A Secondary Ghost: Gibraltar in La vida perra de Juanita Narboni, by Ángel Vázquez

Abstract

This paper addresses Ángel Vázquez’s novel La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (1976), a first-person account of several decades in the life of Juanita Narboni Cortés, a middle-class tangerina of mixed Andalusian/Gibraltarian parentage. I argue that despite Juanita’s distance from her Gibraltarian father, Gibraltar represents a kind of specter, physically distant but insistently “present” through her memories and family ties, and through interpersonal, economic, and cultural connections between Tangier and the Rock. I first describe Juanita’s role as a personification and mirror of late-colonial Tangier. I then explain how we can understand the novel as a ghost story of sorts. I also argue here that Juanita’s Gibraltarian father and Gibraltar itself “haunt” the narrative, with a good deal of this haunting being mediated through photographs. Finally, I analyze the novel’s conclusion to show how Juanita’s desperate attempt to locate a photograph of her mother, and her unexpected encounter with a paperweight, an object associated with her father and with Gibraltar, suggests that she must come to terms, at least partially, with the memory of her father—and by extension, with Gibraltar. I contend that despite Juanita’s centering of her narrative on her mother and Andalusia, by attending to her references to her father and to Gibraltar, we open the novel to an alternate reading that helps us recover these “secondary ghosts,” and that complicates Juanita’s resolute self-identification with Andalusia. Similarly, we unmask Juanita’s andalucismo and disavowal of her ties to Gibraltar as a late-colonial fantasy of an erstwhile “Spanish” Tangier that was never entirely Spanish, but is rather a city whose numerous “ghosts,” including the Rock, cannot be extirpated from its literary memory.