tsunami

What are the chances that a writer finds himself in the exact place and moment of a colossal tragedy, and that he survives, and that he has the opportunity to tell it.

Without having to make any effort, something difficult to achieve unfolds before him: a story, and not just any story, but one of those stories that sinks our bones, with real and massive death.

This writer only has to use his talent and narrate what he has experienced.

He no longer has to scratch the testimonies of others, nor rack his brains to achieve a correct fiction, nor resort to the subterfuge of someone who cannot find a story: writing his irrelevant daily dramas to put together a book that, although in the end it turns out to be a good work, in the process he has been lurching from one side to the other, in a binge of nonsense and boredom.

In a minute I will return to this topic of the writer who survived the catastrophe.

But first I want to go back to Sunday, December 26, 2004. 07:58 local time in Sri Lanka.

An underwater earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale interrupted breakfast and the lives of 35,322 people.

40% were children.

As in that quote by Boccaccio in

, that morning thousands of people had a peaceful breakfast with their friends and family, and then, at night, dined with their ancestors in the other world.

That day.

Sonali Deraniyagala, a London resident but born in the island's capital, to which she had returned for the Christmas holidays, tried to flee in a

with her husband and her two children.

In the escape she did not even consider knocking on the door of the hotel room where her parents were staying, she simply took her two children and ran from something unknown to

also unknown.

In the imagination of all those of us who have not experienced a tsunami, we see gigantic waves breaking like mountains of water on the ground, but Sonali says that during that escape, the

it was not suddenly overturned by a flood of water, but gradually began to flood from below, as if the water, instead of coming from the sea, sprang to the surface from inside the earth.

As Sonali tells it, I imagine it more like a deluge of apocalyptic dimensions than a tsunami, but the water ran in the opposite direction: from the earth to the sky.

From the earth to the sky, the same route that the more than 35,000 dead took.

That Sunday, Sonali lost her two children, ages five and seven, her husband, her mother, her father, and her best friend.

The man who rescued her from the waters said that he had never—not even in the bewilderment he saw during that day and the days that followed—seen an image as strange as Sonali's: half naked and all covered in mud, not looking for her friends. children, she did not ask for help, she just turned around on herself, like that game in which children spin and spin until they get dizzy to fall to the ground.

He so he found her.

Neither the man nor Sonali ever understood what she was doing.

It took nine years for Sonali to share her testimony in the

book .

Until a few days ago I was not interested in him.

I made an already fossilized mistake: I thought I had understood the tsunami in the book

, by Emmanuel Carrère, an internationally awarded writer whose work I follow and applaud.

My mistake was once again trusting that literary talent could come up with a better story, especially when its author has starred in it, and that is because that day Carrère was also on vacation in Sri Lanka, when the tsunami allowed him to live — as they say—to tell it.

But it happens that Carrère did not tell it, or did not tell it in all its depth.

It is true that her tragedy was not so profound, she did not lose anyone, but she did see and smell the dead, hear the cries, flee from the madness installed in the faces of people who, like Sonali, had seen their chain of DNA forever, last links, loose and lost in the mire, abandoned from the past—the death of their parents—to the future—the death of their children.

Without yesterday.

No tomorrow.

Just a top that spins on itself.

Sonali Deraniyagala had never written anything before this book, and to my knowledge, she has never written another book.

I don't know if she was a good reader, but I am convinced that she did not need any kind of literary knowledge to write a more literary book than Carrère's.

This is not a literary criticism, in fact it has nothing to do with either of the two works I'm talking about, but with a question: what makes a great writer extraordinary?

The answer is impossible, but I am certain that there are certain accidents that stand between a writer's talent and his work: the display of erudition, the ballast of criticism, the obsession with permeating the text with what is considered the own style, an egomania that in turn is marked by the huge bookstores loaded with books, as if they had to endure, so that they do not fall, the walls of that fiction that we are and that we have created so that others see us as we do. would like to be.

All this plays against the work when it comes to exhibiting it, otherwise,

What would be the explanation for those thousands of works by authors who have only written a single excellent book without knowing little or nothing about literature?

However, those books are not in our bookstores, we all end up reading the same thing, but the fact is that even the most awarded author should not let his personal library, his academic reading or the latest fashion in literary theory get in the way of the life of the text.

From Carrère's book I hardly remember his narration as a victim of the tsunami.

However, I do remember that other parallel story and for me tedious that has to do with the French judicial system.

How can it be that a story about the most bureaucratic part of a judge's career prevails over a story with a potential for creation as great as the lives it claimed?

The answer I give myself is that Carrère's eyes were veiled by the cataracts of the intelligentsia, of his literary education, of criticism.

Carrère could not tell the truth about the tsunami because, although he suffered it, he was not able to see it without literary interference.

Now that I have read Sonali's book, I confirm that the best way to write is to let that which is bigger than us, that implacable and true, speak.

Talent is a force of nature that writes itself, raw and in excessive freedom.

Sonali lost his family, but achieved a work where the water level rises in the form of creation and truth.

A good book is always a catastrophe, a before and after.

If this is understood, even the most irrelevant detail can be narrated with the grip of the most powerful tsunami in history.

And it is that all of us, at some point in our lives, have to survive in the waters that flood us between the four walls of our body.

Marina Perezagua

is a writer, author of

(Anagram).

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