Pablo Andrés Escapa has just published with Páginas de Espuma Herencias de invierno. Christmas Tales, a work illustrated by Lucie Duboeuf that contains ten stories starring the epiphany and the spirit of redemption typical of Christmas.
—Tell me how the project of making a work of Christmas stories began
—The origin is in a commission already distant. When María Luisa López-Vidriero directed the Royal Library, she proposed to me one Christmas that I write a story for the bibliographic bulletin that we did from there, Avisos. Given the academic nature of the publication, I wrote a Christmas story more attentive to erudite jokes and the invention of historical sources than committed to some other resources to which I have paid preferential attention since. Let’s say aspects more linked to the characterization of the voice that narrates and delivered more frankly to the job of moving and moving than to joking with a tangle of false books, or news and invented historical figures. But that initial attempt served to continue fabulating with Christmas in the background and there was a moment when I began to feel that those winter tales were also a courtesy due to a group of friends who apparently read them with pleasure, who even read them. They waited every December. So the writing of these stories has ended up being a way of honoring the friendship of a few close readers. Herencias del invierno collects a sample of this attempt to reconcile fables and friendship with a periodic date.
—I read that you have somehow updated the Christmas stories your father used to tell you.
—The plots of my father’s stories have nothing to do with mine. But it is true that I cannot dissociate the habit of writing a Christmas story from the memory of my father telling my brothers and me stories at Christmas. Actually, he told us all year round but those that corresponded to these dates were specific and incorporated figures from the Gospel story into the plots. Among these characters, the Magi had preference, but less obvious figures, such as the pharaoh of Egypt, were habitual presences, linked to each other to the incarnation of good and evil. I see the most valuable lesson in those stories in a fact that my father knew how to achieve with extraordinary skill. In his voice, fiction was confused with reality, my brothers and I entered the fable as characters and during the days that passed between Christmas Eve and Epiphany, we had the feeling of living in a magical world, because he also made the fabulous protagonists of the tales came into life. He did this by promoting the discovery of objects that were destined for us “from the East”, any small gift of no importance or by making traces that he took us to check: a page’s feather in the coal cellar or a king’s footprint in the snow. All this back and forth between fiction and reality fed our fantasy, to which my mother joined, feigning astonishment that also helped to strengthen our credulity in the prodigious.
“Is there anyone who has narrated Christmas better than Dickens?” Who do you lean on besides your father’s stories?
—I don’t know if Dickens is the best, but he is the most universal. For me, the extraordinary thing about his Christmas Carol does not have to do so much with the fantastic part but with the moral lesson, wrapped in a powerful fable, which he offers the reader without falling into too much complacency or sentimentality. The great truth of Dickens is a very generous one and lies in having created a character that arouses our hatred, but to whom the novelist does not deny him the opportunity to achieve personal redemption. And that this one does not obtain it by miracle but by conscience. Dickens’ story is also very wise in the administration of melancholy, a feeling closely linked to Christmas but risky to handle without falling into sentimentality. And, finally, it addresses the subject that we can perhaps more fully identify with the bittersweet feelings that Christmas brings: the loss of innocence. If Mr. Scrooge regrets anything, it is having forgotten the happiness he knew as a child. And it’s as if his salvation depended on regaining that purity he once had. My references when writing Christmas stories are the same as when writing any story. I recognize myself in an oral tradition, elaborated, of course, when it is written in a search for precision in language, in reaching a degree of perceptible intensity in what is told and in the construction of atmospheres where the prodigious can be assumed. frankly. Obtaining that consent from the reader always requires an exercise in language that transforms what is narrated into something plausible, no matter how fabulous or subtle it may be.
—What does a Christmas story have to have to really bring us closer to Christmas values?
—I would say that it is essential that you deal with human values, which do not have an expiration date or intermittent date on the calendar. A Christmas setting without a transformation of the souls of the characters into something better than they were when the story began, is just a set. The transformation of a character, the possibility that a gesture can redeem an existence, the opportunity that is given to a character to experience enlightenment or a lucidity that they had not known before, an epiphany that can be derived from a wonderful fact, and that ends up giving a new meaning to its existence, they seem to me possible illustrations of what suits a Christmas story.
—Are there stories without magic?
—There is no story without the fascination of a voice. The magic is that.
“Why do we need the stories to go on?”
