"One is a better person when he writes" | Gioconda Be …

Charles Choiseul de Praslin, a noble of the court of Louis-Philippe I of Orleans, king of France, was accused of having killed his wife in 1847. Because of the scandal that ensued, the King himself believed that De Praslin was to simulate his suicide, simulate his burial, and flee to New York. In the United States, he met the powerful tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, who invited him to join the transit route across the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua. In Matagalpa, the fate of this fugitive of the French aristocracy, great-grandfather of Gioconda Belli, will find love in Margarita Arauz, a young widow. "The stories of the ancestors are often elusive, they escape like smoke from the high chimney of time, there remains the redemption of the imagination, listen to the legends, follow them to the reality of the world. Where do they come from? Or have, like me, the chance to find a manuscript enclosed in a cookie tin ", recognizes the Nicaraguan writer in the novel Las Febres de la memoria (Seix Barral), which she presented yesterday to the 45th International Book Fair of Buenos Aires Aires

The author of La mujer habitada and El país bajo mi piel evokes with a smile the ghosts that besiege the complex political situation in Nicaragua. In the 1970s, he fought against the dictatorship of Somoza, as a clandestine collaborator of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Persecuted by the intelligence services, she went into exile in Mexico, Costa Rica and Cuba. He returned to Nicaragua with the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in July 1979. In 1994, four years after the electoral defeat, he left the FSLN. In his latest novel, he traces the origins of a family story that has pbaded from generation to generation under the imperative of a question: how did this fugitive duke arrived in a Nicaragua city? "The story seems fascinating to me because it talks about what is the migration, the reinvention that people do when we leave one country and we will live for another," says Belli in the news. interview with PáginaI12.

-What was the main challenge you started with The Fevers of Memory?

-I wanted to write a different novel that had a vision of the woman told by a man. And that would get me out of a box in which they wanted to introduce me, that is, I write only romance novels and for women. In this novel, I want to challenge the idea that women only read romance novels. There is a somewhat contemptuous view of women as readers. The story of the novel begins in France and talks about what it means to go from revolution to monarchy. He also speaks of a man besieged by two very strong women, by his wife and lover. And then there is this great journey that he has to make, where the name has to change and badume the identity of a bourgeois.

– How was the experience of writing for the first time in the first person from the point of view of a man?

– There is magic when you find what the authors call the "tone". I was in a writers 'residence and there I started to write and Charles' voice came out. I began to enter his psyche, his tragedy, his attempt to rebuild his life, to be able to feel again the love, to be reconciled with all that he had left. We, who come from families from other places, have stories that we do not know about our ancestors' past. Where do we really come from? If we traveled to our ancestors, what would we find?

– In a moment of the novel, Charles listens to a conversation in which it is revealed that they are looking for it. Paranoia of someone who is leaking or who is really looking for it?

– Yes, it is true that they were looking for it because this crime was a scandal in France. Two scandals strongly affected the reign of Louis-Philippe I of Orleans: the crime of the Duchess of Choiseul Praslin and a swindle of a minister. The minister tried to commit suicide: he shot himself, but he was unsuccessful. Investigating to write a novel fills me with happiness because it allows me to build a world. As a novelist, you must be sure to generate a credible world so that the reader will also believe in the truth of your lie.

Charles says that there is a strange dignity in writing and that "the act of writing has a civilizing effect on consciousness". Do you agree with what the characters narrator is asking?

-Yes, writing requires you to order your thoughts. One is a better person when he writes because there is a desire to communicate in a civilized way with others. When you write, you have to civilize your communication and order it in one way or another. Writing has a degree of refinement that we do not have when we speak. There is much more thought. I had a psychologist who said to me: "I wrote everything you think". Writing is a great exercise when you're angry, because it forces you to see and order what you think.

– How is Nicaragua today?

Nicaragua today is Nicaragua yesterday; It is as if we were in a time machine and that we would have returned to the Somoza dictatorship in the most ironic way: a tyrant engendered another tyrant.

-Daniel Ortega was revolutionary before …

-Yes, it's the saddest thing. This is not the first time that it occurs that a person who is fighting to overthrow someone who is in power becomes the same. In the case of Daniel Ortega, since he lost the elections in 1990, he has become obsessed with power. Each time, he made more concessions to wash the revolutionary profile and present himself as "a man of peace", like a man who had changed; it was allied to the counter-revolution, to the liberal party, and it was this pact that enabled it to come back to power, because this pact implied reducing by 45 to 35% the percentage with which it was possible to win in the first round. votes. Liberalism was divided by this pact and those who left formed another party. The majority of the country voted against Ortega, but they were divided. He won the first round with 38%. Daniel Ortega made an agreement with big capital and ruled by centralizing power and destroying all democratic institutions. He made fraudulent elections to fill the Congress of the majority of his people and amended the Constitution to re-elect him indefinitely. In the last election, voter turnout was very low: about 30% went to vote. And the students started to protest against their grandparents, as they were going to impose a 5% tax on their retirement. Ortega repressed this demonstration in a very violent way.

-The youngest death is Alvaro Conrado, 15 years old …

– They sent snipers to kill people. In five days, they killed 23 people and the whole country rose against these murders. Crimes against humanity have been committed in Nicaragua. Terrible things have been done and continue to be. We are still in a police state; There are 700 political prisoners, some 52,000 people who have left Nicaragua, most of them for Costa Rica. The dialogue was attempted, but it was unsuccessful because the government did not comply with the agreements, including removing the political prisoners from the prison.

– Have you planned to leave Nicaragua? Are you scarred?

-Yes, I'm scared, but I do not want to leave. When they approach too many people that I have as referents, I think that if something happened to him, it could happen to me … Carlos Fernando Chamorro, my best friend, Extraordinary journalist, had to leave the country because they had confiscated Confident, his means of communication. Now the national flag has become subversive; If they see you with a flag in the street, they make you prisoner. I will stay where I can, even if I am worried. It may take a bit, but Daniel Ortega is finished.