Anna Freixas (Barcelona, 76 years old) is a psychologist and feminist.
She is the author of the essay
Yo, Vieja
(Capitán Swing, 2021), which is in its sixth edition, in which she rebels against the infantilization that society makes of “the old”, that is what she calls them and they are called, without detours.
Freixas moved to Córdoba for love.
Her husband, the artist Juan Serrano, passed away two years ago.
She answers the phone from Cádiz, where she has a flat and is spending a "relatively restful" summer.
These hot days she drinks Rueda wine with ice.
“Sounds like a sin, but I like to sin.”
Ask.
How did he end up in Córdoba?
Response.
For love.
I met the artist Juan Serrano in Barcelona, he considered that she was going to be the woman of his life.
P.
How is the duel?
How are you?
A.
Good and bad.
I have a schizophrenic grief.
I am living the happiness of the success of the book, which has been a bombshell for me, but, on the other hand, always with the gap of sharing, of asking, of complicity.
I live two parallel realities.
Q.
Where do you feel from?
A.
I have been living in Córdoba for 41 years.
In Catalonia I am an Andalusian and in Andalusia a Catalan.
I feel, as Hannah Arendt said, an outcast.
I'm lovin 'it.
Q.
Is your old age different from that of your parents?
P.
At 76 years old, as much as I am from a Catalan petty-bourgeois family, I am much less conventional.
My sexual or religious concerns would seem like science fiction to them.
R.
Did the pandemic give you perspective on old age?
Q.
It took me to another planet.
I discovered that there were many old men or women in residences, which are not spaces that you enter and leave and can control your own freedom.
They are places where you are deprived of any ability to manage your own life.
Q.
How would you renovate residences?
R.
In the activities that are proposed I see a total contempt for who those people were.
You have no past, you have no present and you have no future.
We can learn, teach, opine, desire, reject.
Instead they put you to kill time.
We have little time left, do we have to kill him?
P.
The role of other people's children during the pandemic did not like it either.
Q.
People used to say “my daughter won't let me do that”.
Or “my son has forbidden me this other”.
That is a poisoned love, we all have to have it checked.
The children, the Government and the old men and women.
I prefer to die crashed with three covid on top than with someone usurping my decision-making capacity.
Q.
Moral?
R.
When they tell you that they are doing something for your good, get the hell out.
Q.
An issue on which you have changed your mind?
R.
More than a change of opinion, I would tell you that I am making a progressive deconstruction of certainties in numerous aspects of life.
An example would be about objectivity in general and specifically the presumed objectivity of science;
I have widened my field of listening.
The years have made me less dramatic and a better person.
Anna Freixas hands to work.
alexander begs
Q.
What is your favorite dish in summer?
R.
I would live on a pink tomato and a hard-boiled egg with a splash of olive oil.
P.
What is the name of Rosalía's latest success?
A.
Oh, it's a weird proper name...
P.
Disappointed.
A.
That's it.
I really like that you use your own language.
I make up words, like her.
P.
What do you think about the approved abortion ban in the US?
R.
It is an attack on the freedom of women.
In this I am very radical: the only ones who can give an opinion on this matter are women.
I am very concerned about the contagious and emboldening effect it may have.
Q.
And what do you think about the division of feminism?
R.
Feminism has been a movement of freedom and of adding, of making the lives of women and girls great, of welcoming.
The older I am, the clearer I have this and the less I dogmatize.
As I get older I am becoming more human.
P.
Can you explain to me about the carpentry?
A.
I receive classes once a month.
I discovered this workshop as a result of my friendship with the architects of the Plastic Space association.
I have made a large planter for my terrace in Cádiz, I am trying to make some lamps based on a work by Juan [Serrano].
Q.
What does it bring you?
R.
When I'm there I don't think about anything else.
And to show me that nothing is banned with age regarding our wishes.
P.
Not thinking about other things has sounded like a way of salvation.
R.
What I want to say is that doing carpentry you can't put your head to work or you crush your finger.
It is a very pleasant lucid therapy.
Now I'm sending you a photo of the planter I've made.
Q.
You were part of the Averroes choir, from the University of Córdoba.
R.
I loved it, but I started to have a significant loss in my right ear.
I don't want to hide it.
And then Juan got worse, it was a hard stage.
P.
How is the heat this summer?
A.
In summer it is hot.
I can't stand people who spend the day complaining.
In my house it is forbidden to complain about the food.
I have thought about what we eat, I have defrosted it, I have cooked it, you can only praise it.
I have worked in Nicaragua or India, I have seen a lot of poverty and it seems to me that we have a lot to be thankful for.
Zero religiosity, because I apostatized, but compassion yes, and a lot of it.
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