A woman, a fist at the height of the head, throws us a firm look. As challenging as complicit, this rebel gioconda, Spanish republican photographed at the communist newspaper party L’En Humanité of 1936, it serves from the cover of A terrible beauty (Gutenberg Galaxy) to notify the proposal of the novel: a trip to the time in which the revolution was so in sight that not a few people risk practically everything to reach it.
It was the case of Raymond Molinier, Jeanne Martin Des Pallières, Vera Lanis or Elisabeth Käsemann, organized around International Trotskyism and protagonists of the book that Edurne Portela (Santurce, 1974) and José Ovejero (Madrid, 1958).
Why an articulated story around Trotskyists?
José Ovejero: Trotskyism always interested me as that revolutionary movement that never came to be in the center of anything. In that sense, he maintained a purity that the other movements were losing. There is an idealism without specifying, of struggle that does not come to corrupt.
Edurne Portela: As an ideology, I always found the dissent within the dissent. It has a continuous fighting halo against a lot of giant monsters. I also appeal for interest to Latin America, Argentina is one of the countries where it remained more alive.
In the novel, the narration of the lives of the characters is interspersed with fragments of the creative doubts and personal situations of the authors. Did you give them many times to include them?
EP: It was very organic. When I started writing, I did it from a very subjective point of view. Then we talk about how it could be interesting to position ourselves within history. We were still more around the idea of publishing it than writing like this.
Jo: We write without a plan. We did not share the chapters, each one wrote what he wanted from where he wanted and recorded the conversations we had about what we did. Edurne was the proposal to include the most private parts, such as newspaper fragments. We sensed that, if we were telling a political, public history, some characters, but we were unable to tell their intimate story, the same could happen to literature. A novel is not an external entity to those who write it, but it is part of the author or author of the author, so we turn it into part of it.
In it we read that you respect life more than literature and that this is one of the reasons why they are writers. What have you learned doing this book?
EP: A lot at all levels. The obvious, about Trotskyism and its evolution in Europe and America. We have learned to stop worrying about authorship. We have become much more permeable when writing. When you are writing, you usually make you a shell that you don’t want anyone to transparent so that what you are doing is not going on. In this case, we lower our arms and let us permeate what the other was doing. And on a personal level, we have deepened more in our relationship.
Jo: There is one thing we know, but we are not entirely aware. The number of women who make the story, but are not considered part of it. Men who do something important usually write about themselves, but they, in general, no. To document them, we had to go much more to the private, like letters.
Is there a long way to achieve equality in the story of the Revolution?
EP: A lot. I saw in Maddi and the borders What few women enter the archive of the history of revolutions. And the few historians who are interested in those few or who do it with bias. In the case of Jeanne Martin Des Pallières, his few representations are hysterical, unbalanced or thief because he faced Trotsky. There is a lot of reconstruction work of those lives to do.
Trotskyism maintained a purity that the other movements were losing. There is an idealism without specifying, of struggle that does not get to corrupt
José Ovejero
– Writer
Jo: There is a macho story by Jeanne when she rebels, but, if she does not rebel, she disappears from the story. Trotsky does not mention Vera Lanis in her newspapers at any time, and she was a woman who was taking care and helping her. We need to recover these stories from equality, but also from knowledge, because it will be a biased past if we erase part of it.
“Risking was normal,” says Vera Lanis about her youth time. “We are dinosaurs about to extinguish ourselves,” he says as older. The differences with our time seem clear. Does that change in less than a century cause vertigo?
EP: I don’t know if vertigo or deep sadness. It is the feeling of being, not in front of heroic stories, but before a fervent militancy, a faith that as an atheist envy, that security in which things could change. Looking back is seeing the ruins of so much dreams and sacrifice. But, on the other hand, if we have achieved something, it is thanks to people like this. Although they were defeated or in life they never saw any fruit of their struggles, we have reached rights that are now in danger.
Jo: I share that sadness, but I also feel hope. The great successes of capitalism have been to lose faith and replace the desire for the whim. As training historians, we know that history does not end, that, despite everything, there are possibilities.
The book enters us in the territory of torture. Today the True Crime And we have real -time violence images on our phone. Have we harden more?
Jo: I think we have always been hard. Not so long ago people were going to see executions. That distance with the suffering of who is not close to you has always existed. All wars have been beastly and press has been consumed that counted Jack’s crimes. We are not worse than before. The worrying thing may not be better.
EP: now violence is consumed that we know is not real. In a True Crime We see a representation of violence for consumption. Whoever sees it with that filter. On the other hand, if they confront violence without him, I don’t know how much we are prepared for real suffering. We have no idea how we are going to react to real violence, we do not know it except who has lived it in our own flesh.
The historian Enzo Traverso wrote that the memory of Gulag, Holocaust and slavery have erased, respectively, that of the revolution, anti -fascism and anticolonialism. That the memory of the victims has displaced that of their hopes.
EP: Since the 1980s, when studies on the Holocaust were put in the center, there has been a change towards the victimization paradigm. Being a victim became a bottomless symbolic value well. The victim emerges as a being of light that has never had any critical political behavior. It is seen in the Argentine case, where the missing ones were only victims, they could not be militants, because being made them suspect and deserving of what happened to them. Victimization neutralizes the political capacity of the victim. Build a whole story based on the feeling and the affections that the hard militancy neglects.
Jo: This is interesting in the case of Elisabeth Käsemann. Years after being tortured, raped and killed, the German consul came to say that she was a terrorist. Meanwhile, her family tried to show that it never had anything to do with violence, but for me it was moving when her partner claimed that she was in favor of violence and that they could not turn her into a being dedicated to charity because that would be to deny her again.
A chapter takes us to the dance of a strike in Renault. They were lives marked by delivery, but these pages remember that they also had moments of happiness.
Jo: It is that without that you are giving a flat and partial version of what it is to be a revolutionary. Apart from the fact that it is fun to show that side, it seems to us that it is also the right thing. By the way, this is not in the novel, but someone told us that Raymond Molinier refused to celebrate Christmas during the Vietnam War.
EP: Vera Lanis was a singer and joined Cairoli’s circus. In Jeanne’s letters we see that she was a melancholic woman, but we find those desire to laugh, love and enjoy life. For Molinier, the revolution also meant living in full.
Victimization neutralizes the political capacity of the victim. Build a whole story based on feeling and the affections that leave aside hard militancy
Edurne Portela
– Writer
From love we can think that it replies the person in love with their particular world. Do you think it is also a state that gives a mood that can be used to change the broader world, the common?
Jo: The love that these characters feel is fundamental in their lives, but not the essential. Jeanne votes to expel her husband from the game. There is a different hierarchy than we are sold today that love between two is the most important.
EP: It is a generous conception of love that transcends the four walls of a house and permeates all relationships. It is as if love grows the more shared it is. After divorcing and continuing each their lives, above the damages that can be caused in a relationship, Jeanne and Raymond defend themselves to death until the end.
Is A terrible beauty The authors’ love declaration to its protagonists?
Jo: It would be good to say yes, but it is not quite like that. It is not a declaration of love, but of interest and thanks.
EP: and respect. We have moved a lot with their lives. We have cried when discovering things from these people, whom we have felt close. We have come to love them very much.
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