I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness

Novel · 176 pages · Paperback · 2025 · Graywolf Press

Killed, then kept

Bernadeta stops breathing, and Margarida, dead already, takes it for the end. Then the breath returns. Irene Solà sets I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness across one day at Mas Clavell, a farmhouse in the Guilleries, where the dead women prepare a feast for the woman still dying upstairs. One deathbed opens back into centuries.

The novel is easiest to follow as three layers moving at once: the present deathbed, the past lives of the women tied to Mas Clavell and the ghosts who keep interrupting both.

The day will not stay a day. It keeps opening into older lives: Joana, who marries into the house generations back, bargains with the devil, and her daughter Margarida turns her own death into doctrine. Solà lets the book move by return rather than order. Mara Faye Lethem's translation keeps the gothic folk and domestic registers at one pitch, so a marriage and a slaughtered goat share the same plain grammar.

The house does not store memory so much as cook it. A marriage arrives as a meal, a death as a slaughtered kid goat cut into stew and blood fritters. Killed, then kept. The same procedure shadows the body upstairs, one life turned to food as another crosses.

Joana's bargain is the cleanest debt in the book because it is never paid. She asks the devil for a whole man with land and heir, then passes off her husband's missing toe as the flaw that dodges the price, and the debt lands instead on her children: Margarida is born with a heart missing a piece, and her sister Blanca is born without a tongue.

Margarida turns her own injury into judgement, and the house keeps giving her people to punish. She is easy to mistake for the villain of the place. Solà builds her as something harder, a woman confined so long that she guards the confinement herself and calls it faith, keeping the husband who left her as holy while she recasts every woman near him as a stain.

Against Margarida’s doctrine, Blanca and Elisabet give the book its brief clearing. Blanca is born into Mas Clavell’s damage. Elisabet is brought into the house from outside, and the two women become lovers. Their relation is built on touch, pregnancy and shared secrecy rather than judgement. The contrast matters because touch elsewhere becomes instruction. Àngela, Blanca’s daughter, cannot feel pain, and Martí, Elisabet’s son, spends childhood trying to teach her hurt with his own fingers. Between Blanca and Elisabet, touch escapes training. It becomes intimacy.

Bernadeta's sight is the deepest layer and the deepest debt: she is Àngela and Martí's daughter, sight standing in for the pain her mother never learned to feel. Thyme water eases her sore eyes as a child and opens a worse seeing, wolves eating children, the dead not yet found. After the war the house puts the sight to work: women climb up with one question, where their men lie, and Bernadeta answers what the record withheld, hanged men, prisoners never returned. The sight gives information and no repair.

Dolça, Bernadeta's daughter, takes the pattern furthest from its folk origin. Her father is never fixed, framed only as rumour, the same shifting devil figure who has appeared to Bernadeta as bull and man. Dolça repeats the abandonment in a different register. Her lovers are no longer devils but historical men: a guerrilla fighter shot by the Civil Guard, a dam labourer who denies fathering her daughter. The debt does not change. Only the currency does.

The method that builds all this eventually overloads it. Bernadeta's own section should gather every earlier layer, and instead competes with the arrival of her daughter Dolça before the deathbed reasserts its claim, and Bernadeta fights her way back into her own ending.

Marta, Bernadeta's granddaughter, and Alexandra, her great-granddaughter, are the ones who finally move the debt without believing in it. Neither is dead yet, and it is being alive, not being unrelated, that lets them handle the house without its doctrine. Marta's care for Bernadeta is blunt and unlearned, and it is Marta who sits with her at the end, the old woman's last clarity only that they have been good company for each other. Nothing is cleansed and no one is sorted into moral order. Solà's achievement is to leave Mas Clavell less a setting than a stomach: time goes in and comes out altered, and the women go the same way.