Not an easy book to read at first. It is a tough and requires much persistence. Is a literary work on aging, Valter Hugo Mãe describes a reality that left him dismayed. And to better understand the work, I interviewed the author and this is the result of our conversation.
There is a character in this book that will live for a retirement home. Is it not a bit arrogant of you to describe a situation which you never experience?
Valter Hugo Mãe: I see things like that, the writing of fiction, literature, has more to do with the intensification of feelings and perceptions, than with the experience. Agatha Christie did not know have to kill people to be the in the head of a murderer. We do not have to go through the experience of all the characters I invented to write about them. This is what they are, invented. One of the things that fascinates me in the writing exercisem is this exactly, the power of imagination that leads without ceasing to be ourselves, without exiting out of our home, I usually work in my house, understand and what will be portraying fictionalized the lives of others. Peering into what will be a lifetime. Writing a book of fiction is always an attempt, a risk. To me interest me much more to write a book about a man of eighty-four years that I am absolutely not, because I could not compare me with someone so much older. But I was interested because it is a big challenge, to try to understand what the concerns, the plausible worries of a man at that age.
Does been older worries you? Fear of ending up like the character in a nursing home?
It worries me a little to lose capacity, the weakening. This thing as I say in my book, this thing of living a bit against the body. The body at a certain point it becomes our enemy. And that causes us tremendous frustration and eventually kill us. And I must have a certain expectation that does not stop me from been happy, to live and want to live, but I need to create a look to the future, pass it well. I better do this or not to do that that will aggravate my back problem. Or bone problems. And there is a forsight that interests me, because I liked to believe, more than that, I would like to have an old age with quality of life.
Language is another important issue in this book. It's hard to get under the skin of the character. It was deliberate to have the notion of the suffering of Mr. Silva?
What happens to this character is so violent that I thought it wasn't interesting to turn it right at the beginning of the book, in something different from that violence. I wanted to portray that would do justice to that kind of feeling, that total dysphonia that has to do with having lost his wife, having spent a life that suddenly finds itself running out an act so tragic. And so it has to do with the rhythm of things, then I think the novel ends by raising and ultimately winds up in some way. But the entry of the book needed that blackness because that was what that I was talking about.
Mr. Silva is a metaphor for our country?
Mr. Silva is a representative of our people. A nation grieved, disbanded, discredited, and then lives with many paradoxes, yells sovereignty but envys the Spanish. Finds out eventually that he's anywhere well. Mr. Antonio Silva has such a mixture and between believing and been something else. It is a character here and there, will turn from left to right. The average citizen is ever less structured than we could for the catalogs. Categorize people is a common definition and the citizen is always undefined, the subject is always a little more so and a little more than we roasted for the practice of the catalogs would have liked. And socategorized people is not easy. It is not easy to portray them in one fell swoop. The picture is only complete with these paradoxes and idiosyncrasies.
Which of the characters has more of yourself in the book?
Perhaps our beloved man from the National Museum of Ancient Art, Mr. Franco, because I love that illusion, the ability to love. The importance he attaches to books. Facing a book as a generous act, something that leaves generously to others.
Would you liked to be Spanish?
No! (Laughs)
