2023-05-04 22:05:17
A house full of shadows. «They were in every brick, under every tile, behind the lime of the walls, mixed with the mortar. They appeared every time my mother opened the kitchen cupboard, every time she drew the bedroom curtains. They emerged from the darkness of the well, crawled under the table, crawled through the corridors. My mother might hear them breathing near the bed, lurking behind every door.” More than the “presences” that inhabit it, the true, undisputed protagonist of the first novel signed by Layla Martínez, former author of collections of short stories, essays, musical reports and TV series, director of the Antipersona editions, is she, the house, the space of meaning around which it rotates The woodworm (The New Frontier, translated by Gina Maneri, pp. 140, euro 16.50).
In a poor house in the Spanish countryside, generations follow one another in the name of mystery, unexplained disappearances, a lucid and growing horror. The young woman protagonist of the story tells of what she has seen and perceived of her, of what her mother and grandmother experienced before her and how the latter tried to explain her inexplicable to her. All with naturalness, a sort of habit of fear, sometimes a pinch of ill-concealed irony in giving an account of events destined, otherwise, to make the veins on the wrists tremble. It is they, grandmothers, mothers, daughters and even grandchildren who mark the stages of the novel because, as the protagonist admits, «in this family the women become widows quickly. Men consume themselves like candles in church, a few months of marriage and all that’s left of them is a halo on the sheet that doesn’t wash off even if you peel your hands. My mother said the house dries them inside until they die.’
IT’S NOT ABOUT, obviously, of a case. If Martínez chooses to evoke a recurring theme of the gothic novel such as that of the haunted mansion, and intertwine it at least in part with noir, he does so by looking more than at Poe or Lovecraft, at Daphne du Maurier and, above all, at Shirley Jackson. That is to say to authors and stories where the supernatural is confused more clearly with the projections of earthly power, that of gender even before class.
The House of The woodworm thus it becomes the scenario where violent and brutal men know a fate comparable to the one they have tried to impose on their partners, wives, daughters or young women they have come across. Like the protagonist’s father who imprisoned his wife and forced other women into prostitution for years: he will end up walled up alive in the hideout where he had taken refuge to escape the front during the Spanish Civil War.
Similarly, the women of the novel end up resembling witches, mixing like the latter the practice of the most mysterious arts with the practice of self-defense. “My mother had never invoiced, but she had seen one of her friends do it once when her boss slapped her for spilling a glass while she was serving dinner.” It goes without saying that the next day the man had been kicked almost to death by his horse, which had been “quiet” up to that moment.
THE LITERARY FOOTPRINT of horror, with the possibility that belongs to this narrative code to account for social and historical wounds that we have tried to remove, thus leading the author to investigate, as she herself explained to the Spanish press, collective traumas of which little or nothing has been written. The house in the novel thus ends up resembling the Indian cemetery upon which the mansion was built in the center of Poltergeist, the famous film directed in 1982 by Tobe Hooper. If not justice, those ghosts seek a form of truth through revenge. Like the protagonists, oppressed, humiliated, raped, in whose veins anger flows “like a fever” and who will find an answer to their suffering only in the rooms full of dark shadows of that old house.
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#house #fears #anger #horror
