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

BarcelonaThe journalist Montse Virgili (Tarragona, 1976), presenter of the program Las mujeres y los días from Catalunya Ràdio, makes her literary debut with Los pajaritos (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 for no reason to the almost illiterate grandmother who wrote in Spanish, Virgili crafts a narrative collage that precisely captures childhood in the 80s and is, at the same time, a strong tribute to the 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 conceive of it as a novel or as a book of memoirs?

— 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, and we don't give them the recognition or respect they deserve. From there I started building 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 don't dare to ask, and when we are old, the intuitions of childhood reveal themselves in one way or another. Returning to them was a way to confirm 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 of them on the verge of death, did not sadden me; on the contrary. It made me happy 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 llamas sound like "little birds"?

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

What is your perspective on childhood?

— It is the gaze of a childhood that many of us share, of creatures who were not with their parents at all hours. 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 adult meal and you were the only girl, you would eat the three hours of adult meal 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 a sheltered girl, and I'm not so different from a sheltered girl from Eixample, Lleida, or Girona. The book also talks about the fear with which girls are raised: "Don't go here, don't talk to strangers, call when you're home..." This has been told to all of us. The girl in the novel lives in this closed world, which is also the world of caregiving, 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 neighbors. And the fathers, the men, are almost mythological figures, absent. 

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

— They made me believe that what I was and where I was from was worthless. It's what Annie Ernaux says, about writing to avenge my race. I come from a family of peasants, of bricklayers, from a house where there were no books or servant entrances. For me, Barcelona was the place of literature. I remember going to Guinardó and thinking: "Here Marsé wrote that novel, here Matute lived, Rodoreda passed through 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 what we are, where we come from," you write. Does the novel function as a recognition of your origins?"

— Totally. I haven't felt class shame, 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 that their father read them theAeneid before going to sleep. My goodness, my father would say goodnight and tuck me in, you know?

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

— It may seem like a trifle, but those women spent the whole week working in their robes and patchwork 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 on the street with a mask, with 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 of women cooling themselves in the evening air. 

— And also about women who criticize each other a lot. It was a world where there were no filters, where the patriarchy was a machine that we all had on top of 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 women. If we compare it to today, it's an abyss. It was a world where much was said but more was still silenced. With the silence of all those women, you could burn Catalonia.