Actress, composer and, now, novelist. Àfrica Alonso (Barcelona, ??1995) says that one sleepless night she discovered the story of two teachers who loved each other in a town in Valencia during the Franco regime and she wanted to know the reason for the news she had just read, and that we will not reveal so as not to discover the end. Between fiction and reality, she reconstructed the story of Carmen and Isabel, turned it into a remarkably successful musical and now she has written a novel, in Spanish and Catalan: Una luz timid (Seix Barral / Empúries).
Who are Isabel and Carmen?
They are two teachers who coincide at a school in Manuel, a town near Valencia, in the sixties. They fall in love with her, but Carmen’s family is very conservative and, when she finds out about her, they force her to be admitted to a hospital to be treated for homosexuality. This was done at the time and unfortunately it is still done in some places in the world.
Some places where methods are applied that leave consequences.
Carmen is in the hospital for ten years and when she comes out she looks for Isabel. She then begins a relationship where they try to lead a normal life, but Carmen suffers the consequences of going to the hospital and the trauma of everything she has experienced. Furthermore, in ten years society has changed and she has to adapt.
How do you approach writing?
I wanted to understand their love story. I hypothesized how it could have started, especially to explain why these two characters end up making the decisions they do. I write it to refute what the article said, because perhaps that ending had an explanation and they were not giving it.
He made a musical that is still performed these days at the Condal theater, after several seasons.
I wrote it eight years ago, and we composed the music with Andrea Puig.
Now comes the novel.
When we have been performing the musical for a few years now, I feel the need to explain it even better, to go further. And the way I find it is through literature, because I also needed it: to disconnect a little from others and communicate with myself, return to myself.
What’s more in the novel?
Expand the universe of A Shy Light. I think the viewer asked for that, because she left the play wanting to know more, and in the novel she will meet other characters, who help define Isabel and Carmen. Their families, their childhood appear… It is also a map of the time and a tribute to the teachers and the school.
Is it all fiction or have you also done documentation?
There is a very large part that is fiction, but it happened that in August I went to do the Camino de Santiago, walking for a month, and suddenly I took a BlaBlaCar and went to the Valencian Country. I settled in Manuel, which is the first town where those teachers taught, and I followed the path that they could have taken. In Manuel I didn’t know anyone and, little by little, I asked people about them. There were people who knew how the story had ended, there were those who knew that these women had been lesbians, but there were also those who didn’t know anything or didn’t want to say it. And from Manuel I went to Catarroja, because I knew that they had lived there for more than 20 years. Each time I learned a little more. I also met the lawyer who handled Isabel’s case.
The lawyer doesn’t appear in the musical because the ending is different, isn’t it?
The novel is more faithful to the real story. I focus a lot on the fact that the important thing is not what that more sensationalist article I read said, but how society makes these women end up like this, why they end up making a certain decision, how they get there, not the fact. per se. I want you to understand the motives of the characters, the context of loneliness, isolation and lack of protection that Isabel and Carmen ended up experiencing, like many other people in the group. In the end the characters say they can’t take it anymore. In moments of lucidity, Carmen realizes that she is hurting her partner.
Has there been any progress since then?
We have made progress in many things, but now it is very easy to go back. Rights should never be taken for granted. We are in a moment where the extreme right has a very important presence, increasingly worrying, and it must be refuted with a very clear, very strong discourse, and I do it through what I know, which is art, because There has already been a reversal.
She is an actress and musician and now a novelist. Will there be more books?
I think so. I have a list of possible stories and I really want to write them. I have always considered myself an interpreter, period, and now it seems to me that writing…
Likes?
More than liking it, it hooks me. I have really enjoyed the solitude of writing.
Catalan version, here
