It wasn't when he slept two nights on the street out of obligation during his Erasmus in Berlin. When Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, ​​1978) understood human fragility in the city it was during her time in Barcelona's Eixample. A man dressed in a jacket, tie and briefcase settled in the doorway of her block. As the days passed, that increasingly worn suit revealed the end of the triple certainty that it contained in its origin: work, routine, home. “The glass that separates the world from relative safety, what makes us feel safe, is getting thinner. We are one push away from the elements,” the author points out at the beginning of the conversation, as in those dry and sharp aphorisms that so characterize her writing.

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'Boulder', candidate for the Booker International Prize

Dressed in dark tones, camouflaged with the mood of a gray and rainy morning at the end of March, the poet-novelist has emerged from her bubble in her house in the Cardedeu countryside — where she lives about 40 kilometers from Barcelona with her two daughters. and his dog (Mali)—and goes on time to the appointment at the Ateneu next to the Rambla. She orders a black tea to warm up and chat about her “new daughter,” as she affectionately calls

Ocaso y fascinación

, her most recent novel published in original Catalan at Club Editor and since April 4 available in Spanish with a translation by Concha Cardeñoso at Random House. . She does not feel like a “lover” in this fiction as she did with

Boulder

, the second chapter of the triptych of motherhood that she created with

Permagel

(

Permafros

t in Spanish) and

Mamut

. Her obsession with that heroine—a cook on a merchant ship who abandoned her chosen solitude to have a child with her girlfriend—led her to divorce her wife, in addition to making her a finalist for the 2023 Booker Prize. “I hang on to all my dreams.” protagonists in different ways. With

Boulder

it was more erotic, a deeper infatuation. In

Sunset and Fascination

, since I reflected much more on the life of the protagonist, I have had less dissociation,” she points out.

Without a trace of usual sex but with high doses of spiritual eroticism, the Barcelona native returns with this fable that seeks solutions to contemporary decadence. One in which “the present is an inevitable cage” and the city becomes a “bloody” and isolationist entity. Here, the human presence, rather than relief, offers suspicion. “We have normalized real estate violence and turned houses into impassable stone walls. We need a radical paradigm shift,” she predicts. Structured in two very different acts (

Ocaso

and

Fascinación

), the writer narrates in the first what happens when a nameless twenty-something girl who charges four dollars in a play center, one of the precarious ones who spends half a month on tuna and rice, You see yourself on the street without a cell phone, without a toothbrush and without a laptop. The young woman has just been pushed out of what she thought was her house because her room in a central apartment shared with seven other people has been awarded to a Colombian couple who will pay double. After that forced and violent dispossession that will leave her sleeping in the Barcelona Sants station afraid of the rain and being raped, the protagonist will become a house cleaner. She will earn little and in black, but she will do it thanks to the hand extended to her by the cleaner of the building where she lived after she is fired from her job. “Many people ask me why she doesn't ask those around her for help, but nowadays it's not difficult to be left alone. It may sound strange, but I didn't start making friends until I turned 40 and I didn't speak to my family for three years. You can't claim anything when the rest don't expect anything from you either,” Baltasar clarifies about the reason for this isolation.

Baltasar, photographed next to Sants station, where its protagonist spends nights sleeping.massimiliano minocri

If in

Ocaso

the narrative is raw, suffocating and realistic,

Fascination

is transformed into a gothic act of high mystical voltage for that protagonist. A spiritual epiphany where the author destroys everything and has divided critics without half measures: with Fascination

