Synopsis

The False Step (178 pages) is Abraham Pérez’s first published novel and is divided into four parts.

In the first part, “Impromptu Music”, the narrator studies English philology in Santiago de Compostela. He is due to fly to Dublin the following day to visit his brother, Roi, who is there for a year. He arranges to meet Laura, his friend Xavier’s girlfriend. He’s not quite sure why he has done this, since he doesn’t believe they have anything in common. They go for some drinks, end up having a reasonably good time, and at the exit of one of the pubs Laura tries to kiss him. The narrator resists and decides not to tell his friend Xavier about the incident. The next day, he sets out for the airport, feeling pretty hung over. There is a downpour, and he gets soaked. When he arrives in Dublin, his brother thinks he looks like an old man. Things are going well for Roi – he is doing work experience in a telecommunications company and has hopes of staying. The narrator prefers not to go for a drink since he is still feeling under the weather.

On the way back to Santiago, the narrator, who is twenty-two and is called Manuel, thinks perhaps it would be a good idea for him to do some of his studies in a university outside Galicia. On his arrival in Santiago, he tells his parents he must get some books from the library before they go back to his home town of Lugo for the Easter holiday. In the library of his faculty, he comes across a girl he likes, Natalia. In Lugo, Manuel meets up with his friend Xavier and a friend of his called Paulo. Manuel doesn’t like Paulo at all. He goes through life as someone who triumphs and is permanently having to go off somewhere. When Manuel and Xavier are left alone, Xavier admits he is having problems feeling desire for his girlfriend, Laura, and wonders what he can do about it. Manuel suggests giving it a rest and talking about it with Laura.

In the week he spends in Lugo, anything attracts the narrator’s attention more than the essay he has to write: a girl’s blond hair, a seductive book, a bird’s flight. In the end, he applies himself and writes the essay he has to hand in the following week on “The Analysis of Linguistic Structures”. He meets up one final time with Xavier and Paulo. Paulo is having difficulty keeping the girls away from his lips. Xavier thinks (hopes) he is beginning to feel better. The narrator is interested in three girls: Marta, Natalia, and Iris. He has two friends in the faculty: Estevo, who is a year older and studies Latin, and Horacio, who has fallen for a girl and gets Manuel to accompany him to the library to see if she is there. Manuel keeps reading. Even though he has chosen his subject and has the luxury of studying, not working, he feels bored.

The narrator acquires an interest in Natalia before his relationship with Marta, which lasted almost a year, has finished. This makes him look bad in Natalia’s eyes. He and Marta sleep together for one last time, as if saying goodbye to each other. All that is left is the memory of their bodies. The narrator is happy that things are going well for his brother in Dublin. He remembers how he couldn’t find any work at home. He defines himself as part of “a new wave of emigration masked by study grants, work experience, and language qualifications”. The narrator can’t help feeling that neither of them has had to work as hard as their parents.

The narrator goes to buy some books and ends up in the area where Marta lives. He comes across a demonstration by the naval sector, which is being watched closely by a group of firefighters, ready to intervene, and wonders when the rift between the student movement and the working class appeared. It seems we live in an age of spectacle and egocentrism because of digital technology. Xavier comes to visit. They go out drinking and meet up with Laura in the same place she and Manuel had gone to together before she tried to kiss him. Iris is there, together with another girl, Berta. Iris cannot take her eyes off Manuel and, out in the street, they walk together. The narrator feels paralyzed and decides to go to the students’ office the next day and ask for a student exchange.

The second part, “Spasmodic Movements in the Sun”, is a series of reminiscences by ten different people – including Marta, Natalia, Xavier, Horacio, his brother, Roi – who reveal their opinion of the narrator in the first part – Manuel Bugallal – and what they remember about him. The first to give his impressions is a writer who is at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, presenting his new novel. He remembers Manuel from a course they did together on literary criticism. He used to hang out with a girl and with a guy who was Northern European. Manuel recommended other books by an author he was reading. The next person is his ex-girlfriend, Marta. They had a passionate relationship, but things started to go wrong when the relationship became stable. She remembers he went to Madrid. She then spent three years at the University of Sheffield and is now teaching in the department of linguistics in Santiago. They met one more time – Manuel had returned to do a Master’s in literature.

