Xesca Ensenyat, a presence beyond physical death

PalmThe first protagonist of this story is a boy, a boy of about eight or nine years old who closely observes a youth player, driven by an endless curiosity, an unquenchable thirst. Inside that piece of furniture, surely taller and undoubtedly much older and much more overwhelming than he is, lies an entire life, although the boy doesn't know exactly what it contains. He suspects it's all papers, and he knows for certain that they are important to his mother, words that can be as defining as they are definitive. "Can I stick my nose in and read something?" he dares to ask, finally, one day. "If one day I see you doing it, if you break this rule, all these papers will be burned and nothing will remain but ashes. Do you feel me?" his mother replies. "Since I'm dead, go ahead with the chatter. But until then, don't try to get close."

More than fifteen years had to pass since the death of his mother, the writer Xesca Ensenyat (Port de Pollença, 1952 - Inca, 2009), for the child, now the writer Marc Cerdó (Pollença, 1974), to find a way to maintain: impossible as inevitable and which he has transferred to the novel. A submerged light, which Club Editor has just published and which Cerdó himself sums up in one of the chapters thus: "When I was little there were moments when I feared you, there were also others when my heart burst out with love for you. I decided to search, among the papers that survived you, for answers to the answer."

"It's actually a literary portrait," Cerdó explains, "and we'll call it a novel because we have to say something, but it's in no way a biography of Xesca Ensenyat because that can never be written. She took care to mutilate, decapitate, and intervene in all of her childhood texts. And once I'd read, indexed, and classified them all, I realized that all this documentation had been heavily influenced by her, so what I could do was approach it from a literary perspective, write a memoir artificially based on witnesses, unpublished fragments, and other curators, without trying to discern what things were. I needed to put reality in order, and I needed to put my life in order without losing the interest of that reader who knew nothing, neither about me nor about my mother."

From 'enfant terrible' to silenced voice

Locating Xesca Enseñado in the literary scene is a complicated task, and may even seem contradictory: her work has received numerous awards, from the City of Palma Award for Best Novel by Villa Coppola, in 1984, to the Ramon Muntaner, in 1992, by When the squadron came, a kind of fictionalized memory of pre-tourist Mallorca that was adapted for the stage in 2015 with dramaturgy by Joan Yago, directed by Joan Fullana and starring Catalina Solivellas.

With a body of work on par with other writers with whom she more or less shared a generation, such as Antònia Vicens, Maria Antònia Oliver and Carme Riera, especially characterized by a vigorous and virtuoso use of language, the uniqueness of her character and her reservations when it came to relating and feeling good in the environment of the work as well as the version in certain environments, Cerdó summarizes in the book. "Your inability to submit to a discipline – a lack that you shared with a significant number of your generation colleagues –, an uncontrollable impulse to subvert the established order, and the desire to transgress conventions, relegated you over the years ofenfant terrible to the sad condition of a silenced voice," it reads.

"She lived with great bitterness the isolation in which she fatally ended," her son acknowledges, "because she was truly very alone, socially isolated. And in one of her texts she says it in a very graphic way, that she approaches the sea and sees that the waves don't splash on her and she becomes sad because she wants to love and love. A writer without readers is a very serious thing."

• Marc Cerdó
• Editor Club
• 160 pages

However, Xesca Ensenyat's work has had and still has readers. In fact, this July she was declared an Illustrious Daughter of Pollença and became the fourth woman of the twenty people who have received this title (the previous three were nuns, two of them from the 14th and 16th centuries) and the first originally from Port de Pollença. And it is not only her work that is read today, but with A submerged light Her life has been too. Read, questioned, and rewritten. "For me, the twin of everything is a question," Cerdó shares, "which is how the dead enter our lives and push us to act. This idea is fundamental; it's what pushed me to write. If we're not careful, the dead die completely, and I didn't want my mother to be a death. The life of the living. There is a prolongation of existence, a presence that expands beyond physical death. The dead turn the survivors into makers of a story," the author comments.

A brilliant person

Thus, in the 150 pages of the novel, aphorisms, legal texts, letters, diary fragments, and other types of texts exchanged between mother and son, writers and protagonists, are interspersed to create a "treatise on fascination," in the words of poet Blanca Llum Vidal. And it all begins, of course, with the author's access to the material contained in the aforementioned youth record. "It contained little packets tied with longline yarn, and there was everything there. Publishing contracts, drawings by renowned artists, diaries, unpublished novels, literary proofs...", relates Cerdó, who in the same book confesses that it was quite a challenge to construct a memoir from that archive. "In your life, it was already imperative to interpret you at every point; and once you were dead, I couldn't stop reading you between the lines," Cerdó writes in the novel.

"She didn't clearly define the line between reality and fiction, and that, for people's moral lives and also for their practical lives, is highly devastating and destructive. In literature, lying is essential, although it shouldn't be noticed. But in real life, someone who is considered a liar is discredited and ostracized, and it's very difficult to regain lost trust. And that's what happened to her with those closest to her, including myself."

Thus, the book reflects that "sometimes toxic, sometimes oxidative, and sometimes catastrophic" love that united the writer with his mother, whom, however, he does not hesitate to describe as a "brilliant person." "She had the power to summon spirits from beyond. She would keep you glued to your chair until she would talk nonstop. And then, suddenly, it was time for bed. When she had finished chatting there was nothing more to do, but while she spoke it was something that cannot be explained, it was truly .

The author, who had already looked after his mother's posthumous publications, such as the unfinished work Hereafter, says that writing this novel has eluded her for ten years. "I've failed a lot and made a lot of mistakes, I've made many errors along the way. In 2014 I was already talking to Maria Bohigas, my editor, about this project, and I kept trying, but she kept telling me that it was still far from what I said I wanted to do, but in the end I think I got it, but in the end I think I got it. novel, because I was about to give up. And now it belongs to the readers," says Cerdó.

And she shares one last memory with her mother, one that, once read A submerged light, takes on many, and very powerful, dimensions. "I remember that she, in a way, trained me. When we walked through Can Pescador, she would say to me: 'Give me three adjectives to describe the color of the sky.' Or she would ask me for a sentence that featured the sea, a tree, and that mollet de marès we saw on the horizon M'. and school composition. I think she wanted me to be an extension of her."