Aurora Freijo, writer: “We couldn’t wish to be full, we want it because we are broken”

When he saw his first novel published two years ago, calf (Anagram), Aurora Freijo Corbeira (Madrid, 1965) thought to herself and continued without seeing the writer. I didn’t expect to be. Convinced that she does not know how to talk or build plots, she defended herself that it was accidental. But then the “pesky lump” appeared and she forced herself to listen. It showed from there vitreous bodythe second novel, just arrived in bookstores.

— He says that at one point something in his head started to “get stuck”. what was that

— During the pandemic, I suffered from dizziness that destroyed me. This discomfort, which changed my view of things, forced me to start talking about the disease, which, after all, is one of those anthology topics, which has to do with who we are. I didn’t know if I was going to write or not, but that’s where the little clot appeared in my thoughts and this story developed that I don’t know if it’s a novel or not because my style is always a little bit infectious. pieces, a bit of a mosaic. it came out of that vitreous bodyto feel about the disease more than to think, to feel what the disease can be.

— Apart from dizziness, what else is there for you?

— All of us who write are in some way challenged by something we experienced or felt, but what is truly biographical were those dizzy spells. It’s true that I never had any illness, nor the dizziness, but they were like a warning that things were happening. Things happen, death passes, near death passes, finitude passes, fragility passes and fear passes. Because this is, I think, a scary novel. As calf It was a novel about loneliness, this is terrifying, from someone who is very afraid. There is also loneliness, of course, but illness is death and loneliness, because a person is alone when he dies, he cannot stop being alone with death.

— A fragile body attracts certain thoughts, wake them up?

— Yes, and there comes an age – luckily it’s not too early so that we can live more peacefully – in which there is something that blows a little on your neck and tells you: “Be careful, hard times are coming”. And yes, there are hard and tough times that may come, that may pass, sooner or later.

— What scares you the most about the disease?

“Suffering, suffering. It seems inhuman to me to suffer. In addition, when one writes about death, one writes not only about the end, but also about what is around it, about the suffering that comes with it and that coming to death can entail. That fear of agony scares me a lot.

— Is there, in any case, benefit from pain, pain that serves?

— I don’t think so, we don’t deserve it, we don’t deserve to suffer. It is important that we know about our finitude, that we are not omnipotent, that we have many wounds, but I would like there to be no suffering and pain, to not count on them. I know that it is something inseparable from who we are, but there are some pains that seem inhuman to me, we have too many of them. If I were a believer, I would say that they should not have put them on us, that they could have avoided them. This, of course, does not mean that we can believe that we are compact, spherical, full. If that were so, we wouldn’t even be able to want, we want because we are broken. But yes, there are excesses, many, inhuman sufferings that should not exist.

— The protagonist of this story suffers physically. And there is that other suffering, which brings her a complicated love affair, which she is well aware of, but still continues there, always resisting a little more. Can you, should you always resist a little more?

We don’t know what we can resist.

“God forbid to test us and send us all the pain we can bear,” right?

-It’s true. That “come on, a little more”, that Rilke verse that says “one more breath”. Actually, that was supposed to be the title of the book, but it didn’t quite work out. That “a little more” appears here as “let’s pull a little more”, but also as “maybe it will be a little more”.

— “Disease brings humiliations.”

—When the protagonist talks about dizziness, she says that she walks on all fours. That humiliation of not being able to control what’s coming is horrible. None of us would want to go through that, none of us would choose to. This is not talked about much. We all want to own our bodies, but there comes a time when we can’t. That is very sad.

“Everything revolves around Galicia for me emotionally”

Aurora Freijo doubts the cathartic capacity of writing and says that she does not understand well that she is saying something very autobiographical. He refers to Marina Tsvetaeva’s quote introducing the book: “I can’t tell you about the night, because it hasn’t ended yet.” “When someone can’t explain it very late at night, you have to gain some distance to be able to say some things,” the writer thinks.

“He does not think that putting into words what is happening can save us.”

-Not. At least it doesn’t happen to me. I don’t know if writing covers me or vice versa, but in my case it’s almost imperative.

“What are you writing for?”

— For me, writing is very unpleasant, I don’t like to write. I don’t know why I do it, to be honest, but what I do know is that you don’t write for anything or anyone.

— How to make devastation poetic?

“I don’t know either, really. But as I know that the terrible has much more power when it is said beautifully or poetically, my head or my hand work to make it so, it’s not that I translate it later, it directly turns out that way. My writing is that and that’s what I love, and also my readings, my readings are always in the same place, mixing a bit of the scary and the beautiful.

— He here alludes to his Galician origin on several occasions, and he says of his mother that she is a bit meiga: “In her were the forests of the interior of Galicia.”

— It is true that I feel very Galician, I love Galicia. My parents were Galician and we spent the summer in Cangas de Foz, and when we came back, Galicia was at home the whole time. I always say that I am Galician, even though I was born in Madrid. My mother was a poet and sometimes she wrote in Galician, so for me a lot of sensitivity is connected to Galician. And my father, although he spoke in Spanish, when he was particularly gentle, he spoke in a Galician tone, with Galician words. Everything emotionally revolves around what Galicia is for me, the best of my house revolves around what Galicia is.