Use and abuse of power: instruction manual

With a subtitle that says "True facts or almost", Núria Cadenes has managed to find the thread that connects the thirteen stories. that gives us In the flesh (Now Books, 2025). Cadenas does not cheat or involve herself in deceptive terminology: she presents the stories as what they are, free literary elaborations based on real events, which can be oral witnesses or historical studies or ancient or recent chronicles. There is a basis of reality, but the writer manipulates it and works it and serves it as a work of fiction. She has placed the stories in chronological order: first we read stories set in the Middle Ages (about the plague, about Artemisia Gentileschi, about princesses and novices), and we advance among bandits who jump the margins to wars of the 20th century (like the impressive story of the Italian fascist bombing of the city of Xàtiva), dictatorships from here and everywhere, to end the day before yesterday: the last story is inspired by the terrible effects of the DANA. Of all this, there is the exception that confirms the rule: a story entitled "The Dice" and that refers to the universe of Victor Catalan and the Empordà landscape. A dissident voice, says the author in the epilogue, where she explains the diverse origins of the materials: exactly what interests her, as an author, is giving a voice to those who oppose the movement. Allowing them to breathe, giving them a framework of words within which they become people and cease to be numbers or historical data.

One of the most striking things is that practically all the events the author has chosen as the basis for her stories revolve around injustice, obvious or hidden violence, the criminal dynamics of power and the victims, always the victims. They can be women, foreigners, or dissidents: generally, they are people trying to fight against the suffocation of a political dictatorship, against a knee that immobilizes a girl's body, or against a wave that comes through the window and sweeps everything away. What lies beneath a story that narrates something as crude as the rape of the painter Artemisia Gentileschi with a wealth of phrases and baroque language is the same thing that lies beneath the cold and aseptic descriptions of videos where several advisors to former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori speak in such a way that one could be confused.

All (or almost all) of them talk about the impunity of those who abuse power. Not to mention the last story, the one that attempts to follow, minute by minute, what happened the afternoon of the flooding of the rivers in parallel with the more or less confessional activities of the president of the Valencian Country, to whom the author does not even name, so as not to give them any relevance. Cadenas limits himself to writing a few verses of the songs that the president's communications advisor decided to post that day on social media, and thus we can read that, while the disaster devastated the territory, someone was playing a song titled Don't you realize how lucky we are: the fortune of the chosen versus the fate of the damned. For Cadenas, it's not chance that determines people's destiny, but rather the way these people organize themselves to temporarily cede power to others who, unfortunately, decide to use it in an abusive or psychotic way, never with empathy. Writing must provide empathy, as it certainly does.