Berta Creus: "The ghosts we drag throughout life are always with us"

BarcelonaThere is an image that, for some time now, has appeared over and over again in the mind of writer Berta Creus (Sant Martí de Tous, 1986). "I imagined a couple in a relationship that isn't going through its best moment. One of them went out into the garden with a pitcher full of water, it fell to the ground and broke into a thousand pieces. Each piece was a story that made up their life together," explains Creus. Filtered through the sieve of literature, this couple is Jara and Sebastià, the protagonists of the writer's second novel, Worlds where you can find yourself (Males Herbes). The pieces of the pitcher have been transformed into the fragments that compose their story, a mosaic-like account that speaks of loss and the traps of memory following the death of Sebastià.

"When you break off a relationship, whether it's a couple or a friendship, there is a part of idealization. When someone dies, there is too. We are capable of totally modifying our memories so that they mold themselves to the current reality. Those holidays were the best of your life, those fights weren't that serious," explains Creus. Based on this idea, Sebastià becomes the ghost that will accompany Jara throughout the whole story and who will contrast her view on what they lived with that of the rest of the characters who support her. In the first part of the novel, Jara takes the voice and narrates in the first person what she feels and remembers. The pain of death is alive and returns to her like a series of waves, although she tries to attenuate it through Carles, the third great character of this story. He is Sebastià's best friend and, after the accident, Jara's partner.

"From the beginning, I was clear that there would be a triangle of characters. In part, to flee from this literary trend of books about women who move forward alone. Both in literature and in reality we have lost the concept of network, but most of the time we need someone by our side," stresses the writer. While Sebastià and Jara are two impulsive and unstable characters, Carles has a very grounded personality that acts as a counterweight for them. He will balance them out and will live the grief in a different way than the protagonist. "Jara is more mental, she doesn't stop turning things over, while Carles goes to the place where they scattered the ashes, cries, and that's it," says Creus.

Ghosts that return

Sebastià is the great ghost of the novel, but not the only one. The characters live with the presence of people who are no longer part of their lives, such as an old lover or a twin brother who died when he was a child. "There is the idea of the five stages of grief and it seems that, once they are over, you can return to normality. This is a big lie, grief is never overcome. The ghosts we carry throughout life are always with us. If we try to push them away, they always end up coming back," points out the writer, who during the creative process has had three major references: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Solitude by Víctor Català and Anima by Wajdi Mouawad.

The story travels to the island of Thule, a place that welcomed Sebastià when he still did not know Jara and which is a complete mystery to the protagonist. There, she will seek answers and find a small community that is initially suspicious but later welcoming. Although there is an island of Thule in the Atlantic Ocean, Creus is not inspired by it, but has appropriated the mythology related to Pytheas, the Greek explorer of the 4th century BC. "It is known that he discovered an island and named it, but everything he wrote was burned in the fires of Alexandria," says the author. In the novel, she places Thule in the north and imagines it very sparsely populated, with a cold climate and also inhabited by seals.

Creus's second novel contains some elements typical of her literature, such as a deep bond with nature and the environment and the prominence of villages. The writer advances the story by combining the protagonist's introspective monologue with small third-person tales of secondary characters, which function as independent stories. "This is related to my way of thinking. I don't think I could ever write a novel all at once –she states–. I have always tended towards the short story and writing as if the book were made of several pieces that are then linked together and form a single story."