The Last Days of Franco

Montserrat Roig’s classic novel, The Time of Cherries, captures a sort of still point in the history of Barcelona— a moment that came before great change. When the novel ends, no one has any idea that within 18 months, Francisco Franco, the old dictator, will be gone. The Time of Cherries was originally published in Catalan in 1976, the year after Franco died. Half a century later, Roig’s excavation of family life in a period of historical flux is now available in English in the United States for the first time.

The Time of Cherries became an essential book in post-Franco Catalonia. It appeared at a time when there were few images of the culture whose youth had cast off Franco long before 1975. The novel is infused not only with an array of vivid characters but also with a sharply detailed vision of middle-class Barcelona before democracy was restored. The book revolves around Natàlia, once a student activist and now nearly age 40, as she deals with unfinished business: her conservative brother and her fearful and neurotic sister-in-law, her father, her old friends, and, more than anything, the stifling political atmosphere that she had abruptly run away from 12 years earlier. Soon after its publication, the novel became available in a cheap paperback and was on sale in the newspaper kiosks that dotted downtown Barcelona.

When I first encountered Roig’s novel, in the 1980s, I was struck by the freshness of her tone—and by the fact that Natàlia’s generation was being depicted in a fearless and dramatic way. There was, for example, a sexual frankness in the book that came as a relief in a country where many films had been censored or banned for their sexual content. When Roig portrays characters from the older generation, many of them emotionally and spiritually maimed by the long years of the dictatorship, she is careful to make the gap between them and the new generation complex and ambiguous rather than simple or easy to predict.

The middle class in Barcelona had remained, for the most part, undisturbed by the First and Second World Wars, and even by the Spanish Civil War. Its members held on to their spacious apartments in the Eixample, the area of the city that was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Modernista architects, including Antoni Gaudí. Their innate conservatism persisted; they kept their heads down and looked after their affairs during the dictatorship. Things were ripe for a revolt by the generation that came of age in the 1960s.

Roig was born into a middle-class family in Barcelona in 1946, to parents who had already staged their own revolt. Her father was a lawyer and writer deeply embedded in the world of Catalan politics and culture. Her mother, also born into this middle-class milieu, was a feminist writer and suffragist. While Roig was growing up, her parents’ apartment was a gathering place for writers and those involved in progressive politics.

In her late teens, Roig began writing about current affairs in the magazine Triunfo, which was becoming a pro-democracy force. Before going to university, she trained as an actor. During these years, she got to know the feminist writer and left-wing activist Maria Aurèlia Capmany, almost 30 years her senior, who introduced her to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir. Capmany, even when I met her in the last years of her life while I was writing my book Homage to Barcelona, was what might be called an indomitable spirit—witty and sharp, loud when she needed to be, radical. Like Roig herself, Capmany became one of Barcelona’s prominent cultural figures in the 1980s. She was an energetic and visionary head of culture on the Barcelona city council when I knew her. Much of her is there in the figure of Harmonia, Natàlia’s older friend in The Time of Cherries.

Roig uses the trope of the returned daughter, in this case one who has bathed in the freedoms of England, as she herself had done in the early 1970s before coming home to Barcelona as both insider and outsider. The novel explores the strange way that time’s passing makes some aspects of family dynamics subtly different and allows other aspects to stay the same.

Political life is disorienting too. The dates in The Time of Cherries are carefully chosen. Natàlia’s exile to England and France begins with the arrest, in 1962, of the Communist Julián Grimau, who was executed by the Franco government a year later; it ends with the execution of the militant Catalonian anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, in 1974. Natàlia was born in March 1938, the month the Coliseum theater in Barcelona was bombed by Italian fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. Both her father and her brother, Lluís, were born in important years in the history of Catalan nationalism.

According to her biographer, Betsabé Garcia, Roig spent three years planning The Time of Cherries (the title is a reference to a famous French revolutionary song, a favorite of Natàlia’s silly Communist boyfriend at university). She then wrote the book in 26 days, thus placing it among the masterpieces of 20th-century literature created at speed, including Kerouac’s On the Road and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Although Roig wrote about her own city and historical moment, she insisted that her novel was not drawn directly from her life: “I have learned to laugh when it is called autobiographical. If only they knew how it lied!” She noted that three obsessions dominated her imagination: death, sex, and growing old. All of these themes surface in The Time of Cherries as Roig explores shifting elements of the culture in which she grew up. She worried that if she gave her novels a working-class setting, “they would not be convincing.” Rather, she would dramatize “the world that I know,” bourgeois Barcelona, aware that Balzac and Proust had written about a similar class.

