Purgatori

Salvador Donat is a country doctor, a bachelor who lives alone, surrounded by his books and music in the former rectory of a small village. He has little work but does not want any more. Among the people whose health he takes care of are the cloistered Carthusian monks of the Porta Coeli monastery near the small town of Silla, and a community of nuns in a village of the same area, also a closed order. Salvador was born in the city of Valencia in 1940 so, since the novel is set in 1996, he is 56 years old. The action of Purgatori begins one day or, to be precise, early in the morning of 19 March (the feast of Saint Joseph and the annual festival of Valencia): while he is making a routine visit to the monastery he receives a message that his brother Josep -who is four years older- has terminal lung cancer, upon which he decides to leave everything so as to be by his side during the last weeks of his life. This means he has to go back to Valencia, the city from which he had set out many years before in his desire to seek a more spiritually fulfilled life in the service of the less privileged in Africa, working with doctor Albert Schweitzer. Salvador Donat is, then, a stranger in his own city. He is a man who, it if wasn't for his having no qualms about declaring himself an atheist, would make a perfect Carthusian.

On his return to Valencia -riding his powerful Harley Davidson with its Rio Muni number plate- he is accompanied (or rather guided) by a luxurious Mercedes driven by the perfectly uniformed Teodor Llorens, the black chauffer of Valencian father and Guinean mother, a poet who writes in Catalan and right-hand man of his brother Josep, a rich and powerful figure who is exactly the opposite of Salvador.

Dante's Purgatory

The story of Dante's Purgatory is thus retold here but in reverse. Salvador comes down from the sky -the monastery at the top of the mountain- and begins his journey to the city accompanied by a poet -a black Virgil- who acts as his guide. Having gone through the ritual of the journey, he still has to go through the Ante-Purgatory -the hospital where they remove his brother's lung- after which, now staying in Josep's flat, he remains at his side during the slow wait for death, which is punctuated by a series of discrete episodes that bring him into contact with the sordidness of city life and the seven deadly sins. To round off the comparisons with Dante's work it must be said that, in the end, Salvador will find his Beatrice with whom -in the chapter that brings the novel to its end in the cemetery one day in May, when everything is over- he will return to his simple country life on the Harley Davidson after having seen to the distribution of the dead man's bequest. And he leaves with his Beatrice sitting behind him, "without any luggage, with the metal compartments empty", as we are told by the last sentence in the book.

An Ambitious Narrative Project

Before going into the details of the novel, it should be noted that Purgatori is the second part of an ambitious narrative task that Joan F. Mira has set himself: a trilogy set in the city of Valencia, which began with Els treballs perduts (Labours Lost), which was published by Tres i Quatre in 1989 and republished by Proa in 2005, and which, as I write these lines, is still to be concluded. The common features of the three volumes are that each is inspired in classical mythology, they are all set in a specific part of the city of Valencia, there is an underlying philosophical theme and the main character has the attributes of a hero from bygone times.

In Els treballs perduts, the first book, these features correspond respectively to the myth of Hercules' labours, with its action taking place in a medieval walled Valencia that consists of twelve parishes, the philosophical strand is Greek paganism, and the hero is called Jesús. In Purgatori, the mythical reference is The Divine Comedy, the latterly built-up area of Valencia becomes the first circle beyond the walls, the philosophical reference is Christianity and the main character also has a clearly identifiable name: Salvador. Continue reading...