Irene Solà’s 2022 novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance features narration by mushrooms, roe deer, mountains, and other unconventional chroniclers, so it was no big shock to discover that her latest novel is merely a bona fide ghost story. The reveal comes early on in I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, when Margarida, one of the point-of-view characters, describes what befell her after her death some years earlier. Originally published in 2023 and newly available in a magnificent English-language translation by Mara Faye Lethem, the novel is a psychedelic séance of sorts held over the course of a single day, during which seven generations of women—some living, others long dead like Margarida—gather to await the death of Bernadeta, one of their relatives, who lies poised between worlds. The women are all descendants of a matriarch named Joana and I Gave You Eyes is unquestionably their story. Men do appear in the novel, as husbands, sons, or passersby, but they are almost exclusively the source of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, killers and agents of sorrow. Against this broadly dualistic framework, Solà considers conceptions of good versus evil, the desires of the physical body versus those of the soul, and the loneliness, desperation, and abandonment that can lead even the faithful to turn away from God and embrace the devil.
The novel’s ghosts are confined to the family’s ancestral home of Mas Clavell, where Bernadeta is attended to over the course of the day by, among others, her granddaughter Marta and great-granddaughter Alexandra. The Clavell farmhouse (mas means farm in Catalan) is located in the central Catalonian comarca of Osona—a sparsely populated region about fifty miles north of Barcelona that centers on a plain surrounded by rugged, forested mountains teeming with wildlife. In these woods “long ago, more years ago than anyone could count,” Joana married Bernadí Clavell just three days after he appeared as the answer to her unholy prayers. Desperate for the husband that God had not provided, Joana traded her soul to the devil and, in so doing, committed the novel’s “unforgivable” original sin, forsaking eternal salvation for earthly companionship. Compounding her problems, she tried to renege on the deal, rebuffing the devil for a technicality: she had asked for “a full man” but Bernadí lacked one of his toes, a memento from the wolves who ate his siblings and his mother’s body in her grave. Joana puts “the devil out of her mind, convinced she’d gotten the best of him, until her eldest daughter was born.”
That eldest daughter is Margarida and she, like all who follow in Joana’s line, has been cursed by the devil, fated to be born with a single flaw. In Margarida’s case, the imperfection is relatively insignificant in that she has a physically small heart, but the defects become more severe with subsequent children. Margarida’s sister Blanca has no tongue, her “mouth like an empty nest,” and Joana’s next two children don’t survive their manifestations of the curse: a girl born with no liver and a boy born “without a hole back there,” leading him to quickly expire “stuffed like a sausage.” Once Joana stops having children, the curse abates but never stops, and the drama of the novel comes from the gradual exploration of the various imperfect branches of her family tree. Among the many backstories revealed, those of Margarida and Bernadeta are the most verdant and provide a stark contrast in that both, to dramatically different degrees, have dealings with the devil despite the ill favor that Joana’s interaction brought upon the family.
Margarida believes—even as a ghost—that she lived a “good and saintly” life deserving of the salvation she never got. It’s possible that God felt similarly but was put off by the uniquely horrifying manner of her death because, in this world, “when someone has a bad death, a ghastly death, an execrable death so horrific that God can’t bear to watch, then that someone is left behind and wanders through this world doomed.” The physical separation of Margarida from the other ghosts, who busy themselves downstairs sacrificing a goat and preparing a feast, mirrors the way she sees herself as spiritually apart from—and even superior to—them as a result of her abiding faith.
Margarida sees the world in dualistic terms, with herself on the “right” side, though her piety was greatly tested by her husband Francesc’s infidelity, which included fathering a child with Elisabet, a woman he kidnapped and raped, who is the only ghost at Mas Clavell not descended from Joana. With Francesc on the road, whether for work or his own selfish ends, Margarida had to provide and care for her mother, sister, and children. While he got wealthier on these journeys, “she barely scraped by, abandoned by the light of day, all alone, watching the weeks pass like a woman who’d been buried alive.” The devil disguises himself as one of Francesc’s hangers-on and tempts Margarida with news about her husband’s whereabouts. When demons subsequently arrive to terrorize Mas Clavell, Margarida prays for salvation, but God is incensed by what he sees as her betrayal, precipitating the condemnation that gives the novel its title: “I sculpted you and yet you have taken another master . . . Away, fiend, for I gave you ears and you listened to another . . . I gave you a mouth and you conspired with another . . . I gave you eyes and you looked toward darkness.” The powerful passage evokes several similar Biblical verses in which sinners are chastised by God, such as Jeremiah 5:21, where God passes judgment on the house of Jacob in Judah saying, per the King James Version, “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears and hear not.”
