Portbou

Maria Mercè Roca’s tender narratives illustrate the potency of language: “the supplications were like a song and if I said them over and over I became drunk from the rhythm and the words, in a kind of ecstasy.” A profound security is derived through shared conversations, as when her father picks her up from school: “You carry the suitcase and, at first, we walk fast without saying anything as if we were afraid they’d make us go back. When we’ve covered a bit of distance we look at each other and begin to laugh. … I calm down and … nothing seems so tragic any more.” As well as wounds incurred and deepened by silence. From a trauma of police brutality scraping at the interior mind and body—to a child punished by her mother’s refusal to speak or look at her. Many layered, the architecture of steps, ceilings, and train tracks structure the waxing and waning of human life and death.