Dear readers:
You have in your hands the first novel I wrote. It was published in 2009, it was a small edition, but perhaps not so much as to avoid that someone has often appeared with a copy in hand to sign it and that many more demanded to read it. Now I’m excited to bring it back to you.
All my novels are impregnated with a layer of North, with rain and humidity that come from my own roots, from the place where I was born and raised, from the matriarchal family model that was around me, from the culture of hard work, of honor. of the poor and of death. I hated that place, I hated it with all my soul. When I was a young and precocious reader of barely ten years old, it seemed impossible to me that my town could harbor a scene other than squalor, the smell of diesel, fish, stowage boxes, the mountains of salt in the port, the churches crowded with women in mourning, the musky perfume that seeped through the half-open doors of the brothels, which were distinguished by a red lantern and were distributed to the right and left in the same street; the masses for the dead, the sirens of the port calling for work, the ammonia stench of the ice factories and the cemetery with the average number of youngest deceased in Spain.
And I, who then devoured the works of Mario Puzo, dreamed of Boston, of New York and Los Angeles, of taking my protagonists there as he had done, to other skies, to other horizons, to a culture rich and impregnated with modernity and sophistication that the place where I was born lacked.
I was a teenager when ‘Little Theater’, the immortal novel by Ana María Matute, came into my hands. It happened in a town with a northern port, small, traditional and suffocating for its young protagonist. It is often said that reading makes our world bigger, but that book revealed to me the charm of the small, of the own. He made me understand that it was absurd to pretend my stories to take place in Boston or New York if I wasn’t first able to admit my origin, that hating him was part of the process of judging him, exonerating him, and eventually forgiving him. That if I did not make peace with my origin, I would not be honest, that detecting the place where one was born in adolescence is as natural as detesting the way your hair curls, and that learning to love that same comes from a maturity that it has nothing to do with growing up.
So I decided to write about everything that I hated, from knowledge. And while I was writing I discovered that I did not hate him so much, that I even loved him a little, or a lot. I realized that I had been wrong, that detesting that place, that way of living and that way of dying was like detesting my skin full of scars, the visible and the invisible, each one symbolic of a battle, of a loss or victory.
I love my roots, I am at peace. Today I know that this is fundamental, that this truth is the key to the good reception that my following books have had so far. That formula for which I am often asked, which some suspect as something complicated and others, as a technique that can be applied over and over again. But I think that only you, my readers, perceive with the clean gaze of a child that deep down the truth lies.
There are a thousand aspects that I have already talked about in my novels and millions that I have left to tell you, but the first with which I had to put myself at peace was with death, and I did it in this novel, the first one I wrote. ‘The privileges of the angel’ is a novel about grief, the name of the process that takes place immediately after an irreparable loss. When I was five years old, I had not only experienced it in myself, but I also witnessed how others lived it, in almost all its forms, with all its cruelty, in men and women, in children, due to accidental causes and illness, heroic ones and other violent ones.
Facing a great loss at a very young age stops childhood, and not to regain it some time later, but to see it disappear sometimes forever. Because death, loss and grief tear away that veil of protection, magic and immortality with which the first part of our life is clothed, but with the intensity, importance and limitation of the size of the world of a little one. Being aware of death and that children also die cast the relentless shadow of the grim reaper, its inevitability and its presence even in the smallest events, over my known world.
This novel deals with grief through different characters and in its different phases: denial, anger, negotiation, deep sorrow, depression and acceptance. It is not necessary to pass them all, there is no stipulated duration for each one and certain circumstances can increase the condition in each one until it becomes unbearable.
I decided to write about death and grief because I know that this journey through the hell of our emotions is the only way to achieve some kind of peace. The way in which child psychologists warn about the dangers of preventing our little ones from facing frustration, no, impossibility is widespread. I suspect it is just a reflection of what our society has done with pain and suffering in recent times. Turn your back on them.
Death is assumed and accepted as part of the cycle of life, not the suffering and pain that loss generates. A century ago it was difficult to find someone who had not attended, even at a very young age, a funeral, a wake, or a burial. But today for most parents it is unthinkable to let a child attend the ritual of death. It does not differ too much with adults. If someone suffers a great loss, their pain will be understood as long as it is not very obvious. A moderate pain and makeup, which in the last century has fled from all its public manifestations. Mourning, the distinctive color in clothing, helped others to know that we were going through a difficult period in our life, to distinguish ourselves in pain.
The custom of wearing mourning became so deeply rooted that it ceased to be a symbol of sadness to become appearance and pretense and, what is worse, something obligatory in the face of death, therefore undesirable. I am not advocating that people wear black again to make their pain evident. I wear black most of the time just because I like it. But society has been fleeing from representations of pain and increasingly rejects them with more force. We reject pain, the great pharaonic funerals are left for royalty or for the great pop stars, but the samples of pain sustained over time are not well seen. This has led us to flee, to hide, to hide sadness as a stigma because we know that it marks us in a way that society repudiates. Leading us to the ridiculousness of having to celebrate the loss of a job, a girlfriend, a marriage, a friendship, as an openness to new things, almost as luck …
Who wants to be with someone always sad? We flee from bitterness, pain, illness and death. Heroic behaviors are expected from the terminally ill, the integrity of their family and friends, the positive memory, the tributes to their lives.
I know it is not a comfortable subject. I know that many will leave this book on this page. But for those of you who have experienced it, for those of you who are going through it and for those of you who understand that avoiding it is a mistake, here is ‘The Angel’s Privileges’, which takes its title from the novel ‘Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller’ , where it speaks of purity, angels and their true abilities, to touch the mire in the deepest and highest in the sky.
There is a formula to get rid of the seediest, and it is not about being pure: it is about learning to fly.
– .
