In her latest novel, ‘What to do with these pieces’, the Colombian novelist Pietà Bonnet (Amalfi, Colombia, 1951) tells a story of unmitigated loneliness, about a life that looks like “a rotting strawberry.” At one point during the reading, this chronicler wrote on the margin of the pages of the book, edited by Alfaguara, like his others, including ‘What has no name’ (2013) or ‘Where nobody waits for me’ (2018), this phrase: “Life is a son of a bitch”. Pages further on, the novel itself read: “Life is shit.” “What reflections!” she exclaims when we tell her about her find. reflective, this important poet of the Spanish languageinvited now by the Student’s residence to publicize her many-times award-winning literature, she speaks as if she were seeing what is happening in the life she tells, looking not only as a narrator, but as someone who has seen pieces of his own life grow in his fictional characters.
How was this book born?
Of all the books I’ve written, this is one of the few where I have a hard time reconstructing the creative process. I started it shortly before the pandemic, then this plague came and the memory started to work in a different way. The first thing that came to mind was the kitchen, which is an important part of the plot. Because a long time ago, maybe eight years ago, we remodeled the kitchen of the house and it was absolute chaos, with stumbles and absurdities. So I wanted to write some stories and one of them was something funny about a kitchen. I wrote it down and there it was. But one day I went back to those notes and said: this is a novel! A novel of oppressive everyday life. We were already in the pandemic and, being confined, I got a little overwhelmed and started writing. When I had about ten pages, I reread them and said: this is terrible poverty, very prosaic. I was really scared. And I began to read those who write well.
Which author helped you?
I really like John Banville. But Banville was very poetic for what he was going to do. So I went to Vivian Gornick, to her Fierce Attachments. Because this book has to do with Emilia’s attachment and unhealthy relationship with her husband. And that Gornick book helped me a lot. I recovered.
“I only underline the misunderstandings of women in general and I claim friendship, which is what saves us. Because the family world is very surly”
Did you have difficulty with thinking, with language, or with autobiography? Because in the book there is failure and pain. The disdain is such that the husband has no name.
The difficulties were formal, of language. But, above all, I got into the subject of old age because of my parents, who are very old. There is an autobiographical part, but during the pandemic I was more impacted by the mistreatment of women. And, within that, it seemed more necessary to underline the minor mistreatment. The idea was to talk about a personal crisis through the crisis of a kitchen. And the other thing that occurred to me to point out is how many women of my generation quickly conquered the labor field, but we were left with traffic jams or the imprint of religious training, from which we have not completely freed ourselves. That was the idea I was working with. I’m not afraid that they will say “this is Piedad’s husband, this is his sister, this is her mother…”. I am not afraid of that. I only underline the misunderstandings of women in general and claim friendship, which is what saves us. Because the family world is very surly. Recently, correcting the proofs of my complete poetry, I realized that the theme of almost all my work is the family. The father’s relationship with his son, the cracks, the misunderstandings within the family. I saw my parents so old and I thought, for example, that I didn’t know their relationship well.
There are phrases in the novel that summarize the splendor and the sadness, and that are intertwined.
It is that the decomposition crosses. The breakdown of the marital relationship. The one of the bodies. The one of the houses.
The decomposition of old age. The aggressive dependence that unites.
That is something very widespread, more than we think. Many people stay in marriage out of habit. I was very interested in the situation of 65 or 70 years, because that is where it is most difficult to liberate. Because it is thought that a woman, after 60, has no options. So she resigns herself to a poor relationship. And she says: well, I’d better stay here.
Mercy, landscapes appear here, but your country does not appear.
Yes, it appears, look at the social outbursts.
But the great problem of Colombia does not appear.
No. Because it appeared in the previous novel, ‘Where nobody waits for me’, in which the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, the drug traffickers are. But not here. Because this is in a petty-bourgeois world.
There is also a quest. And the language catches.
It was the only salvation, right? Because if it were written truculently, well… Beauty has to emerge so that literature is what allows you to breathe.
There is a loneliness of two.
Note that many years ago I wrote a poem that goes like this: ‘Soledad de dos’. But what got me now is that during the pandemic lockdown, suddenly one discovered things about the other that… one had no idea! It will be because before there was no time to see them. But, being without going out, all the time together, one saw other things. In addition, there is another interesting thing: the loss of dialogue, of the word. Because that’s the good thing about being in a couple.
And in the memories.
Memories are like a chain. It’s what holds, yes. And it creates dependency. The memories of the trips, of what we were, of what we dreamed of.
“What will it be like to live when one no longer expects anything of oneself?” What an insurmountable wall, right?
It is the idea of old age as non-future. It’s very hard, yes.
Was it difficult for you to write such phrases or did they come up without any problem?
You know that I am a poet. And we poets are trained to synthesize like this. Those phrases come out of poetic intuition.
“One sees oneself outside of memories until a certain age. Then one sees oneself as being inside”
And to see yourself as a character from a movie, a dream or a nightmare.
It is that one sees himself out of memories until a certain age. Then one sees oneself as being inside.
It’s hard not to think about the failures.
It is that failure is not outward, it is inward. It is one’s conscience that has wrought his own failures. Well, there are failures that occur due to the circumstances that surround us. But within personal relationships one has to accept failure. Both in case you screw up or if you make an effort to compose something, to move forward with the relationship with someone, and it doesn’t work out for you.
There is also the rot of the time. Aggression, for example, which consists of sending messages to each other instead of calling each other.
Yes. That has caused a deterioration of relations. Where is the voice of your people? Well, before there were also wonderful letters and, now, an email… Where is the calligraphy? Before, too, you put some photos in an album and now you have a lot of images on your cell phone and you no longer know which one is the most important.