While her novel evoked Natàlia’s interior life, it also portrayed a Barcelona, parts of which were about to disappear. In 1974, the airport bus did indeed go as far as Plaça d’Espanya. Rich people did indeed shop for domestic goods at Vinçon. Catalans did indeed look to Switzerland as their ideal state. “Switzerland was the dream,” Roig writes. Men bought their hats at Can Prats, drank a brandy called Torres 10, and had dinner in a restaurant called 7 Portes. To own paintings by Ramón Casas and Isidre Nonell, two 19th-century Catalan painters, was a point of pride. People traveled to Perpignan, just over the border in France, to watch banned films. Intellectuals gathered amid the neoclassical elegance of the Catalan cultural hub, L’Ateneu.

Middle-class kids who had been brought up in the Eixample loved the seedy beauty of downtown Barcelona, as Natàlia does: “What she missed was a certain aroma, a street, the laughter of friends strolling down La Rambla in waves, the shadows around Santa Maria del Mar, the chilly mornings, the leaves of the plane trees when they fell in autumn.” Anyone who knew Barcelona in those years will recognize the “bar on Carrer de Banys Nous where grizzled card sharks and students drank wine and ate olives around barrels that doubled as tables” as El Portalón, and “the old textile-warehouse lobby” near Santa Maria del Mar, now a “large, drafty hall” where “a pair of thick velvet curtains separated two open-plan rooms,” as Zeleste, the nightclub for progressive young Catalans of that time.

The time of cherries, of youthful revolt, was not far away from a time of fear. When the novel came out, a great many citizens of Barcelona had experienced baton charges and vicious police attacks—assaults that were ongoing even as the book was being written and when it was published. But no one had yet written about them. There was no free press. Roig’s account of police violence against students who were protesting the Franco regime, among them Natàlia and her friends, has a sense of urgency that came from her own experience as a young activist.

Roig had taken part in one of the most famous sit-ins in Catalonia during the years before the end of the dictatorship, La Caputxinada. In 1975, when she wrote The Time of Cherries, the memory of that event in 1966 still felt fresh. More than 400 intellectuals and students had demonstrated against the regime in a Capuchin monastery on the outskirts of Barcelona and were surrounded by police for two days.

Though other novelists later wrote about what it was like to navigate these repressive years in Barcelona, no one else described a protagonist having a backstreet abortion in the city. Once again, Roig’s novel broke a silence.

A powerful ghost hovers over the book, that of Puig Antich, the anarchist, who was executed using the garrote vil, whereby the victim is slowly strangled. At the time, no one could tell whether this execution was the regime flexing its muscles or emitting one of its last gasps.

The execution causes one of the family arguments in The Time of Cherries. When Lluís, Natàlia’s brother, refers to Puig Antich as a thief, he gets interrupted by his son: “He wasn’t a thief, Dad.” Lluís then calls Puig Antich a moron. And then, more weakly: “In any event, those zealots are going to make a mess of things and ruin our chances of joining the Common Market.” Lluís is an embodiment of a kind of pragmatism that reigned in those years among the Catalan bourgeoisie.

For others, the execution was chilling. Natàlia’s friend Harmonia blames the Communists for the stalled revolution. Another character sums up the bleak situation: “None of us wants to admit just how powerless we are,” he says. “It’s been years and we’re getting old. Nothing has changed.” The change came later. No one in this novel could have imagined that in the future, a Barcelona street would be named after Maria Aurèlia Capmany and a square on the city’s outskirts would pay tribute to Salvador Puig Antich. A neighborhood park named after Montserrat Roig, who died in 1991, honors her contribution to the reimagining of Barcelona on the brink of change.

This article was adapted from Colm Tóibín’s introduction to the Modern Library edition of  The Time of Cherries. It appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “The Last Days of Franco.”