"When you get older, the feeling of death is closer and you think about it more than when you were ten. It's not that I worry too much, but sometimes I wonder if there's something after that. If you are Catholic you have this very clear; if you doubt, you are less clear", explains Carme Riera (Palma, 1948), who begins her new novel, Una ombra blanca (Edicions 62/Alfaguara), with a famous American opera singer returning to the life after having suffered a heart attack on stage.
But Barbara Simpson is not just any singer, she is a great diva with a past that she must resolve, especially when she comes into contact with a doctor who scientifically studies the so-called "near-death experiences", and it is from him that Simpson, or Barb, or Baba, introspects into his childhood to find the tearjerker: "The main issue of the novel is the return of someone who is clinically dead but, like so many cases, returns to close an issue that has been pending And this issue has to do with the childhood trauma suffered by this singer and what it means to face it definitively, but to be able to return to this place of light you need to resolve the issue".
The narrative takes the reader first to deep South America, during the era of racial segregation, where he will learn how his parents met, traveling musicians – and magicians – living in a caravan, with very poor beginnings . Little by little, the writer leaves clues about the world that surrounds the protagonist until she arrives at the fictional town of Fosclluc, close to Deià, in Mallorca. Who transcribes his life there, however, is not only the secretary, Rose Barnes, but is helped by a Mallorcan writer called... Carme Riera: "I enter history as a journalist, which is what I would have liked to be when I was young". The language, at this point, departs from the standard and opts for Mallorcan "of the era, because I remember how it was spoken in the sixties in Deià", a richness that recognizes that in Spanish it has been necessary to nuance, that "it has been more difficult, but there are repetitions to maintain orality".
In fact, Fosclluc becomes a kind of character, including the Teix mountain, from where Riera invents "the legend of the White Goddess", which contains some keys to the novel. "We have destroyed and desecrated nature, which was the goddess of the mountain and was the mountain. It's terrible, we walk in the mountains a lot and we only find plastic and cans. And people and people and people. It's a drama that I don't know how to fix, because people have the right to go places. My legend is pious, only he who cares for the person who has fallen will come”. Also for this reason, in the book "it is important to do justice to a person who has been convicted for acts he did not commit, there is guilt and there is redemption", explains Riera, but being clear that the children should not be burdened with parents' fault
The whole story also has to do with memory and recollection, with how we sometimes lie to ourselves or reinterpret reality to overcome trauma. "But don't think we know that much about the characters, we, they make their own lives", says the writer.
