It seems unlikely that Lucía Lijtmaer (Buenos Aires, 1977) and Brenda Navarro (Mexico City, 1982) had not crossed paths before this interview. Both live in Madrid and belong to the same generation of female narrators in Spanish, one that is not finding problems in combining literary demands with sales. Her last two novels, which were published in March, are also bumping into novelty tables, at fairs and on recommended shelves. Cauterio –the one by Lijtmaer, in Anagrama– and Ceniza en la boca –the one by Navarro, in Sexto Piso– are very different proposals, but they have something in common: their protagonists make round trips between Madrid and Barcelona, ??which It allows both to make very precise portraits of these two cities in eternal tension, very different portraits from the ones we are used to reading.
They too have experienced that journey. Navarro lived for a time in Barcelona, ??after arriving from Mexico, and for a few years she has lived in Madrid. Lijtmaer arrived in Barcelona with just seven months of life, and she lived there until nine years ago. She is the daughter of Argentine exiles and she recounted part of that experience in her previous book, Almost nothing to wear (The books of the lynx). With this excuse, Culture / s has brought them together to talk about patriarchal urbanism, criticism of the left from the left and why the official story about these two cities with which they have a turbulent polyamory relationship must be dynamited.
What does that Madrid-Barcelona trip represent in your novels? Was it there from the beginning?
Brenda Navarro: In my case, the journey represents flight. There is something that the narrator does not like, something about Madrid that makes her very uncomfortable. She needs something new, to make her feel better. It was clear to her that the protagonist’s journey had to be territorial, not just personal. And it seemed interesting to me to do Madrid-Barcelona for what it means politically. I did it the other way around and what has happened to me is what always happens: when you leave a city is when you understand it. You analyze the cultural codes later and end up understanding who you were when you are no longer in the place. I guess it’s the natural process of migrations.
Lucía Lijtmaer: the two protagonists of Cauterio make a trip, the first one is a religious and political exile. And, in the case of the nameless protagonist, she goes from Barcelona to Madrid in a personal escape and that helped me to talk about relocation, about what happens when you take a person out of their natural place.
B.N. : When you get to a new place you can make up who you want to be because nobody knows you. That is very good because it is what interests me in literature, the performance of the characters, how they themselves can tell us their truth.
I get the feeling that both have had a good time with this specific issue, the portrait of cities. What is your current relationship with both?
B.N.: I love and hate them at the same time. I have great experiences with both. I do believe in the ability of literature to put cities in conversation with what is bad, with what bothers us and what makes us uncomfortable. I do it with the topic of care and Lucía also does it with other topics. Cities right now have a very strong narrative; Madrid has it, Barcelona has it, Mexico too. It is good that in literature we disassemble that discourse to get out of the dogma of the official discourse.
L.L: When I read your book I was very interested in the part where you talked about the subway ride. What seems strange to me is that people don’t talk about cities in their books.
The two novels propose a very different way of telling these two cities, especially Barcelona.
B.N.: I don’t know if that was the intention and I don’t know if it’s going to sound very essentialist, but I think that, since the protagonists are women, we see the city far from those literary discourses that exist even in Latin America. I feel that in the two novels what we do is remove the patriarchal beauty from the power of both cities. I feel that Barcelona is more drawn in both novels but it is also because Madrid is like that, it is a bit chaotic, it is fragmentary, while Barcelona is more cohesive. I think there is a feminine vision that finds nooks and crannies. I’m thinking of La plaça del diamant. Then there is another Barcelona that could be Mendoza’s. There are different ways in which we see men and women in these two cities.
L.L.: Rodoreda is the most modern. Thinking of good portraits of today’s Barcelona, ??Gonzalo Torné also occurs to me. What I think is that there is a discursive construction around Barcelona and Madrid that has to do with the municipal narrative. In the case of Barcelona, ??”the best city in the world”, it is that being happy with the place where you have lived. It was interesting for me to break with that from a place that is not based on costumbrismo.
The two practice a very sharp criticism with movements that touch them closely. In Cauterio there is a macho of the new left, in Ceniza, some university feminists less supportive than they think.
L.L.: In my case, neither the female characters nor the rest of the characters are beings of light, and that is what is interesting. I’m not interested in stories of kindness. By placing the novel in a very specific space, in Barcelona after that triumphalist idea that reached its zenith before the economic crisis, it served me to deal with the issue of the new municipalism and goodness in political will. Also, if we are going to talk about machismo, it would have been very easy for me to build a right-wing or far-right character who in the private sphere is sexist, but that does not interest me. I can speak of leftist machismo.
B.N.: There is a need to believe that those who are seeking justice are pure people, and in reality this is not the case. It’s good to crack it. In politics the past will always appear. Nobody is honest when they go into politics. I can’t with that idea of: “We are all going to be pristine, we have the pure truth.” We should start being more honest. Not even on the left is there much purity, despite the fact that they want to present themselves as very honest.
Also having that external gaze, that Latin American prism, very close at hand, does it give you an advantage when contemplating the Spanish reality?
L.L.: I find it very funny when they call me “Argentine writer”. I think she says more about who calls me than about me. In my previous book she said it: a migration is like an island, like being stuck in a tupperware. The nucleus that is formed is very special and the internal language is not the one that is spoken outside. As a child, I was surprised the first time I went to school that people didn’t talk like my parents and their friends.
B.N.: The mother tongue is the only thing you take with you when you move from the place. There you must decide if you want to protect it so that it is waterproof or if you open it to whatever you want to perform. Sometimes I speak in Spanish, but I still think in Mexican. My daughters speak Madrilenian and communicate with me in a mother tongue that is no longer even a mother tongue. I always think that what my novel is really talking about is the transformation of the protagonist’s mother tongue. She begins by speaking very Mexican and ends up speaking a Latin American Spanish that I hear more and more on the streets of Madrid and Barcelona.
