After the success of the Triptych (Permagel, Boulder, Mamut) and appearing on the shortlist for the Booker prize, Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, 1978) says she is leaving motherhood aside and presents a new novel, Ocàs i fascination (Editor's Club). As in the previous ones, a woman tells her story, which in this case goes over the precipice.
You have worked on many things; also a working woman?
Yes, I have been a busy woman. But many years ago. I studied at the university and lived here in Barcelona. I was working as a waitress in a place where I was treated very badly and I thought, oh my gosh, I clean so well!
And how come you clean so well?
My mother taught me. With what he instructed me I thought: I prefer to live more quietly cleaning houses. And I cleaned a few houses, in the Eixample. It was only a season, a year maybe. I mean, I know what I'm talking about.
Give a detailed description of what to do with each material. Did your mother teach you all this?
Not everything, I've been learning. Sometimes, I went to houses where I was left alone with a grandmother. While I was working, my grandmother taught me things, talked to me, followed me, made me stop, made me coffee with milk and cookies.
Why did you like this job more than the bar job?
Because I didn't have to deal with so many people, because I could be alone with my thoughts. It didn't require waiting for orders, colleagues, customers. I was cleaning, a more lonely thing. It was much better for me, because he made my schedules, organized myself as I wanted. I like cleaning, but they took advantage of me a lot and I got tired of it. I remember it was coming up to Christmas and a lot of people hired me just to clean their dirty kitchens for the whole year, and then they kicked me out.
There are things that remind her protagonist.
Yes, of course, I was cheap, like her. I like this world of being alone, of not having to socialize. And also because it is very interesting to enter people's houses. He is one of the few people outside the family who are allowed to enter their rooms, their dressing tables, their bedside tables and, of course, discover things there. Not because you poke around, but because they can be seen. It's what I say in the book that the house has secrets, stories, and it wants to tell you, you read them. And that interested me a lot.
You explain it with this character who has no name and who "is less than a pet".
He is a person who comes in and out, and must leave no personal trace.
But it also excites people: the three-hour day is organized to work for two.
In a way, she's kind of a con artist. She does the job, she does it well, she also knows how to make it shine. And she is able to reserve an hour to take advantage of the people who hired her and enjoy these houses. His houses are these houses, more than the room he has rented, where he only goes to sleep.
The key to everything is the crisis of work and housing?
It is a thread that I had already hinted at in the triptych, but I wanted to go deeper, because I too have suffered from it, because in the end I see myself as a writer, as a symptom of my time. I don't talk about the past or the future, I show figures from the present. And I found myself there, living like this. Not on the streets, although, when I went from Erasmus to Berlin, I spent two nights on the streets, so I know what it's like to sleep on the streets: the nights are very long.
How come he had to sleep on the street?
Well, because I didn't make a good reservation in a hostel and then there was no internet, no credit cards, and I didn't have any money.
She has a job but no home.
Today this is happening. Now there are people who have such miserable jobs, they have money to eat, but they don't even have money to pay for a rented room. In addition, the city is bloodthirsty: it manufactures loners and forces them to live together.
You also make a metaphor with houses as enlarged wombs: “A womb inside a woman inside a house. A house within a village within borders".
It is the need we have to feel welcomed. There is this belonging: nobody can take away your womb, but they can take away your house. All these layers of security are relative; they give security when you have them. When she is at Trudi's house, she feels safe, she is well protected from the weather. But if they fail, you're out in the cold.
And we arrive at Trudi, the other woman doing chores.
Trudi is the one who hugs you. A hug doesn't save you, but it gives you the courage to save yourself. Solidarity is what is needed. It is the truly human and selfless relationship, because he knows nothing about it. And this happens. And I think we need to go more in this direction, towards weaving such networks, of helping others.
Trudi speaks Spanish, the tenants are Colombian...
Trudi is a woman who gets things done, and most of the people I have met in my life are Spanish speakers. I do it for the sake of verisimilitude. And as far as Colombian women are concerned, I have lived with Colombian, European, Brazilian women... Let's say that in the books I reflect my universe, without making it an autobiography. Why should I invent something different? I'm already making up a story and there's this mirror effect.
You are not politically correct.
That's all the same to me. My advantage in this sense is that I write a lot for myself, I don't write thinking about how it will be read, if it can be uncomfortable, sensitivities. I write very well what interests me and I detach myself from the book once it is out. This makes me very free, it gives me a lot of peace. If the criticisms are good, grateful and happy, and if they are bad, too, because they have their meaning, obviously, and I think they can all be understood. But I live apart from the discourse that is being built on the book and everything that is being said. I'm not on the networks, I don't follow it. It's great if someone tells me about it. And if they give me a comment it's always welcome, it means they've read the book, right?
