LEAVING MADRID
Sarah Manigne
(Mercure de France, 122 pages, 2020)
***winner of the 2021 French voices awards***
***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***
***Long-listed for the Prix Femina 2020***
On the morning of March 11, 2004, Alice is on her way to the Museo del Prado via the Cercanías commuter rail when several bombs detonate. This attack, known since in Spain as 11-M, kills almost two hundred people and gravely injures two thousand. Alice escapes uninjured but in shock. Her only thought is to continue on to the Museo de Prado, find the seclusion of her atelier, and contemplate the painting she has spent the last several months restoring: Allegory of Charity by Francisco de Zurbarán.
Alice had moved to Madrid just a year before. As a specialist in Zurbarán, her work frequently took her to churches, museums, and galleries in different countries; she preferred this errancy, and did not enjoy staying at home in France. Madrid in the late summer was a place of tranquility, and for someone like Alice, who was ever traveling and never committing, the city seemed to offer her a reason to stay and fall in love. She takes to her life here, and to Angel especially, a chef and Colombian ex-patriate she meets through colleagues at the museum.
The 11-M attack threatens to unravel everything that Alice has built for herself. She begins to dissociate, disconnecting from her beloved saints in Zurbarán’s paintings, from Angel, and from Madrid. 11-M unlocks a memory that Alice has long repressed: another terrorist attack, this one in Paris, on July 25, 1995, at the Saint-Michel station when she was still a student—an attack that killed eight and injured over one hundred people. She comes to see the ramifications of the first trauma clearly, and how completely that trauma has directed her life since.
Sarah Manigne conveys Alice’s shock and post-traumatic experience with incredible immediacy. She presents the surreality of PTSD without ornament or melodrama, instead rendering Alice’s interior world like an artist painting a somber portrait: slightly detached, hypersensitive to the light and recesses with a disarming elegance. Art—Zurbarán’s saints, medieval portraits, and still lifes—is a site where horror and beauty speak to each other, reminiscent of Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather or Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty. Leaving Madrid leaves the reader with visions of the most romantic corners of Spain, as well as the starkness of Alice’s loneliness in the aftermath of 11-M, and invites us to linger over the most affecting moments again and again.
Sarah Manigne has authored two novels. Her first, L’atelier, was long-listed for Le Coup de Cœur des Lycéens 2019.