This formidable woman (Zaragoza, 1979) has a unique book, Infinity in Junco, written in the midst of hospital anxiety, after the birth of her son, and which makes reading history – and humanity – her weapon. Uncertainty about the child’s current and future health. The work was a worldwide success and he was collected sensitively and joyfully, knowing that writing was his food. Joy is close to her, her son Pedro, her husband Quique, and their friends. Today, his friends are from many different nationalities, because he invited them to read books with him.
His passion is reading. Accompany the reading. As a result of this passion that became his life, he had previously written, among others, a book of stories called The Legend of the Gentle Tides, illustrated by his friend Lina Vila. This legend, from a trove of Ovid’s writings, reappears in Siruela, the publishing house that published Ovid’s most famous books. At the same time, a version of The Infinity in a Junco was published as a graphic novel on Debate. The drawings in this example are by Tyto Alba.
Listening to him speak is like watching him write (with his left hand), and here you have the opportunity to enjoy what he says, as if he were telling it to the ears of those who cannot yet hear it in public. She already looks like she comes from all ages, but she laughs as if she’s still the girl learning to read with her mother.
It is possible to see his face in this drawing that opens his book…
Yes, it is indeed a portrait… This book is now saved by Siruela but was published in 2015 by an independent Aragonese publishing house. It had been out of print for years, so I’m so grateful to Siruela for saving it. When the project was born, I wanted to write it because it was part of mourning the death of my father… For me, it is important to literary detail the difficult moments or great challenges of life. And I wanted to write a book for this situation, so I went back to the classics, especially Ovid’s The Metamorphosis, and wrote a children’s or teenage story that talked about death, but also about change, not about fear of death, but about transformation, about reunion. future, but it’s an adventure to conquer life after loss and find a way back to everything you left behind. It was a story by Ovid that came to my mind, haunted me, and I decided to make this re-creation, working with Lina Vila, an Aragonese painter I know. I had visited his exhibitions, and even though I had not met him, I felt that the world of his paintings was the universe in which the story I was about to tell took place. He was also in a mourning phase, and we both decided to externalize, to exorcise, that experience through this story. We worked very intensively together, so the text was reflected in the images, but the watercolors also had their own effects, their own ebb and flow in the text.
And this has indeed been achieved…
I really liked Lina’s idea of working with watercolour, which is unusual in children’s picture books, but I said that in a nautical book like this, working with water was very symbolically appropriate to the text, but also because watercolor is a technique. you have to improvise; You don’t have to play with unpredictable water stains. This also had to do with the idea of metamorphosis. The truth is that that’s why it was such an intense collaboration. This wasn’t just writing the text and then moving forward with the illustrations; It was about working together and looking at a creative process in a language other than the language of painting, the image. From the fruit that was so integrated and so intense, for example, the gift that Lina gave me when she portrayed me at the beginning of the book was born. On the other hand, Lina’s brother is a bird photographer and the images in the book consist of photographs taken by him.
What does Irene Vallejo say in that portrait?
I look at him now over the years and see a certain sadness for the moment he lived through. He places a cloak of stars around my shoulders. Maybe it has to do with the dreams I could express at that time, when literature was still an unattainable way of life for me. So I was constantly traveling to little fairs, little libraries in the real world. It was a time of efforts, dreams, idealism. And I think it’s all in this image.
Writing this story, and writing in general, saved you from pain and grief…
Pain and grief are stages that you cannot ignore. You can’t delete it, you can’t prevent it, you can’t speed it up, you can’t block it. But literature has always accompanied me both in my difficult moments and in my happiest moments. I am modest about the act of saving, but I think the books I read accompany me and make me feel less alone. Reading and writing are interconnected and allow me to escape the obsession that often accompanies these difficult moments. Hospitals, death, grief, emptiness, suffering tend to suck you in like a black hole. So literature helps me escape the injustice that pain does to our minds and thoughts.
In a way, Infinity in the Reed was made in times of pain. How do you remember that moment now?
