Grove Koger

The Hive is a difficult book to write about. Camilo José Cela’s naturalistic 1951 novel of Madrid (La colmena in Spanish) isn’t violent, but it’s certainly unpleasant. And much of the unpleasantness, for me at least, stems from Cela’s detached attitude toward his characters. Is his detachment clinical? Disgusted? Ironic? Bemused? There are, it’s true, occasional notes of something like compassion: “None of us ever understand with full clarity what it is that happens to us.”

Whatever else, The Hive is a busy book, as its title suggests. According to Cela (THAY luh) himself, his novel deals directly with 160 characters over the course of a few short days in Madrid during World War II. In a note accompanying the first edition, his publisher Emecé observed that there were actually 346 characters in all—296 of whom were imaginary. For the most part, their lives revolve around money, food, sex, and gossip. We follow them, or note their passage now and then down Madrid’s streets, or catch a glimpse of them in the city’s alleyways, through more than two hundred brief episodes arranged in six chapters and a short “Finale” that takes place a few days later.

Much of the book’s action is set in Doña Rosa’s café. “For Doña Rosa her café is the world, and everything else revolves around the café.” What she likes “is simply to drag her great bulk about between the tables.” She may smile at her customers, but “at heart” she loathes them. A handful of them are reasonably well-to-do, but most are poor, and for many, a cup of “white coffee” or a glass of anís represents an important part of their day’s nourishment. If they care to smoke, they call over the cigarette boy to buy a single cigarette or a packet of tobacco.

Newspapers are sometimes passed around Doñ Rosa’s café, leading one character to comment scornfully: “I can’t see why they want to find out about everything that’s going on.” But “Doña Rosa herself is worried about the fate of the German armies. “Every day she studies the communiqué from Hitler’s headquarters and associates, through a series of vague forebodings she dare not try to see clearly, the fate of the Wehrmacht with the fate of her café.” But that’s about all we hear of the conflict.

Of the larger world, the characters are ignorant. In one brief episode we learn that a young woman is known familiarly as the “Uruguayan” because “she comes from Buenos Aires.” Buenos Aires is, of course, in Argentina.

Ironically enough, Cela fought with Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War, meaning that the Madrid he presents in The Hive is, to some extent, the product of Franco’s ruinous campaign. In another irony, Cela worked as a government censor during the war, but was forced by his own government’s censors to publish La Colmena abroad, in Argentina. Despite those external contradictions, his unsparing literary honesty won him the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature. “Life is like a game of tennis,” the cynical writer remarked of the award, “and this time I have won.”

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The image at the top of today’s post is the delightfully garish cover of my 1954 Signet Giant paperback. The photograph of Cela shows him as an apparently angry young man, while the image at the bottom is the cover of the first edition.

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