Twenty years have passed, but Alba Carballal (Lugo, 1992) has not forgotten the smell of tar or the image of the sea dyed black after the oil tanker Prestige, with 77,000 tons of crude oil on board, sank. split in two and sank off the coast of Galicia.
“It is impossible to erase that memory. I don’t think anyone who has seen it can, ”says the writer during her visit to Barcelona. After the success of Three ways to induce a coma, the writer publishes You will dance on my grave (Seix Barral), a novel in which she demonstrates how major environmental catastrophes can not only compromise the political future, but also condition the lives of those who they suffer closely.
“The 2002 chapapote was my first political memory. When I was ten years old, I realized that the world of adults was much more sloppy than I thought. You had Rajoy saying on television that little threads with the appearance of plasticine were coming out of the Prestige and denying the magnitude of what had just happened. Luckily, the people did come together and mobilize en masse. There were many who came to the coast to clean up and put a solution to something that the politicians left aside. The proof is in how little this subject has been remembered during all this time. It is not interesting to bring to light environmental and political disasters of this type ”, denounces the writer.
It is not the only event that Carballal mentions in his book. Similar events occurred years before in Galicia: the Greek tanker Andros Patria, which sank in 1979; and that of the Aegean Sea, another Greek oil tanker whose oil spill also ruined the coast in 1992. “The impotence that was born after all of them took place made Galicia become one of the great centers of the birth of environmentalism in Spain”, the author points out.
That environmental awareness conditioned more than one, as is the case with one of the protagonists of this story, Aida Celanova, who decides to become an environmental lawyer. “Even though the years go by, restlessness and impotence continue to be present in Galicia. For example, what happens to the radioactive waste from the Atlantic trench? They are forgotten in drums that are supposed to be sealed, yes, but they have a life useful that is not indefinite. Who remembers them? Only the Galicians and, if we don’t repeat it, not even the new generations will. Closing your eyes and looking the other way is a danger”.
Beyond the fuel stains and environmental blows, Carballal takes advantage of its pages to explore not only the recent history of Galicia, but also the countercultural part of an entire country. Thus, by the hand of some characters from a town in the Rías Altas for whom tar will mark their lives, it echoes the so-called ‘movida vigo’ or the one known as the Bakalao or Destroy route in the Valencia of the 90s.
“The bakalao route was demonized a lot in its day. The media did a lot of damage because they reduced everything to chemical substances, traffic accidents and crazy people. And yes, there was that, but in reality it was one of the most interesting movements in the 90s in Spain. It somehow symbolized workers’ liberation. It was carried out mostly by people who worked 14-hour days during the week and who had the weekend as the only loophole in life, so they took advantage of it to death”.
Despite the fact that the author has not lived many of the years that she narrates, that “has not been a great challenge, since I have documented myself a lot. What has been more difficult for me is finding the balance to narrate very harsh topics and combine them with other more intimate and even lyrical ones. I soaked up other authors who did the same thing until I ended up finding my own formula”.
Walking through that balance is something that the Galician author has been doing with ease for some time. She realized that architecture was not her thing during her Erasmus in Paris. “The demands of the classes dropped and I was able to dedicate myself to writing, something that I had put aside.” And since then she has combined studies with the pen and, later, her work as a screenwriter. “When I wrote the first novel, I had the Antonio Gala Foundation scholarship and I could dedicate myself fully. Now, on the other hand, I have to find hours where there are none. I always say and I will never tire of repeating that this scholarship is one of the greatest acts of patronage that exists right now in this country, especially for young creators. It is one of the few that bet on us. Live to work without having to work to live”.
