What world make up the boys, in their imagination, with the broken pieces of a family that divorces? How do they return compatible, in your child logic, The hatred that your parents have with the “love” that declare? These are some of the questions that we usually ask ourselves in front of us a conflicting separation marked by violence and judicialization. A situation we know by heart. We see it every day in the family, among friends and exposed to the scandal in the media.
In his novel “Astronauts” (Alfaguara) Catalan writer and journalist Laura Ferrero He gives voice to a girl whose parents divorce when he was very small. The book recounts with humor and intelligence the many ways in which a boy is the most harmed participant of a war that did not invent. And although Ferrero declares that the text material is in a great fictional proportion, the feelings and circumstances of which they speak are their own. They allude to their personal history, when their parents separated, as a consequence of an infidelity, in their first years of life.
Ferrero is a usual columnist of the El País newspaper and one of the most interesting authors of their generation. “The astronauts” is their third novel. A story of pains so close to all, that we cannot avoid feeling questioned by her.
The facts
The plot starts with a scene: in the house of her uncles, the protagonist finds a photo of her dad, her mother and she when they were a family. I had never seen an image of the three together. Because his parents had married. And in turn, each one had had another son. And Kuki, as the narrator preferred to call her, had felt out of place. Like an aggregate, a loose piece, a foreigner.
To add uncertainty, his father had an intermittent presence. He lived in another city, his mother had never forgiven him and his grandparents did not want him. He was even suggested insistence that he called his stepfather “dad”.
And there the astronauts enter into a picture. Because when they ask Kuki to draw his father, at school, he saw him as an astronaut and titled the work: “Houston.” And then explain that it is his travel trips that prevent him from coming to look for her at school. The fact arouses the teacher’s alarms and causes a call to the mother and a subsequent conversation that does not help much. In front of facts like these, Those who go to the psychologist are the boys, not the parents. “When they once asked me again to draw a family, I thought that if you represent what is commonly understood by a family you can pretend the rest of his life that you also belong to one,” writes the narrator as a conclusion of the episode.
Astronauts appear again and again in the story. They are the teacher who exploded at the Challenger or the Russian who was floating in space when the Soviet Union crumbled. In one way or another, they work in the plot as An unexpected point of view from which to read such a earthly story.
“The idea of the astronauts is that they went as far as possible to tell what they had very close, what they could not see, that it was the earth. That idea served me to say that sometimes you have your mother and your father and you never ask them what matters to you. You have to look for the rodeo because the remoteness is the one that can speak better of the closeness,” explains in Buenos Aires the writer, where he was for a few days to present the novel.
Written in short chapters, fragments, quotes of authors and stories of space, the book has innumerable entries to the same topic: a difficult childhood.
“It is the story of my life. The issue of not having a place. And it is part of the divorces of the ’80, in which there was no shared custody, you did not know how you separated or what you could do. In addition, there is the theme of taboo. It is not that my family was religious, but they were quite traditional. And in whom my grandparents deposit the hatred against a man who left with another? In his own granddaughter, so he doesn’t want it. And that girl is in the middle of anything. It ends up being the loneliest in history. Because the two parents do their families. But she doesn’t know what her place is, who has to tell dad, ”says the writer.
Two moments of the novel especially mark the sadness of the situation. In one, his father and grandmother, alone, witnessed the communion of Kuki, in the last banks of the Church, sections of the rest. In another, the narrator ennerates the various ways in which they call each family member, according to the place where it is. “To my father: if I was with my mother ‘Jaume’, if I was with Miguel (the stepfather) ‘Jaume’. If I was with my grandparents ‘that’, if I was with him, ‘Dad’. To Miguel: if I was with my mother, ‘Dad’, if I was with Miguel, ‘Dad’, if I was with my grandparents, ‘Dad’. If I was with my father and clear, ‘Miguel’.
“As a child, I always felt that I had to choose very well what I said, what I counted. I ended up becoming a balancer. And that is not something that a little boy should learn to do,” says Ferrero.
That balance, in addition, is achieved at the expense of behaviors and symptoms that overshadow the life of boys. The protagonist eats hairs, does not sleep, orders the fringes. “There are thousands of ways to deal with what you do not understand and it is a natural response of the individual when she is afraid. But I would have loved that adults could have repaired that. But perhaps they did not have the tools,” explains the author.
How to write the story
The writing of the book was raised as an investigation. And Ferrero looked for thousands of ways that his parents told him the parts of the story that he did not understand, but did not have much collaboration from them. Nor were they very satisfied with the writing of the book. “I wanted to tell me why. What do you do with a girl who orders fringes and you don’t tell her what happens? How do you get to that situation? What happened to you in your divorce so you can hate so much? I do not get any answer because there was no. Because they were not aware, they didn’t have the words. But when traveling this story I could understand them better.”
A path that did not take her to fury but to the certainty that some wounds will always be open and that parents, like everyone else, do what they do, the best they can. With more irony than drama, with sweeter than resentment, “astronauts” transport us to heaven to look at ourselves.
A fragment
“Sometimes I thought that a part of my parents, a part that I did not know, had been lost in a long space mission. Upon returning to Earth, gravity had weighed too much. Maybe it was by force of custom, the expectations, the weight of the golden watches that are lost over time. For the daughter that was me.
There were both, despite their functionality, their appearance of people especially trained for the most practical areas of life, something that did not end up being present, which was out of place.
From my daughter position I could not make signs to return.
Or I could do them, but they would not have distinguished them, occupied as they were in a mission that I did not know.
Maybe the mission was simply to survive (but what). ”
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