Caterina, Doris and the courage
BarcelonaIn 2007, the Nobel Prize in Literature celebrated the long, prestigious and committed literary career of Doris Lessing, who received the news with the calm of her 88 years, just as she was arriving home loaded with groceries.
Almost twenty years have passed since then and we have joyfully received the latest translation of one of her works into Catalan. It is the novel The Fifth Child (1988) and it is published by Edicions 62, translated by Marta Pera Cucurell.
Lessing has never disappointed me, and this time is no exception. In every work you rediscover her quality as a writer and her firm will to transgress, to make us think and debate, to call into question what seemed untouchable. She had already demonstrated this many times, for example with the novel The Grandmothers, about two older women who, on vacation, end up becoming lovers of each other's son.
In The Fifth Child, Lessing (who explained with great clarity the contradictions that motherhood generated for her personally) delves into an issue that was taboo when she wrote the novel and still is today: there are mothers who can feel aversion towards their children.
Harriet and David are a couple in love who share a common desire to create a large family. They have four children and, despite economic problems, they are happy. But then Harriet becomes pregnant with the fifth and things change. The woman knows from the first moment that this creature is different. After a terrible pregnancy, a boy is born, Ben, who is not a beautiful baby and has disconcerting behavior, and as soon as he grows a little, with an aggressive component. The arrival of little Ben will destroy the family's happiness and the mother struggles between the rejection she feels for this creature and the maternal instinct that pushes her to protect him.
Lessing always tries to go further and step over deterrent lines. The novel was and is revolutionary. And the author's courage made me think of the young Caterina Albert who, almost a hundred years before Lessing, presented herself at the Jocs Florals in Olot with the monologue titled The Infanticide, about a woman sent to a psychiatric hospital after killing her baby. The scandal that occurred was due as much to the subject of the monologue as to the fact that it had been written by a woman. We already know how the story ended.
Our Víctor was not a Nobel Prize winner in literature, but she deserves for her work and her courage to be remembered still today and more every day. And, as we already know, if we do not do it from Catalonia, no one else will.