Antònia Carré-Pons (Terrassa, 1960) insists on the story of old age, but now with unbridled comedy, with the novel El càsting (Club Editor).
Are you hanging out with older people?
The writer Marc Cerdó gave me the idea. Club Editor is like a family, and the writers we publish relate to each other and become friends. One day, having lunch with Marc, he told me that since he had written Com s’esbrava la mala llet, he could make a story that confronted the world of young people with that of old people. And I thought it was a good idea.
Sin embargo Casting is not a continuation.
No, it has nothing to do with it, those were stories and this one is a novel, and the only point of connection is that the protagonists are old. Maybe it’s because I’m getting closer and closer to senescence, right? It is a topic that is not strange to me, but I had not anticipated it, I did not think that I would dedicate myself to gerontological literature.
And after the idea, did you call for a character casting?
Confronting two worlds as different as the young and the old was a challenge, and first I looked for the protagonists. I immediately saw clearly that Ernestina and Paula would be there. And it was later that, so that two older people could have contact with young people they don’t know, it occurred to me that they should rent a room and I did a casting.
So easy?
At first I thought they could be their grandchildren, but they would already know each other and the pungent relationship they have with the young people would cost more because affection is involved.
The two protagonists are very irreverent, nagging all day.
Old age has that, I already saw it in stories, and with all the experience of the nursing homes and hospitals where I accompanied my father. Old people say the first thing that comes to mind, they have no filter, in this sense they are like children. In adolescence, your parents control you and don’t let you do whatever. And in old age your children control you and don’t let you do whatever.
In the latest novel by Miquel Martín i Serra, Guanyaràs la mar llisa, a character says that he has just left kindergarten, referring to the residence…
Yes, although I think the comparison with adolescence is more accurate, especially when the elderly already have their minds more from the other world than from this one. But Ernestina and Paula are aware and are fine, they are not that old, they are not even eighty. It’s just that sometimes as a daughter you want to protect them and you realize that what you are doing is suffocating them.
Is the relationship between them expressly ambiguous?
Everyone thinks what they want. I have invented these two women who live together, nothing is clear, nothing is made explicit, but you can interpret whatever you want. There is a scene of jealousy, but sometimes, with people who have been in a relationship for many years, there can be friendship jealousy.
It could be the queer novel for older people…
It could be. If you ask me how I imagined them, I didn’t want to explain it.
Like the previous book, this is not a treatise on anything, but rather a fun novel… Did you also do it in contrast to an academic life that has often led you to write more serious texts?
Yes. One day I met Josep Cots at an event at the Calders bookstore, with whom we did not know much, and he told me that speaking I was just like the characters in my book, because of my sense of humor, and I told him that I write literature of the self, and we both burst out laughing. I have this sense of humor and it comes out. In other novels maybe not, but here I have released it. It’s a sense of humor that’s sometimes a bit caustic, because laughing stupidly doesn’t make much sense, so it hasn’t been difficult for me because it’s part of my nature.
Of the two friends, I would say that Ernestina is more fun, she spies on her neighbor, she doesn’t want to leave the house because she is neurotic, she dresses up…
I have some actress friends and one of them is Marissa Josa. We don’t live together, but we’ve known each other for many years, and I was inspired, although it’s not her, she does leave the house. But there are some phrases that she says, and there are some theater anecdotes that she has told me. When it comes to building a character, and I suppose all the people who write do the same, we need to imagine someone we know, and when I was writing Ernestina I thought a lot about Marissa, who is very funny, we laughed a lot, and it was easy.
Why do you spy on the neighbors?
I don’t know how it came out. I have not written the book with a script, but I was clear that first I had to introduce the characters and then the candidates would come home. And it happened that you were writing scenes and then I thought of Rear Window by James Stewart, because, a person who doesn’t leave the house, what can he do to distract himself?
I could leave them hooked on TV, or watching series, like so many people…
They have a more creative life, Ernestina talks through the lights with a neighbor and spies on another with binoculars.
What image of young people do you think the reader will draw?
I wanted to make portraits of very different young people. There is a very responsible young woman, who studies medicine and takes her job very seriously… I like it because that fragment is a little gore and plays with the old people. It’s about that. Another says that she was born tired and everything happens. You look around the world and you see that there are young people like that, who have been given a hard time all their lives and it seems like they are perpetual teenagers, and then there are others who you say, “oh man, the world will move forward!”, responsible young people! and they do many things in a very creative way. I wanted to portray different personalities of young people.
And remove prejudices.
Yes, because there is everything. Globalizing is very unfair, it is like saying that Catalans are stingy, it is absurd. There are people from all walks of life and I didn’t want the young people to look bad either.
It is not a war between young and old.
No, not a confrontation, it is a coming face to face and seeing two ways of approaching life. There is the apathy of old people who say whatever they want and the arrogance of youth and the hopes of thinking that they have their whole lives ahead of them and that they will take on the world.
Well, some maybe not…
There is one that goes with one who is from Vox, but it has helped me touch on a very delicate topic, consensual abuse, which is something that unfortunately happens a lot, but is very difficult to influence, because abused women, sometimes, It is very difficult for them to get out of it. I have been putting brushstrokes in different places without making any philosophical treatise, nor without outlining any theory.
At the end of the day it is a novel to laugh at.
Exactly, and I confess that I had a lot of fun doing it and I had a great time. I don’t know if the people who read it will have fun, but I will, and that’s worth all the money in the world.
In the book the ghost of covid makes Ernestina suffer.
It could happen right now, and Covid is as it is in our lives. I remember that for my great-grandmother the world was either before the war or after the war, well for us it is the same: before or after covid. I know people who have been touched and scared, especially older people, who are still afraid to go to places where there are many people. And Ernestina, since she is an actress and is hyperbolic and has a tendency towards drama, has been caught here.
Why don’t you publish in your publishing house, Cal Carré?
It just seems ugly, and you also have to pass an external filter, because there comes a point when you, since you are very involved in what you write, need an external look. And also at Cal Carré we only publish classics and the classics are dead, and if I died I wouldn’t be able to publish myself because I would be dead…
Does reading medieval literature change the way you write?
Yes and no, that is, it changes the way I write in the same way as reading something else. We are like sponges and everything goes through the unconscious and you suck and obviously something remains, everything. I even have linguistic tics from the translators. Núria Sales, for example, made some very specific expressions, and they escape me. Everything you read creates sediment.
There are some literary tributes in the book.
Sale Ausiàs Marc, there is a quote from Romeo and Juliet… In the previous book each story had a literary reference, but not here.