Despite her relative innocence, Margarida is the only one of these women whom God takes the time to admonish. Bernadeta seeks out and has a physical relationship with the devil, yet goes on to live a long life, raising the question of who steers the fate of these women in the world. Bernadeta bears perhaps the worst curse of those in Joana’s line, in that she is a soothsayer, with the ability to know both the past and the future, to see those deaths that have happened and those still to come, including her own. Is it this hereditary gift from the devil, via his curse of Joana, that emboldens Bernadeta to slither into the devil’s den and take him as a lover, embracing him in all his forms—he-goat, majestic black bull, and “bald man with magnificent eyebrows, the toes of a rooster, and the breasts of a woman”?
While the day the novel takes place exists in our modern age, Mas Clavell exists outside of our conception of time. At some point in the distant past, Margarida’s anger at her husband caused the house to shrink down and become “so secreted away . . . that even the passage of time eventually forgot the house, and the years overlooked it and the women inside.” The world that Solà crafts not only blurs these lines between past and present, but those between people, animals, and physical objects, emphasized by the novel’s luxurious use of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. “The farmhouse’s entrance was damp and dark, like a throat. With rough walls, which were the fleshy insides of the cheeks. With a beamed ceiling like a striped palate, and a rock floor, which was a tongue worn down by countless years of swallowing.” The women and the animals they live so closely alongside are often described in terms of each other as well: Dolça has the “face of a goat” and Margarida’s son takes his name, Guilla, from the fact that he has a “fox face.” Even the worlds of the living and dead are melded together. Though the two groups never interact, the smells of the ghosts’ cooking permeate the living world and the dead can see what their breathing descendants are seeing, leading to some fun descriptions: a cell phone is perceived as a “little mirror” filled with “tiny men,” the microwave oven is a “glass urn,” and the kitchen faucet is a “swan’s mouth.” Lethem thrives within Solà’s whimsy, producing some deliciously lyrical and trippy imagery: “And while the clouds huddled like a herd near the farmhouse, the sun stuck skinny orange fingers into the holes, and every time the clouds cut through them, the trees would shiver suddenly, as if they’d been shoved.”
Solà fleshes out her parable of temptation and sin with historical details of betrayal and abuse. Men with red berets, favored by Franco’s reluctant Carlist allies during the Spanish Civil War, kill two of the only kindhearted men in the novel, and one of Dolça’s many lovers confesses how he had foolishly believed that after the conclusion of World War II, “the allies would overthrow Franco, too, and fascism would be finished.” The novel also incorporates fairy tales from Osona and the surrounding comarca, often related by Joana as entertainment for the ghosts bustling about in the kitchen. The lighthearted legends leaven the tales of the women’s repeated suffering, the source of which is often their critical role as mothers. Margarida puts it plainly when she says, “For a baby to come out, its mother has to go through torture!” And once that child is born, the peril does not go away, with several of the women experiencing tremendous sorrow as a result of their children’s fates. Margarida is spiritually crushed by the death of her son Guilla and the realization that her other two sons, Bartomeu and Esteve, are cursed with having no love for their mother. Even Bernadeta recognizes the sacred mystery of motherhood:
Because you can talk about misfortune, and you can talk about grief; you can talk about remorse and guilt, and about death, about evil and the things men do. The good things and the bad things. But you can’t say how a girl is made. There aren’t enough words to explain it, because you made her like dirt makes trees, and trees make branches, and branches make fruit, and fruit makes seeds. In the dark. From a place so deep within that you didn’t know you knew how to do it.
That mystical view of the world is vanishing. Bernadeta sees it in her granddaughter’s world of fast cars and other material concerns. Margarida sees it in a kind of insolence—men and women strolling “through the world as if they owned it, as if they had the right to see everything, even that which shouldn’t be seen. So brazen! As if it were no longer God who had the measure of all things, and no longer He who chose the darkness of the nights and the length of the days.” Perhaps as a nod to this control, a powerful storm knocks out the power as Bernadeta’s life draws to a close, though it has no influence on the ghosts, as they are already inside the mystery.
One specific moment in Catalan history that the novel alludes to is the construction of the Sau reservoir in the years following World War II. The reservoir was formed by damming the Ter river and, in the process, submerging the village of Sant Romà de Sau. Under normal circumstances, the spire of the village’s eleventh-century church remains barely visible above the surface of the reservoir, but when the water level drops, the village reemerges. In March 2024, after years of a historic drought in Catalonia, the reservoir was almost entirely depleted, revealing the ruins of the church and several other structures along the base of a sere canyon. Water levels had previously approached such low levels in the mid- and late aughts, a time when Solà—who was born in the small town of Malla, a few miles south of the reservoir—was growing up in the region. I like to imagine that the idea for Mas Clavell as a chamber for bringing together the living and the dead was first sparked in her mind as she walked past the crumbling remains of Sant Romà, a village that had been forgotten by time beneath the waves, where the ghosts of those who had once lived there reflected on their legacy, the sorrows they had seen, and these visitors from the modern world.
Copyright © 2025 by Cory Oldweiler. All rights reserved.