,

either tune in or reject. “All reception is valid and interests me, my work does not have a single meaning,” she says without a trace of irritation and very entertained by the polarization that this second act so marked by Christian iconography awakens. The author confirms that if her school had been for nuns and not for priests, she would now be “secluded in a convent” (she studied with her sister at the Sant Ramon de Penyafort school in Vilafranca del Penedès and was confirmed, but later abandoned the faith). She believes that the only way out of this social unrest is in a spiritual search. “It is not about surrendering to a religion in the face of this decline. It doesn't matter if it's Christian, Islamic or whatever. I talk about surrendering to a tradition, finding meaning. The protagonist is part of the one I have grown up with, because her plastic sense has always fascinated me. Within her delirium, she creates her own goddess,” she reflects on the paths of a text that includes clues to understand what really happens in that abrupt, almost hallucinogenic ending. “I have come to this novel to kill. I have killed the motherhood that was dragging from the triptych. I have killed that powerful caste that dominates us through money. I have killed destructive feelings that I was carrying, because writing in me works like a catharsis. Many readers have told me that this book has helped them kill toxic relationships, end people they had adored and who had only hurt them, isn't it wonderful? "She summarizes.

Homeless in the jungle

The Catalan woman is not the only plot that is delving into the housing crisis derived from real estate speculation. In

Administrative Silence

(Anagrama, 2019), Sara Mesa focused on the bureaucratic labyrinth and institutionalized indignity of a disabled and homeless thirty-year-old woman who is trying to access housing and the minimum vital income. In

Casi

(Books of the Asteroid, 2024), Jorge Bustos investigates the dehumanization of the community of homeless people in his Madrid neighborhood. And in

Imperatiu categòric

, playwright Victoria Szpunberg has just closed one of the successes of the Barcelona theater season. In that work that has been sold out throughout the month of March, a university professor of Ethics without a permanent position who has just separated from her also finds herself dispossessed, expelled from her apartment due to price pressure in the center. Alone and ignored, she will look for her place in the jungle of

expats

and digital nomads that gentrified Barcelona has become.

Scene photograph of the play 'Imperatiu Categòric', in the image the actress Àgata Roca. Teatre Lliure, Barcelona. Sílvia Poch

“I wanted to portray a middle-aged woman who believes she has done everything well, who without feeling like an activist or being anti-system, suffers a lot of anguish in a city that atomizes us and in which the neighborhood network has been lost due to the tourist imposition,” explains the author, who was inspired by her own experience looking for an apartment in the city. “Hers is an invisible character on whom all kinds of prejudices fall, but apparently harmless people, like 50-year-old women, can also have a dark side,” she points out. Szpunberg even recorded the conversations she had with real estate agents in a house search that has not yet ended. “This business gives off a lot of anger and violence, it is a frankly depressing scenario. I am not a person who idealizes life in the country, I want to live in my city. But, nowadays, if you don't live as a couple, the city expels you,” she says.

The privacy of the cleaner

Magda Szabó wrote in

The Door

that “the world is divided into two classes of people, those who sweep and those who do not.” In another twist to a vital resume that never ceases to surprise her, Eva Baltasar confirms that she, like her heroine, was also one of the first class. If in the promotion of

Mamut

we discovered that the author spent part of her youth in an isolated mountain in Berguedà without electricity, with this book she has revealed that, in addition to working for a time as a teacher in public and subsidized schools, she also worked as a cleaner. “I cleaned houses for two years while studying for college. I did it because of the miseries I experienced as a waitress in a coffee shop chain. Cleaning allowed me to organize my schedule and live better. That doesn't mean that I got paid in black, that it was very tiring and that they exploited me because I was very cheap,” she reveals about her experience. Maybe that's why, in every house she cleans, her protagonist takes a subtle and gratifying revenge for seeing herself on her knees for eight euros an hour.

Her heroine disagrees with what Betty Friedan popularized when she said that “no woman has ever had an orgasm cleaning the kitchen floor.” Here the order of the home becomes an act of possession, an erotic and pleasurable experience of devotion and care towards objects and surfaces. “Most people are unaware that cleaners, in addition to knowing your intimacies better than your co-worker, have the ability to order universes, to civilize them. They are creators of spaces of beauty,” explains a writer who never reads novels related to their plots.

