Milena Busquets: "Imagination and memory are our treasures, we live off them"

Milena Busquets attends to us from the other side of the screen with a serene and kind gaze. The conversation flows with such evident naturalness that at times it seems strange, happening between two people who have never met, or have they? The story she recalls in her novel Gema (Anagrama) is set in the Lycée Français of Barcelona, where we both studied and where, despite our age difference, we must have coincided. However, it is legitimate to wonder if this feeling of familiarity does not in reality derive from the fictional plot. The author's setting tends to become the reader's in every novel, and even more so in the present one. The apparent alignment of author, narrator, and protagonist is deliberate, constitutive of the literary artifice. It takes the reader by the hand with fascinating determination, and transports them to that her past, whether they lived in a similar space-time or not.

The synopsis of Gema is as simple as it is captivating. A female character, whom the reader spontaneously associates with the author, decides to investigate the life of a friend who died of cancer during adolescence. From her current life moment ---mother of two children, novelist, and translator--- she turns back to the person she was, to gather data and find a living and true glimpse of the person who ceased to be. We think of Gema, but of course also of herself. In that act of looking back, she will encounter a series of voids, or hazy areas, which she will try to elucidate in conversation with other schoolmates, and by performing some detective maneuvers. The most exciting thing, in any case, lies in witnessing the transformation of memories, in discovering that the free fluctuation of memory also affects our way of understanding the present, and of generating expectations.

Busquets implies the ambivalence of that movement through the stream of consciousness technique, officiating the alliance between the unforeseen and the foreseeable in the form of an interior monologue. When in our conversation the name of Proust appears, she confesses that "of all the books I have, that one I think is my favorite". She refers, specifically, to the Pléiade edition, which she would have borrowed from her mother's library and which, after devouring it during her stay in London ---in an almost literal sense, she shows me the battered copy--- she ended up receiving as a gift. Like the book itself, memory wears out, but it does not stop working. Surprisingly, it is from (or, through) volubility that memories are configured, that expectations are woven and unraveled.

From her present, she turns to the person she was, to try to gather data and reach a living and true glimpse of the person she ceased to be

The returning Ulysses it cannot not be another, different from the one who left and ---above all--- different from the one Penelope remembers. In a similar way, the wake of who we have been projects forward in dialogue with the present. A creative representation of meaning, which in fact puts our creativity into play ---with or without consciousness--- through the faculty that since modern times we know as imagination, or "capacity to form images" (Imagination). In one of the most interesting moments of the conversation, Busquets states that"we are a combination of imagination and memory, all human beings, whether we write or not". Junto a la memoria ---la divina Mnemosyne, custodia de la verdad atemporal y madre de las musas--- la otra facultad fundamental para el ser humano es, en efecto, la imaginación. "Estos dos elementos son nuestros tesoros, vivimos de ello". Un regusto oracular emana de ambas sentencias, que Busquets profiere con encantadora modestia.

Desde una perspectiva mucho más positivista, en cambio, algunos lectores inquieren en qué medida lo narrado por su personaje aconteció efectivamente. Explica la autora que, movidos por la obsesión ---o la pseudo-moda--- de la autoficción, le han llegado a preguntar "qué porcentaje exacto es verdad y qué mentira", esperando obtener una cifra concreta. "Es una locura". Una locura con sentido, como tantas. Trazar una línea entre realidad y ficción es para muchos urgente cuando la ficción se parece demasiado a la realidad… no fuera a ser que, a la inversa, su inequívoca realidad tuviera algo de ficticio, y por tanto incontrolable. Pero, por lo visto ---por lo leído--- no todo el mundo se lo toma igual. Ser el sueño de otro, el producto de la imaginación de un creador más o menos benévolo, es el juego barroco al que se prestan algunas amigas de la autora ---que piden figurar en la trama, y allí están--- en maravilloso ejercicio de metaficción cervantina.

Lectores o escritores, formamos todos parte de la ficción, pues no podemos hablar de la vida propia sin recrear imágenes: "Cuando te pones a escribir incluso lo que has hecho durante el día, a un amigo, ya lo estás convirtiendo en ficción, lo cual es genial, es un talento que tenemos los humanos", razona Busquets. Y, en perfecta correspondencia, desde la perspectiva contraria, señala que tampoco podemos imaginar la vida de otros sin el filtro que es inherente a la propia mirada: "Cualquier escritor habla de sí mismo". No podemos evitar la risa al recordar la fatalidad que persigue a la exmujer de Emmanuel Carrère, quien le hizo firmar un contrato para no aparecer en sus novelas… y acabó realizando su fantasía menos deseada al verse en las páginas de Yoga (Anagrama). La mente humana tiende a confirmar lo que ya sabe para su propia tranquilidad, pero no siempre. Pues también realiza lo que sospecha o se imagina. Lo intuyeron algunos pensadores de la modernidad y la neurociencia ha puesto el sello.

But, returning to Gema, each reader ---we said--- is also a narrator, one who recalls the "Gema" that never existed outside the pages of the book: outside the memory of "Milena", outside the vital experience of her close ones, outside the space-time in which we all are, or are not. A particularly revealing moment occurs when faced with the difficulty of constructing the memory of someone who lived before the digital age, without social media publications. Paradoxically, the artificial nature of Instagram or Facebook accounts proves, in its ghostly reality, more reliable than Gema's evanescent image. "I thought she had returned to school before she died, but my friends said no," Busquets clarifies, also in our conversation. What she calls "foundational memory" comes and goes throughout the novel, modulating in the mind of its protagonist according to the data she collects, until a resolution worthy of the great masters of literature.

A particularly revealing moment occurs when faced with the difficulty of constructing the memory of someone who lived before the digital age, without social media publications

Albert Camus, not only Marcel Proust, is mentioned in Gemafor the simplicity of her elegance. Elegance that she also demonstrated in her writing, with an economy of language and potential for signification that we rediscover in Busquets' work. The strategic use of ellipsis, for example, intimately involves the reader in the plot. Thanks to what Kant called "productive imagination" ---to distinguish it from that which reproduced the image of something perceived--- we unconsciously supply the omitted information. By that same mental mechanismthe protagonist we remember will appear to us, without ever having actually seen her. The sensation that the reader experiences withGema---that, in reality, nothing is superfluous or missing--- is the result of a work of stylistic refinement, which has positioned Busquets alongside another reference name in Francophone culture, such as Françoise Sagan.

The confluence of sensuality and melancholy of Bonjour tristesse also emerges in Gema. It fully reaches the reader due to the veracity of the autobiographical tone ---as mentioned at the beginning--- and the subtlety of many psychological observations, imbued with a complicit humor. The possibilities of identification with the narrative voice largely justify the success of Busquets' novel. An even greater merit, however, can be found in the verbalization of a need that is common to all: the meaningful articulation of life, from a past that always has something traumatic, or pending resolution. Writing is intuited in Busquets' work as one of the most effective means to make peace with the dead we carry, with or without consciousness. Correlatively, and beyond all equivocation, reading takes us away from life and repairs it as a kind of daytime reverie, scripted by people we know and don't.