There are years that mark a lifetime, as Imma Monsó (Lleida, 1959) shows in her novel La mestra i la Bèstia (Anagrama), which hits bookstores on Wednesday in Catalan and Spanish. In the book, Severina, orphaned by her father and mother, ends up as a teacher in Dusa, a small high mountain village in Ribagorça in 1962. She is nineteen years old and has very few social skills, partly due to the particular education she has received from her mother at home, as she has never been to school. It will be there that she hatches and begins to understand the reality of her parents and the world that surrounds her, with the oppression of a small town where a Beast also lives who, like the one in the story, is as gifted for the wild as for the wild. tenderness.
What a particular protagonist, his Severina.
I had a very young and naive girl in mind, especially when it came to real reality, because she reads a lot and in a very peculiar way. I needed to recover the ingenuity lost in time immemorial, because in the last twenty years there has been a great acceleration and noise. We know everything, even a five-year-old child knows absolutely everything. This return to a kind of purity and ingenuity is quite consistent with the Franco era and with the condition of women at that time. Also, after my mother died, during the pandemic, I thought a lot about her generation. At the same time, almost by chance, which comes at the right times, I found a file on my father.
How retaliated?
Yes. I had suspicions of his ideological bent, but since he died when I was very young, I had known practically nothing else. First I read his name in a book, and finally in the file of reprisals of the Generalitat.
What did you find?
I learned that he had had a summary court martial. It was a remarkable experience that in the novel is marginal, but above all the question was realizing that I had no idea what had happened. All this silence is still very surprising. Everything was terribly camouflaged by the motto of “peace and prosperity.”
Severina doesn’t even know the slogans of the time.
She has had a very original education and at home by a mother who wants to protect her from appearing disaffected by the regime and at the same time has her republican ideas, in addition to the problem of her husband, who obviously has some enigmatic activity that we do not know about. until later and that the girl does not know.
The parents speak in code in front of the girl: whether bishops, canonizations or the baby Jesus.
And that disorients her, even though she reads a lot to try to find out. Knowledge until recently was condensed in books and on printed paper.
Reading will open all doors for him, his mother tells him.
Yes, although today the distrust in the printed letter has increased a lot.
Is the key to Severina’s personality the education received?
Education is one cause, and the isolation of the place is another. The only way out of this education and this loneliness are trips to Barcelona with Aunt Júlia, a very original character. She has a deficit of triviality, of a more normal world. I dare not say that he has some autistic characteristics, because it might seem disrespectful, but it is clear that he has a shy, ultra-reserved character, and this loneliness accentuates you, it also gives you a bit of anguish and you end up generating your resources. And at the age of seven she has a revelation: she knows that she has little and one day there will be nothing left of all that.
A revelation already in the first paragraph!
Things as they are, we are not fooling ourselves, he is absolutely right. But this lucidity, quite typical of adult people and of many writers or philosophers of the pessimistic genre, this feeling of constantly living next to death, is peculiar to a little girl.
Her mother tells her that sometimes she doesn’t know if she’s gifted or an idiot.
Yes, there is a contrast between the powerful reflexivity accompanied by bookish knowledge and the lack of what is usually called common sense, which comes from socialization, from knowing that you are a social being and therefore political.
There is also a tribute to literature and reading.
There is a factor of humanity and the broth of the human condition in the books, which ends up letting you know that you necessarily have to reach out to others in some way. Or let them come.
They ask him what he wants to be when he grows up and instead of a job he says: “self-sufficient”!
He wants to be so in every way, also emotional and affective. Towards adolescence it becomes clear that this doesn’t work, that he has to do to reach out to people. And that’s when the theme of Dusa appears, which is the main thread of the novel, the town where she goes to socialize, although she may not choose the right place because it really is a small community, and she’s a bitch.
Severina’s arrival in town is considered an event.
It was like that, and they were very young. There were 17-year-old teachers and everything, and even so they were considered one of the living forces of the town. The town, which is not on the map with this name, is not my father’s town either, it is the set of anecdotes that I had been hearing throughout my childhood that they explained to the women in my family, especially the mother and his sister. They were both from Girona and ended up as rural teachers in the Lleida Pyrenees, because in my family they always went to the other side. They told some very hilarious anecdotes. They had been in towns even smaller than the one that is actually my father’s, which are mentioned, such as Durro or Forcat. Before my mother died we went to the town and it was incredible, because when these towns have had a teacher they have a lot of devotion and gratitude… Nothing to do with today.