Still from the series 'Maid' (2021), based on the memoirs of writer Stephanie Land. RICARDO HUBBS (NETFLIX)

Baltasar is unaware of the emergence of contemporary essays and fictions that are in tune with his novel and that have also brought domestic work out of invisibility. He confirms that he has not seen

The Maid

or read

Maid,

the Netflix phenomenon series that adapts the memoirs of Stephanie Land, a homeless young woman who also became a cleaner to survive. As in his novel, this is one of the few fictions in which the writer can speak from her own experience.

Whether from class guilt, narrative curiosity or the desire to dignify, other books are also correcting the depersonalization of these women, giving a voice to the subalterns. This is what happens in

Fámulas

(Anagrama, 2022), the essay by the writer Cristina Sánchez-Andrade. Horrified by the news of those workers locked in their employers' homes during confinement, the author contacted four migrant workers in Spain to tell her her story. Or in

Clean

(Lumen, 2022)

,

by Alia Trabucco Zeran, which investigates classism about an inmate in Chile. Something similar happens in

Renata sin más

, the unbridled monologue of another inmate who abandons her home and work to wander around Paris, the text that Catherine Guérard dedicated to François (Mitterrand) in 1967 and that Tránsito has now recovered with a translation by Regina López Muñoz . The only novel that Baltasar has read, who prefers “not to get intoxicated” with the same themes of his books while he writes, was

Manual for cleaning women

.

He only thought one thing when he acquired the Catalan translation of the anthology of stories based on the life of Lucía Berlin: “Come on, look, like me.”

Map of dispossessed

Decline and fascination,

Eva Baltasar (Club Editor/ Random House, 2024)

In the latest novel by the Booker nominee, translated from the original Catalan into Spanish by Concha Cardeñoso Sáenz de Miera, a precarious 27-year-old teacher is expelled from her rented room in a shared apartment in the center of Barcelona. Invisible and on the street, she will begin a stage of her life as a house cleaner that will take her from decline to her personal fascination.

Renata without further ado

, Catherine Guérard (Transit, 2024) 

In 1967, after having published this novel that she dedicated to François (Mitterrand), its author disappeared as a writer. Translated by Regina López Muñoz, in this agitated interior monologue with hardly any semicolons, a cleaner leaves the house where she works as an intern in anger. Fed up with wasting her life working for others, she will wander the streets of Paris for three days and three nights. 

Fámulas

, Cristina Sánchez-Andrade (New Anagram Notebooks, 2022)

The silenced voice of the maids. Fascinated by

The Maids,

the work of Jean Genet, the author evokes the life of her grandmother's domestic worker and offers testimonies of women from Honduras, Portugal and Cape Verde who, driven by economic needs, came to Spain to work in a path full of violence, sexual abuse and crudeness.

Maid,

Stephanie Land (Captain Swing, 2019) 

Translated by Mireia Bofill, in these memoirs the author tells how at the age of 28 she struggled to escape a violent relationship, without having savings and with her daughter in her arms, taking refuge on the street, in shelters and later living poorly in filthy apartments while I worked cleaning houses for two years. Her story inspired the Netflix series

Maid

, which in its first 28 days was viewed by more than 67 million accounts.

Administrative Silence

, Sara Mesa (New Anagram Notebooks, 2019)

The writer Sara Mesa delves into the bureaucratic labyrinths and violence that suffocate Carmen, a thirty-something homeless, disabled and sick woman who tries to apply for the minimum income. A short and clairvoyant text to understand why “no one is going to rent her a decent room because in her state it is considered that she no longer even deserves dignity.” 

Manual for cleaning women

, Lucía Berlin (Alfaguara/ L'Altra, 2016)

Anthology of stories based on the life of the author, translated into Spanish by Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino and into Catalan by Albert Torrescasana. The women of Berlin,

alter egos

of her experience, deal with motherhood, misery and alcoholism with prodigious prose that moves us between tenderness and horror in a laugh destined to freeze.

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