El viento de la Luna
Antonio Muñoz Molina
Publicado: 2006 | 238 páginas
Novela Drama

El 20 de julio de 1969 la misión espacial del Apolo XI se posa en el Mar de la Tranquilidad, convirtiendo a su comandante, Neil Armstrong, en el primer hombre que pisa la luna. Las noticias sobre el viaje son el hilo conductor de esta novela protagonizada por un adolescente que, fascinado por estos acontecimientos, asiste al nacimiento de una nueva época, el universo que le rodea comienza a serle tan ajeno como su propia felicidad infantil. El viento de la Luna es un viaje a la memoria, una sucesión de golpes de efecto y defecto de la nostalgia, cuya trampa siempre somos propensos a pisar. Ampliamente descriptiva, con una delicada prosa, pareciera que no ocurriese mucho en la novela. Sin embargo, es cuestión de atender los recuerdos del niño triste pero cargado de sueños para llegar a la conclusión de que al parecer también está hablando por nosotros, por nuestros recuerdos. Historia de iniciación magistralmente narrada, El viento de la Luna posee elementos que remiten al mundo de escritores como Salinger o Philip Roth, pero también es un nuevo episodio en el ciclo narrativo de Mágina, como reconocerán enseguida los lectores de Beatus Ille y El jinete polaco. La imagen de un futuro de ciencia ficción a los ojos del protagonista que ya es recuerdo nostálgico para el lector es uno de los mayores aciertos de esta cautivadora novela. El viento de la Luna es una obra con claras reminiscencias biográficas. Un niño con esa capacidad de maravillarse ante la ciencia y la historia, atribulado por las fantasías de viajes espaciales, lector compulsivo, naturalmente tenía que convertirse en escritor.

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El 20 de julio de 1969 la misión espacial del Apolo XI se posa en el Mar de la Tranquilidad, convirtiendo a su comandante, Neil Armstrong, en el primer hombre que pisa la Luna. Las noticias sobre el viaje son el hilo conductor de esta novela protagonizada por un adolescente que, fascinado por estos acontecimientos, asiste al nacimiento de una nueva época; el universo que le rodea comienza a serle tan ajeno como su propia felicidad infantil.
En 1969 la vida en la ciudad de Mágina transcurre con la regularidad con que las cosas han sucedido siempre, en el tiempo en apariencia detenido de una larga dictadura. Antonio Muñoz Molina transmite como nadie la fragilidad de instantes capaces de cambiar una vida, como la llegada del primer televisor a casa, la conciencia del incalculable consuelo de la lectura o el descubrimiento de un secreto que ha marcado a la ciudad desde la guerra civil.

It's the hot summer of 1969, and our 12-year-old narrator is following the progress of the Apollo XI moon mission from his home in the small town of Mágina in southern Spain (this fictional version of the author's birthplace, Úbeda, appears in several of his other books). He puts himself imaginatively into the minds of the astronauts — their isolation and the unknown dangers they face reflect in unexpected ways on his situation as an adolescent. But the high-tech world of spaceflight also seems bizarrely out of step with the backward semi-rural life he knows, where the family still gets its water in buckets from the well and uses a mule and a donkey for transport.

Big changes are happening for the narrator. He feels like a stranger in his own body, struggling to cope with the mental and physical changes of adolescence (and the constant masturbation-guilt). But he's also the first person in his family of peasants and market-gardeners to go to secondary school, and no-one at home can quite make sense of his passion for books; he no longer sees anything of his primary-school friends, who are all now doing apprenticeships or working in the fields, but at the Salesian school he's with bourgeois boys who can't relate to his peasant background and the way he has to work in the holidays.

The world in 1969 is in an exciting state of flux too: spaceflight above all, but there are also things like television, running water, tourists in short skirts and sunglasses, gas cookers, telephones, Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, refrigerators, aeroplanes towing advertisements for products no-one he knows would have any idea what to do with... His reading is racing ahead of his Catholic teachers, too: he is aware of the narrow-mindedness of the maths-teaching headmaster, who likes to use Darwin, Nietzsche and Galileo as examples of thinkers punished by God for their presumptuousness, and is beginning to see through the charismatic young Father Peter — keen on the dignity of physical labour, although he's never actually done any — who sees the narrator as vocation material and keeps trying to persuade him to read Teilhard de Chardin.

Underlying all this, there's another, largely suppressed layer, with the people of Mágina still working through the consequences of things that happened thirty years ago in the Civil War. A prosperous neighbour is dying of cancer, which the narrator's grandfather (who had been a policeman under the Republic) sees as a very inadequate punishment for the way he cheated them of their savings at the end of the war; another neighbour is found hanged in his house — it's treated officially as suicide, but everyone in the street thinks it must have been delayed revenge.

Obviously, either the young Muñoz Molina was very precocious, or his adult self has been guilty of a little time-compression for dramatic purposes, but it's easy to suspend disbelief and engage with his vivid descriptions of the world of his childhood. A lot of it felt very like what I remember from that time, the excitement of all those acronym-filled technical diagrams of the Saturn V and the Apollo capsule to cut out and keep from magazines, the conviction that the world would never be the same as it was for our parents (different war, same principle), the realisation that our dim teachers had been fobbing us off with religious nonsense, the knowledge that space was quite different and actually much more interesting in reality than it was in H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and so on. All those things you see so clearly in your early teens, which have a way of becoming nuanced and difficult later on... ( )

Bien belle excursion dans laquelle nous entraîne Muñoz Molina, dans un petit village reculé d'Espagne, où un jeune adolescent de milieu rural découvre les émois de son âge à l'époque où les Américains débarquent sur la lune. Il est pris en flagrant délit de déloyauté par rapport aux espoirs que son père forgeait en lui de perpétuer son métier de maraîcher et par rapport à ceux du père salésien qui espère de faire de ce boursier un curé, alors que le jeune homme n'aime que les livres d'aventures et d'astronomie ainsi que sa sensualité toute neuve.

J'ai beaucoup aimé ce livre, qui est, tout de même, un large cran en-dessous, à mon estime, que "Dans la grande nuit des temps" du même auteur, que j'avais adoré.