The next person is a German, Marcus, who works for an NGO in Ramallah. He remembers Manuel from his time in Madrid. They spent some time together. He had the impression that Manuel also felt like a foreigner in the context of Castilian culture and missed Galicia. The next person is his university friend Horacio, who is now a secondary school teacher in Coruña. He had seen Manuel again in Monforte de Lemos, where he was taking part as an author in a literary event. Their communications now are limited to sporadic messages.

The next person is a librarian in Newark, USA. She remembers Manuel from her time in Madrid. She calls him “ambivalent” and remembers how he used to lament the fact Galician literature was ignored. He called it “peripheral” and celebrated the figure of Ramón Otero Pedrayo, who translated some fragments of Ulysses by James Joyce into Galician. Manuel claims to be working in a savings bank, to be preparing for the civil servant entrance exam, and to be working on a novel. The librarian, Agnes, only believes the last part about writing a novel. The next person is his brother, Roi, who has had to return to Lugo from Dublin. They have both been told that they will have a better life if they study, but Manuel believes they have been deceived. After studying, your only choice is to become a civil servant, to live precariously, or to emigrate. There are no social movements anymore that have real repercussions. Roi is finding it difficult to get a permanent job and is constantly having to start from zero. Manuel reminds him of the main character in Otero Pedrayo’s novel Circling, Adrián Solovio.

The next person is Marcus’s girlfriend in Madrid, María, who sings in a band. She remembers Manuel as being serious and moderate. He showed her a poem he was writing about a Greek woman, which struck María as being very musical. She offered to sing it if he would translate it, but Manuel seemed reluctant. The next person is the woman Manuel liked, Natalia. She found him immature. She particularly objected to a letter he wrote, declaring his interest in her. She found the tragic air of the letter to be more suitable for a Romantic writer.

The next person is his friend Xavier in Lugo, who works for his father’s restaurant, contracting suppliers. He remembers Manuel as being reserved. He would only tell you things if he wanted to. He had had a relationship with a woman in Madrid – someone from outside, like him – but hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Xavier is still with Laura, though they went through a rocky patch. The last person is a Greek woman in Thessaloniki, Adara, who reads a poem by Paul Éluard out loud while the wind from the Aegean Sea causes spasmodic movements in her hair.

The third part, “The Song of the Sirens”, is defined as “fragments of an almost complete Impressionist diary”. It is the diary written by Manuel during the year he spent in Madrid. In the first days, Manuel feels crushed, like a stranger, but after three weeks he begins to get used to the rhythm of the city. His routine is limited to going from home to the faculty and vice versa. He experiences complete loneliness and takes refuge in reading. He would like to reread Otero Pedrayo’s novel Circling, but cannot find it in the bookshops. He takes the metro, walks in the streets, observes people, who exude vitality, and yet most of the time they are doing useless things, keeping themselves entertained until it comes time to die. He has a dream about walking along a corridor in the Prado museum and coming across Fra Angelico’s Annunciation altarpiece, with house music being played in the background.

He spends the Christmas holidays with his family in Lugo. He remembers things from before the holidays – chatting with Agnes and Marcus, sitting in the faculty, watching the bare trees – but there are lots of experiences he has lost because he didn’t write them down. He feels that he is following in the footsteps of earlier Galician writers, such as Otero Pedrayo and Valle-Inclán. He reads poetry, Ellmann’s biography of Joyce. Sometimes he goes out, and the city is empty. He is attracted to a Greek muse and dreams of her.

He spends the Easter holidays in Lugo and returns to a Madrid that is yellow, almost red. He reads Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett. He suffers a virus. He likes to watch the seeds falling from black poplars on his way to the faculty and contrasts their slowness with the speed at which people go about their business. He celebrates Galician Literature Day, which this year (2013) is dedicated to a playwright, Roberto Vidal Bolaño. He goes to see a play by Ibsen with Agnes, then Waiting for Godot with Marcus. He accompanies Marcus to the bar where María sings and suspects something is not well between them.

