At the age of 15, Luisa Castro (Foz, Lugo, 1966) won the Galician Booksellers Award for short stories. The contest forced them to spend the 5,000 pesetas of the prize on Galician literature, and thus authors such as Castelao, Celso Emilio Ferreiro or Rosalía de Castro came into their hands. During her life she has gone from poetry to narrative, she won the Hiperión Prize for poetry in 1986 and the Short Narrative Prize in 2006. She has been director of the Instituto Cervantes in Naples, Bordeaux and now in Dublin, and she republishes a novel later of ten years
Rosario Villajos publishes her winner of the Biblioteca Breve Award to talk about the body and male violence
Further
horchata blood (Alfaguara, 2023) is narrated by a 16-year-old girl who goes through a bizarre adolescence with an absent mother, a controlling and enigmatic father, a brother who spends his days away from home and different tutors who advise the father and direct his life according to distance. They all hide secrets about accidents, psychiatric hospitalizations, inheritances and lovers. A chain of unexpected turns reveals a web of family relationships in which she looks for strategies to avoid suffocating.
“It’s like a thriller of the everyday But it is a daily occurrence, I think, not so strange. I believe that we have all felt coerced or intimidated by our environment not to treat this person or the other, or to be loyal to one in front of the other. She is born in a context where life is polarized, she is either with me or out of here. There is that entry approach: you are here under my rules and my standards, under my affection, pampering and care, and if you leave you no longer exist for me anymore. This kind of division in which the young woman lives, who is told that ‘no water to your mother’, but without telling her, in a very secretive way, I think we have all experienced it in our immediate family and also in the world of friendships That is one of the themes that the novel talks about”, explains Luisa Castro.
Writing to survive the daily gymkhana
Belén, the young protagonist of horchata blood, he has grown up not knowing why his mother left. She listens to her voice in brief and sporadic phone calls, while her father delegates his authority to advisers and lawyers who manage a rundown estate. The family home, once a modernist mansion, has a façade full of cracks caused by accidents that have not yet been cleared up. Just like the relationships between those who inhabit it or frequent it, full of scars whose wounds do not come to light, although some are beginning to reveal themselves little by little.
Luisa Castro is amused by having drawn a plot in which living becomes more and more complicated. “As if life were a gym in which you get on a device and every day is to raise the level of difficulty a little. But one thing that is in the novel from the beginning is salvation through writing, because the girl is capable of writing her story and laughing at it. That is a success, a small triumph over things”, reflects the author.
Castro relates his character to his own writing process: “I have not written it to mount a plot and amuse or sadden the readers. I have done it because I have needed it, because I needed to have that face to face with the situations that the young woman is going through. And perhaps also because it is a way of dealing with our anxiety, with our fears or with the fears of those we love and whom we cannot always help”.
Now that he is answering interviews is when he begins to analyze the novel. “I don’t know very well what I’ve done or what I’ve written about. I only know that suddenly a series of things and characters start up. Although from the beginning there is that young woman’s search for love and someone to take care of her, that is another of the lines that mark the character’s drift ”, she analyzes.
Jump from poetry to novel
For Luisa Castro, as for the protagonist of horchata blood, writing is an act of survival. “Sometimes I think that I write novels in part so as not to go crazy. Only on very few occasions do moments of beatitude or contemplation inspire me, poetry participates more in that contemplative world. But the novel is a necessity that I have been wearing since I was very young. Writing helps me to live, to sustain myself in life, where many times we are held by pins, we grope our way, like stepping on eggs on a reality that is sometimes explosive, and other times extremely boring and tedious. And then in that life everyone carries their own backpack, their own ghosts, their own story and for me, when that backpack has a certain weight, I need to lighten it and that’s where my novels usually come from”, explains Castro.
In the last ten years, Luisa Castro has published two poetry books, Street dressed actors y an old love. She says that she goes from poetry to narrative effortlessly, and thinks that the compartments of the genres in which the cultural press insists are impoverishing. “It’s been a long time since I wrote a novel, but I really don’t force the machine in that sense. There are a thousand things and a thousand stories that I would like to write and tell, but in the end only those progress that somehow link us to something real, material, of our lives, of our fears and that suddenly approach me and I see there a material that He is truly alive for me and I need to purge him, make that catharsis”, indicates the writer.
The sham of perfection
Luisa Castro’s characters are not models of coherence, they are complex and have many voices. She says that this kind of ventriloquism comes naturally to her and starts automatically when she starts writing. “That in this novel is very noticeable. When the characters speak, I believe, they speak not only responding to their character or their knowledge, but they are the echo of many other voices that resonate within them. They are not a person who behaves in a certain way and has habits and those conventional things. In my novels the characters are transcripts of life that emerge from many different wells at the same time, ”she says.
“The same character can have things that don’t seem to fit him and yet, if you think about it, our life is like that, it’s a continuous incoherence. What is surprising is that we believe that we are all perfection and correctness in person. That is a suit that one puts on in the morning and then at night, when you go to bed and undress, you are left alone with your contradictions, your fears, your vanities or your beauty”, reflects the writer.
The same character can have things that don’t seem to add up and yet, if you think about it, our life is like that, it’s a continuous incoherence
Luisa Castro
— writer
His characters do not want to be prototypes of anything. “They are multiple states of life that are manifested through fictional beings. In all of them there is a list of things that appear because they arise like that, I do not outline or define them a priori, nor do I say ‘this is going to be the traitor or that is going to be the savior’”, the author clarifies.
The 2006 Biblioteca Breve Award winner says she feels the process of writing a novel is like an emotional roller coaster ride. “My novel comes out like after a trip on the witch’s train. You get out of that witch train, you have taken a tour of the chamber of horrors and when you finish the novel you say how good, what a relief. That is the feeling I have. And you have that need to live that journey through those tunnels accompanying that young woman through those scenarios, because that way you also free yourself from your fears, ”explains Castro.
To face adversity
At different times in the book, the adults in the family remind the protagonist that she has to keep a cool head, the ‘sangre de horchata’ in the face of vital conflicts and complications. “Horchata is something very typical in Catalonia and that is the drink that the father always brings, and the family friend to the children. And the expression refers to a certain way of facing adversity, having horchata blood is having cold blood, and cold blood is necessary to do something criminal or ugly. It is that you do not care much about anything and that is what is transmitted to this girl, that this is necessary to live. And she is learning it, ”she explains.
In the novel there is a playful tone that goes hand in hand with a contained sadness, and a contrast between the atmosphere of an old house and the ways of another era of a father proud of his lineage, and the rhythms and experiences of a young woman of the century XXI. “It is something that I like about the novel, that it has this old-fashioned aroma, which has to do with the pedigree that the family boasts of, a slightly rancid aroma that clashes with the times and the youth of the protagonist. For me it was a way of putting different times on the same level, the time of reverie of the past, of heroic pasts, of great families and that of people who are waking up and discovering life”, says the writer.
Luisa Castro started publishing in Galician when she was very young, that is her mother tongue. At the age of 19, she went to Madrid to study for a degree and that led her to write in Spanish. She later lived in Barcelona, Italy, France and now in Ireland, and she does not belong to a single literary tradition. “Neither in my life nor in my experience as a writer can I subscribe to a single linguistic pattern. I don’t think anyone in this country can do it, also, because we are a country with incredible fortune, we have a good part of our population that has two languages; That is very enriching, it enriches me. It would not even occur to me to give up Galician, which is impossible, nor Spanish either, ”she maintains.