Juan José Millás, the Spanish author of more than a dozen novels and the recipient of several prestigious literary prizes including the Premio Nadal and the Premio Planeta, blends myth, opera, and the avian world in his phantasmagorical novel Let No One Sleep, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. The character who does not sleep is Lucía, a recently unemployed computer programmer.
After she is laid off, Lucía secures her taxi license, earning a living driving passengers around Madrid. In her apartment each morning, she is treated to the sweet sounds of opera wafting through her air vents. These arias penetrate her soul “and [she] find[s] herself completely overcome with feelings of love,” thus leading her to the apartment directly below to meet the person playing the music – a man “forty or fifty years old, tall and slim, his nose was an eagle’s beak and his hair was white and very messy.” He is an actor whose name is Calaf, the name of the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday. The day she received the bird, “a blackbird [dropped] from the sky like a missile, crashing beak-first into her [mother’s] head,” eventually killing her. This event sets the surrealistic mood for Let No One Sleep. Calaf, by the way, is also the name of a Prince in the Puccini opera Turandot, which Millás braids throughout the narrative. From the outset, Millás urges us to consider why there are so many coincidences regarding the name Calaf.
The author provides a summary of Turandot for readers who are not familiar with it:
“A Chinese princess whose name is Turandot, whom all princes in the world want to marry, although she doesn’t want to marry any of them. So she sets them each three riddles, saying she’ll marry whomever gets them right. But the ones who don’t get them right are beheaded at dawn, and their heads are put on spikes around the main square, in sight of the whole city.”
Although she met Calaf, who goes by Braulio Botas, just one time, Lucía becomes infatuated with him. When he moves out of their apartment building, Lucía is focused on one thing:
“From the first minute of taking her wheel in her taxi, the single fantasy she entertained was that of picking up Braulio Botas. She would keep the vehicle spick-and-span, solely with this possibility in mind. She would turn it into Madrid’s cleanest taxi, the most agreeable, the sweetest-smelling. And, of course, Turandot would always be playing, so that the actor, when she did finally pick him up, would feel at home.”
Because she truly believes she will pick up Botas, Lucía wears her hair in two styles and “she started doing her makeup” to look like a Chinese princess. During her journey throughout Madrid, she meets a diverse clientele including Roberta, whom she has a “fantasy of being a reincarnation of her mother,” and the two men with whom she sleeps – a terminally ill fellow whose “slim frame was reminiscent of a sparrow that didn’t have any feathers,” and Ricardo, a journalist. She even asks one of her passengers to solve a riddle from Turandot. Her deepening obsession with Botas is revealed through a tattoo she emblazons on her pubis: Nessun dorma, which translates as “Let No One Sleep,” an aria from Turandot. In her taxi, alone, Lucía fantasizes that she is in Beijing, and “when she looked at the road signs, the letters and symbols began coming apart and rearranging themselves into Chinese characters.”
Lucia’s continued journey into madness is alarming: “it seemed that her legs, under her jeans, had mutated into the legs of a bird.” In addition, her “inner perception was that of a bird. This bird had a curved, very hard beak, capable of ripping out a man’s stomach wall and eviscerating him” — an image reminiscent of of the eagle that devours the liver of Prometheus in the Caucasus Mountains. A scene like these ensures that we exist at the bottom of the rabbit hole with Lucía, complicit in fantasy.
Millás offers us a seat in Lucía’s taxi for a drive throughout Madrid as the protagonist searches desperately for Calaf – or Botas – on every street corner. The author deftly blurs the line between reality and the absurd, so we can embrace the dream-like sequences that run through Lucía’s mind. Coincidences are plentiful and may remind American readers of Paul Auster’s mode. Millás tips his cap to his Latin American literary cousins in his fantastical denouement in which he returns to a scene akin to the the punishment of Prometheus.
[Published by Bellevue Literary Press on August 23, 2022, 208 pages, $16.99 paperback]