealth, and social expectations, Juan and Norma marry, embarking on a life that promises ascent but soon tests the boundaries of their world.

Norma Valenti Ornella Muti ascends into a position of prominence through her work for the linguistics department of the Generalitat regional government, a role that makes Juan acutely aware of the social prestige his marriage grants—and also of how little of his own craft and identity it acknowledges. He finds that there is little room in this newly elevated life for his talents as a ventriloquist or an accordionist, and the gap between their two worlds widens. After five years, the marriage unravels as Norma’s true character emerges: she is proud and cold, with an allure that veers into dark sexual desire, and she harbors a fascination with xarnegos, lower‑class migrants from other parts of Spain. Her infidelity is starkly revealed when she is found with a xarnego shoe shiner, a scene that shatters the illusion of their union and drives Norma to leave.

With the divorce leaving him without his wife’s financial support, Juan clings to the apartment in Walden 7 and must survive by playing the accordion and busking on the streets of La Rambla. The street becomes his stage and his battleground: during a clash between pro‑Catalan language groups and Francoist extremists, he plays Els Segadors, the Catalan anthem, and a Molotov cocktail is hurled at him. The explosion leaves him physically scarred and his psyche profoundly altered, pushing him further into poverty and into a more fragile, schizophrenic landscape. He encounters Norma again while performing, but she fails to recognize him. In a subsequent carnival encounter, he speaks to her in disguise, and only at the end of their conversation does he manage to hint at his true identity. He even phones her later, posing as someone needing help with translating words from Spanish into Catalan, blurring the line between memory and illusion.

As his hallucinations intensify, a new identity crystallizes in his mind: Juan Faneca (the author’s birth name rendered through a non‑Catalan persona). Imanol Arias embodies this alternate self, a xarnego from Murcia with a pencil mustache, dark skin, sharp sideburns, and an eye patch, returning to Barcelona as a supposed worker who has spent years in Germany. Disguised as Faneca, he seduces his lonely neighbor, Griselda, an Andalusian widow who is attempting to reinvent her life in the Catalan capital. Their one‑night stand leaves both Juan and Norma disappointed, marking a turning point in which the Faneca persona appears to overtake Marés. The story closes with Juan Faneca continuing to live the life he has constructed, leaving behind the memory of the man he once was and the wife he once knew.