In
the bitch
(Random House Literature)
,
the writer
Pilar Quintana (Cali, 1973) turned the nature and landscapes of the Colombian Caribbean into another character in the novel.
In
the abysses
(Alfaguara)
,
With which she has recently won the 2021 Alfaguara Novel Prize, Quintana transfers that nature to the interior of a building in Cali, the city where she was born and grew up and which she herself has defined as one of her literary obsessions. “Once a friend who had a small plane took me to fly over Cali. From above I felt that it was a kind of lost city, like a city in the middle of the jungle. I think there I was aware of the fortune of having grown up in it. So my father is a man who likes nature very much and knows the names of almost all trees and almost all birds. Ever since we were little we traveled a lot by car and he was pointing out the landscapes and telling me where to look, so I agreed with someone who made me notice the importance and beauty of landscapes ”,He reflects via WhatsApp, where he attends EL PAÍS through a video call. In the middle of the exuberance of Cali takes place the story Claudia, an almost orphan girl (despite having parents) who is forced to look into the abysses of adulthood too soon, pushed by the silences of her father and the depression of a mother who never wanted to be. As I already did in
La perra,
in
Los abismos
Quintana once again looks straight at the chiaroscuro of motherhood.
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QUESTION.
Although from a very different point of view, in
Los abismos he
returns to a theme that he already addressed in
La
perra, his previous novel: motherhood and its grays.
There is a great space there for literature.
ANSWER.
Of course.
And I didn't do it on purpose, but there is a very interesting relationship between the two novels.
In
La perra
there is a character whose only wish is to have children and he does not get it.
In
Los abismos
we have the reverse of that story: a mother whose daughter suddenly begins to wonder if she was wanted, if her mother is happy in that role.
Q.
How much of your own motherhood is there in these novels?
Would they have been possible without you being a mother?
R.
I think they would not have been possible. I remember when I was starting to be a writer, they told me that to be one I had to give up motherhood, as one thing and the other were not compatible. At that time I did not want to be a mother and I was not interested in motherhood at all, so it was fine. Now I think how tremendous that burden is for a woman who wants to be a mother and who begins in this world. For me, having my son was like unleashing a creative flow, it is the most fortunate experience in creative terms that I have lived because it gave me endless impressive stories, of things that happen to me and that I feel and that I need to name. In
La Perra,
for example, I turned over all my worst fears as a mother: that my son will die and mistreat him. Because in the same way that your son makes you be a better person, he also makes you bring out your deepest rages, the most terrible monster, the one that I don't want to see because it is the same as my mother had. In a way, that novel helped me to conjure up my deepest fears around motherhood. With
Los abismos
I have reconciled with my mother, with the women of her generation and with myself by accepting that I cannot be a perfect mother.
P.
Motherhood, however, literarily speaking, has been a traditionally forgotten or despised space, as if it were a woman's thing.
The boom we are experiencing from novels that address motherhood in one way or another and awards such as the Alfaguara that you have just received for
Los abismos
, show that motherhood is gradually occupying the literary space it deserves?
A.
Yes I do.
There have always been many books on what it means to be a son.
We even have books about children who, metaphorically, want to kill their parents, which is a great literary subject.
I think, for example, of
El baile,
by Irene Némirovsky, which is a novel about a mother and daughter who have hatred for that mother, all told from the daughter's point of view. However, there are not as many books on parenting and the darkness of motherhood has not been sufficiently explored. Fortunately, every time we are witnessing the birth of more novels that do not speak from the point of view of the son or the daughter, but from the point of view of the mother and father and that tell us everything that many times it is forbidden to name. Because it is not well seen for a mother to say that she cannot stand her child or that sometimes she wants to give him away or kill him, which in the end are absolutely normal feelings but which, nevertheless, is frowned upon to name because the role of the mother it is sacred.
Q.
In
Los abismos,
the protagonist's mother, grandmother and other women who appear in the novel are an example of the imposition of motherhood. The novel is set in the '80s. Would you say that in countries like Colombia this imposition still exists today?
