The motto is not to leave anything for tomorrow, "because I distrust life ever since, when I was 16, my father died suddenly in an accident." Leaning on the bar, Fernanda García Lao has ordered a glass of "preferably Empordà" red wine, and has let the conversations and noises of the bar's clientele serve as the afternoon's soundtrack. "Things must be done today, because there may not be a tomorrow," she adds. She is always writing several books at once. "I feel comfortable living among stories, knowing that, sooner or later, they will all have an ending. Because, yes, I always end up finishing them." She sips a drink of wine, laughs and adds: "I make a virtue of wandering."
This transhumance between different stories reflects a life moving between different places. A fictional territory that replaces the anchoring to a specific geographical territory. Born in Mendoza, at the foot of the Andes, in 1976, her family moved to Madrid fleeing Videla's dictatorship. Later, she returned to Argentina and has been living between Mendoza, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Prague and, now, Barcelona.
She has been a mother twice, has been married, has made friends. She has performed on stages and written verses, stories, tales, novels and plays. She has taught acting and writing. She has lived several lives —"I would tell you that I am a multiple person"—, in which she has tried to be free, to fly as high as her wings would allow without jumping through unwanted hoops. She has enjoyed being inside, though a little outside, of each place. And this is evidenced in a vibrant corpus that includes theater, poetry and prose.
Jumping between narrative options
At the age of twelve, Fernanda García Lao began writing poetry, and entered that world through the front door: "I ended up selected among the 100 finalist children of an initiative called the International Congress of Children!" She never stopped writing, but she developed as an actress andcoachof actors, and it wasn't until much later, in her late twenties, that she felt the need to stop being the vehicle through which to express other people's stories, to share with the world what was bubbling in her head.Thus began a frantic activity as a playwright and writer that also started big. "My first novel, Muerta de hambre (Starving), won the National Endowment for the Arts award, and that allowed me to publish with a prestigious publishing house in Argentina like El Cuenco de Plata (The Silver Bowl)." That story full of acid humor about obesity, unhealthy appetites, and bodies that are prisons, published in 2005, was the starting gun for a body of work that, over the years, has added short story collections, poetry books, short stories, theater, and a handful of novels, two of which—Amor invertido (Inverted Love) and Los que vienen de la noche (Those Who Come from the Night)—were co-written with Guillermo Saccomanno.
Among her titles are diverse artifacts such as La piel dura (The Hard Skin), La perfecta otra cosa (The Perfect Other Thing), Sulfuro (Sulfur), (No) me acuerdo ((I Don't) Remember), Nación vacuna (Vaccine Nation) or the brand new Estación Saturno (Saturn Station) (Candaya), a road movie written with a cinematic rhythm, but pregnant with the literary ingredients that characterize its author's voice: humor, passion, obsession, madness, and a strongly political spirit, though never pamphleteering. A story of affections, family, love, disagreements, and pain where nothing is taken for granted and where every page overflows with the profound humanity of a gaze that knows where to observe and what pieces to move.
Swimming, as usual, between several narrative options, the writer warns: "Right now I'm writing an essay book, a couple of poetry books, and a manuscript that for now is resembling a novel –she laughs–… and we'll see how it develops."
And, suddenly, my home
Three years ago, the parishioner spent a summer in a friend's attic in Barcelona to take care of her plants. "She was traveling and I found myself with this huge apartment and the whole city to myself. None of the people I knew were here, of course, and I had the opportunity to walk through its streets and discover it." She soon moved here "and I felt like it immediately welcomed me until, suddenly, one fine day I realized that I felt at home."
Her relationship with Barcelona "is like the one you can have with a lover… and besides, here I can be the Argentine writer, whereas in Argentina I'm the 'gallega', because my mother is Spanish!", she laughs. She loves the city's walkable size and that it ends at the seashore, and she likes that it's a cultured city "where interesting things happen and where, on top of that, there are libraries that are the best." And she finishes her glass of wine, without her smile losing an ounce of its breadth.
— What's the best is the gastronomic offer of this Bar, in case you want to have dinner…
Fernanda García Lao catches the proposal on the fly.
"I'd fancy a tapa of mojama with toasted almonds, if you have it," she asks. She looks around. She lets herself be infected by the evening atmosphere of the Bar, a thousand and one conversations, laughs and voices of a varied clientele on the first and second line of the bar. She likes it.
— And, of course, give me another glass of this wine —she adds.
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