Miquel is a young gay man in Franco’s Spain whose mother’s death in a blizzard was the subject of Colm Tóibín’s brief masterpiece A Long Winter.
Tóibín’s short novel The Bridge begins with a new bridge that promises to connect Miquel’s remote Catalan mountain valley to the outside world. It introduces temptations: electricity, smuggled contraband, strange men with whom to have encounters. When catastrophe occurs, the hurt, rendered with the author’s plainly worded reserve, is acute.
Perhaps The Bridge is painful because it opens with hope. Summer is approaching; Miquel is more sexually confident. Even the decision to relocate – to his dead mother’s childhood home – is cautiously optimistic. “It gave Miquel some comfort that this house was where his mother had been born; it was where she had been brought up, where she had been returning on the day of the sudden heavy snowfall.”
In Miquel, Tóibín makes us privy to the inner workings of a man not prone to profound introspection. Miquel dwells in moments, like a kiss “by the wall of the church, like lovers in some old song”. His dreams are both vast and plebeian: “He would do anything in his new life – he would cut stones, dig the road, work in a bar, drive a taxi.” But his father’s keenness for smuggling is unwise, and eventually lands them in prison.
Critical things are left unsaid, as one bleakness is heaped upon another. When Miquel’s brother Jordi returns from the military, no one has told him that both his mother and his dog are dead. When his father sells Miquel’s donkey to be butchered, Miquel mourns. Tóibín’s men pour their deepest tenderness into their animals while their human connections fail.
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At its heart, The Bridge is about what rends us apart, a chronicle of relationships that have been in collapse even before Miquel’s mother walked into the snow. “Obviously,” Jordi fumes, “she didn’t want to be here in this house with you, with either of you.”
After his lover Manolo visits him in prison, Miquel thinks, “He [Manolo] could wander back into the world, walk on whichever side of the street he wanted … He didn’t have to put much thought into where Miquel would go, how he would sleep, who would share his cell.”
His father has ruined him; his cellmate dotes upon and controls him. But Miquel is a mild man, and like Tóibín, without judgment. The Bridge may be steeped in sadness, but it is Miquel’s gentle spirit that makes his story, for the reader, difficult to bear.
Mei Chin is a writer from New York City living in Dublin.