R.
My feeling is that women are still expected to be mothers and to form a family. It is true that the mothers of the women of my generation were ensured that their daughters studied. Studies were the most important value. That gave us great freedom, because it allows us to divorce if we are not happy or to choose a life other than motherhood. So we have more freedom than women of previous generations, yes, but my feeling is that motherhood is still seen as a value, as something very important for a woman to be fully realized. The idea still survives that if a woman is not a mother, she is not complete.
P.
The result of this imposition and the prevailing machismo in the society of the time is clearly seen in the fate of many of those women who appear in the novel. As the Alfaguara Prize jury rightly said, they seem "tied to the wheel of a Ferris wheel from which they cannot or do not know how to escape". The maternity thus imposed has a lot of jail.
A.
I had my son when I was 43 years old, after having done everything I wanted in my life.
At that age I decided to be a mother and mine was a wanted, loved and desired child.
However, parenting is very difficult, motherhood is a series of tremendous challenges.
That is why I often wonder what it will be like to be a mother without wanting to be or without being prepared.
Or being a daughter when your mother didn't want to be, when she was under pressure.
It must be a huge challenge and that is reflected in the novel.
P.
Nor do the men in the novel escape from that wheel, by the way.
'Los abismos', by Pilar Quintana.
R.
Totally and about it, about how men are trapped by a macho and patriarchal society, less is said. The example is Claudia's father: he has his princesses at home while he breaks his back working alone. He fulfills the role of provider, does not participate in raising the daughter except when his wife is ill. And then there is his inability to connect with his emotional side, to express himself, to express his feelings, to acknowledge his family's problems, to face the fact that his wife is depressed and his daughter is abandoned.
P.
Precisely I liked how the mother of the narrator excuses herself in a rhinitis to try to hide what is clearly a very strong depression.
And I find it surprising that everyone, except the girl, accepted that excuse, as if they were wearing a blindfold so as not to see the obvious.
R.
It is that today it still is, but in the 80s the stigma towards mental illness was enormous. My grandfather suffered from depression and I remember hearing my mother and aunt talking quietly about it, between whispers, because it was embarrassing to admit that someone was suffering from depression. And another thing that was very present then and that also appears in the novel were the magazines of the heart. On the cover, for example, there was the magnificent Princess Diana, wearing jewels, smiling from ear to ear, but when you opened the magazine and read the article it turned out that she was completely unhappy. It was very impressive to have that window open to the lives of the rich and famous, a life that seemed very glamorous but that hid a very strong distance between the facade and real life. That is a reflection of what is lived with Claudia's mother.She seems to the rest of the world the perfect woman, but her daughter feels at times that her mother is the worst of all.
P.
That daughter, Claudia, is an almost orphan girl. Her father lives in silence and her mother does not want her. Is it inspired by someone in particular?
A.
I'm not sure if I was a desired daughter or rather my mother got pregnant, because whenever I ask her she laughs and doesn't tell me anything; But I think that her character is very much based on being the daughter, not necessarily of my mother, but of the women of that generation, who still carried the authoritarianism of the previous generation and we, when we were children, still treated us as if we were less than adults, as if we had fewer rights. And there is another thing about this generation of my mother: it is difficult for them to look in the mirror, to recognize that they have a problem and that they have to go to the psychologist. This has caused that the children of them have carried on our shoulders many times with their defects, their problems and their frustrations.
P.
I have thought precisely reading the novel that how many boys and girls like Claudia there will be in the world; boys and girls who have to grow up suddenly to support and care for those who should care for them. In this sense, does
Los abismos
also hide
a plea against the idealization of childhood?
The novel perfectly shows that, the end of childhood not because you are 18 years old, but when you are still a child and you have to emotionally take charge of your parents and find out some secrets that you should not have to carry.
I think this novel demystifies motherhood, but it also does the same with childhood.
We tend to think that childhood is the happy and carefree place, but in the writing exercise I went back to my childhood and found that I had a relatively normal childhood, like any other, but with tremendous darkness.
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