Antonio Soler (Málaga, 1956), writer and screenwriter, is one of our most outstanding novelists. “For me each book is completely different,” he declared. In some of them the reality of the moment is always present. I think above all of The Name I Now Say (1999) or Sacramento (2021), about a priest from Malaga, Hipólito Lucena, who sets up a sexual sect in the post-war years, recruiting those who would become known for his orgies. like the hypolinitas and where Franco appears as “a ridiculous king with the voice of a castrate and the appearance of an office worker.” Paul Preston affirms that he had never read such an accurate description of Franco’s regime.
In The Way of the English (2004), made into a film by Antonio Banderas, also from Malaga, the environment plays a determining role. In the novel I am commenting on now, I Who Was a Dog, the setting is smaller and sex has a dominant presence, now like something sick. And we don’t know where the action takes place. The most he can tell us, always omitting the name, is: “I got off in a neighborhood I had never been to. “I walked the streets.”
The protagonist is Carlos, who tells us about his pathological relationship with Yolanda. Being written in the form of a diary, it allows us to delve into his personality, tracing a “sentimental biography.” Carlos frequently refers to his state of mind, bitter, without incentives, like something out of Alberto Moravia’s La noia. Soler himself has stated that his first trip to Italy in 1984 especially marked him, so it is not surprising that the novel ends with “Nothing. Everything too painful”, which reminds us of the end of Il mestiere di vivere, by Cesare Pavese.
A medical student, Carlos identifies with Andrés Hurtado, the protagonist of The Tree of Science, by Pío Baroja, a novel to which he returns obsessively as he returns to The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist, because everything about him is obsessive, which explains the choirality of recurring motifs, which accompany us throughout the book: the library, the Faculty, the failed subjects, the unhealthy jealousy, the aspidistras on the terrace that “in the darkness, were vulvas, eyes, reptiles.” Like vulvas because his greatest obsession is sex: friends, women’s cleavage that causes him frequent erections, what he calls penile circulation, and the need to masturbate. It is understandable, then, that Soler mentions Gerty McDowell, the young woman who, I add this today, stares fascinated at Leopold Bloom on Sandymount beach, until he ends up masturbating.
But the most striking thing is that Carlos, who will be revealed as an abuser, is jealous and possessive of Yolanda. From her terrace he spies on her on her terrace, in the house across the street from her. “One day she opened her blouse. I did not like. Someone could have seen it from another terrace.” “I know he hides things from me. The day I find out I will end it.” She reproaches him for sharing a bed with her brother, and they often stop speaking for a while, because “she is not going to change nor am I going to manipulate her. I want to be me, she told me.” After a very violent encounter, he can say, like Pascual Duarte in Cela’s novel: “she could breathe.” And if the diary is full of erasures, it does not seem that anything is erased from the frequent and very explicit sexual scenes.
Free of rhetorical devices, there are situations of great intensity. The expressive and even fun descriptions are very attractive, focused obsessively? in the teeth. The characters that revolve around Carlos are also attractive. I Who Was a Dog invites, from its title, the reader’s complicity.
