The last book of the writer from Oviedo Eduardo Romero is “Centimeter by centimeter”, edited by Pumpkin Seeds. A little book of just 65 pages in which it tells the minute by minute of an old man and the woman who cares for him. In the words of the philosopher and writer Santiago Alba Rico, It is “an exciting story without adjectives: a pure, meticulous and attentive description of physical operations around a body that, at the same time, through that attention, becomes indispensably human.” This next week, Romero will be in Madrid presenting this little literary artifact: on Wednesday the 27th in a reading club at the Cervantes y Compañía bookstoreaccompanied by Sara Fernández Polo; and the next day, together with the poet Berta García Faet, at the Ateneo La Maliciosa.
Why this story
For some time now I have been interested in literaryally addressing scenes starring the elderly and those who care for them. When I pass an old man pushing a walker on the street, I usually get stunned. I like to observe their movements, the movements of whoever accompanies them, the way the people who come across them interact. On the other hand, I have written quite a bit about migration, and therefore I am very aware of the existence of transnational care networks, the flow of migrant women who end up in Europe taking care of an aging population. Jenny, a Peruvian woman, is the protagonist of my novel In the open seaand in it he ends up working for an elderly couple, worried that he won’t leave the house alone and get lost in the city. In How is the mountain going to be a god? I address the bond between an old miner who suffers from silicosis and an Afro-Colombian woman who, from Valle del Cauca, crosses the ocean and ends up caring for this old man after he falls and breaks his hip.
Why in 60 pages
This is my shortest book. The others that I have named are starred by many characters, their stories intertwine and feed each other. The structure is that of a puzzle of stories that fit together, with relevant temporal and geographical movements. The relationship between the different pieces is the most important and the most complex to assemble. However, this time I wanted to stop at just one piece. In the other books I had to go through these types of scenes relatively quickly, the story had to continue. Now it is the opposite exercise: delving, without haste, into the details. As it says on the back cover, it is about observing a woman and an old man who together walk through a day in a kind of slow motion dance. The book, therefore, has a single narrative register, compared to others that I have written in which the register, and with it the rhythm, varied. I understood that in Centimeter by centimeter I had to look for that thoroughness, but I also thought that the tone of the novel could exhaust the reader if I tried to sustain it for one hundred or two hundred pages. I think the length it has is enough to tell what I want to tell. I have never liked to write too much.
As
In the last twenty years, I have been able to hear many testimonies from migrant women dedicated to caring for the elderly. Some are friends and over time they have told me the details of their daily lives. During research for the book How is the mountain going to be a god? I visited some elderly people in their homes, and I also spoke with people who work in them, sometimes in very precarious conditions. In recent years I have also been very close to the issue of caring for the elderly for family reasons. I think it was Leila Slimani who I read that we novelists feed on details. Through these various sources, I had access to countless details.
The caregivers
This little book is a literary proposal, it is not an essay in which I give my opinion on structural issues linked to the care of the most dependent people. That is something that can be done perhaps from reading it. In fact, I would be happy if it fueled that debate. In any case, one of my motivations for writing it is the feeling that these types of scenes are not very present in literature, that we lack stories that help us think about these issues. In Logroño, a woman who is taking care of her father told me at the end of the presentation that, by reading the little book, she had resigned her role. That, suddenly, upon seeing it captured in the book, he had felt it more worthy, and had even seemed like a somewhat heroic work. I liked that reading had that effect on her.
The elderly
Centimeter by centimeter He dwells a lot on the movement of the two bodies, that of the woman he cares for and that of the old man. She and him. I have not given them their own names, although I do believe that they have a specific personality that becomes known over the course of the story, especially through the few dialogues between them. There is affection and tenderness in the relationship they establish. I do not mean to say that care is always like this, that the elderly are always like the one in my story. There are old bastards or those who have lost their temper who insult and hit those who take care of them. There are people who work as caregivers (paid or through family ties) who are cruel or simply indelicate. I have chosen a story through which I try to convey beauty. Not only, but also beauty. And she, in addition to treating the old man with tenderness, does something very important: she gives him space to achieve, no matter how little, all the autonomy he can.
Hear
I am interested in authors who have been defined in the category of “listening literature.” Svetlana Aleksievich, for example. Or the Colombian Alfredo Molano. It is true that some of my books—not so much Centimeter by centimeter— They try to collect multiple voices of characters that compose a collective story. I have never used a tape recorder. But I have spoken with many people who end up being the protagonists of my books, people who have trusted me with their story. “Listening is almost writing,” said Alfredo Molano. That phrase opens my book How is the mountain going to be a god? It collects testimonies from the Asturian mining neighborhoods, from the neighborhoods surrounding the ports of Gijón in Asturias and Buenaventura in Colombia, from migrants, from exiles, from indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. The story is told, mainly, through what they tell us. In the case of Autobiography of Manuel Martínezthe novel about the life of one of the members of the Coordinator of Prisoners in Struggle (COPEL), that assembly organization of prisoners that turned Spanish prisons upside down in the late seventies and early eighties, the “listening ” consisted of visiting Manolo at his house for ten days and simply listening to the story he wanted to tell me. Then comes the work of fighting with the notes to give a literary form to what you have heard.
Literature and activism
I believe that the best way to intervene in the world through literature is by making good literature. And I think that normally means that whoever manages to carry it out has been able to awaken the imagination and the desire to think of those who read it. Literature is always political, but I don’t think that the most radical book is necessarily the most forceful or the most explicit, the one that tells truths like fists. I usually prefer those texts that, as Berger said, through “the art of playing with silence,” force the reader to complete the story.
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