THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PEOPLE
An airplane read that was poignant and powerful made me wonder about our inner lives. How much do we really know about the people close to us?
“I don’t know about you all but I implicitly trust my husband. That’s just how it is with me,” a friend said in her typical self-assured way. She simply didn’t know how else to be, she added, after a pause, wondering what the meaning of a marriage was without each partner trusting the other completely. I was in complete agreement. I told her that it was precisely how it was with me too. Both our husbands traveled a lot on business. If we were suspicious and insecure, our marriages would have crumbled eons ago. This exchange with the friend took place a few days ago in Singapore at a mutual friend’s home amid discussions of androgynous Korean heroes of Netflix that we, the women in the group, had been swooning over.
The day before I heard that observation about trust inside a marriage, I’d happened upon The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra at Littered With Books, a book shop whose curation I love so much. This is not a big shop at all but it’s clear, from the moment you enter it, that someone with a great sense of the written word is curating the collection. Littered With Books is in a historic part of town right by a perfectly situated metro station. What could be better?
A celebrated Chilean writer, Alejandro Zambra is known for his successful use of metafiction, or writing about writing, in the creation of his work. Zambra’s novella is a trenchant look at the inner lives of people.
In this story, a writer, Julian, tells his stepdaughter a bedtime story called The Private Lives of Trees (same title as the novel), which he plans to end when Daniela’s mother returns home from work. Trees have feelings, let’s please respect them.
Right now, sheltered in the solitude of the park, the trees are commenting on the bad luck of an oak, in whose bark two people have carved their names as a symbol of a friendship. No one has the right to give you a tattoo without your consent, says the poplar, and the baobab is even more emphatic: The oak tree has been the victim of a deplorable act of vandalism. These people deserve to be punished. I shall not rest until they get the punishment they deserve.
This is a taut Spanish novella about Julian and his eight-year-old stepdaughter Daniela and their life the day that his wife, Veronica (Daniela’s mother), does not return home from art class. It turns out that the novel is playfully autobiographical, as the man in the story also has finished a book about bonsai trees, thus referencing Zambra's previous successful novel Bonsái. While the story of The Private Lives of Trees does not overtly have much to do with marriage itself, it doesn’t take long for a reader to gather how, almost always, the people inside a partnership carry all the baggages of their past into their future.
Translated by Megan McDowell, The Private Lives of Trees is unflinchingly honest and hilarious, too. Zambra is a gifted observer of people and it doesn’t take him long to see how screwed up the people are even when there are few extenuating reasons for them to be a certain way. The question this little book asks at the outset is this: How well do we know those we think we know and take for granted?
The narrative plays out during a twelve-hour period and we learn so much about all the key characters in that time period. Thanks to Zambra’s sleight of hand, we also manage to visit Julian when he was a child and we watch his parents playing Monopoly with him. What they lose on the board translates into financial losses also in real life; we infer that he is estranged from his parents perhaps because his parents have squandered away all that could have been his future. It’s a riveting tale of several parallel lives told in 86 pages and while some chapters are jarring on a first read, I felt they read smoothly on a second iteration.
While reading The Private Lives of Trees we realize that the hoariness of everyone’s current story is entwined with the anguish of the past. Veronica married Fernando only so that the child she was carrying would have a father; three months later, however, her marriage was on the rocks. Veronica’s second marriage—with Julian—is altogether different; yet it’s clear, as we enter Julian’s brain, that Julian is more enamored of Veronica than she is of him. She is an enigma to us and it’s clear that it was he who pursued her. She never really did. What she saw in Julian, in my view, is his extraordinary capacity for compassion and fatherhood. Naturally, three years later, on what seems like a perfectly ordinary evening, Veronica does not return home at all.
Veronica has a flat tyre. She knows I can’t go on looking for her. I can’t leave Daniela alone. Veronica will change the tyre. Veronica is a woman changing a tyre in the middle of the street. Hundreds of cars pass by every minute but no one stops to help her. That’s what is happening, thinks Julian, who resolves to stick with the image of Veronica lost, changing a tyre, alone on a distant avenue.
According to some reviews of The Private Lives of Trees, the story ends on an ambiguous note. It’s not clear if the mother ever returns home. I was not so interested in knowing what she does even though I read the novella in one sitting to find out exactly what happens in the end. Curiously enough, it’s not spelt out at all, yet I loved the closing chapter. Julian knows he must ensure that Daniela grows up in a happy home, and the writer in him imagines the ending as he only can and in that imagining we already know that he has sowed the seed for the beginning of a beautiful life.
And Julian imagines, writes that story, that future day: the setting is the same. Daniela still lives in the same apartment as now, as then. It has just been redone and the walls are no longer green, blue and white, but there are things that have remained the same over the years: Daniela always knows where to find the tea, the toaster, the pins, the flashlight, the summer clothes. Now there are no dirty rugs or broken windows. No more spiders or cockroaches or ants. Daniela still lives in the same room, the blue room, and the guest room is now, properly a guest room: almost all her girlfriends have lived there at some point, after leaving home or losing a job.