What happens when the bonds between sisters don't work and comfort has to be sought in unexpected places? How are the family's unchosen affections traced? As happens with the solar eclipse that serves as the premise of the novel, in which the celestial bodies do not touch, but cast shadows on each other, Berta Dávila (Santiago de Compostela, 1987) creates in The Imaginary Wound (Ed. Destino) two parallel stories between Marga and Paula, between Beatriz and the narrator –unnamed–, two pairs of sisters who have not known how to mean more to each other.
“Although it is a story about grief, loss and the search for consolation, the center is the wound as an anomaly, as an accident that modifies the planned course and forces one to relocate in the world,” says the author of Carrusel (2019) and The loved ones (2022).
What meaning does that imaginary wound have?
The book arose from the intention of writing a fiction that confused what we usually call “the real” with “the imaginary” in the lives of characters who do not relate well to the wound. The novel almost always tells what the shell is like that all the characters build to avoid looking at what is inside. At first it seems that it is only about avoiding a conflict, but what they propose is a particular way of dealing with it, the only one they know or are capable of developing. Finally, the imaginary is as real as the real.
Grief for a father, not feeling valuable in anything or not fitting into the world of adults are the reasons that almost nullify the existence of your protagonists...
It is the circumstances prior to the injury that we sense in the characters that determine everything else. A job that forces us to spend a lot of time alone at home, a dysfunctional family, the feeling of lack of roots with respect to everything that belongs to us and to which we belong, the place of origin, the material conditions... All this determines decisive is their way of relating to what happens to them afterwards and also their way of dealing with it and what they can allow themselves to dream about.
There is uprooting between the sisters. Do faulty ties also sustain us?
Not all the bonds that sustain us are deep and meaningful, and perhaps they don't need to be. They support us equally despite that or even precisely for that reason. Many of our family or more lasting ties provide structure to our lives, they have a lot to do with the people we are, with our life story, and yet, one does not always understand oneself completely with family, or with very close friends. ancient. But that does not mean that one does not understand each other at all or that there is a lacerating conflict or that we only preserve them out of habit. The decision to preserve them is in itself what indicates their importance.
On the contrary, they find comfort in other people...
The encounter with unknown people, in central moments, ends up saving, so to speak, the four protagonists. It is something that has to do with chance, with everything that we do not have under control, but also with belonging to a community. A moment of communion, any afternoon, for example, at a demonstration or a concert, with a completely unknown woman who perhaps we will never see again, can have a deep and important meaning, sometimes more important than an ancient dinner. high school students.
The protagonists are indolent to the eclipse that arrives. This already denotes his way of being in the world…
I think it says something about how contemporary solitudes are configured, but, above all, I liked the idea of pointing out the disconnection that exists between what happens and a priori should be special and what really matters to the people in the community where that happens. .
In their respective escapes, they arm themselves or reconstruct themselves in their own way. Isn't it always necessary to have a life purpose?
I believe that we are not born with a purpose in life, nor with a destiny. But it is always about seeking meaning in what we do, and that is valuable and can be a sufficient purpose.
