when we find it Gioconda Belli I was sitting in front of a cafe con leche in Plaza de la Paja, the corner preferred by Javier Marías, who lives here, in Madrid.
It’s Giconda Belli, this blonde woman, smiling, dressed in blonde, her hair done as nature dictates, she loves it, talks about it as if it were an extension of her home, and word Housein an exileexpelled from the country he loved by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, It is a word that looks like a wound, a wish, a sadness.
But here he is, by his house in Madrid, and he’s smiling like that, He talks with great enthusiasm about life, what he’s just written (a new novel), just finished reading (“two great books, one by Julia Navarro, about women, one by David Toscana, one about some madness). Mexicans who want to go to ‘)) talk so much about what her mother told her when she got her period, about the house they now want to move to, about this woman who was born in Managua in 1948 and now has no country or the country that gave it to her, who now welcomes her, despite all the laws. It is very difficult to comply with the survey we made to find out. him, Spain.
So much so that almost everything we prepare (how life is rebuilt, what the new home means, which is the baggage of exile, what a place to write in, how and what new friendships are…) remains in the hands of the journalist. notebook because, facing this smileIt is better not to evoke the mood of sadness that drives this poet, who, like many Nicaraguans expelled from the paradise of his childhood, youth and life, remains. And of course, we’re talking about his life, literature, which neither Daniel Ortega nor his wife Rosario Murillo can steal.companion of the same satrapy.
What does literature mean to you?
I don’t know what my life would be like without literature. He is my source, my food.
Q. How is it going?
R. It came through when I was very young through my grandfather, who was a great reader and had a great photographic memory, and was very progressive and set the eight-hour workday for those who collaborated with him. All of a sudden he started giving me books. For example, from Jules Verne. In “Little Women”. Lope de Vega, which my mother loved. Anyway, reading has been my biggest pastime ever since.
Q. Did that take you to writing or imagination?
R. Imagination first. For example, I was a friend of the sea. I spoke to the sea. I’d go to the edge of the beach and say to him, “Hey, don’t let the waves get my feet wet.” And the sea fulfilled it, hahahahaha.
Q. Do you still have this fantasy?
R. Not at the same level, but yes. It’s just that I’ve always had fantasies: freedom, justice… that’s why I’ve devoted a large part of my youth to this. I also had many fantasies with my children and now my grandchildren. And I like to invent worlds as I write.
Q. These inventions are part of your autobiography, right?
A. Yes, I started working in an advertising agency when I was 19-20 years old. I was already married, huh. And at the agency, I met poets and writers who gave meaning to my life. Because I was bored, I had a husband, a nice person but very boring and thanks to them I found creative energy. Later, we shot commercials with Carlos Mejía Godoy, who composed the music of Devrim, with his music. And that helped me a lot to know what I could do with my life. I grew up in the house next to Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and I saw him being taken away by the dictator Somoza’s men and… that kind of thing struck me, and I wanted to escape from something like that, I wanted joy.
“I met poets and writers who added meaning to my life in the agency”
Q. What was joy for you?
R. I am cheerful by nature because I have a deep optimism. But I also have a melancholic side. But I have a job for joy, I say. Because I believe that I am happy to be on this planet, and I believe that everything that happens to me allows me to strengthen myself. Aristotle said that one should develop one’s potential. I tried to do that too. Being born is such a privilege…
Q. How does memory help you become a Gioconda?
A. A lot. My mother was very important in this because she helped me become a woman. I always say, when you told me how my period was going to come, it looked great to me and I felt so sorry for my brothers because they were never going to happen, hahahahaha. My mother was a very restless woman, a great newspaper, book reader… very educated. When she brought me to school here in Madrid, she took me to all the museums and asked her, “Mom, for what?” I said. But then I realized how important it was. My mother wasn’t very affectionate, but my father was. And that was also very important to me.
Q. What did you get from your father and what did you get from your mother?
R. I have feminine strength and tenderness from my mother. From my father, joy. About all this. My father had a work ethic that he instilled in us. He owned an electrical appliance shop but he was an illegitimate child and they took him to Managua and grew up believing his father was his brother. At 18 he discovered it wasn’t, but hey… My dad worked hard. He worked in a soap factory, sold fabric… My father was not a spoiled child. My father believed in education very much and said to us, “The only thing I will leave you is a good education”. And he put a lot of effort into it and… he succeeded, yes. I have arrogance from my mother. He told me, “Never go out without getting dressed.” And I always do, hahahaha. “The elegant woman looks in the mirror and wonders what to take off and tells what to wear that isn’t elegant,” he said, hahahaha. Something like that. My mom always talked to me about sex and never said anything negative. She told me that making love is the deepest act of communication. She told me what sex is like and that I can do whatever I want. “Nothing is a sin,” he told me.
“My mom told me that making love is the deepest act of communication”
Q. Well, there is a lot of sex appeal in your poem..
A. No, no. It’s not a prayer, Juan. This is the declaration of joy. I have a lofty idea of sexuality. I don’t understand how anyone can sin sex because I wasn’t taught that. This is where my book ‘Infinity in the Palm’ was born, for example where I describe my vision of Eva. Well, all my novels except the last one have a female pretense.
Q. Why not the last one?
R. Because this is the story of my ancestors. My father’s biological mother was named Graciela Zapata and was descended from a duke who supposedly came to Nicaragua to evade the accusation that he had murdered his wife. He fell in love with a beautiful woman and… well, I tell his whole story in ‘The fire of memory’.
Q. What prompted you to write?
R. Drive, reason, I don’t know. I started writing letters when I was in boarding school, and that’s how I moved to other places. I even got a boyfriend by letter, hahahaha. Then idioms started forming in my head and I started writing them down and so I started writing poems.
Q. What gives you the ability to write?
A. Everything. Because being a writer is the best thing that has ever happened to me. When ‘Living Woman’ was successful, it changed my life. From that moment on, I devoted myself solely to writing.
“Being a writer is the best thing that has ever happened to me”
Q. To what do you attribute the success of this book?
R. Well… I don’t know, but it’s been in print and read since 1988.
Q. How was he born?
R. In the dream, he becomes a tree with a woman and he begins to see the woman of the house where the tree is planted. In reality, it was my struggle to create another reality alien to my childhood and privileges. And the indigenous resistance against Fatah. It was so easy for me to feel like a tree! I don’t know why but it was like that. How magical, right?
Q. You have now finished writing a novel here in Spain. About what?
R. is about a mother’s relationship with her daughters during the pandemic. She is a Nicaraguan woman who arrived in Madrid when the quarantine started and had to make up with her mother because she had always been half-abandoned. This is a novel about disappointment, I say.
You read a poem called ‘I have nowhere to live’ in S. Cádiz. He touched the audience as if you were undressed in the street where you were fired. How was this poem born?
R. Well, when I realized I had nowhere to live. I was at my daughter’s house and I said, “I can’t stay here, where should I go? I have no place to stay.” It was a ‘shock’. I left Nicaragua for America, believing that I would return to my country, but then they started catching a lot of people and… I better not go back.
Q. Is this poem more than just a poem?
A. Well… yes. Because it defines me, because it shows me as I am. I reread that poem yesterday because it was refugee day and… not having a place to live is the story of refugees, right? And also live by thinking about what’s left. When I lived in the United States for a few years, I lived centered in Nicaragua, I cried for Nicaragua… And now here in Spain I plan to do the opposite: I plan to live here and now. I am a woman who wants to live intensely. It must be because of that.