There are people who have never entered an apartment in the Eixample

Patricia Capdevila (Barcelona, 1980) debuts as a writer with No con un estallido (De Conatus), a novel rooted in the blocks of an unnamed neighborhood, with characters who transcend different eras, attached to an discomfort that dislocates and constitutes them. Multiple plots intertwine with a historical unfolding that determines them, almost always unconsciously, like a continuous cascade of headlines that writes a future that is already happening. And with family as the origin of everything, with its half-truths and underlying silences. From shared rooms smelling of Gallina Blanca soup to precarious flats without light bulbs.

No detail is left to chance in Capdevila's first novel. She holds a degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Barcelona (UB) and is a Narrative professor at the Ateneu Barcelonès Writing School. After years of teaching others to write, a feeling of what she could tell matured within her, with the reading of Don Delillo's Underworld as a key piece in that long-distance race that has shaped her as a creator. "There was always a desire to write, but I couldn't find a way to do it," says the author, who saw the need to refute how history has been ignored in the neoliberal era, giving it body to be able to approach the small daily lives of characters who don't know where they should be and what their role in the world is.

--- What is shown of the city where No con un estallido takes place?

--- I wanted to be able to enter different spaces in Barcelona to show the social complexity of a city that cannot be read in a single image. The center, the Raval, Glòries... It is a complex, overflowing, saturating city, loaded with a thousand impressions. And I was interested in the periphery. It is clearly inspired by a block neighborhood, but the name is never mentioned. I want it to be an aesthetic reality and belong to that imaginary. I think it is more peripheral by not being rooted in any place. What matters is the image and the sensation, not that it is a specific neighborhood.

--- Is there a periphery in the very center of Barcelona?

--- Of course, those small peripheries that we don't notice because the city makes them invisible and swallows everything. Perhaps the periphery is like the clearest image of being outside, but, in the end, that feeling is carried to all spaces. All the characters in No con un estallido have a certain displacement: either because they come from the periphery to the city, or they arrive from the provinces or the countryside. Or because they are from the Eixample and want to be workers, that is, there is also that bourgeois daydreaming with the periphery, of wanting to belong to the neighborhood due to the idealization of the popular classes.

--- How does the protagonist feel?

--- Carla thinks of herself from the outside and, in doing so, turns the periphery into the center. You can leave your origin but, in some way, it goes with you. The space I really wanted to be there and endure in a clearer way was the blocks and then contrast it with the living rooms of the upper area.

"You can leave your origin but, in some way, it goes with you"

--- There is the idea of classes and contrasts. Of being in different home environments, which also has to do with culture, with the way of conceiving houses. A Glòries apartment with an attempt at Swedish design, the small apartment in the outskirts, the large bourgeois living room. There is a contrasting journey through several faces of the city. When the protagonist goes to a literary salon in Turó Park, she is in a space that is very, very alien to her. She faces again the idea of belonging or not and whether she has conquered declassification. But when she is there, she really sees that there is no possibility of access, not because specific people exclude her, but because there is no place to integrate. She will not find a place to arrive and conclusively say, finally I am here, at ease. In the end, she thinks that the awareness of being exposed is better than a comfortable salon. It is a reminder that the protection of a home or a salon is always an illusion and that there is no place to take shelter.

--- How is the class difference reflected?

--- I didn't want class to be defined only by economics, but by small, much more subtle things, like a gesture, a way of being, a comfort. There is a specifically Barcelonian way of being posh. There are things that are taken for granted if you belong to certain circles. And that tranquility that things are there and they are there for you. It hasn't even been an effort to go to that place or a question of whether it is appropriate for you to be in it. It is an internalization of something that no one has told you. There is comfort or discomfort and, for me, I prefer the latter. Narratively, with characters who are not naturally settled in the world. So, that tension of whether I belong or not, of whether I am or not, interests me with respect to thinking about who we are, how we inhabit without having that calm and convinced life, being more or less displaced.

--- With what intention?

--- There is no reproach, everyone is where they are. For me, it is simply the awareness that there are differences, it is not the same to come from one place or another. The world is not a tabula rasa, some have facilities and others do not. You have to understand what your privileges are and what you don't have. Remembering this helps some people take charge of their situations and defend them better. But there is also the will to think about the system we are in. We must destabilize the idea that this capitalist, liberal, economic, competitive and individualistic framework is the only one and that there is no alternative.

"The world is not a tabula rasa, some have facilities and others do not. Remembering this helps some people take charge of their situations and defend them better"

-- She accepts that there is no such place, just as there is no knowledge of the history that is most present, that of her father, which she does not want to know, but she keeps finding it. She also comes to the idea that there is no conclusive knowledge about others. This lack of knowledge does not come because everything is bad, but simply because it is. I believe that thinking of oneself from this weakness is the way to keep going. You will not know who you are, nor who others are, nor what your place in the world is. This feeling, in literary terms, appealed to me in order not to reproduce conventions, but rather to think about them, to question one's own identity, space, the possibility of knowing, and not to write to confirm what the destination should be, but to think that, after all, we are the exercise with which we relate to this doubt: Who are we?

--- And, how does that translate?

--- We are in relation to others. That's why there are also so many characters in the novel, not simply to put people from different spheres, but to understand that you are through others. Also to contradict this individualistic impulse very focused on oneself, which has to do with capitalism. To think of oneself within the framework of something bigger is to do so in relationships with other people. The encounter with others constitutes you. For example, Carla, the protagonist, meets a friend who comes from the Eixample and that person gives her access to a different world. There are people who have never entered an apartment in the Eixample, just as there are people who have never been in one in a neighborhood. Let's say the Gornal industrial estate, there are people who have no idea where that even is.

--- All this, portrayed with jumps in time that cover the last seven decades of Spanish society.

--- I wanted it to have a temporal journey effect to witness how history is constructed. With the idea that while one thing is happening, many others are happening at the same time, of which you may or may not be aware, but which at some point can affect your desires, fears, ideas. In the 80s, Carla arrives home from her brother's first communion and the first jihadist attack in Spain is taking place. Ten years later, there is an attempted attack on the Twin Towers. Everything is prefigured and then ends up happening, because it was already happening. That is, it does not depend on starring in a unique and decisive moment to be in history, but you are in it all the time. Although we want to live outside the past and the future, it is always there.

--- Visually, the reader sees it with all those stock market numbers and news headlines that appear throughout the novel.

--- They are a reminder that other things are happening that will affect you, you don't know it now, but perhaps in 20 years it will determine your present and your worldview. I thus reinforce the link of the present with the past, and of the present with the future. For example, in the beginning there are stock market numbers. They don't have to be understood, they are just a presence. And, then, over time, everything economic, which you weren't paying attention to, suddenly, with the crisis, comes to the forefront and everyone starts talking about economic concepts and people's lives are invaded. But it was always there. The numbers, the neighborhood blocks, are there all the time and we are busy with our small things, seeing or not, everything that is happening. I wanted to convey this constant feeling of not being aware of things that should be paid attention to because, if we were attentive, perhaps we could take charge of their possible consequences.