It’s been a long time since my parents died. Then came the birth of my son, who had serious health problems. It’s a very difficult time. I needed all the support, all the crutches, including the things I have always needed most: Creation and the word. Because really, at that time, it seemed impossible to me to get out of my father’s pain, find my son’s illness, and start the cycle of hospitals and care all over again. For almost ten years, I took care of my father and then my son. It was such a difficult moment because they both needed me in their own time and I was afraid because the caregiver needs to stay healthy and strong and accompany and stay on course so that the tides don’t drag you away… We haven’t yet voiced everything that happened to us during the pandemic. There are many farewells and mourning that we cannot detail due to the rush to return to daily life. I believe literature helps navigate potentially difficult conversations about our own pain. Metaphors, characters’ stories, and stories will make it even more difficult to address this pain from the past. That’s why I think this book, like Infinity in a Reed, can help in some way.
What does the act of writing mean to you personally?
I always thought writing was a way to free myself and combat silence. But after traveling the world over these years and meeting readers and editors, for example, at the Buenos Aires Fair, I realized that this is a highly collective activity, that we create communities through books. Maybe I wasn’t aware of this because until Eternity in the Reed I had no contact with groups, families, tribes, reading clans, in short, the reading clan… And now I realized the extent of it. that we build through literature. I am fascinated by how in Latin America books and reading are used as tools of reconstruction to heal the wounds of societies subjected to violence. I hope that this polarization, this whole atmosphere of confrontation and verbal aggression that has spread all over the world can somehow be softened with stories, fiction, literature.
Could a big part of your success be that people not only read it but, above all, read it with you?
I’d like to think so too. When I write, I want the written record to have a verbal dimension, the person reading it, or at least that’s how I want it, to have a presence speaking next to him, gently guiding his voice. with a closeness from you to you. I want those who read it to feel this, too.
In this last book, which includes dangers and death, you yourself warn that there will be compensation in the future. So your drawing and you encourage you to feel that there will be calm in the midst of the storm…
Thank you for this synthesis… I wanted to play with all these metaphors because I think the feeling of suffocation is also a feeling we feel during the pandemic period. The stories have to do with the “and they ate partridges” situation in one way or another. I like to play with expectations and challenge them. So much so that, as in this story, the big drama, the big episode is not the essence of the story… And by changing the rhythm of what is happening, another story is built, represented by its own part. dreamlike This visit to the world of dreams allows for reunion with the previous life and union with the next life… I also like to think that Lina’s watercolor illustrations carry a very strong message that should be respected in her own literature, adding a lot to it. So much so that she is full of these blue atmospheres and displays her own eloquence.
As soon as the book begins, when there is no definite danger left, the heroes become alienated from each other, like “cloud chasers”, an expression that the clouds are the beginning of the storm that immediately creates fear…
The symbols have all been chosen very carefully. Cloud is the harbinger of the storm and moreover clouds are pure metamorphosis. Changing shapes. When we look at clouds as children, we see images and figures lost in them. Of course, in the book I am the weird girl, and I was the same way at school. In literature, I reconcile myself with this weirdness of mine, and I also write for today’s weird boys and girls to see if they feel a little more accompanied, or maybe they already know that most of us are weird after all. I think the most abnormal thing is normality. Statistically, there are very few normal people, and almost all of us are weird in some way.
You are a rare figure in Spanish literature.
It is true that this passion for the classics has perhaps provided me with references different from the backgrounds shared by other writers of my generation. But in the end, whoever writes always has their own unique, original and unique way of looking at the world. So we are a brotherhood of weirdos.
Now, Debate is bringing its worldwide success to the Infinity in a Reed drawing, interpreted by cartoonist Tyto Alba. What did this new dimension of your business force you to do?
I wanted to give Tyto creative freedom because I think because it’s an adaptation, it’s also his reading, his take on the book. In any case, questions arose about the images of the text, about the reconstructions he wanted us to make together, and he asked me for fresco engravings from the Alexandrian period, for example, because he wanted to be confident in his representation. they are good. But we got to the more personal part and he asked me for family photos; For example, while he was telling me stories, he included my age as well as a photo of my school garden… At the end of this episode, it became a family album. everyone is at home… Therefore, this book has the atmosphere of a volume in which we share both literary and drawing atmospheres. All of this was very exciting for me: to see how he constructed with his pen what I had in mind while writing. He did very brave things, switched from black and white to color, painted full-page watercolors, experimented with representation… And I find all those portraits entertaining, representing the writers with whom I have a dialogue in the epilogue. .
I asked him the first word he remembers saying to her some time ago. She said it was Mambo. What would your say be now?
To listen. Listen to find yourself. Listen to people, even for brief moments. Listen, listen, listen.