Troika were three bitches.
They all lived with the writer Isabel Zapata, but one never left her head.
Troika is a novel, the author's first.
It is a story for her daughter and an unfinished conversation with her mother.
It is, perhaps, a fable.
A book of ghosts.
There are 192 pages to dissect grief, guilt, memories.
It's childhood before
fast forward
.
It is an eclipse and a story of dislocated motherhoods.
It is a coconut palette from La Michoacana, a karate uniform stained with grass, it is inequality.
It is the incursion of the poet Zapata, of the essayist, the translator and editor, in a fiction, in the love between a girl and her infinite dog.
Troika is an obsession.
It is the one that accompanies Mictlán.
On this March morning, Isabel Zapata (Mexico City, 40 years old) had her
boiler
break and had to take a shower at her neighbor's house.
She runs with wet hair to the El Desastre bookstore, where she—in the company of her dog Roncha de ella—has written her last two books:
In Vitro
and
Troika,
both from the Almadía publishing house.
In addition, Zapata has published four others:
The nights are like this
,
Empty pool, A whale is a country
and
Three animals that fit the water.
They are all essays and poetry.
“A poem is something you can hold like this,” she says and extends her palm, “the novel overflows, of all proportions.”
Isabel Zapata's first fiction tells the triangulated story of affection between a stray dog, Troika, her owner who is a girl, Andrea, and their caretaker, Francisca.
With some jump to Veracruz, the novel takes place in the neighborhood of Coyoacán.
And she begins like this: “The year 1995 took place in the Federal District, but now I know that it doesn't matter: this story could have happened in any year and in any country, because everywhere there are dogs, mothers and ghosts.”
The construction of the book took almost five years.
“The novel is a very intrusive thing,” she says.
The three protagonists did things on their own while Zapata slept and the writer began to live in them: “This imaginary world imagined by me got into my head, which, however, was already taking care of itself.”
In those years of writing, the book changed a lot—in structure, in voices, in tone, in title—and Isabel changed, who had a daughter and watched her grow up, who reflected on motherhood, gave workshops, separated, translated, continued living. in the city.
Childhood, grief, memory
Troika began as a letter to her daughter Aurelia, to whom she wanted to convey, for example, why it was better to grow up surrounded by dogs or to try to understand, with generosity, those who seem to make incomprehensible decisions.
“There were a lot of things I wanted to tell her: about my childhood, about grief, about what it's like to grow up.”
The writer says that she had a privileged childhood in economic terms, also warm and loving, but chaotic, where her parents separated and people came and went from her life, and the most constant company was her dogs and books.
Zapata is still there in some way: “I am very aligned with the girl I was, because my family very soon fell apart;
I don't have a grandparents' house or one where my records have always been there, I have a very remote childhood and it's ironic because at the same time, just because it's very far away, I have it very present."
The author lost her father and later, at the age of 18, her mother.
“I never knew my mother as an adult and there are a lot of things that I did not resolve or that I did not have the maturity to ask.
Sometimes I think that everything I have done since then is as a result of that unfinished conversation, it is a way to continue talking.”
Grief is a topic that has obsessed her for years and that she believes has been treated in the wrong way, thinking of it as something that has stages or a final goal.
“Grief does not advance in a straight line”: she writes in a poem in
A Whale is a Country
, she repeats again on the
Troika flap,
where she found another angle to face it.
The writer Ocean Vuong states in his book
On Earth We Are Fleetingly Great
: “Memory is a second chance.”
Andrea, the protagonist, and also Isabel cling to that sentence: “Memory is not true.
Memory is invention, pure desire.
To give you an example, in
Troika
there is a stepfather, I didn't have a stepfather, but I would have loved to have one like him.
And when they ask me: is it true?
It is true in that my desires are there and my desires are also true, they are truer than many other things that you can write with exact or precise data.
I do not believe in that division that fiction is a lie and the truth is memory, I think that we put a lot of truth when we write narrative and we invent a lot when we write memory.
The end of the book is approaching.
“Will happy or unhappy memories be truer?” asks Andrea, now an adult.
“I write so that my dog stays alive.
I write and reach out to memory, this statue that we touch at the same point over and over again, for good luck or to guarantee that we will return to a certain city.
When I touch it I make it shine, uselessly.”
The novel ends, the memory begins.
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