Actress, composer and, now, novelist. África Alonso (Barcelona, ??1995) explains that one sleepless night she discovered the story of two teachers who fell in love in a town in Valencia in the midst of Francoism and wanted to know the reason for the news she had just read, and that it did not we will explain so as not to discover the end. Between fiction and reality, he reconstructed the story of Carmen and Isabel, turned it into a remarkably successful musical and has now turned it into a novel, which he has written in Catalan and Spanish: Una llum tímida (Empúries / Six Barral).
Who are Isabel and Carmen?
They are two teachers who met at a school in Manuel, a town near Valencia, in the sixties. They fall in love, but Carmen’s family is very conservative and, when they find out, they force her to enter a hospital to treat her homosexuality. It is something that was done at the time and that unfortunately is still done in some places in the world.
Some places where methods are applied that leave sequels.
Carmen spends ten years in the hospital and when she comes out she looks for Isabel. Then begins a coexistence in which they try to lead a normal life, but Carmen suffers the consequences of the time in the hospital and the trauma of everything she has experienced. In addition, in ten years society has changed and she has to adapt.
How do you approach writing?
I wanted to understand their love story. I hypothesized how it might have started, mostly to explain why these two characters end up making the decisions they do. I’m writing this to refute what the article said, because maybe that ending had an explanation and they weren’t giving it.
You made a musical out of it that is still performed these days at the Condal theater, after many seasons.
I wrote it eight years ago, and we composed the music with Andrea Puig.
Now comes the novel.
Since we’ve been performing the musical for a few years now, I feel that I need to explain it even better, to go further. And the way I find it is through literature, because I also needed that: to disconnect a little from others and communicate with myself, return to myself.
What else is there in the novel?
Expands the universe of A Shy Light. I think that the viewer asked for this, because she left the play wanting to know more, and in the novel they will meet other characters, who help to define Isabel and Carmen. They show their families, their childhood… It is also a map of the time and a tribute to the teachers and the school.
Is it all fiction or did you do documentation as well?
There is a very big part that is fiction, but it happened that in August I went to do the Camino de Sant Jaume, a month of walking, and suddenly I took a BlaBlaCar and went to the Valencian Country. I settled in Manuel, which is the first town where the teachers taught, and I followed the path they could have taken. I didn’t know anyone in Manuel and, little by little, I asked people about them. There were those who knew how the story had ended, there were those who knew that these women had been lesbians, but there were also those who knew nothing or did not want to say it. And from Manuel I went to Catarroja, because I learned that they had lived there for more than twenty years. Each time I got to know a little more about it. I also met the lawyer who had handled Isabel’s case.
The lawyer doesn’t appear in the musical because the ending is different, right?
The novel is more faithful to the real story. I focus a lot on the fact that the important thing is not what was explained in that article I read, more sensational, but how society makes these women end up like this, why they end up making a certain decision, how they get there, not the fact itself I want them to understand the motives of the characters, the context of loneliness, isolation and lack of protection that Isabel and Carmen ended up experiencing, like many other people in the group. In the end the characters say they can’t take it anymore. In the moments of lucidity, Carmen realizes that she is hurting the couple.
Have we progressed since then?
We’ve made a lot of progress, but now it’s very easy to go back. Rights should never be taken for granted. We are at a time when the extreme right has a very important presence, which is increasingly worrying, and it must be countered with a very clear, very strong speech, and I do it through what I know, which is the art, because there has already been an involution.
You are an actress and musician and now a novelist. Will there be more books?
I think so. I have a list of potential stories and I’m really looking forward to them. I’ve always considered myself an interpreter and a point, and now it seems to me that the writing thing…
Do you like it?
More than liking me, I’m hooked. I have enjoyed the solitude of writing very much.
