Patricia Almarcegui, nomadic writer: “Curiosity drives you to travel”

2023-08-01 11:55:55

Where is the place in the world of a traveler? From someone who says they don’t have a home anywhere but they do have a house? Patricia Almarcegui, As an author of travel books, who knows that in her case places condition the narrative, she proclaims that her home is in Menorca, which is the place where she writes, even though her other great geographical fondness is miles away. In Iran, a country that she seduced when she made a long journey through the Middle East after having studied Arabic. A good part of the life of this comparative literature professor, expert in orientalism, who was born in Zaragoza 53 years ago, takes place between these two geographical points – “Perhaps the Aragonese desert taught me to love the landscape, the light and the colors of Iran” , he jokes-, and being a professor at the University in Barcelona he decided to reorganize his life to live permanently on the Balearic island. Behind her was the frustrated vocation of classical dance, to which she dedicated herself professionally for a while until an injury took her on other paths. Her story, the one that gave birth to her second novel, ‘The memory of the body’.

His latest travel book, ‘Lost Notebooks of Japan’, which has sold out several editions, is a fragmentary, delicate and elegant book and no less delicate is his recent novel, ‘The Lives I Didn’t Live’ (Candaya), where she has turned her adopted island into a meeting point for two women, one from Menorca, Anna, and the other from Iran, Pari, both in crisis. This couple may seem unlikely but it is based on specific and real circumstances: the fact that in recent years Menorca has been a stopover for the 33 Iranians who have passed through there on their way to exile in Brussels. “I wanted to talk about the mobility of people in unthinkable places, to show, for example, that an Iranian barber has settled in Sant Lluís, a Menorcan town.”

Menorca conceived as a crossroads between East and West keeps unknown stories, such as the Turkish attack suffered in the 16th century who took 4,000 of the 4,500 inhabitants that the island had then prisoner, and which makes the author wonder about the astonishment of those Menorcans when contemplating the opulence of Constantinople at that time.

The novel arises from a thirty interviews with women of three generations to which he asked about the moments in which they had seen themselves in inferiority of family, sentimental and social conditions. All of this crystallized in the story of these two women that Almarcegui convenes as parallel lives. The idea is that being born in the West does not exempt a woman from inequality and violence: “She wanted to go beyond the Islamic revolution and show how women also had difficulties in the time of the Shah. Women have had a hard time in the 40s, 50s and 60s, both with the East and the West. That is why neither of my two protagonists have it easy”.

When the orchard is a garden

The common denominator between the two is the care of a garden that she conceives of in a different way than usual: “The first person who saw an orange plant was a pumpkin and the one who saw a fountain very possibly saw a ditch. The idea is that it is not necessary to make gardens but orchards or use them as if they were gardens. I think you have to change your look so that the most beautiful landscape is a pea”.

The Menorcan years have served him to witness the latest political paths in the Balearic Islands, with the disappearance of the Equality and Environment ministries, deactivated due to pressure from Vox. “The island is being sold because it is beautiful and it is safe and that in these times is. A comfortable target for millionaires who used to go to Beirut or Corcega. Menorca is suffering from the gentrification of visitors with high purchasing power while the Menorcans are relegated because they cannot afford the exorbitant prices of houses”.

Almarcegui maintains that traveling serves to have those social perspectives, broaden aspirations and the horizon. She learned it when she was a child looking out the back window of her father’s car, who could not be anything other than a salesman. “Curiosity drives you to travel and traveling allows you to attend an event in real time, a sunset in Madras or a ballet in Saint Petersburg. I have been through the world, I have seen it, and that leaves me calmer”.