The Persistence of Memory

Paco Roca's latest, Return to Eden (176 pages, Fantagraphics), is one of the more cinematic graphic memoirs I’ve encountered, y’all — it bristles with information. I had to read it twice just to write this review, & I don’t think a third or fourth read is completely out of the question, so chock full of details is the narrative. The whole thing is based on a single photograph of the author’s mother, Antonia (I learned from the back cover — I read the whole book not realizing she was the author’s mother, but understanding nonetheless that the photograph was real since it’s reproduced in the book, along with others of the family), taken on the beach in Valencia, Spain, in the 1940s. In fact, the front cover is a reverse of the photograph, the cameraman in view, the characters looking back at the viewer, who is presumably the main character, Antonia.

From this single photograph the book takes its organizing principle, both philosophically & logistically. The opening is a fade-in contemplating the nothingness that exists before being born, (or the blackness of a camera at rest, the emptiness before a photograph is taken), & the book’s conclusion a fade-out contemplating the malleability of memory, the effect of looking back with rose-colored glasses. We meet Antonia as an old woman who is obsessed with finding this specific photograph, then the author enters the world of the photograph & the people who are in it — interestingly, he begins with who isn’t in the photo, absence & disappearance being major themes, of course. Speaking of which, one of the most chilling graphics in the book is people from the past that have blank faces — literally blank, just the shape of a head with no facial features — to represent the memory of them slipping away, as memories of faces will do.

The family is vast & the struggle is real, as the kids say these days. But like, actually real. Nineteen-forties Spain, under the Franco dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War, during which the communists were roundly defeated & their supporters made outcasts, was no picnic, as this book makes clear. Much of Antonia’s memories are tainted with the ambient feeling of constant, nagging hunger, & the depth of her family’s poverty (& the surrounding community’s) is astounding — at one point two or three branches of the family are sharing a single, tiny apartment, & not happily. They sell rags in order to purchase drinking cups (a letter between siblings towards the end triumphantly reports that they almost have enough cups for everyone in the family). There is much male angst & brutality set against female shouldering of household responsibilities, which Antonia is swept up in, listening to her mother, Carmen, tell stories of comeuppance while they hang laundry on the roof, stories either from life or the Bible — Catholicism plays a large role in the lives of midcentury Spaniards, as you can imagine, & folds into the book’s theme of a long-ago past that seems too good to be true. One such story is of a man who did incredible acrobatic feats around town, Don Milán, a legend in Valencia, who floated away in a hot-air balloon never to return, thus becoming a central image — a kind of Wizard of Oz before he found Oz, making the ultimate escape, except where to, no one can know.

The many threads of the narrative are woven together with such panache, darting here & there & yet managing to remain cohesive, in such a way that it builds a fully-realized world encapsulating all the little dramas within the family, the community, & the country at large. It reminded me a bit of Titanic, since we have an old woman remembering a place & time that only exist in her mind — that almost none of the people or locales in the book exist anymore was one of the more poignant comments provided by the author’s narration. To preserve the memory is the purpose of photography, & yet still the past is always receding, isn’t it? And here we have an homage to that very process of receding, letting the past slip away while still being able to gaze at it & wonder, what if…?

— Cowboy Books