What happens after a war? What would happen if a legionnaire had a homosexual son who also had an aversion to the military? How would the neighbors of a slaughterhouse react when the law of silence imposed by Franco's dictatorship disappears? The novelist Carmen Clara Balmaseda has tried to answer all these questions, who has just published 'Where Men Burn' (ADN), a Galdosian story in which she investigates the future of the winners of the 1936 contest. “I have written a crime novel in which the blackness is not in morbidity, but in the characters, the environment and the type of society,” says the writer.
Graduated in Hispanic Philology, Carmen Clara Balmaseda (Badajoz, 1995) has written a novel about guilt, for which she uses in a very free way the resources of criminal stories, social denunciation and historical literature. As a child she listened to her grandmothers' stories about the Civil War, stories that were discrepant and even contradictory. «My paternal grandmother, who was on the winning side, told some things that were very far from reality. For her everything seemed like a game in which she had a great time, the war was an event that could even be frivolized. My maternal grandmother, who was on the losing side, had to start working as a seamstress from a very young age, she suffered hunger and hardship. This shows that reality is the object of multiple visions,” says the writer, who is signing her second novel.
The author addresses one of the bloodiest episodes of the Civil War, the battle of Badajoz, in which the regulars of the African army participated in the summer of 1936 and which gave rise to an atrocious massacre, with murders, looting and rape by everywhere A war correspondent claimed that the bullring and the streets became an improvised gallows. The American journalist Jay Allen observed how the rebellious troops set up a killing factory in the arena. “After the first night it was believed that the blood reached a hand's breadth above the ground,” read the chronicle of Allen, Hemingway's friend and companion.
indissoluble union
Balmaseda invents two legionnaires who star in the plot, Eusebio Vegas and José Antonio Expósito, who intervene in the siege of the city. This trance will give rise to the indissoluble union between the families of one and the other, a union that will be perpetuated through their descendants. «José Antonio Expósito, who commutes his prison sentence by enlisting in the Legion, kills so as not to be killed. When he has to participate in the firing squad, because Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe did not want to take prisoners since they were a burden on him, he recognizes some of his neighbors, which torments him throughout his life. As the years go by, he will be obsessed with the way they look at him.
The writer recreates the vicissitudes of Julián Expósito, homosexual, son of a legionnaire and a man who denies weapons. Balmaseda, instead of focusing on the losers of the contest, focuses on the winners, and asks if violence is an innate drive that erupts when the occasion propitiates it. «If you ask me if the war continues to condition our lives, at first I would say yes. But I am a high school teacher and I see daily that the new generations do not know what this event was or where they sell it.
«I have written a crime novel in which the blackness is in the characters and the environment»
Balmaseda, an admirer of Galdós, wanted to emulate the author of the 'National Episodes' and weave a tapestry of stories with characters who know the pain inflicted by remorse. In the style of what Almudena Grandes did, she has woven together fictitious biographies and characters that serve to surface conflicts and evoke forgotten events in history. «Now it is easier to rebel because we are not in a dictatorship, but what would have happened if someone had done it. “We are here because there were brave people who sacrificed themselves to open the way for us.”
Despite her passion for history, Balmaseda avoids being trapped by a genre. “I don't want to repeat the same novel,” she says.
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