When Lola married Luis, the glazier, she set in motion a butterfly effect that has brought us here: Paz Padilla (Cádiz, 1969), one of the seven children of Lola and Luis, picks up Madre! the history of her lineage from two generations back to her own motherhood. It is a book to laugh at – the anecdote makes for a thousand monologues – and to reflect, a story that travels from Spain in black and white to that of the iPhone 15, leaving signs for the reader. “This book is a tribute to the woman, to the mother who runs a house or a business in a time when to open a book you had to go with a man. We have to see where we come from. I am who I am because my mother opened a path for me, although my daughter has also opened my eyes: ‘Mom, put on the glasses of feminism’, she used to tell me. We women continue to open our eyes to each other”, the popular actress, comedian and presenter explains to La Vanguardia.
Let’s leave aside the carefree image that television has given of Paz Padilla. She is much more than that. For years he has been traveling to places where women are second-class human beings to continue with his eyes open. In the program Te falta un viaje, he showed his daughter how to live far from the privileges of the first world. “Traveling is the best school. In Ghana, we met a girl who sold fruit but wanted to be a nurse. However, it is very difficult for a woman to study there. In the Amazon, we crossed the jungle with a machete with a woman who lived by dodging snakes. I asked him his age and he replied that knowing age is useless. This opened Anna’s soul: she has studied a career, a master’s degree, she is a strong and independent woman at 27, but in certain countries she could never be”.
Padilla dedicates this book to the women who sacrificed their dreams to raise children and wants it to be a beacon for the clueless: “We forget that our mothers will one day not be there. After he died, I would pick up the phone and call my mother: I would pick up the phone, hear ‘this number is not working’ [his voice cuts off] and I would answer ‘mom, how are you?’ and tell her about my things , as before There came a day when I stopped calling him because it was useless. What I would give now for those ten minutes on the phone every day!”.
Padilla would not have been such a well-known comedian without the school that Lola gave her, a mother who moved things around to make her children believe that there were ghosts in the house or who released maggots for laughs by scaring visitors. But she was also a woman who made them understand that even if the neighbor enjoyed many toys for Reis, they were lucky to live in a home where there was never a lack of love and laughter: “Children don’t need anything: just food and love”, said Lola with clairvoyance. And his daughter follows this line: “I don’t know how to live without humor. Humor saves us. In this book I use it to talk about serious things because humor is the opposite of anxiety. The most I used it was when Antonio, my husband, got sick, also so that he would suffer less”, sighs Paz Padilla.
