2023-10-03 17:46:10
Tuesday, October 3, 2023, 17:46
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When he was engrossed with a long story, a “white butterfly” passed before Uxue Alberdi. He is said to have told her to “follow me”, as explained this Tuesday, and by accepting the challenge and pulling the strings, she has finished the book ‘Belarriko kilkerra’ (Elkar), which she made together with the illustrator Begoña Durruty. “I was furious with a long story that I couldn’t get out when I remembered the audio messages my father had sent during the lockdown.”
In fact, in order to entertain the family, Alberdi asked his father to send voice messages, reciting stories and anecdotes from his childhood and youth. “We are obedient in the family and every day without fail he sent us a voice message that lasted about 10 minutes,” he explained. There were 60 in all, of all kinds, some of which his father had heard before, and he began the exercise of putting the ones he liked the most into writing, motivated by the desire to see how they sounded on paper, “whether they kept the grace and spark of the spoken word”.
Satisfied with the result, in order to collect more stories, he asked the good storytellers around him. At first he asked them to be related to the parts of the body, but on the advice of Antxiñe Mendizabal, it was finally put aside because it was a “restrictive classification”. He collected “100 or 200 stories” and after the exercise of listening and writing them down, Alberdi has collected 60 stories and anecdotes from 32 different storytellers, including Nerea Ibarzabal and Beñat Gaztelumendi. As he announced this Tuesday, the intention is to invite ‘crickets’ in the presentations “according to proximity”.
The presentation started with the voice message of one of these cricketers. The bertsolist and writer Nerea Ibarzabal has told an anecdote featuring his grandfather. In recent years he seems to have been quite deaf and did not want to wear a sonotone. In the end, during a general health examination, a similar plug was found in his ear, “a cricket or a small insect, we don’t know how many years he had it in his ear”.
‘ear cricket’
The reader will find similar but also very different ones in the book ‘Ellarriko kilkerra’. He finally divided it into four sections: ‘Strawberry thieves’, which are cheerful and fresher, “mischief and petty theft”; ‘Stairway to Heaven’, which includes posthumous accounts and is dominated by dark humor; ‘The room of pain’, there are more frightening and dramatic stories, “about the treatment of ourselves and others”; and the ‘Mirror’, which reflects the physical body.
The stories contained in the book are not “specifically” aimed at children, although Mendizabal is sure that “if told to children, they will take great pleasure”. In this regard, the editor of Elkarre wanted to emphasize the importance of those who collect “stories, stories, accounts and songs” and wanted to give a voice to the women who have been silenced for many years. Thus, he recalled the writer Maddi Ariztia (1887-1972), reading a part of the prologue from the book ‘Amattu uzta’ in 1934. In that work, he collected traditional stories and has compared them with the work brought by Alberdi this Tuesday, because the locals will also “perhaps one day become traditional”.
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