"When I was a teenager, a very good friend committed suicide and I experienced it closely. I used the pain as material for my first collection of poems, Anatomía de una bañera (Anatomy of a Bathtub). And I wrote this novel years after living with my grandmother and her Alzheimer's," reflects the writer and multidisciplinary artist with an adversative surname, Júlia Peró, at the bar, regarding her debut Olor a hormiga (Smell of Ant) (Penguin).
The book delves into the fears and loneliness of old age treated as a taboo outcast by a self-centered society that glances at life quickly, almost without looking and barely seeing. "I suppose what moves me literarily are selfish reasons: to work through my pain, my fears, and my insecurities," she adds, while sipping a black tea with plant-based milk and accepting that the Menahan Street Band plays its instrumental repertoire in the background, "so as not to have lyrics that will distract me from the conversation."
She defines herself, above all, as a writer "although I then earn money as a graphic and UX designer." When she can ---"and when not, too"--- she compulsively reads everything she accumulates in her bookstore, which has led her to run the online book club Libros Crujientes (Crunchy Books). "And if all that weren't enough, my mind sometimes also leads me to think about performance, photography, or video art."
---A bit of a workaholic, you, aren't you?
Júlia lets out an almost feline laugh. "It seems like I like to work and everything, but the truth is I dislike it quite a lot. Can you tell I'm self-employed?" And, immediately, she confesses to crying or getting very angry: "I think that's what I'm best at. A professional crybaby, can you imagine? I wish". Perhaps writing is, in this sense, another way of crying.
The attraction of seemingly tiny details
Always proud of the latest, the regular assures that she sees Olor a hormiga as the best thing she has written to date. "What's more, I'm ashamed of my poetry collection and all the anthologies I've participated in. I suppose that, in a few years, the novel will seem excessive, immature, or unfortunate to me. But for now, I feel that with it I have learned a lot and it has been very revealing in finding my style."
A language that, in some way, she has always been searching for. "I am someone who pays a lot of attention to things and people. The seemingly tiny details are like a light and I am its moth. So perhaps communicating with the world or expressing myself artistically happened as a natural process."
Regarding writing, the thing comes from afar. "I developed an obsessive interest at twelve or thirteen years old. I spent hours inventing stories and dialogues, watching movies and rewriting them entirely. In 2008 I wrote my first novel, terrible and childish, which my father edited and printed with great affection. Having that book in my hands, that book that was nothing, but that for me was everything, was the instigator of everything I have written since then."
These days, she is immersed in her second collection of poems and certifies that she already has many notes accumulated for her next novel, while trying not to neglect conceptual art, even if time is short. "Besides being self-employed, I am a daughter, sister, lover, and friend to some people. And mother to a very good and patient cat, and that I am forbidden to neglect. You have to play a lot with cats. It's essential!"
A city to return to
Born in Barcelona in 1995, the writer identifies the city as the place where, besides being born, all the transcendent things of her childhood and adolescence happened to her, from uttering her first word, "it was arròs" or falling in love with "galets and pa amb tomàquet," to suffering bullying, getting into fights, or breaking her scaphoid while skating. "I did many puzzles on Violant d'Hongria street and specialized in eyeliner in a windowless room on Riego street. Then I grew a little, but not much, because I sensed that being five feet tall would make me stand out in some way," she laughs.
These days, she is immersed in her second collection of poems and certifies that she already has many notes accumulated for her next novelGrowing up was getting angry: "I went to some demonstrations, changed friends, fell in love a few times. I studied design for fear of not being able to make a living as an artist. I started working seriously, which is a huge mistake, and I started writing seriously, which is a great success. Much later I met a Cantabrian and left Barcelona to live in other countries. When Covid started and life got ugly, I backed off and returned to the city like that scared child who throws herself into her mother's arms. I lived the city without seeing it, stuck between four walls, and when they let us go out again I decided it wasn't for me and I went to another province to mix among the trees."
And there she remains, although "with the premonition that I will always return here", perhaps attracted by the altarpieces that sentimentally link her to the city, "like the old women who sit on benches to sunbathe, with their shopping carts and their white, curly hair. The girls and boys jumping rope in Osca square while their mothers have vermouth at the tables next door… or the pigeons, I adore Barcelona's pigeons!"
---Come on, woman, don't mess around! Pigeons? They're the most disgusting thing in this city!
Júlia Peró laughs again. "What I dislike about this place are the dog pees on the corners, the men who follow me at night, and the impossible price of rents."
And a silence falls, which is suddenly broken by Las Pipiolas with the notes of Romancero propio, and the writer exults: "This album is exciting!"