Years ago, Juan Francisco Ferrándiz (Cocentaina, Alicante, 1971) fell in love with Barcelona. “It’s like when you meet a person, they catch your attention and, as you know more, you discover more things that captivate you.” Proof of this idyll are the stories that he has set in the city, turning it into another protagonist, such as The Cursed Land (2018) or The Judgment of Water (2021). His infatuation with the Catalan capital continues now with The Heiress of the Sea (Grijalbo), a historical novel set in one of the city’s darkest moments: the arrival of the Black Death.
“For all of us, who have just experienced a pandemic, it is easy for us to empathize and connect on an emotional level with the characters of that time, because they experienced something similar. We know what it feels like to come across empty streets or to know that many people are dying from a disease that is out of our hands,” reflects the author, who recognizes that “it would not have had the same meaning or effect to write this novel in 2008. They would have told us that many people, faced with exhaustion, ended up leaving their homes to relax and even celebrate parties and we would not have believed it. Now yes. We have seen it with our own eyes and we may have even been participants.”
The novel focuses on the story of Marina Montaner, descendant of a long line of Valencian merchants, who disembarks in a Barcelona plunged into chaos. The young woman flees from the henchmen of King Peter IV the Ceremonious for an affront of which she has been unjustly accused. “These are the times of the Union War, a citizen revolt against unprecedented royal authoritarianism that humiliated the monarch and his wife, forcing her, among other things, to dance in front of everyone.” In his novel, the author rescues fragments of the royal chronicles written by the sovereign himself since “anyone could think that my mind has gone away or that what I am telling is fiction. But it happened”.
Although Marina does come from Ferrándiz’s head, “her family is inspired by the Mitjavila, a very powerful lineage of merchants who conquered the Mediterranean.” But the character is mixed with others who did live in 14th century Barcelona, ??such as Agnès, “a woman who took care of lepers and who did not belong to the Church. Beguines like her were greatly persecuted for not being subject to any authority. But they did something right when the city council defended them and asked the religious to leave it alone. “Women like her had to have an overwhelming personality and be very brave.”
Finding so many strong and notable women, although invisible, in history “was a turning point in the plot,” because “I was surprised to see the power that so many of them assumed and the many economic and social functions they developed. Some even went so far as to write doctoral theses. And this forced me to start a completely different investigation that made me change the perspective of my story.”
What happened to make the role of women in society take “one or many” steps backwards? “It’s not that equality existed back then. That has never happened as such, but it is true that in many areas the balance was greater. The pandemic, among many other factors, disrupted everything, and was nothing more than an excuse to return them home. But, logically, they have been shouting loudly for centuries that this is not their natural place.”
Sexuality, and freedom and the enjoyment of it in the Middle Ages, is another of the points highlighted in the novel. “There are many documents that show that they lived sex and love in a different way. Nowadays, we have a very romantic vision of love and before it was more of a job. I am marrying for convenience and family interests. But they did not experience that as a trauma, it was normal, and it is obvious that promiscuity, heterosexual and homosexual, was unleashed. Sometimes we go modern, but the medieval world was just as complex as ours. What they were clear about was that our pace is short and that it was important to enjoy life.”
