What happens when childhood is not a safe place?
BarcelonaI'm arriving in July feeling short on energy. It's been an intense year, and this week I wanted to write something light, something that wouldn't require too much emotional effort. But karma literary had other plans for me and it has come into my hands the latest novel by the Valencian writer Enric Pardo i Ramírez, The man of the house, published by La Magrana.
Having attended the presentation at the La Tribu bookstore with Alicia Kopf and Anna Pacheco, I knew that Pardo writes about his own story, as one of the first children of divorced parents in Onda, his family's town in Castelló. I also knew that he had used a child narrator to unfold a story that, on the one hand, sought to pay tribute to the courage of his mother, a woman who refused to conform to the assigned role of wife, homemaker, and mother; and, on the other, sought to fondly recall the cultural references of those childhood years.
Since I'm not a nostalgic person, and in fact, I don't believe that any time past is better, I confess that, at the beginning of the reading, this child's voice transcribing the songs from the 1980s TVE1 cartoons seemed somewhat irritating to me. But as I read on, I realized that these moments I went to EGB They are the illusionist trick that Pardo, as a good scriptwriter, does. Stephen King which is, it uses to take us by the hand, without us realizing it, into a much more disturbing and terrifying world.
A few weeks ago I talked about the concept of black pedagogy, popularized by psychoanalyst Alice Miller: the set of educational practices that start from the idea that the child must be disciplined through punishment, humiliation, manipulation, and the suppression of their needs and emotions. Although Pardo writes from a realist perspective, The man of the house It made me think of the films of another master of horror, the Catalan Jaume Balagueró, in which the home, which should be a refuge, becomes a threatening setting; and the adults (parents, teachers, psychologists, or friends) who should protect children are incontinent, selfish, and, to paraphrase the narrator, "roïnes."
Helplessness and anguish
Like Balagueró's viewers, Pardo's readers see the threat before the protagonist can understand it: the homophobia, the humiliation, the blows to the mouth, the threat of hell, the prohibition against crying. Like the filmmaker, who shoots with subjective cameras and narrow points of view, Pardo places us inside the head of a narrator who doesn't fully understand the reality around him and who, with the innocence of a particularly sensitive and unexplained child, tells us uncomfortable and frightening scenes. Little Enric senses that things aren't going well, but he can't quite put them into words because he doesn't yet have the maturity or the tools to understand or resist them; and this fact provokes in the reader a state of helplessness and anguish that makes this a much more disturbing novel than it might seem at first glance.
Fortunately, Pardo makes up for it with touches of humor, tenderness, and funny spite (the chapter in which the mother becomes angry with a PSPV-PSOE deputy is memorable). The man of the house It is a good exercise that neurologist and psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik explores in the essay on resilience The ugly ducklings (Eumo): Humor, a touch of rebellion, hope, and curiosity allow us to develop resilience and connect the wounds of the past with the present, so we can imagine and move toward a freer and more creative future. Just as the adult Pardo does through the little (big) Enrique.