The pentimenti, explains Flavia Company, are "alterations in a picture that show the error or change of mind about what the artist was painting". Applying this concept to reality and fiction, Andrea Mayo, heteronym of Company, signs his first book of stories, Penediments (Navona, also in Spanish).
How do we hide the things we don't like? Company explains that there are three basic ways to do this, from which he has structured the book: "Those that are visible to the naked eye but we don't want to see, those that are seen after years, and those that can be to see if fixed reality is violated, 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 we humans are", especially those aspects that "don't let us be who we are and lead us to hide it for different reasons". However, it does not define the book as a collection of stories, because the look is unitary despite the diversity of styles, from narrators in the first or third person to a small one-act play or a lot of meta-literature. The multiplicity of points of view.
Company assures that the use of heteronyms is not an eccentricity, because she as an author "could not add anything more", but instead they allow her to "recover the freedom she had, but multiplied", and also allows 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 (like Haru and his father, Osamu) will have more works, each with their own style, which is not Company's. Today, when we are so used to avatars and fragmentation, they are "characters that are already given". And they serve him precisely to "defend honesty, consistency, simplicity and love for things well done and for real".
Mayo chooses to face reality and "stop hiding things", a fact that entails "a certain violence", because this "is not a calm book nor to put anyone at ease, it aims to ignite things, with the intention of awakening the desire to consider the structures that you obey without protesting".
Company describes Mayo as someone who "exists, but has no life", and "does not respond to the human categories of guilt and regret", "does not write so many sentences to emphasize, but concepts, it is more of a face a barraca", and this allows him to write a combative book to question issues such as motherhood, because "it cannot be that with as many people as we are there are women who are forced to have children, it seems a lie that we still need to free the sexuality of reproduction", a fact that "reflects the past and the future".
Comrade, unrepentant traveler, after going around the world twice, she lived for a while in Argentina and now she's 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.
