Antònia Vicens: "If I regained faith, pain and death would have meaning."

BarcelonaIn Take up your cross, new collection of poems byAntonia Vicens (Santanyí, 1941), "echoes of a bloody battle are felt everywhere," tanks advance with solitary executioners inside, and birds of prey "tear out the eyes of combatants" to make their nests. The omnipresence of struggle, blood, and war coexists with the human spirit of survival and the vindication of words like "redemption" and "memory." Once again, the Mallorcan author manages to move the reader with a compact and dense collection of verses published by LaBreu, as well as All the horses (2017) and Father, what do we do with the dead mother? (2020).

When, three years ago, he received the Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature, he said that he led a "very solitary" life: he read books, listened to music and wrote to himself. WhatsApp with friends. Is it still the same?

— Yes. I hardly ever leave the house. I have a dog, and every now and then I get a little sad and go for a walk around the neighborhood, but that's all. I really like a life without a schedule, without anything stretching or forcing me.

Have you been practicing this kind of hermitism for a long time?

— In my own way, yes. When I was in my early 20s, I worked in the hospitality industry and had the winters off. One year, since my father didn't want me to stay at home, I spent three months in Montserrat alone, in the middle of winter. This shows that my personality tends toward solitude. I find solitude very rewarding. It's a great companion for me.

Have you needed it to write?

— I need solitude to live. Not so much for writing, because I'm not very prolific. I write books very rarely, and they're very short. This one, Take up your cross, it's small, small. I don't know what the readers will say!

It's a book that leaves you stunned.

— Thank you.

When published Father, what do we do with the dead mother? He said that he had suffered a lot writing it, that it was "a black hole" that had accompanied him for a long time. How did it go, in the case ofTake up your cross?

— My poetry collections usually spring from a spark that ignites a dream or a memory. The poems serve to extinguish that fire. Take up your cross was born from a memory. One day, in that lonely atmosphere I find myself in, I began to remember that when I was a doll, I would go on an excursion to the Consolació shrine in Santanyí, and I would always see two rows of young men with their heads bowed like a stone. The other children and I would laugh at those men, who worked whether it was sunny or raining. After a few years, someone told us they were political prisoners. This changed my mind about them. We had received a Judeo-Christian education, and we were told about Golgotha, the mountain of Calvary, but not about what was happening in the neighboring town. It was all a path of pain, blood, and dedication: the memory of what, on the one hand, I had been taught and, on the other, what I had seen, set my memory ablaze, and so it was born. Take up your cross.

It's a book about war: we can see echoes of the Civil War, but also some of the wars of our present.

— War is always present. For as long as life has existed, there has always been that struggle, that bloodshed... I've tried to transform it, in the book, into an inner journey as well. There is death and hunger that remain outside of us, but we can also assimilate it with what each of us has experienced.

He wrote it with tears in his eyes, just like Father, what do we do with the dead mother??

— Many of the visions I have make me shudder. At times, tears fall, yes. And all the pain that appeared in some of the poems made me doubt whether it was worth writing, but then I compared it to what's happening in the world, and it was nothing. There are so many wars, so many dreams that die, so many lost hopes... From the beginning, I wanted to unite the Sanctuary of Consolation with Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. It's my way of saying that there is no innocent land; everything is connected.

The initial quote, from Cain Byron's poem, already makes us think of this biblical dimension that often appears in his work. Cain asks Adam: "Why should I speak?" Adam replies: "To pray." Given the darkness of the present, is prayer the only thing left for us?

— Praying in the sense that we used to pray the Lord's Prayer or the Hail Mary, no, but prayer does seem important to me. We must insist on trying to make the world a better place, or perhaps even bring about a change. There's a poem in the book that says: "Who knows if that rumor / that disturbs you / is / the voice / of someone praying and not the wind tearing rose petals apart." Prayer can be a cry.

The poem elevates the habitual murmur of prayer to a cry.

— The power of the cry appeals to the powerlessness of life itself. As a very young child, I went from priest to priest, because there was no one else to talk to, asking them to tell me the mystery of pain. Why did we have to suffer? And how do you explain the pain of children and animals, who have not sinned? No one knew what to answer.

Words like pain, wound and death are very present in this book. Also in novels like Call the wandering death, tell me where you are going (The Granada, 2024).

— Death accompanies us from birth, it's just that we don't want to see it. Sometimes we see its face when we're one year old, and sometimes when we're approaching 100.

In one of the poems, the lyrical voice manages to crush "ancient gods" and "wild beasts." You feel like you "triumph over death." Does death scare you more now that you're 84?

— Over the years, I've become braver. I'm capable of writing things I wouldn't have written before. Sometimes I feel like I'm 1,000 or 2,000 years old, instead of 84, because of all the things I carry inside. What I fear most is not poverty or illness, but life itself.

Since the beginning of his career he has written brave books, such as 39º in the shade, Sant Jordi Award 1967, in which he showed the harshest side of tourism in Mallorca in the 1960s.

— To write, you need to be, above all, authentic. You have to forget what people will think and say, whether they will like it or not, and focus on what you want to do. When I published 39º in the shade They told me that if I continued talking about hotels and tourists, I wouldn't find work anywhere else in Mallorca. My novel dealt with the exploitation of workers in this sector, a topic that was forbidden to discuss at the time. There were two other topics that bothered them: the fact that I discussed a priest's love affair and the fact that the book included a suicide.

I have the feeling that he has never been very afraid to say what he thinks. When he published Under the umbrella the cry (Leonard Muntaner, 2013) admitted that he longed for the loss of faith, a theme that, incidentally, also appears in Take up your cross.

I miss it so much. As a doll, I was happy because I believed in the heaven they'd sold me. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said: a saint. But all that was reduced to nothing. Around the age of 20, I began to lose faith. I'd give anything to have even a little bit of it back. If I could regain my faith, pain and death would make sense. Now, to get them out of my system, all I can write are a few rather harsh poems...