Agustín Fernández Mallo (La Coruña, 1967) knows that there was a moment when his father, due to a senile illness, looked him in the eyes and did not recognize him. But his mind wanted to erase that precise moment, “to protect me, surely. “It’s a very hard thing that your father doesn’t know who you are.” The physicist and writer barely had time to digest what was happening to his mother, because in just over a year, when he turned 87, he died. But this progressive loss of identity and consciousness marked him and led him to wonder who was there. A question to which he tries to answer in Madre de corazón atomic (Seix Barral), in which he has been immersed for twelve years.
“My mother was the only person he never forgot. And that is something that she keeps deep in her heart,” explains Fernández Mallo in a bookstore in Barcelona, ??hours before presenting the book to readers for the first time. Although, he clarifies, “she is not the main protagonist. When I start writing, I realize that it is impossible to talk about my mother and my father at the same time. They are two individual people and I am not the one to write about their life together, although it is inevitable that it appears in the story, as well as the relationship that existed between him and me. A relationship that he defines as “deep, as well as distant. It sounds paradoxical, but he was a man who received a type of education that no longer exists, and his behavior, and that of so many men, was the fruit of a time. That did not exempt him from always being there. He never failed me.”
There were many times that the Galician physicist and writer looked at his father and knew that, sooner or later, he would write about him. But it was in room 405 of the clinic where he was admitted, the place where that idea began to materialize, even though “it was not easy to find the tone, although I was clear that I wanted to tell the peculiar stories of “a person who I consider very creative and pioneering in various fields.”
The title, on the other hand, came “in a much more natural way. It’s a nod to Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother album. I don’t remember listening carefully, but I do remember looking at the cow on the cover for hours. I showed it to my father and, as a veterinarian, he gave me an anatomical, physiological, historical and genetic description of the animal. Something I didn’t expect and a memory that still accompanies me today. He was unique in many aspects of life. And that is what I strive to show, with great effort not to sound sentimental.”
The book, in fact, is an amalgamation of family stories that, in parallel, cover a century of Spanish history, ranging from the civil war and the post-war period to the turn of the century. One of the anecdotes that has the most weight in the writer’s pages is the image of his father touring the United States a few weeks before the author of the Nocilla Project trilogy was born with the aim of bringing twenty cows by plane to Galicia. . “A pioneering trip to which he did not give much importance and which he did not tell me in detail until shortly before he died.” A journey that, “casually,” the writer retraces, being very aware that he was repeating many of his father’s steps.
In its pages, Fernández Mallo makes it clear that “grief is assumed, but it never ends. When someone dies, they don’t really die at all, because they come back to life again and again in your head. The person always accompanies you because it is inevitable to reconstruct his steps and his figure. It’s a human thing.” Of course, he specifies that these memoirs “were not written in order to fix memories so that they are not forgotten in the future. I know for sure that I will not forget anything I say. “You can’t forget a father.”
What I would appreciate is dreaming about him. “It only appeared to me the day he died. So I spent a long time thinking about whether the time I saw him was the same time he died or not. Death is something mysterious and it gives you epiphanies and very crazy ideas that you try to make sense of, even if it doesn’t always make sense. Maybe it is a way to entertain ourselves and to postpone for as long as possible the pain that, from the moment we accept it, will always be with us.”
