Plot
Juan Marés is a man from a humble background, the son of a frustrated zarzuela seamstress and an illusionist known as Fu-Ching, the magician. He grew up in Barcelona during the 1950s, dreaming of leaving his poverty behind. During his youth in the 1970s, he meets his future wife. He was in a photograph exhibit, when just coincidence involved him with a group who was organizing a hunger strike for four days. There, he meets Norma Valenti, the only daughter of a wealthy family of traditional Catalan background. In spite of big economical, social and cultural differences between them, Juan and Norma get married.
Norma works for the department of linguistics of Catalonia while Juan or Joan, his Catalan name, is overwhelmed by the social position acquired through the marriage. There is little use in Marés’ new life for his skills as ventriloquist or accordion player. After five years, the marriage starts to fall apart, when Norma’s real character comes to the surface. The beautiful Norma is a proud, cold woman with dark sexual tendencies. She has a special attraction for low class men who are “charnegos” (people who are not Catalan). Norma also has a particular fetish with shoes, the men she sleeps with have to hold a shoe with the sole force of their erection. Juan returns home one evening, earlier than expected. He finds his unfaithful wife having sex with a shoe shiner charnego. Face with proof of her infidelity, Norma, tired of her husband, just leaves him for good.
Juan keeps the apartment he used to share with his wife but without her support he is reduced to scratch a living from the streets playing the accordion and begging for money in las Ramblas. While performing on the streets, he is caught in the middle of a confrontation between a pro-Catalan language group and a Spanish right wing extremists. Juan plays the anthem of Catalonia which makes him a target of the extremists who throw a Molotov cocktail at him, burning him.
Horribly disfigured in the explosion, Juan Marés falls deeper into indigence and schizophrenic hallucinations. His personality is transformed by his misfortune. He is obsessed with the happiness he has lost and with the memory of his wife. He encounters Norma a couple of times, first while he is performing on the streets, but she does not recognize him in his new painful condition. Marés talks to her again during the carnival in Barcelona, under the disguise of the invisible man; only at the end of their small talk, he gives her a clue about his identity. Another day he calls her up at work pretending to need help in the translation of many words from Spanish to Catalan.
His hallucinations increase and a new identity starts to take shape in his mind: the emphatically non-Catalan Juan Faneca. Faneca has a strong, deep Murcian accent, a pencil mustache, sharp sideburns and eye patch. He is a charnego from Murcia and childhood friend of Marés, coming back to Barcelona after years living as a worker in Germany.
Juan Marés, now under the disguise of Juan Faneca, tries first his new identity with his lonely neighbor, Griselda, whom he seduces starting an affair. Later with the excuse of looking for Juan Marés, Faneca gets closer to Norma and his dream is fulfilled. They have a one night stand. By then the seductiveness of the happier personality of Juan Faneca has completely taken over Marés, who is no more. A future with Griselda awaits now Faneca.
Read more about this topic: The Bilingual Lover
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