The mere possibility that something like this could have happened in contemporary Spain is hard to imagine, but it did happen: on October 23, 1980 in Ortuella, Vizcaya, a propane gas explosion killed 50 children and three adults at the town school. Now Fernando Aramburu (San Sebastián, 1959) departs from that misfortune in El Niño (Tusquets), the new installment of his novel series Basque People, to address how we cope with an omnipresent theme in his works: trauma.
“It was almost an extermination. It is said that an entire generation was lost. I experienced the event when I was 21 years old and it left a deep mark on me, revived because I was a teacher of children for more than two decades, some of the age of those who died in Ortuella. Added to that is the fact that I am writing a series of short novels and stories in which I try to draw a human portrait of people from my homeland during the time I lived. And this fact challenged me directly. And there was narrative substance,” Aramburu reasons about the origin of a story that portrays the different paths followed by the members of an affected family.
A story in which the novel itself speaks and questions the author's decisions. A story that borders on magical realism and at the same time is so truthful that the reader doubts where the invention begins. “I start from the episode to construct a fiction that is the result of my own inventiveness,” he says, “and in which the main thematic element is the personal effort to develop a strategy that allows one to assimilate the misfortune or seek some type of consolation in the face of it. Overcome it, find the right place in your memory so that it does not appear excessively in nightmares. Time passes, what do we do? How we do? My novel chooses a small cast where you can see that each one tries to come to terms with what happened in their own way. At the same time, it brings to light personal, marital, and work stories that lead us to imagine a social drawing of that time, from the industrial crisis to terrorism.”
“What the hell is pain for? "I have asked myself this many times," the mother, the protagonist of this novel, confesses to the author, where after the tragedy some choose life, others choose death, and others, like the grandfather, use their imagination to invent their own reality. And sacrifice everything to her. “I understand this character. And it seems to me more common than it might seem at first glance for human beings to deny problems and misfortunes, because that saves you from having to solve them,” she reflects.
And he concludes that he is very interested in addressing trauma, “particularly when it is associated with childhood. I am fixated on Lazarillo de Tormes, the first book I read that goes head-to-head into the issue. It's not just about the existence of trauma, but something that has to do with my philosophy of life. How can we make people who have suffered suffer less? How can we free them a little from their pain, their grief? People who have lost a relative murdered, suffered an accident. How can we, among ourselves, console ourselves, free ourselves a little from the negative burdens, the nightmares? I was raised to compassion. Now they call it empathy. As a child I had a very strong sensitivity when someone got hurt. I haven't gotten rid of that, nor do I need to. And in my novels I share the way I face human destiny.”
