Pere Pena: In towns, both affections and enmities are inherited

BarcelonaThe writer Pere Pena (Seròs, 1962) was investigating a few years ago the death of his great-uncle during the Civil War when he came across the disappearance of a teacher from Seròs, Candelària Ametlla. From that mystery, Pena began to craft the story of his first novel, Sota la pell, un arbre (Eclecta), which reconstructs Candelària's life by mixing reality and fiction. The author begins with his sentimental awakening to link the teacher's figure with Rita, a French girl who spent her summers in the village. He does this through interviews with war witnesses and relatives of exiles, in a polyhedral narrative that is also made up of his thoughts to end up drawing a literary mosaic of the collective memory of a village.

Your first novel comes after a career focused mainly on poetry. How do you make the change of literary genre?

— There is a part of challenge, but the story was there before. The first chapter of the novel was already written in a short story. It seemed to me that the story had more depth, and six or seven years ago I started to think about it. I had been investigating the death of my great-uncle in the war and had found information about a missing teacher from Seròs. Little by little, the elements began to fit together.

Formally, it is a singular novel, because there is an autobiographical part encapsulated within the fiction. Did you conceive it like this from the beginning?

— I wanted to write a novel based on completely truthful elements. How to build a story that contained a truth? The entire imaginary construction could not betray the real elements. For example, Rita is not called Rita, but she existed. I construct her biography, in part, through her daughter's accounts. I don't know if she was exactly as she appears in the novel, but she fits the profile she was meant to represent. It couldn't be any other way so as not to betray the spirit of the character.

The narrator's voice is your alter ego, a man in his sixties, but in reality the protagonists of the novel are the women. Why?

— The birth of my daughter meant a change of perspective for me. It was also a shock that my mother suffered from Alzheimer's. I don't know exactly why, but there came a moment in my life when women gained importance. There is also an ideological issue. What the female characters of the war can tell is very different from what a man can tell. Talking to them, I realized their strength: many have built themselves from the awareness of their fragility, but at the same time this fragility is a strength. For example, Antonieta del Francès wanted to be a militiawoman and her father denied it to her. She liked painting but couldn't paint either. Instead of complaining, she explained that she had accustomed herself to life from an absolutely powerful spirit. 

What role does the narrator play, this alter ego that is you but disguised as fiction?

— I remember an article by Joan Burdeus that said that the literature of the self, in reality, is the literature of the you. In my case, it is the literature of the us. I was looking for this self to be disseminated, to be transformed so that the other characters would gain prominence.

This is also transferred into memory. You start from individual memories to create a collective narrative.

— Sometimes we have the idea that the self is sacred and immaculate, that there is an exclusive truth. But what we believe to be so individual, in reality, is not. It is a self born of circumstances and different memories: that of parents, that of friends… They grow like a kind of thread and create a network that goes beyond the person. It is as if memory had its own autonomy and we were only a part of it. 

How does the fact of explaining the memory of a people, of a specific and small space, influence it?

— Jesús Moncada already did it: from a very local place, a story can be written that goes beyond localism. My novel can be read outside of Baix Segre, in Barcelona or anywhere else. Then the linguistic play was also important. I wanted the characters to be themselves, they had to speak in a certain way. Language corroborates their personality.

One of the fundamental axes of the novel is the character of Candelaria. How do you find her?

— I end up looking for information about my uncle in the Salamanca archives. There, suddenly, a dead man appears, a priest, and a missing teacher. From here, I discover that she was born in Alcoletge, I get the birth certificate and I see that there is no death certificate there or in Lleida. Talking to Marieta Pano about when she was little, she mentions a teacher to me and I ask her if her name was Candelària Ametlla, and yes. 

Fiction enters here through the character of Sebastià del Cabaler Gran, a man full of light and shadow who will secretly love Candelària in a very turbulent era.

— I like his ambivalence; I think it gives him a lot of room to play. He is a type of character that was quite common at the time, someone who believed strongly in the word, in the weight of ideas, and defended them with his life. Sebastià is capable of being passionate and, at the same time, has that rational, cold, and controlling side. He knows how to adapt to circumstances. During the war, many people knew how to play the game of swimming between two waters. 

He starts a conflict with your uncle Miquel that will last for decades and reflects how family feuds can sometimes be passed down from generation to generation.

— The issue of blood, in villages, is brutal. When I spoke with Marieta Pano, one of the things that surprised me after the interview is that when I asked her if her family was right-wing or left-wing, she replied: "We were from Can Pere Cama". He was my great-grandfather. It shocked me a lot. She was left-wing but not ideologically, but because the clan by which they felt most represented was that of my family. In villages, affections as well as enmities are inherited. 

How does this novel fit into your trajectory as a poet?

— I haven't stopped writing poetry. In fact, in the autumn I will publish an anthology with Pagès Editors, but it's also likely that I'll do something else in fiction. They are not incompatible. This is a poet's novel, not only in terms of the narrative voice but also in the way it is composed. My poetry is figurative, tied to experience, and the novel starts from the same game: it starts from the self and personal experience to write a completely fictional work that challenges the reader, so that when they finish reading the novel, they feel moved.