In Txani Rodríguez's latest novel,
La seca,
we witness a conflict that I have never seen represented in all its thorny complexity until now: the protagonist, a woman who lives in a medium-sized town like Llodio with hardly any close family ties, falls under the protection of that sacrosanct institution that is the Basque gang and, at a certain moment, is expelled from it.
It all begins when one of her supposed friends harshly rebukes her during a night of partying, having a drink, and she seeks the complicity or understanding of the rest of the members of the group.
One after another, she finds that everyone is closing ranks around the aggressor and moving away from her for fear of discomfort or friction from her.
“She continued going to the usual bar, without desire, because she forced herself not to stay locked up at home: some of her former friends greeted her with as much discretion as clumsiness when passing by her, others actively ignored her and there were also those who tried to pretend that they didn't see it," he writes.
She “she remembers herself alone, leaning against the wall, with a beer in her hand, with her pulse in her neck and wrists, with her stomach closed.”
The portrait of this social void, a kind of bullying among adult actors on a large scale, generates a clear and dull feeling of suffocation in me, perhaps because it reminds me of my own negative experiences in contexts of group toxicity, perhaps because it invites me to reflect. about the less friendly side of those non-blood ties that we have claimed so much and perhaps romanticized in my generation, following the example of the support networks with which the LGTBI collective learned to survive on the margins of the system that expelled it.
With everything that is undeniably vindicated about the construction of spaces of love and care that transcend the often suffocating institution of “the given family,” I recognize that I have been uneasy for some time with the resonances that the contrasting concept of “chosen family” returns to me. .
This binomial given/chosen puts freedom of choice at the center, as if the social subject were a
casting
director who, when it came time to leave the nest and face the adult world, opened a great audition to choose between an infinite number of candidates for the friends who, by affinity or quality, you best estimate will accompany you on your journey.
But is that how it works?
Have we already invented a Tinder for crews?
Can anyone accurately affirm that he has freely chosen his best friends?
The truth is that my chosen family is quite similar to the one I did not choose, and is often burdened by the same types of conflicts and tensions.
During the last few weeks, I have lived immersed in that strange sociological event that represents each new edition of
Operation Triunfo
, which celebrates its end this Monday.
I realize that the images related to
castings
and auditions that I have invoked in the previous paragraph may have come from there.
Also the intrigue, or fascination, of having seen firsthand how friendships and intense bonds were forged between people who have spent three months locked up on a large set, with nothing to do with each other beyond a shared talent ( and talent is not chosen).
When I was 18 years old, they also “locked me” in a house with a group of strangers with whom I was only related to my vocation.
Eighteen years after that founding experience at the Antonio Gala Foundation, some of my classmates are still central members of the family that supports me, but I couldn't say that I chose them myself, because Antonio did.
The same thing happens to me with the members of the group that, as a Basque that I am, I have held since high school, and there it was the socioeconomic variables that determined the educational center that corresponded to me who selected the people who are supposedly related to me.
Almost all my friends are university students, they work in jobs related to the humanities, they vote for left-wing parties, they have houses to return to for Christmas.
The truth is that my chosen family is quite similar to the one I did not choose, and is often weighed down by the same type of conflicts and tensions that the ego causes when it finds a solid, smooth crystal in which to reflect itself.
It is a shame that in my adult life I have not known how to make room for the otherness that would probably have unraveled my seams for the better, but this dissolution of the difference between what is given and what is acquired forces, in a certain way, to seal sacred pacts with the people who impose themselves on us along the way.
If we have not chosen anyone, we cannot rule out anyone for such petty reasons—"he accused her of being a backbiter, of not paying for the rounds when she was due"—as those that distance the protagonist of
La seca
from her main support network.
It makes me happy to say that I have friends who I often hate, friends who often hate me, but the firm conviction that we are in this together, until something that would have to be stronger than death separates us, because we have not had a choice.
Aixa de la Cruz
is a writer.
Her latest book is 'Las heiresses' (Alfaguara).
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