Today there is a lot of hybridization of Spanish, but also of English.
My generation was the last one that was always educated in Spanish, you finished school and your entire academic and book environment was in Spanish, and then you managed to learn Catalan as best you could, this bilingualism weighs more heavily on us but in a different way. Today it is common to see a habitual and excessive weight of other languages ??in novels in Catalan. The other day I was commenting with Sergi Pàmies that we have spent our lives trying to be correct with Catalan, and looking for balance, because the language also evolves. But now there is a very massive interference from Spanish and English. We have come across novels, especially by very young people, in which a third are in Spanish, a third in English and a third in Catalan, and some are very good…
And where does the Beast of the novel come from?
It is inspired by someone I knew, who died two years ago, and is one of those indescribable characters, as Severina herself says. She is intrigued by everything that cannot be reduced to words, so much so that she is fascinated and does not even realize that she is falling in love with her. She has that thing that since she can’t describe herself, we don’t kill each other much either. There are amazing characters that you can’t even defend, but they are very curious.
As it already appears in the title, there is an expectation…
I had doubts, but the Beast has a lot of weight, it is a foundational love, because she has never fallen in love like this, and you have to think about the repression of the time. When he appears on the scene, she leaves her completely confused. The other founding model for Severina is that of her parents dancing on a tile, seeing that passion that at the same time is a bit distressing because it is always when her father leaves and it is a way of seeing the world.
They always dance the same song.
Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady, and they played it over and over again. Music is important, in the novel. In the end, literature is emotion, and there is nothing like music to express immediate emotion, words do not come, although they can do a lot, but in this sense, music wins. In any case, the words try to reproduce this emotion that we can all have inside. Poetry also has it, perhaps more than prose.
Did you easily find the style?
Style is a voice that comes naturally to you. I recently had to reread Tot un caràcter and Un home de paraula, because they had just been published in paperback format, and I was somewhat envious of that agility I had at that time, at that age. A certain unconsciousness that you have when you are much younger gives a certain freshness to the writing, but sometimes you are not so precise, because if you have to be precise enough, things get more involved. Now I don’t feel that freshness, nor do I feel the need. With age you learn that if you explain something it is because it is necessary. If not, I would get bored writing.
Every book has its way.
At first I imagined it as a winter tale and classic, to a certain extent. My point of view of things is always a little different, but it is true that the originality is not necessarily in the style but in the characters, in the vision, the look.
The reality of the landscape is reflected in what the characters feel, and vice versa.
I often say that the events that happen in a novel do not interest me as much as what goes on inside, but things do happen, yes, and one thing is linked to another, landscape included. Severina, for example, enjoys the enclosing of the mountains and feels this need for protection, when many times this landscape is seen as a bit overwhelming.
He flees from the house on the road, where he has lived with his parents, precisely because the view is unreachable.
The horizon destabilizes her, in contrast to the neighbor, López, who is enchanted precisely by the light. It is a house that I locate near Montgrí, but it does not say so in the book, it is not necessary. My return to the summers near Girona, about fifteen years ago, was like going back to my mother, hearing these accents again, because I speak like that, a kind of Girona person who had passed through Barcelona.
And that you are also from Lleida…
Yes, and there I speak completely in Lleida, which is how we spoke with my father. There are people who are very angry that they change their accent. Some pick up the accent from where they go and others don’t. If they are two languages ??it is not surprising, but two accents yes.
In the book the dialectal varieties mark the characters.
Yes, and that was very good for me to make the audiobook in Catalan. At first I thought that I’d prefer someone else to do it, but I’ve had a lot of fun doing the accents, especially the one from Ribagorça, which I’m not so good at, but I do have it inside.
Returning to the house on the road, it is a non-place, a limbo.
Yes, because since her mother has this kind of sense of secrecy, she goes to Barcelona or Girona but she doesn’t relate to the environment. Going along the road it is common to see a house that you don’t know exactly what it is doing there, and going to where I spend the summer there was one in ruins, and I thought it would go very well. Now there is an apple store there.
Catalan version, here
