When Lola married Luis, the glazier, she set in motion a butterfly effect that has brought us here: Paz Padilla (Cádiz, 1969), one of the seven children of Lola and Luis, collects in Madre! (Harper Collins) the story of her lineage from two generations back to her own motherhood. It is a book to laugh – the anecdote is enough for a thousand monologues – and to reflect, a story that travels from Spain in black and white to that of the iPhone 15, leaving signs for the reader. “This book is a tribute to the woman, to the mother who runs a house or a business at a time when to open a book she had to go with a man. We have to see where we come from. I am who I am because my mother opened a path for me, although my daughter has also opened my eyes: 'Mom, put on the glasses of feminism,' she told me. We women continue to open our eyes to each other,” the popular actress, comedian and presenter explains to La Vanguardia.
Let's put aside that carefree image that television has given of Paz Padilla. She is much more. She has been traveling for years to places where women are second-class human beings to continue with her eyes open. In the program You're missing a trip (Mediaset) she showed her daughter how she lives far from the privileges of the first world. “Traveling is the best school. In Ghana we met a girl who sold fruit, but she would have wanted to be a nurse. However, it is very difficult for a woman to study there. In the Amazon, we crossed the jungle with a machete with a woman who lived dodging snakes. I asked her age and she replied that knowing her age is useless. That opened Anna's soul: she has studied a degree, a master's degree, she is a strong and independent woman at 27 years old, but in certain countries she could never be that."
Paz dedicates this book to the women who sacrificed their dreams to raise children and wants it to be a lighthouse for the clueless: “We forget that one day our mothers will not be there. After he died, I would pick up the phone and call my mother: I would dial her number, I would hear that 'this number is not operational' [her voice breaks] and I would answer 'mom, how are you?' and I would tell her my thoughts. things, like before. There came a day when I stopped calling because she was of no use. What I wouldn't give now for those ten minutes on the phone every day!
Paz would not have been such a renowned comedian without the school that Lola gave her, a mother who moved things around to make her children believe that there were ghosts at home or who released cockroaches to laugh, scaring visitors. But she was also a woman who made them understand that even though the neighbor enjoyed many toys for Reyes, they were lucky to live in a home where love and laughter were never lacking: “Children don't need anything: just food and affection.” ”Lola said with clairvoyance. And her daughter follows in her wake: “I don't know how to live without humor. Humor saves us. In this book I use it to talk about serious things because humor is the opposite of anguish. When I used it the most it was when Antonio, my husband, got sick, also so that he would suffer less,” Paz sighs.
In the Friday program Paz put a genuine and fair complaint on the table: “Society does not understand that you have suffered the loss of a husband and now want to continue living. It seems like you have to bury yourself with him.” Are we cruel? "A lot. I remember when my grandmother died that my mother turned off the TV and removed the radio for at least a year or two. We continue to carry that mourning in society, because mourning is social. Instead, grief is internal. Mourning is society telling you that you can't be happy again. But happiness depends on you: you have to be happy in all adversities. For me, happiness is living calmly and if I see the things that happen to me as part of life, as learning, then I live it calmly. Because there is nothing that I am not going to experience that someone else has not suffered.”
Paz Padilla has loved on three levels: her parents, her partner – especially Antonio, who died of cancer four years ago – and her daughter, Anna. She does not believe that there is a substantial difference between these three ways of loving: “I believe that love is love, but we force ourselves to give ourselves labels and a scale. When I hug you and tell you that I love you, I'm feeling the same if I give it to my mother but you, in your head, have to classify it. I know that I am a machine for generating love and I give it to everyone; It is the greatest treasure I have and I trust that Antonio, my mother and all those who leave, take with them as much love as they leave behind: they leave a part of themselves in you and at the same time, they take a part of you with them.”
