It has been 48 years since Clara Obligado (Buenos Aires, 1950) left Argentina to come to a Spain that had just emerged from the Franco regime. But, no matter how much time passes, "we must not lose good habits," she assures while she delights with a Milanese in a restaurant in Barcelona. A dish that brings back good memories of her land, which she has been talking about so much in recent months with the arrival of Javier Milei to the presidency. "We are all expectant and, above all, worried," she admits.
The Catalan capital welcomed the author last week with open arms – and with dulce de leche pancakes – where she came to talk about her new book, Three Ways to Say Goodbye (Páginas de Espuma), a book halfway between the story and novel, "that territory so frequented by authors like Alice Munro", which brings together three women, their profound losses and the various spaces and times in which they lived.
"I started this book before the pandemic, but I had to stop, because the fiction was on the streets and bringing it home was too much." Now, after two essays – A House Away From Home and Everything That Grows – "I have found myself ready to return, although I have realized that I am better at essays than literature. It may be because this book, despite to be fiction, be the most autobiographical of all," he admits.
Obligado admits that "I had no idea where to start. I had never felt so lost. I started writing and, after the first story, in which I asked myself what a hero was and what the price of being one is, the rest It's already started to flow." A narrative that covers this experience "from the Odyssey to the woman who was a victim of the Spanish Civil War" and that was inspired by many of the stories of the war that a neighboring couple told her years ago, when she lived in a town in Guadalajara.
The Argentine writer rescues that same protagonist, already widowed and 70 years old, in her second story and describes mature love. "It bothers me that love is not talked about at certain ages. It is supposed to be suspended. Women stop producing, being desired and almost being human beings," laments Obligado, who also reflects on her condition as a grandmother, something about which has been going around for a long time. "The grandmothers of my generation were hippies and many of us left the cliché of crochet and the wing chair. We have nothing to do with that and, many times, that makes our children uncomfortable and strains relationships."
Dystopia also takes place in its pages, since one of the plots is located "in a place similar to Russia", in a universe in which Ukraine has won the war and governs in "an idiotic class" in which "the grain economy". A story that "forces us to rethink "the miserable place the world is becoming." Despite everything, Obligado considers herself a "radical optimist." "If we writers have any function, it is none other than that of create a possible utopia, no matter how dark it may seem at times, and try to believe it. If not, what are we left with?
