There are lives irremediably linked to deaths.
One of them is lived by Violeta Gil.
Her father committed suicide three months after she was born.
And from there, everything else: pain, silence, not knowing, also love and distance.
The distance of not even having heard her voice and being a constant presence.
Gil (Dimples, Segovia, 39 years old), author of
Llego con tres heridas
(Trojan Horse, 2022), lives in this paradox of union and distance, a catharsis that delves into the wound of love, death and life ( Serrat, Joan Baez and Miguel Hernández appear in the acknowledgments of the book) who take the voice of his paternal grandfather, his mother and his, mainly, in addition to those who surrounded his father.
Question.
How do we relate to death?
Reply.
We don't know how to carry it.
My relationship with death has changed during the writing process of the book.
Some time ago she was like on top of it, she thought: “I was born with this, it doesn't affect me like other people.
I can afford to make macabre jokes."
She despised long duels.
This makes her feel tough, like a person who puts up with everything.
And on top of that, I look like him, I'm what's left of my father.
That is a responsibility, although the people around me have not wanted to burden me.
Everyone deals with death in different ways and I think we shouldn't judge them.
In contemporary society, with the obsession we have with youth, everything related to death, with the outdated and the old, has been relegated.
Between that and that what the capitalist world asks for is production, speed and overcoming things, I don't think we are in a good moment in relation to death.
Capitalism is giving the appearance that everything is easy.
In the cities there is a fiction about death.
He is not present.
It is not so missing in the towns, where Catholicism still has weight: watching over the dead, taking them to the cemetery, visiting the graves, putting flowers on them.
The rites exist for a reason, on the one hand, they are very emasculating, but they also originated from human needs like dealing with death, with the incomprehensible, with what we don't know how it works.
We are very centralist.
We turn our backs on the peoples and our colonial past
Q.
And with suicide?
R.
It is a major taboo and it must be put on the table.
Try to understand: what does it mean? Why does it happen?
how to deal with it?
Talk about prevention and how to deal with it when it happens, because it's not going to stop happening.
Skip those unbreakable walls of misunderstanding.
Misunderstanding only generates pain.
Understanding will always ease.
Q.
_
In
I arrive with three wounds
, he exposes his privacy and that of close relatives.
Has anyone put a hit on him for opening up in the canal?
A.
My grandfather, who is about to turn 99 but is still super lucid, has a hard time.
What he liked most about my book of poems,
Before you throw away my things
(Arrebato, 2019), was the part in which I talked about him.
That relieved me a bit, I thought this one wouldn't matter so much to him;
but of course it is different.
He told me that he didn't like the approach.
It's totally understandable.
The book talks about a person who has been surrounded by silence, who has not wanted to bring up these issues, and her granddaughter arrives and puts everything in writing so that everyone can read it.
It must not be easy for him.
I also have cousins who told me they didn't know anything.
A friend of my father's has contacted me about the book.
Another close friend, whom I have known since high school, wrote to me in an email that he was sorry for not having asked me more, not having accompanied me more.
That he believed that I was worth it alone, he did not imagine to what extent it affected me.
But it's not his responsibility, it's mine because I didn't allow that help.
Violeta Gil, on January 19 in a cafeteria in Madrid. Andrea Comas
Q.
Conversations with your grandfather – a retired military man who was assigned to Guinea when he was 19 years old – lead to bringing up parts of Spain's silenced past.
R.
Yes, we live with our backs to death, but there are also other issues in the book that are invisible.
The case of [Equatorial] Guinea, other colonial histories are a little more present, although insufficiently, but what happened in Guinea is outrageous.
I began to investigate and there was very little material.
Nobody tells you at school, and it was a colony until 1968, which is said soon!
We don't look at the province either, when you spend time in the provinces you realize how centralist we are in everything, in literature, in art, in politics, what else!
And the complaints are totally founded.
We live with our backs to the towns, to the colonies and we continue to have the feeling of being a mother country.
Q.
The last part of the book is marked by the end of a relationship, do you consider sentimental breakups duels?
R.
I remember writing about my breakup and realizing that I was doing it as if it were a duel, and, on the one hand, it is.
But, on the other, I felt bad because it's not comparable to the end of my parents' story, with how my mother lost her partner.
Be that as it may, it is a loss and I experienced that as a duel.
There is a type of pain and inability to go out into the world that is comparable to mourning the physical loss of a person.
P.
Poet, philologist, actress, translator, founder of the company La tristura, what else do you want to be when you grow up?
R.
Stage creator and writer, who are very close to me.
I studied acting, but I don't feel comfortable there.
When I realized it was a liberating moment, I found out what I didn't want to do.
Even so, I have some pending paper.
The world has changed and in this sense it benefits me: there are many things that interest me and I need to investigate them.
Right now I am working on a theater project that I am very excited about and that will premiere in February 2024.
The most unpleasant part is that this does not happen because there are more options, precariousness plays an important role: life forces you to do more things.
In recent years I have had jobs that I have liked, but I would have liked more not to see myself in that need because I could focus on what I really want and live from that.
But not.
If my economic situation were different, I would not have done it.
The translations, yes.
It is very little money, they are a pure gesture of love.
Now, I feel like writing fiction, a story is forming in my head that I would like to explore.
The writing of poems goes in parallel, I have quite a few that I think I'll take out next year or within two years.
You have to talk about suicide, how to deal with it when it happens, because it's not going to stop happening.
Jumping the walls of misunderstanding that only generate pain.
Understanding will always ease
Q.
How do you make readers feel identified with your story?
R.
I don't know, I always ask myself when they tell me.
It also happens with films like
Aftersun
or
Summer 1993
, I think it's the generational tension, something that tells you about your country, something you know and understand.
It also has to do with putting the human at the center.
We are dehumanized and when someone approaches a subject with humanity, they appeal to you;
although it is not equivalent to your story.
I have done that exercise in this book.
Q.
At the end of the book you leave some notes in which you are looking for a person and a letter, have they appeared?
A.
No. But I still trust.
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