The interview that the journalist from this house Josep Fita did with Francesc Torralba is one of those that makes the pit of your stomach knot. ‘La Vanguardia’ published it on Sunday. If you haven’t read it yet, do it now, it’s already taking a while. The testimony of this philosopher as well as theologian is an embrace and a chill that can be read underlining the pain and understanding, as if it were our own, the suffering that must be felt when you are left orphaned by a child. Natural law is destroyed the moment the logic of life is reversed: fathers and mothers should never outlive their children.
I was lucky enough to talk a little with Torralba before the interview. He is a very loved guy. I could say that I was surprised by his fortitude, but no. Those who know him know well that this man is made of another material, like that of the stem of the best tree. Staying upright at the beginning, that is the imperative to keep going when everything collapses. After crazy grief, what comes next?
The fear that makes you lose fear.
I decided not to ask him questions, Fita would ask them later. We greeted each other with a hug and immediately joked about how we reorganized our ideas first thing in the morning just by putting on our running shoes. We talked for a few more minutes in my attempt to figure out how to take the blow of loss without breaking inside and out. There is no manual, she summarized, self-discipline, knowing how to think, is good. “As if that were easy if you’re not Francesc Torralba…”, I replied. And she smiled.
The power of the first person. Without that trauma, without that experience, Torralba, like other fathers in his situation, would never have realized the need to describe and share his pain in this way, nor would he have discovered the immense power of nudity. That kind of intimacy that ends up being cathartic.
I thanked him for having decided to break the silence about that black day when father and son went on a hike in the mountains for the sole pleasure of being together. In the editorial office we knew that his words would make other people who have gone through the same thing feel supported. That’s how it went.
Literature, like journalism at times, and also music, have the power to insert you back into the human species, into that flow from which a trauma takes you out at some point. The interview with Torralba is a reflection of the transformation, of the change, of how an absence makes a father look at the world from another perspective, which can no longer be anything like the previous one.
Theirs is not a sorrowful testimony, despite how ruthless fate can be. Allow me, Torralba does not deny God; I would do it, for God and all his saints. If the philosopher beyond creeds teaches us anything, it is that pain transforms, adapts, metabolizes, becomes oneself, but the genuine pain of losing a child never, ever disappears.
Paco Umbral already deciphered that alphabet in ‘Mortal y rosa’. Torralba told us that he writes down his thoughts in a notebook almost daily. I hope a book comes out of it.
