When Alejandro Zambra (Santiago de Chile, 1975) held his son in his arms for the first time, he saw himself small before the world. “I looked at him and immediately felt absolute love, but at the same time I was disappointed in myself. He couldn’t provide her with food, as his mother did. That relegated me to the background, or I understood it that way at the time, and it generated great frustration in me”. It would be the first of many, although “there have been more joys than fears along this complex path”, acknowledges the author, who is visiting Barcelona these days as part of the ‘En altres paraules’ festival, which is held at the CaixaForum until next May 31.

He would have liked to talk about all these concerns with someone beyond his wife and his close circle. With another man, with a father. Someone who went through exactly the same thing as him. “Whether they ask for it or not, women are supported from minute zero. But we live everything from silence and loneliness. It is difficult for us to open up more, we have not always been allowed, socially speaking, although this is changing. For this reason, when we find another man with whom we can share these experiences, we keep him as a treasure”.

The difficulty of finding “those little jewels” led him to look for another equally effective way of venting, writing, a habit that has been with him since childhood, when his grandmother instilled it in him by giving him notebooks and pens for plasmas his day to day and his concerns. The result comes “a long time later” in the form of a book, Children’s Literature (Anagram), his most personal work to date.

Zambra has already evidenced his interest in fatherhood in previous works, such as his famous novel Chilean Poet. “Being a father consists of letting yourself win until the day defeat is true,” he said then. An idea that reappears in its new pages in a more developed way and with a very varied style, as it combines poetry, stories and even essays, always accompanied by truth and its particular irony to which its readers are so accustomed.

Although the style and way of telling it is something that has changed during the writing process, it must be said that what he was clear about, even before his son was born, is that one day he would capture on paper what it means to be father. “It would have been weird not to. He wanted to write about something that is not so common in literature: the first years of parenthood. When books or movies talk about the experience of being a father, they focus on the adolescent period, when the son rebels and, in one way or another, is a copy of him. But it is not common to treat the first years, nor the fears, feelings and thoughts that go through our heads. It seems that we do not exist. I was interested in seeing these discourses appear in literature”.

Memory is another subject that also particularly interested him. “Childhood amnesia and how care is forgotten is something fascinating. Now there are more videos of children and more memories that are fixed, but not before. We will see how children of the future manage these recordings since, until this era, we knew of those stages because of what they told us”.

Throughout this documentation process, based almost entirely on his own experiences, Zambra says that “he is a son again”, which also encourages him to face his role with respect to his father. “As you get older he begins to understand his father better. That does not mean that he shares the way of doing some things. But you do see everything with another look. Of course, the fact that it is a commonplace from which one speaks should not neutralize the story. Parents always retain the superpower to disappoint us. And I fear the time will come when my son will be disappointed in me. Perhaps it has already happened, when he realized that no food would ever come out of my body ”.