In June, he meets a girl on a metro who reminds him of the Greek muse, Adara. When he arrives home, he feels melancholy and cannot eat. He buys a copy of Madame Bovary for his mother. With this, his time in Madrid comes to an end. He does his best to make the most of the opportunities and goes to see one final exhibition.

The fourth part, “The Innocents”, is again narrated in the first person by Manuel, like the first part. Back in Lugo, he is obsessed by images of Adara. He goes out with his friend Xavier. They try to disguise their feeling of nothingness – “those moments when the youthful sensation of being invincible became fractured and fell into a thousand pieces, until turning into dust” – with frivolity. Manuel dedicates himself seriously to writing and then becomes concerned with the last year of his course. When he returns to university in Santiago, there are protests on account of the cutbacks. Shops and businesses are closing down. Horacio and Manuel go to a showing of the 1989 film A Woman Forever (Sempre Xonxa) about the emotional consequences of emigration. There is a discussion before and after the film.

Manuel believes in the emancipatory power of culture and art. You won’t change the world, but you can change preconceived ideas. His parents have worked hard to give him the opportunity to study, to come and go as he pleases. He has not had to suffer hunger or endure a war. He feels that culture and art, even if there isn’t a job at the end, still has a role to play. He meets up with Horacio, who is going out with a woman called Érika, but has slept with an Italian girl, Livia. Manuel hears news about Natalia, but thinks it’s better not to know. Manuel’s brother in Lugo can only get short-term contracts or sign up for courses that aren’t going to have any useful outcome. It’s a frustrating situation, and Roi comes to visit Manuel in Santiago. Manuel writes a thesis on the similarities between Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s work and Adrián Solovio in Otero Pedrayo’s. He goes to a party in the apartment of some girls, but finds it excruciatingly boring. He feels he must be getting old.

Manuel and Horacio visit a friend’s apartment, next to which lives a madwoman who makes a lot of noise. Another apartment is being renovated, but all they complain about is the noise the students make. The next chapter is written like a play. On leaving the apartment, Manuel falls unconscious. Different characters appear in the street – a drag queen, a bicycle that wants to make love to him, a hand that speaks. Manuel calls out for Adara, but only Marta and Natalia appear and accuse him of not behaving well towards them. The chorus of voices recites the same poem the Greek woman was reading out loud in Thessaloniki at the end of the second part. There is no Ithaca. Just attempts, crossings, failures. “Each step is a false step.”

It turns out Manuel had fallen down the stairs and a woman, Almudena, had called for an ambulance. He watches the 1972 film Just Great (Tout va bien) and is struck when a character says, “My job is to make films. To find new forms for new content.” This seems to him to be his vocation as a writer. He decides to visit his parents in Lugo. He looks back at the four years he has spent as an undergraduate in Santiago and Madrid. He again is drawn to the voice of a woman or birds flocking together. Towards the end of August, in an attempt to make sense of his surroundings, he sits down to write. He is a kind of impostor or comedian.

This is a thoughtful reflection on life as a student, on the power of culture and art to effect change, on the difficulties of finding a permanent job and being able to look towards the future with any confidence, as witness the narrator’s brother’s difficulties in settling down after his time spent in Dublin. It reads a little like an autobiography, since there are obvious similarities between the narrator, Manuel, and the author (who is also from Lugo and studied in Santiago and Madrid). One of the most attractive facets of the novel is the use of different narrative techniques – the first and last parts are divided into chapters, which are narrated by Manuel, but the second part is a series of short reminiscences about Manuel by people who have known him and the third is in the form of a diary; one chapter in the fourth part is written like a play. It is obvious that the narrator (the author) is very well read, and this feeds into the narrative. The False Step was shortlisted for two major literary awards in Galicia, the Torrente Ballester and the Illa Nova.