For Silvia Hidalgo (Seville, 1978), writing is the best medicine. When she is sick, she is not able to turn on the computer, but she is able to pick up a notepad and start jotting down ideas. Sometimes, she doesn’t give them shape and they stay just that, ideas. But others, she develops and end up in a novel that ends up winning the Tusquets prize. This is what happened to her with Nothing to Say, which last September she won said award and which recently hit bookstores. She “she came back from a trip and was exhausted. My throat hurt and I had a slight fever. I was going to go to sleep, but a writer friend recommended that I write something, it would make me feel better. And I listened to him.”
I didn’t have any plot in mind. She didn’t even have writing a book in mind at the time. That writing was not going to be more than a remedy for his discomfort. But, suddenly, a protagonist emerged with whom she felt quite identified, and she decided to continue. “She was born from my view of the current world. A woman who tried to conform to that. I based it on my own experiences and those of my friends and neighbors. In the end, it is less difficult for us to open up than for men and we have learned to talk about our frailties naturally. And all of them inspired my story.”
He never imagined that a story like this could win an award. “Fifteen years ago it would have been unthinkable for this visibility to be given to the story of a non-conformist woman who moves in the waters of anger and not exclusively sadness. In an argument, the woman is expected to be the mediator. An exercise in containment that does us no good and to which I say enough is enough. She wanted to give life to someone who would run away from all this.”
Although they were scarce in the media, in awards, “and also in school textbooks,” Hidalgo was clear that her references were “women who looked like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (1974).” Since he did not find in fiction all the examples he would have liked of women who rebel, and the few he found “were presented as people who to be strong must transmute into the masculine,” he wrote his own. “He wanted to show real contemporary women. “That they make mistakes and that they don’t have a perfect life, but that they move forward.”
His identity doesn’t matter and neither does his past and his until recently perfect family. His life partner is now his ex-husband, whom he only sees when he picks up his daughter and whom he barely looks at. He is too aware of his cell phone notifications to do so. The uncertainty of knowing whether or not she is going to have a date with a stranger who has caught her attention keeps her in suspense. Anything goes for her when it comes to forgetting a man. But it is not her ex-husband that she has to remove from her thoughts, but rather his co-worker, with whom she had an affair that left her upset.
“He feels that he has no control over his life and that he decides to take it. He could be wrong, but he wants her to be wrong. She leaves her comfort zone behind because she didn’t feel like it was hers. She had built a life around the convenience product that we believe is happiness. Love and happiness are abstract ideas and we tend to want to illustrate them with images. A couple walking on the beach at sunset, hugging around a fireplace or buying a townhouse on the outskirts of the city. And since it is not easy for those idyllic postcards to come true, we get frustrated. I don’t know any families that comply with this canon. All this imagery is the fault of movies, series and also some books. That’s why I decided to show something more real.”
Hidalgo recognizes that “the reader will more than once feel like saying, friend, realize that. But nothing happens if one does not realize something at a certain moment in life. It is important to hug him and wait for him to see you, because lecturing him is not going to help him learn from mistakes and situations. In any case, the woman in my book is very self-aware and knows that the relationship between her and the one she baptizes as a tumor man is a textbook red flag. She feels that, by realizing it, she will be empowered and she believes that she can stop playing whenever she wants, although it is not always that easy. “In love and desire one does not play alone and the other person also uses their cards.”
The writer does not hide that “I cried writing and rereading this book because I embraced emotion and I followed my protagonist very closely at all times, which is why I got angry when she did it, I laughed and, also, I shed some tears.” She happened to finish the manuscript and send it to the competition “a few minutes before the submission deadline. I felt so proud of myself that I took a selfie, with my pajamas and bow, to remind myself in moments of weakness that I can do anything. It is an exercise that we have to do more often.”
It is now when the recognitions arrive. Their own and the editorials. But the Sevillian writer’s relationship with literature goes back a long way. “Since I was a child, everything that happens to me I translate in my head as a story that I tell myself to understand what is happening to me. Before learning to write, I already did it mentally. So putting it down later in the notebook was something natural for me, which I would have taken to the professional field sooner if I could have. But, unfortunately, dedicating yourself exclusively to writing is not possible, at least in this country, if you are not a high-selling author, or if you are rich. I was neither one nor the other, so I had to train myself in something else.”
He studied computer engineering, although “he had no vocation. He sought precisely to have that livelihood that he lacked so that he could have independence, sustenance, and a network and, one day, be able to write. Today I combine the two things and I can say loudly that I have fulfilled a dream.”
