Pilar Quintana, novelist and short story writer born in Cali (Colombia) in 1972, won
the XXIV Alfaguara Novel Prize
with 'Los abismos', where she tells in the first person the perception of a girl, Claudia, about the tense relationships that the married couple lives. they form their parents and on the world of several generations of women apparently tied to a way of life from which they cannot escape.
'The abyss' is
the fifth novel
de Quintana, who has written it based on her own experience of motherhood and her childhood memories.
In the words of the jury, the novel displays "a subtle and luminous prose in which nature connects us with the symbolic possibilities of literature, and the abysses are both real and intimate."
The novel arrives this Thursday at the bookstores by the hand of Alfaguara.
These are your first pages.
In the apartment there were so many plants that we called it the jungle.
The building looked like something out of an old futuristic movie.
Flat shapes, ruffles, a lot of gray, large open spaces, large windows.
The apartment was a duplex and the large window in the living room rose from the floor to the ceiling, which was at the top of the two floors there.
Downstairs it had a black granite floor with white veins.
Above, white granite with black veins.
The staircase was made of black steel tubing and steps of polished planks.
A bare stairway, full of holes.
Upstairs the corridor was open to the living room, like a balcony, with tube railings equal to those of the staircase.
From there you could see the jungle, below, scattered everywhere.
There were plants on the floor, on the tables, on top of the sound system and the steak, among the furniture, on wrought iron platforms, and clay pots, hung from the walls and ceiling, in the first steps and in the places that could not be seen from the second floor: the kitchen, the laundry room and the guest bathroom.
There were all kinds.
Sun, shade and water.
A few, the red anthuriums and the white herons, had flowers.
The others were green.
Smooth and curly ferns, bushes with striped, stained, colorful leaves, palm trees, shrubs, huge trees that did well in flowerpots, and delicate herbs that fit in my child's hand.
Sometimes, walking around the apartment, it seemed to me that the plants were reaching out to touch me with their leaves like fingers, and that the larger ones, in a forest behind the three-seater sofa, liked to wrap people around that they would sit there or scare them with a touch.
In the street there were two Guayacanes that covered the view of the balcony and the living room.
In the rainy seasons they lost their leaves and were loaded with pink flowers.
The birds jumped from the Guayacanes onto the balcony.
Hummingbirds and Siriris, the most daring, peeked into the dining room.
The butterflies went fearlessly from the dining room to the living room.
Sometimes, at night, a bat would fly low and as if it did not know where to go.
My mom and i were screaming
Sometimes, at night, a bat would fly low and as if it did not know where to go.
My mom and I were screaming.
My dad would grab a broom and stay in the middle of the jungle, still, until the bat came out the way it had come.
In the afternoons a cool wind came down from the mountains and crossed Cali.
He woke up the Guayacanes, entered through the open windows, and shook the plants inside as well.
The commotion that was being made was equal to that of people at a concert.
At dusk my mother watered them.
The water filled the pots, filtered through the earth, came out through the holes and fell into the clay dishes with the sound of a stream.
I loved running through the jungle, being caressed by the plants, staying in the middle, closing my eyes and listening to them.
The thread of the water, the whispers of the air, the nervous and agitated branches.
I loved running up the ladder and looking at it from the second floor, as well as from the edge of a cliff, the steps as if they were the fractured ravine.
Our jungle, rich and wild, down there.
My mom was always at the house.
She didn't want to be like my grandmother.
He told me all his life.
My grandmother slept until midmorning and my mother went to school without seeing her.
In the afternoons I played lulo with my friends and when my mother came home from school, she was not there for four days.
The day he was here was because he was supposed to attend the game at home.
Eight ladies at the dining room table smoking, laughing, throwing cards and eating pandebonos.
My grandmother didn't even look at my mom.
Once, at the club, she heard a lady ask my grandmother why she had not had more children.
"Oh, mija," my grandmother said, "if I could have avoided it, I wouldn't have had this one either."
The two ladies laughed out loud.
My mom had just gotten out of the pool and was dripping water.
He felt, he told me, that his chest was being opened to put a hand in him and rip out his heart.
Cover of 'Los Abismos', by Pilar Quintana EDITORIAL COURTESY ALFAGUARA
My grandfather came home from work at the end of the afternoon.
