Sibila Freijo: “I prefer to have a normal childhood and not know who Lubitsch is”

Although his name was Manuel, he chose a much more complex name for her. They went as hippies, but they had rich families and they put us those who did not appear in any saint, she writes. He is the father. Sibyl Freijo (A Coruña, 1972), daughter. Just published Salt (Espasa), a book that begins with the death of parents and recounts a rough portrait of childhood in A Coruña «without root braids, without high braids, without side braids, without bows, without cream, without cakes or cannelloni, without three little pigs or Little Red Riding Hood or Bollicaos or hosts,” he says.

— It originates from the writing of erotic romance novels. Why did you make this record change?

— My father died after a sudden illness from cancer. I was with him. I helped him die. That’s the only thing I did as a daughter, because we always had a very complicated relationship. I was left with an unexpected pain. In theory, he was a person for whom I suffered greatly, with whom I did not agree, but his loss brought us together. I wrote to order and sorry. I wanted to look back at my childhood, something that weighs heavily on me and had brutal consequences in my life.

“Calculation?”

“People don’t turn out bad. I speak very badly of my father and very well. People are like that. It’s all of us evil. I wanted to understand and get rid of the anger I had.

— He dismisses many progressive parents of the eighties as irresponsible. He says that they were more aware of culture and liberation than raising a child.

– They left us. I have many examples of friends. Our parents used to go to Patacón, Filloa… smoky bars. And there, until that much. It didn’t matter if the child ate or not, if he had to go to class the next day. Fatherhood did not begin like it does now, when we have children like in a glass urn. Before, we grew up almost alone, with grandparents and alone. They believed that while we sleep, eat and have a roof over our heads, the child will already be taken care of.

— Your story seems to go against the grain: that generation is usually held in high esteem.

— No, because they were tyrants. This is always associated with a right-wing father from a military family, but a liberal father can be just as tyrannical with his daughter’s education. These parents wanted to show how cultured their children are. My father would brag to his friends that I had already been to La Fura dels Bauls and that I was watching Buñuel films. It was like a car. As a certain person corresponds to a certain car, as a certain progressive father corresponds to a certain daughter.

— In the book, it seems that this culture softened everything else.

-Yes, a little bit. I have always considered myself a special girl. Not all girls saw Lubitsch at the age of 10. It created my personality and way of being. I appreciate that, but it doesn’t work. I preferred to have a normal childhood and not know who Lubitsch was. Now I know. They turned us into adults with millions of flaws.

— Is it hard to hate your parents? Can?

— Family is cancer and chemotherapy. Necessary and harmful. Who has more or who has less conflict. We need our parents, but we want to lose sight of them. Between that dichotomy you manage. It’s all very frustrating. How can you hate your parents? But sometimes you want it. It could be the biggest conflict of our lives. Parents and children. Because we who already have children find ourselves with the same things.

—There is a moment in which you see the remnants of what you experienced projected onto your children. They don’t want them to go through the same thing.

I often see myself like this.

—Did you also make them watch Bergman films when they were ten years old?

— No, but I took them to demonstrations, I played them black and white films and I took them to see Guernica when they were four years old with them like: «What are we doing here? I indoctrinated them. But they don’t allow themselves and I don’t force them, like my father. But you try to model them and bring them closer to your sphere of influence. Although I always tried to do it for fun, not like my father. make read Levitical from the Bible to a 12-year-old girl… well, I don’t know, maybe that’s why she hates reading it.

— He places his story in A Coruña, but calls it Marineda in a novelistic way.

“He went out alone. It was automatic. My father told me a long time ago that Emilia Pardo Bazán used that resource. And yes, a very nostalgic portrait was made of that city in the eighties and the place of my childhood: Italian, Ibense, pancakes with cream from Linaro, Santa Margarita Hill, the garden in Méndez Núñez, the places for those that my grandfather took me to eat in La Marino, or Remo , Bonilla…

There is a lot of drama, but with humor. Is it a savior?

– Yes, it saves me from everything. It is the sieve through which you look at life and through which you also look at yourself. The first one who looks funny and laughs at himself is me. Nothing is that important and no one is that important. Everything must be looked at with a certain doubt and a certain wonder. As a child: I don’t like this, next.

— In the book, you mentioned the missing Casa Enrique on Calle Compostela and its baths.

— I grew up in Enrique, peeing standing up in that bathroom with those dirty walls. I remember skewers with cheese and anchovies. They gave us some money, sometimes. buy an exaggerated surprise at the bookstore next door. The posh parents went to the Canton Bar, which even gave out fries, and they took us to Enrique.

“Sexual abuse is not only committed by men”

Apart from those places in A Coruña that immediately arouse nostalgia in those who knew them, u Salt others seem much murkier. For example, the Rex cinema, where the protagonist’s grandmother used to go to watch X movies in an atmosphere of filth. “That woman gave me many good and bad things, because she was very dark. He was born at the wrong time. So there was enormous hypocrisy. Couldn’t my grandmother have lovers? You couldn’t watch porn like them? Why was she a grandmother?”, asks the author. “What he couldn’t do was cross certain boundaries, which he crossed,” he adds.

— Despite locating the time when sexual liberation supposedly took place, there is a very dark side to your book.

– There is a part Salt which talks about dark or incomprehensible areas of people in our family. The human soul is sometimes full of shadow zones. This includes the closest people. There is an episode of completely unexpected abuse of the main character, more precisely a woman. Sexual abuse is not only committed by men.

— After that progressive phenomenon, was machismo still in effect?

— Many liberals of that time were extremely macho. They did things like separating and leaving a woman with children, without taking responsibility for those children. My father, for example, did not pay my mother a penny of child support. They liked to have intellectually powerful and politically engaged partners, but they also demanded that the food be ready and the children taken care of.

Are you worried about the reaction of your loved ones when they read it?

“Obviously it’s something I’ve thought about. I tried to be as considerate as possible to the people I love who are alive, but when you’re writing something autobiographical, you can’t worry about the judgment of others. you must be beautiful destroyer and jump into a swimming pool without water. If self-censorship is done, the story loses its meaning, for the writer and for the reader. I don’t think anyone in my family is surprised by what I’m saying. Whether they will accept them or not is another story. Everything is subjective, and so is the story of our life.