Silvia Hidalgo, writer: “With WhatsApp, Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán would last eight weeks today”

Here is a computer engineer who has won the latest Tusquets novel prize. Silvia Hidalgo (Seville, 1978) projected herself strongly into the literary scene with I, lie (Transit, 2021) and sign now Nothing to say, the portrait of a toxic relationship in which he invents the concept of “tumor man.”

Ask. What does a computer engineer who becomes a writer do?

Answer. Or vice versa! What does a writer become a computer engineer do? What was she before? I didn't know what being a writer was: for me, the image of a writer was, for example, Paco Umbral. Gentlemen with glasses, with elegant cloth coats and very distant. And a neighborhood girl like me had nothing to do with it. At that time, if you were good at science you had to take advantage of it and that's it. I studied Computer Engineering, which had that important thing about “exits”. I always liked writing, but it wasn't until I was more of an adult that I began to take my vocation seriously.

Q. She is an auditor. What does she audit?

R. Cybersecurity of companies and Public Administration. There is a royal decree that establishes the national security scheme that they must comply with and I audit that they comply. That is.

Q. Define “neighborhood girl.”

R. When you have grown up in a peripheral working-class neighborhood, in my case in Seville, outside the Macarena wall, your references, objective and horizon are very different. The women around me did not have the opportunity to study, most did not work outside the home or worked in other homes, but nothing more. That's why fiction is so important to me, it broadened my horizons. I have always had a great hunger for fiction and also a hunger for life, to go beyond everything I could. The good thing for a girl from the neighborhood is that, since there were so few expectations and you are always underestimated, you can only surprise.

Q. There was no literature in his house. How did she find it?

R. There were classics in my house, but they didn't appeal to me, they didn't interest me in the least. My older brother became interested and I remember the pocket Anagrama. Those American authors began to reach me whose realities or fictions appealed to me much more and that was when I got hooked on narrative. When people say they don't like reading or movies it is because they have not yet found what is their thing, what appeals, pleases and fulfills them.

Q. What is the “tumor-man”?

R. It is an idealization, it is the romantic idea of ​​love, infatuation and love at first sight. Sometimes you know someone a little, you keep a quality that you liked and you make up the rest. We create an illusion, we complete it, we invent it, and if it is also a distant relationship in time and space in which we only have that idealization and little communication, a state of anxiety begins to create. What could be an illusion becomes an obsession. That's why I call it man-tumor, because I'm talking about a harmful obsession that you don't know how to get rid of. The more you try to get away, the more you become anchored, not by the man himself, but by the idea of ​​that man. And not love itself, but the idea of ​​that love. I call it a tumor because it can become sickly.

Q. Would we understand if they called us “tumor-woman”?

R. Yes, of course, because the effect it has on her is more important than the action of the man himself. I define a cold man who also wants something, who manipulates with language, something selfish and dishonest as we can all be at a given moment, also a woman who wants to get something from the object of his desire.

Q. Women, therefore, can also be tumors.

R. Yes, but women have a relationship with traditional romantic love that plays against us, much more than against men. Historically we have never had an advantage in that type of relationship. We are more vulnerable to falling into this idea, to our value and self-confidence depending on a man's judgment of us, of our physique, of the person we are. It is different.

Q. Is there love in addiction, in that type of relationship?

R. I will not be the one who achieves the definition of love, but for me it has to do with admiration, illusion. It can start there and become a love or an obsession, but there has to be tenderness, care, empathy, respect and in these types of relationships this is conspicuous by its absence.

Q. It seems that mobile phones have added complexity to toxic relationships.

R. Relationships today are under a very different umbrella and that can be very good because it expands possibilities, but it can also create anxiety. Before, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Galdós wrote letters to each other and could spend two or three months waiting for a response.

Q. Imagine now with WhatsApp.

R. Then people lived more slowly and that is why the relationship would last so long. Nowadays they might last eight weeks, because immediacy causes more anxiety. Knowing that there is a possibility of immediacy in the response generates anxiety and if the other person does not respond quickly we go back to inventing the situation, the possibilities. And the more creative you are, the more risky you are, because your inventive capacity can reach dangerous levels.

Q. Why do you write?

R. I have always written, even if it is not on paper. Since I was little, I told myself the reality before going to sleep, I translated it to understand it, to record a memory. I wasn't aware that she did it, but I know she did it and I do it constantly. In my head I am narrating what is happening. And then I took the step to write for what I do everything: out of envy. You have to find the driving force of envy, bad envy, envy as absolute admiration, that of picking up a book and saying: “I want to do this. “Will I be able to do this?” Fiction has given me so much, it has saved my life so much… It has expanded my horizon, my life, my experience. And to be able to belong to this, contribute a little, be there, and with a spirit of beauty, of doing something beautiful and of feeling proud. Yes, that's it, yes, proud and satisfied. Why do I write? I guess it's vanity, I don't know. I guess.

_