After the success of Tríptic (Permagel, Boulder, Mamut) and appearing on the short list for the Booker Prize, Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, 1978) says she is leaving motherhood aside and presenting a new novel, Ocàs i fascinació (Club Editor). As in the previous ones, a woman tells the story of herself, who in this case is walking along the edge of the cliff.
He has done all kinds of jobs; Also a cleaning woman?
Yes, I have been a cleaning woman. But many years ago. She was studying at university and lived here in Barcelona. She worked as a waitress in a place where they treated me very badly and I thought: I clean very well!
Why does it clean so well?
My mother taught me. With what she instructed me I thought: I prefer to live more peacefully cleaning houses. And I cleaned a few houses, in Eixample. It was just a season, a year maybe. I mean, I know what I'm talking about.
Describe in detail what to do with each material. Did his mother teach him all that?
Not everything, I have been learning. Sometimes I went to houses where I was alone with an old woman. While she worked, the old woman taught me things, gave me conversation, followed me, made me rest, prepared me a coffee with milk and some cookies.
Why did you like that job more than working at the bar?
Because I didn't have to deal with so many people, because I could be alone with my thoughts. It did not require being aware of orders, colleagues, or clients. I was cleaning, a lonely occupation. For me it was much better, because I set my schedule, I organized myself just the way I wanted. I like cleaning, but they took a lot of advantage of me and I got tired. I remember Christmas was approaching and a lot of people called me just to clean their dirty kitchens from all year round, and then they kicked me out.
There are things that remind us of its protagonist.
Yes, of course, I was cheap, like her. I like that world of being alone, of not having to socialize. And also because it is very interesting to enter people's houses. You are one of the few people outside the family unit who is allowed into their rooms, their dressers, their bedside tables and, of course, discover things. Not because you poke around, but because you can see them. That's what I say in the book: the house has secrets, stories, and it wants to explain them to you, you read them. And that interested me a lot.
He explains it with this character who has no name and who “is less than a pet.”
He is a person who enters and leaves, and must not leave a personal trace.
But it also deceives people: a three-hour day is organized to work two.
In some ways, she's kind of a scammer. She does the job, she does it well, she also knows how to make it look great. And she is capable of reserving an hour to take advantage of the people who have hired her and enjoy those houses. Her house is those houses, more than the room she has rented, where she only goes to sleep.
Is the key to everything the job and housing crisis?
It is a thread that I had already hinted at in the triptych, but I wanted to go deeper, because I have also suffered it, because in the end I see myself as a writer, as a symptom of my time. I don't talk about the past or the future, I exactly show figures from the present. And I have found myself living like this. Not on the street, even though, when I went on Erasmus to Berlin, I spent two nights on the street, so I know what it's like to sleep on the street: the nights are very long.
How come he had to sleep on the street?
Well, because I didn't make a reservation at a hostel correctly and then there was no internet, no credit cards, and I didn't have any money.
She has a job but no home.
Today that is happening. Now there are people who have such a miserable job, who have money to eat, but they don't even have money to pay for a rented room. Furthermore, the city is bloodthirsty: it creates solitaires and forces them to live together.
There is also a metaphor of houses as enlarged wombs: “A womb inside a woman inside a house. “A house within a town within borders.”
It is the need we have to feel welcomed. There is this belonging: no one can take your uterus away from you, but they can take away your house. All of those security layers are relative; They give security when you have them. When she is at Trudi's house she feels safe, it saves her exactly from the elements. But if they fail, you are doomed to the cold.
And we come to Trudi, the other cleaning woman.
Trudi is the one who gives you the hug. A hug doesn't save you, but it gives you the courage to save you. It is solidarity, it is what is needed. It is the truly human and selfless relationship, because she doesn't know her at all. And that happens. And I think we have to go further here, weaving networks of help towards each other.
Trudi speaks in Spanish, the tenants are Colombian...
Trudi is a cleaning woman, and most of the ones I have met in my life are Spanish speakers. I do it for verisimilitude. And with respect to Colombian women, I have lived as a renter with Colombians, Europeans, Brazilians... Let's say that in the books I reflect my universe, without writing an autobiography. Why do I have to invent something different? I'm already inventing a story, with that mirror effect.
It is not politically correct.
