Jaio My Father's House

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-915568-09-0
Verlag: Dedalus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 217 Seiten

Reihe: Dedalus Europe

Ismael, a successful novelist, has been suffering from writer's block for two years, trying to get inside his female narrator's head and failing. However, he tells no one about this problem and continues to spend each day in his study, supposedly writing. When his mother is taken into hospital, he is forced to spend time with his father who has the beginnings of dementia. This experience carries him back to a moment in his childhood that has remained hidden away in his memory until then. Jasone, Ismael's wife, has always been his first reader and editor. As a student, she used to write, but has devoted the last decade of her life to her daughters and to her husband's career. Now that the girls have left home, Jasone finds herself drawn to ideas and causes she believed were the domain of her best friend Libe, as well as to an old flame, who is also her husband's publisher. The rape of a young woman in a nearby town triggers something in Jasone, and she begins spending her nights at her computer writing a novel she never expected to write. When the couple's respective secrets are revealed, everything will change. With intelligence and wisdom, Karmele Jaio brilliantly dissects the complexities of relationships of all kinds, never coming down on one side, but allowing her characters space to evolve and take up roles of their own making.

Karmele Jaio Eiguren (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1970) has written three collections of stories, three novels and a book of poetry. She writes in Basque and translates her own work into Spanish. Her first novel, Her Mother's Hands, appeared in English in 2018, and has since been made into a film. Her stories have appeared in various anthologies, including Best European Fiction 2017 and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories (2022). Her work has already won her several prizes, most recently the 2020 Basque Literary Prize for My Father's House.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jaio, Karmele

Weitere Mitwirkende

Hughes, Sophie

Jull Costa, Margaret

Leseproben

1

From up on the top of the hill

Gunshots in the hills. You hear them again from where you are, up high. You know, though, that the shots aren’t coming from the surrounding trees, but from inside you. Your body is just another part of the greenery. How many empty cartridges must get lost in the undergrowth, like little hearts that slowly corrode over time and yet beat on, and on, and on…

Gunshots in the hills. You’ve heard them again, from up high. And you can see the cartridges as clearly as if you were holding them in your hand. Trust cartridges, made in Eibar. Your father’s watchful gaze as he checks to see if you’ve loaded them into the shotgun correctly. Red or green, with a gold base, and packed with pellets. The pellets swiftly expand when they pierce the flesh, like some sort of evil spermatozoa. Those stupid cartridges go flying into the bushes and there’s no way to retrieve them. Not that anyone really tries. When all’s said and done, they’re just empty casings. Nobody thinks about how they continue beating and firing — bang, bang, bang — however rusty, however old.

You’ve reached the top, panting hard, having raced out of your study, leaving the computer on, and possibly also the hall light. You left without really knowing where you were going, as urgently as a diver furiously swimming up to the surface for air. Propelled more by angst than by the strong southerly wind. A familiar feeling that came back to you at your computer when you remembered yesterday’s nightmarish news about the girl found in the woods.

The news about the girl who was raped and abandoned up in the hills. Some hunters found her, too late. It turned your stomach, you can’t get it out of your head, it’s like what happened in Pamplona all over again, and you really didn’t need that. The last straw. What a hackneyed phrase, another tired cliché. No, seriously, you really can’t write any more. Your head is one big mess. One day they’ll finally find something there, a malignant tumour that prevents you from thinking. That prevents you from writing.

The news about the girl who was raped and abandoned in the woods. You’re not sure if it’s affected you more because you fear for your daughters — especially now you know that Eider was in Pamplona the night of the tragedy — or because of where it took place. Out in the wild, in the hills, a landscape that still tears at your skin like brambles, a landscape that has haunted your dreams since you were a boy.

And now here, at the top of Olarizu, a brisk forty-minute walk from your house, you ask yourself why your feet have carried you out into the woods. You wonder why the angst you feel has driven you to this precise spot, to the very epicentre of your fears.

You gaze down at the city from above, your thinning hair fluttering about your forehead. Up here, you’ve finally been able to take a deep breath and calm down a little. There’s always something so calming about being up above it all.

You haven’t been here since you were a kid. Your father brought you once or twice, soon after you moved to Vitoria, just as he used to take you to Kalamua or Ixua when you lived in Eibar, only without the shotgun. And yet the setting now fills your head with the sound of gunshots. Bang, bang, bang. Gunshots in the hills. Gunshots and dogs barking. For you, there is no more terrifying combination of sounds.

