When Andrés Neuman (Buenos Aires, 1977) found out that he was going to be a father, he felt that his universe was expanding, both vitally and literary. He first wrote Umbilical (2022), a moving story about the gestation of a father and now returns to bookstores with Little Talker (Alfaguara), in which he does not hide his emotions as his son begins to talk.
How does life change when you become a father?
Routines transform, but I don't have the feeling that you become another person, quite the opposite. Everything you have received, enjoyed and suffered begins to resonate simultaneously. It is inevitable to return to the past.
Is going back something that bothers you?
I had a tough childhood, in a very violent and difficult time for my native country, Argentina, and no one likes to revisit that black hole. My family went into exile and there were many cases of kidnappings and persecutions. The conflicts that this flight generated in my childhood, which were many, I thought I had digested them but it turns out that I haven't.
The duels reopen.
It's very sad to know that I can't introduce my mother to my son. I thought I had grieved, but she had done it as a son and not as a father. My son once again leaves me an orphan in a sense and, at the same time, inaugurates a loving bond of a power unknown to me.
New sensations on the surface.
Both past and future. Everything becomes uncertain. You know that, if everything is going biologically well, you will not be able to always accompany your child.
Does that scare you?
It is the law of life. I don't know how long I'll be here. It's something I reflect on often, I guess because I lost my mother at a very young age. So, it seemed to me that there was no time to waste in starting the conversation with my son about his own memory.
It narrates his first three years.
Because they are key. In the first three years of life, many of the transcendental things that make us human occur. And it is curious because we will not remember almost anything that happens to us during this period. Neither being born, nor walking, nor having learned to speak...
Is that why there are few narratives focused on this stage?
That is. Our early childhood is made of other people's stories.
Does anyone particularly excite you?
The first time I heard my son speak in the past tense. We were playing and the noise of an engine was heard and then he said 'dad, a car passed by'. It may seem silly, but it moved me.
Did you get excited?
I filled my eyes with tears. I understood that he was already a little speaker and that he was no longer a baby.
The language empowered him.
Until that moment, he felt vulnerable and limited. I had not fallen into that critical stage in which learning a language is not a tool of liberation, but a kind of obstacle. As the months passed, he became more aware that he did not know how to express himself well, and that generated frustration in him that led to tantrums.
Do you think that more and more writers will be encouraged to write about their paternal experience?
There are men who have always done it, but until now it does not seem that it has permeated much into the imagination of fiction or art. It is true that there are more and more of us who tell our experiences and try to demystify parenting, but in volume we are much fewer than the authors who talk about motherhood, perhaps because it is more difficult and painful for us to take off the mantle of heroes that we never were. .