I hugged my mom, tickled her, asked her about her day.
For the rest, she grew up in the care of the employees who succeeded each other, because my grandmother did not like any of them.
In our house the employees did not last either.
Yesenia came from the Amazon rainforest.
He was nineteen years old, with straight hair down to his waist and the rough features of the stone statues of Saint Augustine.
We understood each other from day one.
My school was a few blocks from our building.
Yesenia would walk me in the mornings and wait for me at the exit in the afternoons.
On the way he would tell me about his land.
The fruits, the animals, the rivers wider than any avenue.
"That," he would say, pointing to the Cali River, "is not a river, but a ravine."
One afternoon we went straight to his room.
A room with bathroom and a small window next to the kitchen.
We sat on the bed, facing each other.
We had discovered that he did not know songs or sleight of hand.
I was showing him my favorite, the one with the Paris dolls.
At every step he was wrong and we burst out laughing.
My mom appeared at the door.
"Claudia, would you please go upstairs."
It was very serious.
-What happened?
"Come upstairs," I said.
-We're playing.
"Don't make me repeat it."
I looked at Yesenia.
She, with her eyes, told me to obey.
I got up and went out.
My mom grabbed my suitcase off the floor.
We went upstairs, went into my room and he closed the door.
"I never want to see you confiding with her again."
"With Yesenia?"
"With no employee."
-Why?
"Because she's the clerk, girl."
-So what?
—That one becomes fond of them and then they leave.
—Yesenia doesn't have anyone in Cali.
You can stay with us forever.
"Oh, Claudia, don't be so naive."
A few days later Yesenia left without saying goodbye, while I was at school.
My mother told me that they had called her from Leticia and she had to go back to her family.
I suspected that this was not the truth, but Mom was angry in her version.
Next came Lucila, an older woman from Cauca who didn't mess with me at all and was the employee who spent the longest time with us.
My mom did her housekeeping jobs in the mornings when I was at school.
Purchases, errands, payments
My mom did her housekeeping jobs in the mornings when I was at school.
Purchases, errands, payments.
At noon I would pick up my dad from the supermarket and they would have lunch together at home.
In the afternoon he would take the car to work and she would stay home to wait for me.
When he returned from school, he found her in bed with a magazine.
He liked the
Hello!
, the Vanities and the Cosmopolitans.
In them he read about the lives of famous women.
The articles featured large color photos of the houses, yachts, and parties.
I had lunch and she turned the pages.
I did my homework and she turned the pages.
At four o'clock the programming began on the only TV channel and, while I was watching Sesame Street, she turned the pages.
Once my mother told me that shortly before finishing high school she waited for my grandfather to come home from work to tell him that he wanted to study at the university.
They were in my grandparents' room.
He took off his guayabera, dropped it to the floor and was left in his shirt.
Large, hairy, with a round and warm belly.
A bear.
Then he looked at her with strange eyes that she did not know him.
"Right," my mom still dared to say.
My grandfather's veins bulged in his throat and in his thickest voice he told him that what decent young ladies did was get married and that which university or Law or which eight quarters.
The terrible voice echoing like a megaphone, I almost heard it, while my mom, little girl, backed away.
Less than a month later he had a heart attack and died.
In the studio we had a wall with family portraits.
The one of my maternal grandparents was a black and white photo, with a silver frame.
It was taken at the club, at the last end of the year party they had together.
Streamers fell all around and people wore paper hats and bugles.
My grandparents were breaking away from the hug.
They laughed.
He, huge, in a tuxedo, with bifocal glasses and a drink in hand.
The hairs could not be seen, but I knew, from other photos and from my mother, that they sprouted everywhere.
The sleeves of the shirt, the back, the nose and even the ears.
My grandmother had an elegant open-back dress, a cigarette case between her fingers, and her short, puffy hair.
She was long and skinny, an upright worm.
Next to him she looked tiny.
Beauty and the Beast, I always thought, although my mother defended her father saying that he was not a beast, but a teddy bear that only got angry that time.
The abysses
Author: Pilar Quintana
Editorial: Alfaguara, 2021
Format: Softcover.
256 pages.
18.90 euros.
Look for it in your bookstore
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