You look at the city that welcomed you when you were fifteen. A city that has grown with you, that has expanded like an ink blot on a piece of paper, losing intensity as the stain widens and spreads. It took you a moment to pinpoint the roof of your parents’ apartment building. The Church of San Pedro helped you to place it. They’ve been living in that apartment since the move from Eibar. Like their fellow residents, who also came from elsewhere: Zamora, Cáceres… In many cases, those neighbours would spend their summers back in their home towns. You remember months of empty apartments, lowered blinds, deserted stairwells. The coolness of the hallway compared to the desert heat of the street. Cold landings and scorching patios. Those intense August contrasts.

At this hour, your mother will be mopping the kitchen floor, as she has done for the last fifty years, from left to right, right to left, zigzagging back and forth as if trying to remove the evidence of a murder. Your mother, always removing evidence, silencing voices, putting out fires. She’ll have left the balcony door open so that the floor dries more quickly and to get rid of the smell of cooking. Fried fillet steak and bleach, that post-lunch blend of smells also travelled with you from Eibar to Vitoria. Homes aren’t physical places, they’re atmospheres that follow us from one house to the next. Nancy has been helping them out ever since your father started losing his memory, but there’s no way your mother would let her mop the floor. Nobody mops like her. Mopping is her domain.

To the right of your parents’ home is the bell tower of the Church of San Miguel. You lived near there for years, in the old part of town, with Jasone and the girls. But in among that compact jumble of houses, you haven’t been able to pinpoint the one that used to be yours. Just as you can’t see your daughters either. They’ve already left the scene, flown the nest. They no longer need your protection. They move in and out of sight like those flocks of birds you often watch in the afternoon from your study window, making shapes and patterns in the sky only to immediately unmake them again.

Your current house, the one where you and Jasone now live just the two of you, albeit with two spare bedrooms for your daughters’ comings and goings, is easy to spot. It’s in one of the residential areas in the south of the city, where the buildings are more spread out. You can even see the terrace your study looks out on. The window from which you’ve observed the world in recent years. On the other side of that window is your computer, your dried-up cup of coffee on the desk, your fears, your post-it notes, your paper clips, your slippers beside the chair, your nightmares, your books, your notepads, your world. There is your novel, the one you’ve been trying to write for the last two years. There is your secret. A novel that isn’t progressing, a creative drought, a classic case of writer’s block. Never a truer word spoken. Yet another cliché.

Just like every sentence you write. Over the last two years, your words have created nothing but cardboard scenery for a stage set. But how to create a really believable set for a world you’ve always kept well away from in real life. You’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve regretted your decision to try and describe the corrosive political atmosphere of the Basque Country in the 1980s. Putting the political conflict at the centre of your work was a disastrous idea. If it hadn’t been for Vidarte’s review of your last book, you might never have got yourself into this mess. And if it hadn’t been for the offer you received to have your next work published in Spanish translation, you might not have embarked on a history of that time of “Si vis pacem, para bellum” — “If you want peace, prepare for war” — which was your sister’s mantra. You thought the publisher would like that authentic touch, an insider’s view of the Basque conflict, but you’ve regretted it ever since. Over the last two years, you’ve questioned every single line you’ve written; not a word of it rings true, because you didn’t live through those years the way your sister did, ending up getting arrested, or like Jauregi or countless others. You always ran away from political commitment, from activism; you ran away from the first sign of pain or risk and kept the conflict at arm’s length. So how are you supposed to write about it now, if you can’t find even fragments of truth in either your hands or your memory.

You can see your study window and it seems so small… Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s the reason all your ideas have dried up in recent years. You’re looking at reality from too far away. You can’t see anything from there, detached from the world. Vidarte was right all along. In his review, he wrote that your characters felt like extra-terrestrial beings, that your novel didn’t make a single reference to the world in which they live, to the social or political context… He said you never let your characters out in the street, that you kept them locked indoors, between four walls, debating among themselves. But he also said that you’d failed to do even that properly, because you watched them from afar, as if you were afraid to enter their thoughts, their nightmares. In your novel there was no engagement with either the setting or your characters’ inner lives. And without any real engagement with the truth, there can be no art. That’s what the critic Vidarte wrote about your last novel, along with a few other equally charming comments. And over these last two years you haven’t been able to shake off the image of him hovering over your study day and night, calling you an extra-terrestrial. You’re an extra-terrestrial, Alberdi.

Perhaps that’s the problem. In this new novel, you’ve tried to get close to the real world, but it isn’t easy; whenever you get too close, you take fright — as you did when you heard about that poor girl — and you scurry back to the refuge of your study. It’s not easy engaging fully with what’s happening in the world, or with the people in it, if you never leave your study from whose window you see only your own nightmares and the geraniums on the balcony that Jasone has...