When the protagonist works as a housekeeper, she talks about the secrets of the house, about creating a center in each room, the eroticism of touching everything.
In this book we don't have sex, but in my previous books you were finding sex. This woman lives sensuality, just as Boulder also lived it working with bread dough and with food, apart from with other women, in this case she conveys eroticism in the fact of being in other people's houses and caressing, touching, caring for, polishing other people's objects. I say it in a couple of sentences throughout the book and that's it, we don't see her masturbating with a vase of flowers either. It is also a way of understanding his work as a poetic work. She is a woman who values beauty. She likes being there and says so: "I've stepped on the best carpets, I've sat on the best sofas."
In the second part, the fascination, he loses all this and makes up for it with his inner world.
She is already in her inner world and begins to make her home a sanctuary. That's when he removes everything there and turns it into a kind of monastery, which is also a fortress, because he wants to protect everything. He ends up obsessing because his world is to preserve that virgin he has at home.
What inspired you about this story and this character?
It was a voice that I found and that interested me, and I wanted to tell the story of a woman doing jobs. But not just any busy woman, but a busy woman who had a very organized and well-organized life. This woman who has a bachelor's degree and is working doing jobs, lives much better than people with a bachelor's degree working where they are supposed to fit in for education. She finds her hole and lives very well.
He has studies in pedagogy.
Yes, like me, a qualification with few exits.
But ends up living on the streets for a few days?
This is not an accident and that is why he wonders at what point the decisions he has been making have been ill-advised and how he has been getting poorer. She is a woman who seemed to come from abundance, with a career, you might think she has a more or less good family, but she makes all the wrong decisions. We have created a society where everything leads you to go there. It's very easy to go from sharing a flat with friends to subletting a room in a stranger's house. It's a decision of a day when, boom, you're getting poorer, and you're getting poorer, and you're getting poorer, and the street ends, and thanks to Trudi showing up with this solidarity, get out of there and find his place in the world, which is not what he seemed destined to do.
And everything is taken apart again.
I was interested in creating a character who is satisfied with his life. However, when it is thrown out into the open air for the second time, which no longer has the will to get up, I started with the fascination, because I wanted to approach the mystic, literary speaking. I don't consider myself particularly religious, but I did go to a chaplain's school and I have a tradition. And I'm very happy to have a tradition that doesn't matter to me whether it's Christian, Catholic, or Muslim or Jewish, whatever it is. It has fueled my imagination a lot, they are vertebrae. Then, I wanted to experience spirituality. I spend time in my life listening or going for a walk in the woods, and feeling this oneness, this feeling that we are much more interconnected than it would seem. Then, I really wanted to create a story where there was a character who rubs this mystique. And I've done it with multiple reading layers. The fascination is full of the life of Mary, there are scenes of the life of Mary: when it is a beast of burden, or when it makes the path of worship, or the star that is always in the sky, the star that announced the birth. I combine all these elements of my own Christian tradition with a story that may not have such a reading, but that if you want it can have.
At the beginning of the novel, they do it outside a locked room.
She is on the street and at that moment she has thoughts about doing evil. He realizes that doing evil requires a lot of awareness.
But it is not quite a murder novel, even though it reflects on the desire to kill.
Arriving at the sunset, both of a civilization and of her own personal history, the protagonist no longer has a way to survive. Or as much as she would like to continue surviving, she sees that it is impossible. Then she begins to hear her own voices and begins to inhabit her world, which is half fantasy, half reality, but it is her own world, oriented towards spirituality and where she manufactures a virgin. In the sunset what I have done is to show where we are, how we are living, who we are and what is happening. This bad weather, this fragility, this precariousness.
Of jobs and housing?
And human relationships. I show the portrait of a woman in this situation, in this painting. And then, what exit does it give? A manic one. And the fascination is like going into one's unconscious and going to see what we have there.
What do we have at the bottom of it all?
The origin of eros and thanatos, of love and death. Because fascination is an adoration and at the same time an annihilation: of a caste, of a love, of motherhood, of a social system, of a woman...
A kind of maredeu.
Exactly, a sublimated woman, an icon. He needs to do this to give meaning to his life. He is in a society that has almost led him to have this desire to cease to exist. She doesn't want to die, but she wants to cease to exist.
