Habla Elvira Mínguez Proust’s famous Magdalene to explain what happens to Matilda, the main character Raising a monster (Espasa), on the new novella, in the story of the story. Coo le ocurre al Charles Swann de In search of lost timeFor her, too, the external phenomenon suggests a tragedy of memories that brings her back to a forgotten episode of her childhood.
However, the case that concerns us is not as sensual as that of Proust’s alter ego protagonist. It is more precisely said of an episode that seems to reconstruct step by step what entered Matilda’s subconscious: the temporary disappearance of your childwho walks out of the garden of the house away from the pelota when the mother takes further steps, allows to record the time when several little girls at her school took to the streets for a serial abuser.
“It’s not a very vivid memory, it’s true I will return to the moment. The brain takes you to a specific place where a specific experience is alive,” says the writer, director and star of the Goya — a galardón for the one who is newly nominated in the latest issue for his article of the year Dinner— above the beginning of the book that won her the Primavera de Novela award. “The new part of it, the board reconstruction. That was my initial idea to build the board we’re going through with it.”
The actress and writer offers these statements in an interview she shared with the media in Valencia to launch the book. The capital of Turia is actually the place of our country where one of the most famous tragedies of its kind took place: the case niñas de Alcàsserwhich caused an authentic state of psychosis in Spanish families in the 1990s.
Those who, like the one who writes these lines, were children at that moment, remember el miedo los peligros del exterior which adults carry into their world, completely incomprehensible to these adults. Those who, like Mínguez, were fathers of minors at the time admit to an overprotectiveness stemming from the terror that someone would take over from their own sons.
The writer is acutely aware that she experienced a very similar episode with Matilda with her own child: a moment of emergency, a child not yet ready and where it should be, and a flood of possible disasters that abound in the mother’s imagination, which goes into an understandable nervous breakdown just enough for her child to strike safe and sound, luring him over the countless pilgrims outside. “I didn’t understand the damage I was doing to her with this mine. The charity I marveled at was how one stuns when one actually comes to a monster. I remembered it, I was anxious that I didn’t know what was inside me, and it was something I decided to keep because I knew what was worth putting down on paper.’
“I was interested in talking about these monsters that, when we were small, we encountered live. These men from the bag, these sacamantecas… these are stories that have become a trick to manipulate us, to measure the weight in our body and in this way to control what we do,” the writer pointed out later during the presentation of the book to the public in the Valencian theater. “Fathers, at some point, without complaining, we could have been monsters to our children… and In this way many times we create another little monster in our hearts“.
Raising a monster It’s a short story discuss three timeswith chapters alternating to transport us to different eras. “If it disrupts the linear structure of past, present and future, and then it changes, it merges and it happens,” says Mínguez.
Cut to an adult Matilda in our present, with the aforementioned disappearance of her son as a mountain gun for a vital adventure in which she changes her present by coming to terms with her past.
Second, we met before I said the departure of the main character, in 1976, when she was no longer a pre-pubescent EGB graduate in school monjas Vallisoletano, where there is panic due to the outbreak of various cases of kidnapping and abuse of children in the center.
The last of the three time dimensions covered in our book was in 1963 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Here, Matilda’s fathers, Manolo and Águeda, they immigrate illegally before their birth in search of better services. They share the same place in a German town with Felipe, his supposed benefactor, and Javier, his son, a taciturn 13-year-old who has a certain determination to talk about lives and endure bad deeds from his father.
It is in these chapters – do not be alarmed by the person who might assume this information, because it is something you know in the first part of the story – where we find the reasons that led the young Javier to head to Valladolid years later, where he will be responsible for secuestros students of the school who attend hija Águeda and Manola. “Let’s go bit by bit as one becomes stronger and stronger, the strength that gives her survival and the ability to accept the bad things,” welcome the author, who admits that she feels a certain fascination with these characters.
The machismo of those years will also be signaled when Agueda takes it locally the moment it informs your seres queridos de a certain shame of the one who has become a victim and that nadie creates it. “I find it very interesting and vivid that the way in which the situation of the woman in those years is represented… the misunderstanding, the feeling of needing to decide: ‘But it’s true and I don’t believe it,'” said Anabel Alonso during the presentation.
There is one more reason to be interested in this last group of chapters. In us we see the reflection of Spanish immigration in the fifties and now we feel it in the economic capitals of Germany. Your home camera and contact information will be displayed immediately. asimism, it results from that idealization of the work that Spaniards can do on German soilin most cases very uncertain, both in relation to the characteristics of the company and from a contractual point of view.
History, la de la raising a monster, which is surprising for a little knowledge of the language of cinema, because the author is a professional veteran in the industry. “When I write, I never think about the cinema, I try to put my anxieties on paper. However, for the joys of the office, I have a very visual imagination, but I try to separate“.
Even if you do not have this idea in mind in the genesis of the novel, do not discount the possibility of a screen adaptation, as you did with your first work, Shadow of the earth (Espasa, 2023). But above all, there is something that is clear: “To make a movie, I will direct it!“, sentence between laughs.
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