Almost thirty years have passed since then Elvira Lindo He created the character Manolito Gafotas, with whom he stepped into the world of children’s literature. The character is already part of the author’s past; She transitioned into adult literature in 1998 to become one of the best-known writers on the national stage. In her latest novel, In the Wolf’s Mouth, Lindo introduces the reader to the story of Julieta, who arrives in a village at the age of eleven and finds the perfect place to escape a trauma she doesn’t know how to do. name.
Were you clear from the beginning that you wanted to tell this story?
The novel was born thinking about the landscape that was so familiar to me. The landscape of my childhood is the landscape of my mother’s land, a sparsely populated rural village. I started thinking of a mystery novel. We all leave the ghost of our childhood and youth somewhere important, and the first thing that came to my mind was that that ghost was me, but I am so saturated with autofiction literature.
And he decided to create the character of Juliet. Where did it originate from?
This character was created from thousands of conversations I had with women who were abused as children. I wrote this story with pure humanity and friendship.
There are many people who were abused in their childhood. Is there enough talk?
Now there is a tendency to show everything. In fact, I could have promoted the book much better if I had explained the shocking nature of the subject and the abuse itself. But what was important to me was to know what the trauma of abuse was over the years and to express the thoughts of someone who experienced it and did not know how to express it.
Can the wound of abuse be healed?
It doesn’t cure him. We always set out based on our experiences and no one can solve anything. But it is definitely possible to live with this in your past, and it should be said so, because otherwise we condemn people to always be victims. Those who are abused try to live a normal, fulfilling life, but the wound suddenly opens and causes a lot of distress. Having people who can express it verbally and not stigmatize it is the hardest thing.
This girl talks to other women who are at the center of the novel. Among them is Emma, a free woman.
He was a very important character for me. For the girl, meeting a motherly woman was very different from meeting a completely different woman who believed in free love, a radical, very advanced and groundbreaking pedagogy… those so common in the culture of the eighties. . But he doesn’t know how to calibrate his actions well. She comes from a city with a population of eleven and doesn’t know how to reconcile her desire for freedom into such a small society.
And it is in this countryside where the most interesting conversations between generations take place.
There are many confessional speeches in the novel. Emma tells her story and the girl listens but doesn’t understand because she is hurt. Interestingly, each of them talks about their own experience, their own age, such a different time. Sometimes what we need is just to listen.
Are the children resting?
They are listened to in a very special way. When a child is very sensitive or very creative, he or she tends to have seemingly deep thoughts, but quickly realizes that if they express them, adults will greet them with laughter. He quickly suppressed it because he wasn’t trying to be funny. We adults are losing the sensitivity of knowing how we were as children and need to remember how we wanted to be heard. We largely condition the future of childhood by wrong listening.
The girl’s mother isn’t the typical mother who ignores her daughter either, right?
What I describe in the book happens relatively frequently. The mother figure seems to be the one who listens and protects, but in some cases she is the one who multiplies the trauma. If the child does not receive support from those who need it, this causes the trauma to continue and increase exponentially.
Today there are mothers who admit that they really do not want to have children. Is it a taboo subject?
I think you should be careful. I come from a generation where mothers said a lot of ugly things. But if today’s generations have not heard of these, it is because they are the children of people who speak to a certain extent because we think it may affect the child. The feeling of saying ‘This is beyond me’ was a force that mothers had to complain about, but efforts were made to control it in order not to create trauma.
And isn’t this containment exercise being carried out now?
We are not in a period of containment now. It seems like everyone has to say what they think right away. You should be careful about this because life is longer and what you say may disturb you.