That does not matter to me. My advantage in this sense is that I write for myself, I don't write thinking about how it will be read, whether it may be uncomfortable, the sensitivities. I write exactly what interests me and I disassociate myself from the book once it has come out. That makes me free, it gives me a lot of peace. If the reviews are good, grateful and happy, and if they are bad, too, because they make sense, obviously, and I think they can all be understood. But I live apart from the discourse that is being built on the book and everything that is said. I'm not on the networks, I don't follow it. Only if someone tells me about it. And if they give me a comment it is always welcome, it means that they have read the book.
When the protagonist works as a cleaning woman, she talks about the secrets of the house, about creating a center in each room, the eroticism of touching everything.
In this book there is no sex, however in my previous books you found sex. This woman lives sensuality, just like Boulder, she also lived it, working with bread dough and with food, apart from with other women. In this case she conveys eroticism in the fact of being in other people's houses and caressing, touching, caring for, polishing other people's objects. I say it with a couple of sentences throughout the book and she's done, we don't see her masturbating with a vase of flowers either. It is also a way of understanding her work as a poetic work. She is a woman who values beauty. She likes being there and says so: “I have walked on the best carpets, I have sat on the best sofas.”
In the second part, the fascination, he loses all of that and makes up for it with his inner world.
She is already in her inner world and begins to make her house a sanctuary. It is when she takes out everything there is and turns it into a kind of monastery, which is at the same time a fortress, because she wants to protect everything. She ends up becoming obsessed because her world is to preserve that virgin that she has at home.
What inspired this story and this character?
It was a voice that I found and that interested me, and I wanted to tell the story of a cleaning woman. But she was not just any cleaning woman, but one who had her life very organized and very well set up. This woman who has a degree and is working in cleaning, she lives much better than people with a degree working where she is supposed to fit because of her studies. She finds her niche and lives very well.
He has studied pedagogy.
Yes, like me, a degree with few exits.
But does he end up living on the street for a few days?
That is not an accident and that is why he wonders when the decisions he has been making have been wrong and how he has become poorer. She is a woman who seemed to come from plenty, with a career, you might think she has a more or less good family, but she makes a series of bad decisions. We have created a society in which everything leads you there. It is very easy to go from sharing a flat with friends to renting a room in a stranger's house. It's a decision made in one day when, boom, you're already getting poorer, and you're getting poorer, and you're getting poorer, and you end up on the street, and thanks to Trudi appearing with that solidarity, you get out of there and find your place in the world, which is not what it seemed like it was destined for.
And everything is dismantled again.
I was interested in creating a character who is satisfied with his life. Now, when she is left out in the open for the second time, when she no longer has the courage to get up, I began with fascination, because she wanted to address mysticism, literary speaking. I don't consider myself especially religious, but I did go to a school for priests and I have a tradition. And I am very happy to have a tradition that makes no difference whether it is Catholic Christian, Muslim or Hebrew, whatever. My imagination has fed me, they are vertebrae. So, I wanted to live spirituality. I spend time in my life listening or going for a walk in the forest, and feeling this oneness, this feeling that we are much more interconnected than it would seem. I really wanted to create a story where there was a character that borders on this mystique. And I have done it with several layers of reading. Fascination is full of Mary's life, there are scenes from Mary's life: when she is a beast of burden, or when she follows the path of adoration, or the star that is always in the sky, the star that announced the birth. I combine all these elements of my own Christian tradition with a story that may not have a reading like that, but it can have one.
At the beginning of the novel she is kicked out of a rented room.
She is on the street and at that moment she has thoughts about doing evil. She realizes that doing evil requires a lot of awareness.
But it is not exactly a murder novel, although it reflects on the desire to kill.
Arriving at the end of both a civilization and her own personal history, the protagonist no longer has a way to survive. Or just as she would like to continue surviving, she sees that it is impossible. She then begins to hear her own voices and begins to inhabit her world, which is half fantasy, half reality, but it is her own world, oriented to spirituality and where she creates a virgin. In the twilight what I have done is show where we are, how we are living, who we are and what is happening. This weather, this fragility, this precariousness.
About jobs and housing?
And human relationships. I show the portrait of a woman in this situation, in this painting. And then, what way out does she give? A manic exit. And fascination is like entering one's own unconscious and going to see what we have.
What do we have at the bottom of everything?
The origin of eros and thanatos, of love and death. Because fascination is an adoration and at the same time an annihilation: of a caste, of a love, of motherhood, of a social system, of a woman...
A kind of virgin.
Exactly, a sublimated woman, an icon. She has to do that to give meaning to her life. She is in a society that has led her to almost have this desire to cease to exist. She doesn't want to die, but she wants to cease to exist.
Catalan version, here
