On Sundays, to the lake. It is a childhood memory of Maria Barbal (Tremp, 1949), when they would spend the day in the Sant Antoni reservoir, which frames her latest novel, Al llac (Column).
It's a day in the life of twelve-year-old Nora. "Remembering that summer is like turning to look at paradise before going through a door that will take it away forever (...) I wouldn't even know how many times I had wondered where that time was and how to keep the light of its beauty ” (Remembering that summer is like turning to look at paradise before crossing a door that will drive it away forever (...) I wouldn’t know how many times he had wondered where that time was and how to save the light of its beauty). Between these two sentences, in 155 pages, Barbal weaves a novel about the passage from childhood to maturity and at the same time introduces us to the lives and perspectives of a group of characters.
One year after Tàndem, with which she won the Josep Pla award, and receiving the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, the novel helps the author ask herself “how do we preserve these moments full of beauty when it seems that everything goes up It is thanks to photos, literature or any other creation”.
He does it with the distance that Nora, already an adult, takes to narrate that day that ends with an incident that flies over the book. “All the characters participate in the narration of the others, but above all the look of the girl, which later is the look of a young woman who has already passed adolescence, and can already feel nostalgic”, explains the writer. Now, although she was of a similar age to that of the protagonist in the sixties, when the action takes place, she makes it clear that it is not her: “It is not so easy to portray oneself as a character, and rather I have avoided it . I am very close to this girl, but not so much in what she happens to her ”. “I start from a lived thing –she clarifies-, but normal and current, that we all share, but that for me has a special importance. There is a personal starting point, but all the rest is fiction.
And it is that when she was young she also had adventures in the swamp, and in the cover photograph, a family memory, there is a skate like the one described in its pages. “I don't even remember ever getting on it. I do remember once that we went up with a friend in a little boat and then she got windy and we got lost, until well beyond that they refished us to be able to return, ”says the narrator. And she confesses that the photograph is partly “a sentimental slip, because they are three well-known people in a situation that reflects the atmosphere of the novel. You can take very nice photos of a lake with landscapes, trees, mountains, but this one seemed more authentic to me, and above all it was a small important tribute to me”.
And although it reflects part of the environment of his childhood, he also does not believe that it should be included in that Pallars cycle that began in 1985 Pedra de tartera and closed A l'amic escocès in 2019, because "the Pallars here is circumstantial, it could be another swamp, with all the differences there may be, because not all are the same”. Even so, it is a mythical space for her, a reflection of an era: “For me, as I think for all the people of Tremp, the swamp is important, because it has been that playground for everyone. Later those who had money built swimming pools, and others even went to the coast, but they were an exception”. "At that time -she continues- it was something very modest, because you had to take the train, families did not have a car, normally, and therefore it was a small event with transportation, bringing food, bathing and spending the day" .
Barbal's will in this book is to "capture life": "I find that it is very difficult, because it is automatic, simple in a certain way, but that it contains these inner complexities: what we are, what we would like to be, the influence of the others, what makes us doubt, what is wrong with us and we would like to change...”.
Little by little, in the story of what happens that day, the lives behind it come out and how they evolve. “I had wanted to reproduce that precious moment, and then, when putting the characters into play, it is when you see the narrative path to delve into these people that we see ordinary, everyday, who are by our side. But each one of them doubts, worries, dreams, remembers... the inner world, which is the one that has interested me the most when writing. The rest too, for me the landscape is one more character that forms part of each of them, some of whom don't even see it”.
Catalan version, here