—Because the fable is part of life. Imagination is not alien to existence and to renounce it is to impoverish our nature as creatures with perpetual needs for chance, mystery and wonder. This was said by Cunqueiro, who has more authority than me.
—Do any of the stories take place in Leonese settings?
—All those with a rural setting are indebted to my memory as a child raised in a town in the mountains of Leon. A story like Nudos even recreates the atmosphere of a mining basin, let’s say that of Laciana to do justice to my biography. I have less tendency to place my fables in the city but it is not hidden, even if it is not named, that the setting of Fuelle is the city of León. I don’t think readers will have a hard time acknowledging this. But, apart from more or less recognizable topographies, it seems to me that the most notable link with our geography in these stories is verbal, a debt to orality. The voice in many of them is that of a narrator who tells as he has heard, that is, he transmits a heritage of words. These ways of presenting the fable have to do with the origin of the story as an artifact created for recitation, just like poetry, another genre intended for the ears. And in that same agreement is the request to suspend the spirits to listen that every storyteller claims. Among us, trades typical of the filandón. The fire accompanies these ceremonies of the word and disputes with it to gain the attention of those gathered around it to listen. Bellows is an example of such oscillations between the flames and the voice that lifts them up and lets them die with its speech.
—How does León look from Madrid?
-Something far. I am not saying this just because of the distance, but because in Madrid it is believed that the only reality that counts is yours. Madrid is self-referential for most of its tenants. The provinces, and even more those that have a striking natural heritage, like ours, end up being perceived as theme parks that can be used to spend a few days.
“Are you a story reader?” Do you think there is any difference between the short story and the novel beyond the length?
—I read stories more than anything else. I have always enjoyed them and have always considered them the center of prose. Rather than encrypt the nature of each genre in a matter of size, it is convenient to pay more attention to the different effects that they pursue through the management of certain resources. Among those who share the story and the short novel, I would highlight the intensity, the concentration of the narrative material, the expressive conciseness, the capacity for suggestion, as well as a more spontaneous propensity towards the formal experiment. To the short story, above the other genres mentioned, I claim the need to fascinate through words. In the short novel it seems fundamental to me to contain the possibilities of dispersion. In this medium distance it is less urgent to reach the outcome than to create a rhythm that does not harm some stops. As many pages as necessary and as few as enough, could be a good guide to stay in the discipline of a short or medium narrative that does not want to become a novel.
“Could there be a Christmas Carol in the middle of the war?”
-Of course. Right now I remember a Christmas micro-story by José María Merino set in the middle of the front. And it’s not the only one. Christmas made literature is not in the lights or in the snow. It is in the version that is made of the souls that those lights illuminate or that that snow stills.
—Auggie Wren’s tale is one of the most beautiful Christmas stories there is, and yet it lacks spirituality. What is Christmas for you?
—It does not seem to me that an attitude such as compassion, which is what feeds this story, is something alien to spirituality. Or at least to the existence of a certain sensitivity of spirit. Everything that transcends pure materialism to seek the highest level of the human condition enters the realm of spirituality. Auggie Wren’s Christmas Carol is spiritual in this broad sense, that of putting the humanity of the characters before the circumstances that correspond to them to live, however adverse they may be: crime, poverty or blindness in this story. At Christmas I find a very propitious time for illusion. Also for the evocations of those childhood days. Mine were, in addition to blue, white, because snow was common then in my valley. Since I started writing Christmas stories, Christmas has also been about complying with that disposition to fable that started from a commission and has ended up becoming a habit. I suspect that the prosperity of the parcel is due to the fact that it allowed me to do justice to my memory as a grown child listening to stories. For the rest, the values that I appreciate at Christmas are rooted in that kind of state of mind that inclines us towards good-naturedness and the recovery of an essential innocence. All of this against the background of that collective hallucination animated by lights and noise but in which it is possible to recognize gestures and attitudes that certify that the most dignified of the human condition, which is also usually the quietest and most secret, encourages here and beyond. The Gospel account of the Nativity itself suggests it, with its version of those days in Bethlehem in which, under the powerful light of a comet, the humble and innocent are exalted but wrapped in cloths that admit the marvelous. I have always been attracted by the reasons for the modest and that the wonder can ally with them to transform the small into great.
«All the stories are indebted to my memory as a child in the mountains of León»