Beatriz Montañez, hermit star

In the movie

Dersu Uzala,

the old nomad hunter curses a Russian soldier for throwing a piece of meat on the stake.

"Do not do that!

The fire will eat all the meat, and if other people come and see it, they will be able to eat! ”.

"Who is going to come this way ..."

-Many people!

Dersu insists.

-Who?

"The badger is coming, and the raven too, and the mice!"

Many people!

In the taiga we are not alone!

Never!

Beatriz Montañez lives with many people.

He lives with the centipede and with the bull spider, with the ocellated lizard, with the spurred toad, with the crickets, the wild boar and the gardener bat.

It also lives with the horseshoe snake, the red-tailed lizard and the cemetery beetle.

And with dozens of birds: the hoopoe, the simple wren, the woodpecker, the European oriole, the grass pipit, the rock plane ..., among many others to which he thanks in the zoo glossary that closes his first novel,

Niadela ,

published by the Errata Naturae label.

Before, Beatriz Montañez lived in Madrid and hundreds of thousands of people watched her on television with Greater Wyoming.

He had success with that show, El Intermedio, but there came a point where he didn't feel well.

"I started hearing the ticking of a bomb that could explode at any moment," he says.

He went.

In 2014 he signed for Tele 5 and did a program with four other presenters that ended up blowing his fuses.

He explains that he asked to stay out of matters of the heart and banal entertainment.

"They got engaged, but after a few weeks of broadcast I realized that it was leading to something that I did not want to be part of."

He left it and says that's when the time bomb went off.

"But it was not the only thing that motivated the detonation, because a bomb is composed of many materials connected to each other."

He was born in Ciudad Real (1977) and lived in the La Mancha town of Almadén until he was a teenager.

His father died in a car accident when he was four years old.

No one explained it to him.

His mother did not tell him that his father had died and that she would never see him again.

Says she grew up almost speechless.

In high school they called her weird.

"They gave me a big bump on the head."

The ghost of the father, difficult childhood, television, fame, frustration.

The elements of the pump.

When it exploded, he went on a trip to Asia.

He was in Buddhist temples.

He remembers the name of one, Wat Ram Poeng, in Thailand, not of the others.

He says that he has a memory problem and that a psychologist diagnosed him with "retrograde amnesia" due to a trauma from his adolescence.

When he returned from Asia, he worked as a screenwriter for

Many children, a monkey and a castle, a

documentary directed by his ex-partner Gustavo Salmerón.

Then he was secluded in a small house in the Valencian interior which is reached by a dirt track, alone and isolated.

“There were cobwebs everywhere, mattresses full of fleas and carpets full of life.

It had no hot water or electricity.

The fireplace did not pull.

The first night I slept dressed.

I was cold and heard strange noises.

I ended up sleeping out of sheer exhaustion, but fell asleep with a smile.

That first night I was very happy.

I was at peace.

It was a sensation that I had never experienced, as if a warm liquid was born in the pit of the stomach and spilled all over the body ”.

He has been there for five years and has written Niadela, a book in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of

nature writing

.

Now the house is cozy.

Simple, decorated with taste and care, crammed with crocheted pieces and with a row of post-it notes on the fireplace with his ideas written down in pen such as "The surest way to get rid of lack is to deviate from the path" or "Do not possess nothing is one of the facets of freedom ”.

Even as a child she was fond of writing — her mother submitted her to the Almadén poetry contest;

he lost— but in this house he has lived it with a new passion.

"I have realized that I can spend months in silence, but I cannot go days without writing."

In the morning she meditates in front of a cliff with her Nepalese bead necklace in hand, then she does the house, walks, cooks and the afternoon is devoted to literature.

When he goes to the nearest town to do his shopping, in a broken jeep driving at a certain speed along the unpaved road, he stuffs foam plugs into his ears.

In

Niadela he puts

his observations into words.

Use an exuberant vocabulary and make millimeter representations.

“I describe the sun more than 40 times and never from the same point of view.

The sun is different every day, as are the sky and clouds, as are the branches of trees and bushes.

You just have to stop and look deeply to realize it ”.

The book describes his first year in this place and is composed of fragments where there is memory, rehearsal, reality, delirium, lyricism, a short and fast rhythm.

"I wanted it to be poetic but to be made with the blow of the ax."

Beatriz Montañez seems a fragile and fierce person.

Wounded but with an animal will.

As a teenager he went home to Ciudad Real, then to Madrid, and at the age of 21 he worked for a year in Tokyo as a model.

There he lived in a building with other professional colleagues.

One day a rat appeared in the toilet.

She beat her to death with an iron spatula.

Later she went to Los Angeles and studied Communication at the University of California while working in several places at the same time and pulling ephedrine to be able to be active without rest.

Sometimes we read

Niadela,

she likes to go for a walk naked.

Montañez narrates it like this: “The more tangled the undergrowth, the more accompanied I feel.

It is an ancient, glorious feeling.

I feel neither cold nor hot.

I don't feel the body.

The brambles scratch me with their sharp nails looking for the strings of the harp.

It doesn't sound anything.

I am hollow skin on burnished bone.

That is why I wander through the undergrowth.

I seek my guts, awaken the sleeping blood, fan the neglected soul.

I want to lose my mind to feel strange, I want to walk along the limits of the world, change color in autumn, drink nectar from the frost, mix with the earth and be reborn purified ”.