Núria Cadenes: "The disregard for the lives of others is very stark and terrible to witness."

BarcelonaNúria Cadenes (Barcelona, ​​​​1970) still finds it hard to find the words to overcome the disbelief and anger caused by "negligence," she says, not saying tragedy, from DANA. The writer has lived in l'Horta Sud, Torrent, for over twenty-five years. Her house was on the edge of ground zero. that affected so many neighbors, friends and familyThat nightmare has become the story that closes his latest book, In the flesh (Now). Describe what happened during the 20 hours and 11 minutes before the alarm didn't sound in time. Cadenes contrasts the notarial description of what was happening in the offices with the dramatic situations that were being experienced on the street, where the water was destroying houses, sweeping people away, drowning children and elderly people with mobility problems, while some escaped by pure luck.

"I needed to put the facts on record, what we experienced. Because it's already happened that you've been soaked from head to toe, and the populist leader on duty comes out and says he was doing an amazing solo, and we end up believing it. It's very dangerous for it to be rewritten." In our town, this lack of interest in the common good on the part of the people who had the powers; this disregard for the lives of others is very stark and terrible to witness."

In the flesh These are twelve stories based on real events (and a thirteenth that is fictional) that unfold from the Middle Ages to the present. Cadenas makes the effort to take passages from history with capital letters or characters who have stood out by transforming them into human beings who live everyday situations, with genuine pain and sadness and also with the simplest love and tenderness. This is the case of the story dedicated to the last queen of the Catalan casal, Margarita de Prades, widow of Martí l'Humà, who had a son from a second marriage that she kept secret so as not to lose her status as widowed queen, and who gave him to the monks as if it were supposed to be a safe place. "The child faces the absolute and overwhelming power of the Church, and is physically punished when he does not want to be a monk. In this image of the child affirming "I am me" there is part of human greatness," Cadenes argues.

One of the elements that connects all the stories is the rebellion of the protagonists, who clash with social conventions or the political regime. "I claim freedom and human dignity in the face of power, which often denies it. The confrontation of the individual with power sometimes shows our smallness, but at other times it also shows the will to resist, which sometimes triumphs and sometimes breaks. Chance means that from time to time the bonds win," says Cadenes. It is no coincidence that "it is not dirty force that wins but the cunning of a vixen" in the only story that has been completely invented, a dark but moving tale about two people who live isolated, alone, in the open, threatened.

The Arrest of the Parents

The rest of the stories are born from the foundation of reality, whether they are bloodthirsty tales about the Middle Ages, sterile portraits of how corruption works, or stories filled with poetic justice, like that of the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose extraordinary art overcame rape, torture, and humanity. "I wanted to vindicate the truth of the facts at a time when facts are questioned or relative," says Cadenes. In some cases, she has used distant but powerful witnesses, such as that of Iwao Hakamada, who, after spending 45 years in prison on death row, was acquitted thanks to the struggle of his sister, who, nevertheless, recovered a mentally broken person. "I wanted to tell stories like these that we humans do to ourselves. The injustice of the justice system can be condensed into a specific person, because sometimes all of humanity is within one person," explains the author.

In other cases, they deal with situations as close to home as the arrest of her parents in 1969, as newlyweds. In the story, she describes Franco's repression and the torture on Via Laietana, but through love, specifically two images that she knows happened: that of the night watchman who turned on the lights throughout the building to discreetly warn of the police searches, and that of the couple who also didn't escape by running, holding hands. "They are poetic images of solidarity, seemingly simple things that actually contain strength and humanity," says Cadenes. Another heartbreaking account is the story of nonagenarian Josefa Llàcer, who, in her simple Valencian, describes how she was saved as a child from the bombing of Xàtiva. "When she explains that there were pieces of people falling from the trees, her voice still breaks; after so many years she is still suffering from what she experienced," explains Cadenes, who confesses to "having cried like a baby" listening to the recording that relatives had made.

There are memories and sensations that a person can never forget, and it is into this dark side of humanity that Núria Cadenes wants to explore. "Víctor Català said that the human heart is like a house with four winds; on three of them the sun touches now, then the shadow, but the fourth is reserved exclusively for the shadow," Cadenes recalls, "and when she began to write she was drawn to the fourth band. When I read this I thought I could go around the world saying: 'I am fourth.'