Empty Houses went from being an online novel to being published by Sexto Piso, followed by the Tigre Juan Award, international distribution, translations, sales of audiovisual rights… Now the latter is published and what perspective does it have? Did you experience all that process?
My problem is that the Empty Houses don’t end. There isn’t a day that I don’t get a comment or anything, and it’s such a heavy burden because I feel like I’m getting further and further away. There are things that some people tell me they can feel recognized for, but I distanced myself from or started to criticize. Even though I understand that my part is over and the book is defending itself. I think Ceniza en la boca has a more distant way, and I appreciate that, because I want to talk about literature rather than being the gender violence expert that happened to me in the previous one.
House cleaners and caregivers are common characters in fiction, tending to appear only as minor, background characters. You highlight them. Was that the main idea of this novel?
The main idea is that a boy committed suicide by throwing himself from a fifth-floor apartment in Madrid. The issue of caregivers… Just yesterday, a colleague of yours told me, “Okay, but this woman is a very smart girl”. Implicit was “being cleaner, no formal training”. That was part of my intention: you don’t need formal training to have your own vision of the world, and you don’t need to have any specific experience as a writer to understand these unreal issues. very attractive to most writers, should be included in literary conversation
How was the process of creating this look?
Fiction has the possibility of letting the imagination fly and getting a believable character. It was very natural for me to give a voice to a cleaning lady, how can it be natural to give a voice to an astronaut who is very technical but still has ordinary human needs and needs to clean? his dishes. I like to start a novel and then start reading what I’ve written. So I feel like I can talk about what I’ve added to the novel without these readings affecting me. Then, on the other hand, I like to start reading what I’m talking about and say “oh, we’ve got communication ships” or “it’s about the same thing”. Although I think the novel continues to talk about my main concerns in life: the care and position of women in the world.
At a time when feminism was fragmented in 8-M, the heroine reflects another split within the movement, particularly between students—young white women and bourgeois families—and the group that originally housed the hero, “cousins.” “, immigrant and precarious women. What drew you to this conflict?
Of course, I’m not saying anything new. These groups of women like cousins, the Kellys, and many other women claiming their rights as cleaners, caregivers… I have to say that this hurts me a lot. Especially in Barcelona I had to see the performances of cleaning women, Hispanic or Latino American and they were always very lonely, with two or three curious people who used to be Latino and weren’t at the same time. In the meantime, stay. This is something that hurts me personally. We are talking about what rights in the public sphere and what honorable life we are defending for whom, when it is cleared by these people.
There is a stark difference between immigrants and those born in Spain: Immigrants are not asked their own version of the facts, they are not spoken for. In his novel, it is seen that the lives of both of them pass in parallel realities and only occasionally touch. What needs to happen for this to change?
One of the scenes that cost me the most to write but felt I should include is the scene where Diego is chased with a stick when he returns home. This happens not only with immigrants, but often with poor people. There is always a very essentialist vision that they are violent, barbaric. And good and civilized people are those who violate them. And they say “why are you raising your voice”, “why do you experience violence”. Because you are attacking him. And a person or group will not stop feeling angry until they stop attacking them. This problem that the vulnerable people, including us women, the poor… have, will in any case be resolved when those in power stop being angry with us for existing; They are angry at us for making their streets ugly, we are making their landscapes ugly, and we are making their very modern capitalist world ugly with human needs. They’re mad at us, and when they’re done, they’ll probably want to talk because we talk all the time.