Sometimes it is nice to join the consensus to say, for example and in this case, that Marc Cerdó has written a magnificent novel. I am talking aboutA submerged light, published by Club Editor. Marc Cerdó reconstructs the figure of his mother, the writer Xesca Ensenyat, fifteen years after her death. And of his relationship with her—which he still has, and will surely have for the rest of his life.
Xesca Ensenyat was a Majorcan novelist, born in 1952 in Port de Pollença, author of notable novels such as Villa Coppola, A cool fashion either When the squadron came. Also short stories, like the one in the volume Changing hairdressers and other miseries. By age and by literary and ideological affinities, it is easy to place her alongside, or close to, authors such as Maria Antònia Oliver or Biel Mesquida. In 2012, three years after the premature death of Xesca Ensenyat, Lleonard Muntaner Editor published an important posthumous novel, HereafterMarc Cerdó took care of the edition of this novel –and of the children's story Babalusa, the jellyfish–, and it is possible (I don't know) that then I began to think about what has ended up being A submerged light.
In addition to writing her literary work, Xesca Ensenyat was what is often called a woman ahead of her time and environment who, among other things, dared to decide to be a single mother in Barcelona and Mallorca – since she alternated her life between these two places – in 1974. That is, in a time and a country that were completely hostile. A submerged light narrates this decision and its consequences in Ensenyat's life, as well as the relationship between mother and son through their two intertwined voices, conflicting, confused, often overwhelmed. It is a relationship of love as full as that of any son with his mother, but also a relationship marked by precariousness: economic, artistic, vital, psychological, mental. The mother realizes that her son is a burden on her, and the son realizes that she realizes this. However, there are no reproaches, underlining, or overacting. There is no annoying feeling produced by a narrator who believes himself to be more intelligent than his characters or his eventual readers.
At the end of what he tells, so well told, A submerged light, There is a question: what have we come to do in this world? Why are we born, why do we live, why do we die? There is the realization of never fully knowing another person, even if it is one's own mother, even if it is by digging into her secrets and her intimate papers. There is cruelty, there is crying, there is smile and melancholy, a beautiful and elegant sadness. There is, in the end, a novel that speaks of something that matters to the author, and manages to make it matter to us, the readers, too. After all, as Xesca Ensenyat's voice says at one point in the book: "The reader is a figure created by publishers, so they can advance their industry; in reality, the reader does not exist."
