His father, Dragó, has died.
I talk to him every day.
What have you talked about today?
"Today Amela interviews me," I explained. “Give him a hug!”, She has asked me. She was always very cordial.
You do literature, of course.
Literature is conversing with the dead.
What was the last thing you did together?
Comment my latest novel.
what's it about?
A young dancer talks with her father, an old shoemaker, on his last day and early morning. They wake up together and he dies.
His father woke up on Easter Monday, sat down at the keyboard...
And his cat got on top of his head.
Vi el tuit...
Half an hour later he died of a heart attack.
His novel has been premonitory...
He was my shoemaker, although as a writer.
Did he lead you to writing?
As a child she heard her typewriter, she pounded it furiously: that sound was the cricket of the home, she wrote Gargoris and Habidis.
A magical history of Spain, I read it.
I lay at the foot of his desk with my sleeping bag, his typing lulled me to sleep every night, I fell asleep there...
The lullaby of the typewriter.
That typewriter belonged to his father, a journalist murdered by Falangists at the beginning of the war: a black and gold Underwood. My father, a posthumous son, inherited it and there he began to write, when he was four years old.
Early.
I was six years old and my father gave me the Underwood: "Write, write!" he told me.
They had great complicity, I sense.
Parents are full of secrets and children are full of lies. My father and I, no.
Thanks to literature
Literature pulls out old knots and gives them a beautiful ending. By writing you remove the unconscious, redraw memories and console yourself. Literature is the only possible consolation.
What did your father tell you about your novel?
"You accompany me to a good death, I see."
What epitaph did your father choose?
We'll find out when we open his will, which he used to edit. Although we must first resolve bureaucratic issues.
"Excuse me for not getting up."
I was joking with this one. She loved to exaggerate, like with the Japanese. "Writing consists of stopping, tempering and carrying luck", she maintained. Without exaggeration you can not write.
Nor live.
“Nothing matters at all”, he also told me. And as a teenager I used to get angry: I cared a lot about everything! "Over the years you will agree with me," she concluded. And if!
What other motto did you love to draw?
"And an inflexible voice shouts, let's go!" he cried: he urged us to always move forward.
You paint yourself as a dancer in your story: why dancer?
I was born with club feet. To correct them, they put me on hideous black orthopedic boots. One day they freed me from them and I asked for some red ballerinas. I wanted to dance.
And did he dance?
I danced classical ballet: it was my great dream. But in the end the books won.
He wrote a book about his mother...
My mother, Caterina, died when I was nine years old. Writing I have been able to drink all the coffees that we could not share. My father and my mother had separated when I was very young.
Dragó mentions Caterina in his magical history of Spain...
They traveled a lot together. And I was conceived in the Philippines, tipsy from a bottle of Asian liquor. I was born and they soon separated, but they always missed each other very much.
Yeah?
Yes, because they shared many complicities. If today I think of one or the other, I imagine them together. Now they are together.
What would you want to teach your children?
Let them be creative, whatever they do. And don't forget spirituality.
What is the best part of the novel you just wrote?
The scene in which a woman goes to the port of Barcelona to receive the Semirami s ship, confident that her love will return: she wears his photo around her neck...
AND?
Read it for yourself. Nothing desires a writer more than to be read.
What books would you recommend for a young girl to start reading?
My Family and Other Animals, by Durrell; The Bead Game, from Hesse; Lady Chatterley's Lover, by Lawrence; Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy: because I couldn't stop reading it one afternoon I lost a boyfriend...
He regrets?
As a woman I only regret so much time spent caring for my loved ones and stolen from myself.
