Montse Virgili: "I wonder if women are not dogs who have fallen in love with the leash"

BarcelonaJournalist Montse Virgili (Tarragona, 1976), presenter of the program Les dones i els dies on Catalunya Ràdio, debuts in literature with Els moixons (La Magrana), a novel about the women who have marked her. From the fishmonger who was missing half an arm and the pastry chef who gave her sweets without asking for anything in return to the almost illiterate grandmother who wrote in Spanish, Virgili crafts a narrative collage that accurately captures childhood in the 80s and is, at the same time, a firm tribute to women silenced by the patriarchy.

The book captures, through the eyes of a girl living in Tarragona in the 80s, the lives of a series of women who are part of her environment. Did you consider it a novel or a memoir?

— The beginning of everything was a question: "Who are the women who have marked me?" I realized that the women who first taught me what the world was like were those around me, those on the periphery to whom we don't give the recognition or respect they deserve. From here I went on to construct the text, which for me is a novel, but not from a classic point of view. It has a touch of autobiography, but instead of talking about my life, I talk about the lives of these women who, when I still knew nothing about life, showed me the world.

You approach the figures of all these women from memories, but also from the present, when they are already very old and some are about to die. Why did you need to reconnect with them?

— When we are young we do not dare to ask, and when we are old, the intuitions of childhood reveal themselves in one way or another. Returning to them was to verify that everything was as I imagined. I was also interested in reflecting the journey from girl to adult and showing how these intuitions I had as a child have evolved. Going to see them when they were already old, some on the verge of death, did not sadden me; on the contrary. I was glad to see that not all old ages are the same, that growing old means having some losses but also gaining good things. I am proud of them.

Why do you call them "little birds"?

— Sparrows are the small birds we don't pay attention to. In reality, the book goes against that. We haven't paid enough attention to these women either, but they all have very interesting stories that can tell us about the world. The book is a call for conversation between people of different generations and, at the same time, a reading for men, so they look at their neighbor, the shop assistant. We are all much more intertwined than we imagine, like in this flock of sparrows on the cover.

What view do you have of childhood?

— It is the gaze of a childhood that many of us share, of children who were not with their parents all the time. Now they are asked: "Do you want to go to the park or do you want to stay home?" Before, you would go with your father to the market and there were no questions. It was what was expected. If there was an adults' lunch and you were the only girl, you would eat the three hours of adults' lunch and stay quiet. It is the childhood of children who get very bored, who are in the adult world and who have a lot of time to listen. I don't know if it's good or bad, but if we compare it to now, that is a much less spoiled childhood.

The protagonist spends a good part of her days in the apartment, in Tarragona. How does this affect her?

— I was an apartment girl, and I'm not that different from an apartment girl from l'Eixample, Lleida, or Girona. The book also talks about the fear with which they raise us girls: "Don't go here, don't talk to strangers, call when you get home..." They've told all of us this. The girl in the novel lives in this closed world, which is also the world of care, because in the eighties, women didn't go to work like they do now. There were many housewives and, therefore, a lot of contact with the neighbors. And the fathers, the men, are almost mythological, absent figures.

In the protagonist's story there is a flight, from Tarragona to Barcelona, also crossed by class consciousness. 

— They made me believe that who I was and where I came from was worthless. It is what Annie Ernaux says, to write to avenge my race. I come from a family of farmers, of bricklayers, from a house where there were no books or service doors. For me, Barcelona was the place of literature. I remember I went to Guinardó and thought: "Here Marsé wrote that novel, here Matute lived, Rodoreda passed by here". I was fascinated, I walked down the street in a new dress. I grew up with the idea that Barcelona was everything, then my heart broke a little.

"We are late to love who we are, where we come from," you write. Does the novel function as a recognition of your origins?

— Totally. I haven't felt shame about my class, but I have felt that I didn't have access to certain things, and that made me angry. When I studied law, I went to class with the children of many of Barcelona's great families, who had an office and then went to work there. I spoke with people who told me their father used to read them the Aeneid before going to sleep. My goodness, my father used to say goodnight and cover yourself up, you know?

You also defend the right of the protagonist women to be presumed "as an act of resistance". Why?

— It may seem like a triviality, but those women spent the whole week working in their dressing gowns and worn-out slippers. They had very little, but on Sundays they wanted to dress up to love themselves a little, to give themselves a gift. It's a way of saying: "You haven't said anything to me all week, but I'm here, I'm going out into the public space." Many times, women, in order to exist, have had to go out into the street with a mask, makeup. There is this demand, but at the same time I wonder if we are not dogs who have fallen in love with the leash. Does this create slavery for us? 

The novel portrays a world that is ending, of neighbors talking from window to window and women cooling themselves. 

— And also of women who criticize each other a lot. It was a world where there were no filters, where patriarchy was a machine that we all had upon us and no one questioned. I used to go to the hairdresser's and hear those women talking about other women in a terrible way. Everything was much more violent, more brutal, men said terrible things to older women. If we compare it to today, it's an abyss. It was a world where people talked a lot but remained silent even more. With the silence of all those women, you could burn Catalonia.