The pentimenti, explains Flavia Company, are "alterations in a painting that show the error or the change of idea about what the artist was painting". Applying this concept to reality and fiction, Andrea Mayo, Company's heteronym, signs her first book of short stories, Regrets (Navona, also in Catalan).
How do we hide the things we don't like? Company explains that there are three basic ways to do it, from which he has structured the book: "Those that are seen with the naked eye but we do not want to see, those that are seen after years and those that can be seen if it violates the established reality, because they are rooted in learning or norms”; a range of explorations that "could have been a novel, but I wanted a mosaic to explore the different ways of how humans are", especially those aspects that "do not let us be who we are and lead us to hide it for different reasons". However, she does not define the book as a compilation of short stories, because the look is unitary despite the diversity of styles, from first or third person narrators to a small one-act play or quite a lot of metaliterature. The multiplicity of points of view.
Company assures that the use of heteronyms is not an eccentricity, because as an author "she could not add anything else" but instead the heteronyms allow her to "recover the freedom she had but multiplied" and allow her to find "paths that connect some works with the others, in a kind of internal corridors”.
Not only does he not regret it, but he plans that Mayo (who was born as a character in a story and signed his novel The Carnivorous Plant, which has just been translated into English) and other heteronyms (such as Haru and his father, Osamu) will have more works, each with its own style, which is not that of Company. Today that we are so used to vicissitudes and fragmentation, they are "characters that are already given". And they serve him to "defend honesty, consistency, simplicity and love for things well done and truly".
May chooses to face reality and “stop hiding things”, a fact that involves “a certain violence”, because this “is not a quiet book or to leave anyone alone; It tries to turn things on, with the will to arouse the desire to propose the structures that you obey without protesting”.
Company describes Mayo as someone who "exists but has no life, does not respond to human categories of guilt and regret, does not write so many sentences to underline, but concepts, it is more to get to the point" and that allows him to do a combative book to question issues such as motherhood, because “it cannot be that with so many people there are women who are forced to have children; It seems unbelievable that sexuality has yet to be liberated from reproduction”, a fact that “reflects the past and the future”.
Company, an unrepentant traveller, after traveling around the world twice, has lived for a while in Argentina and has now been in Catalonia for a few weeks with the hope of leaving soon: "I won't stay here, but I'll come back, I'll keep coming back". But not as an author.
Catalan version, here
