When she was a child, Anna R. Alós used to go to her grandmother's house in Poblenou for snacks on bread and sugar. Several neighbors from the neighborhood met there who spent the afternoon chatting and drinking their tea with anise. On those childhood afternoons, Anna she met Teresa, who “was good, generous and funny”. But little Alós detected that something strange was happening with that lady, because “everyone hid when I asked about her”.
That wall of silence only increased the curiosity of the girl, who asked and asked until she found out that "Teresa had been a whore." Hello she always wanted to write and very soon she decided that she would novelize the incredible life of her neighbor. But he let the years go by and focused on his career as a journalist. Now, "at 67 years old and after retirement, I have seen the moment, because suddenly I have had the two things necessary to write a novel: a good story and time to tell it."
The result of this process is Llámame Teresa, which begins at the beginning of the 20th century in a small and impoverished town in Lleida. Treseta, the protagonist, leaves the place and, at a very young age, settles with some relatives in Barcelona, but she "is raped and feels guilty, so she decides to run away." Her adventure begins as a novice in a convent in Pontevedra. Right away, the girl discovers that she is not called to be a nun and moves to Buenos Aires, where "life condemns her to prostitution."
And yet, "the first time she practices it, she realizes that she likes this job, because it allows her to make people happy, to give pleasure and also to feel pleasure herself." “Teresa puts a price on what she likes the most and she practices prostitution for pleasure, not for money. That is the key plot of this book”, says the author in an interview with La Vanguardia.
“Teresita, as she was called during her time in Argentina, touches her first client in a spontaneous way and sees how she pleases him. At that time, she decides to dedicate herself to prostitution. She also feels pleasure, but she wants to give it more than live it, because she is very generous ”, concludes Alós, who has written this first and highly entertaining novel at a time when the debate on the prohibition of prostitution is opening.
His protagonist never had doubts. She liked her job and she did not want to practice another: she adopted the final name of Teresa when she returned to Barcelona, "where she married a rich industrialist, whose name I have promised not to reveal," the author points out. And she adds that “it was not a bad marriage, because her husband was a good person, but Teresa felt like she was in a golden cage, she wanted to be free and it was not enough to give pleasure to just one man. So she left her husband and her daughter to go back to prostitution.”
Other strong and intense women swarm through Alós's novel, such as Dorotea or Lolita, which the author has created with “pieces of people I met”. These experiences have been the material for a book that the journalist has built thanks to the advice of three of the greats: "Camilo José Cela suggested that I always carry a pen and that if I had an idea, write it down, even if it was on the palm of my hand." hand in hand so as not to forget her. Antonio Gala recommended that I set a schedule and Luis Racionero told me to write shamelessly”. “With age I have lost my modesty and I have finally been able to write my novel. Now I am preparing the second one”, concludes the writer.
