A few days ago, my teenage daughter, overwhelmed by her transition from ESO to high school, asked for my help to help her prepare a text commentary for a newspaper article related to artificial intelligence. My niece thought so too. … His uncle regularly took apart books, so he would have had little difficulty in giving him deep thought on the subject, and searching between its lines for qualities of adequacy, coherence, and coherence. However, it was not until he showed me the pedagogical guidelines that had been drawn up for him that I was able to verify, with bewilderment and sadness, that the new educational methods were the antithesis of my primitive and instinctive analytical techniques.
For this reason, I will try to update myself a little from now on, to improve my wardrobe and update my haircut. Moreover, inoculated with a sudden desire to improve, I will try to update my dissection techniques, and I will do so tremendously, in the face of the experience of a novel set at the end of the nineteenth century which, like everything he writes, I already expect, is a literary gem by Adolfo García Ortega.
Dead Mother represents a startling new literary device in García Ortega’s long and successful career as a novelist, essayist, translator, and columnist, which, from its title and dedication: “To the memory of Burri, my mother, who dwelt in her heart before the beginning,” tells us that the novel is a tribute to motherhood, death, and memory. Then, in a brilliant introduction, which may be true or just a justification, the author explains the reasons that led to the story he will tell us below.
And so, without further ado, with his trademark lively and beautiful prose, he places us on the night of October 7 to 8, 1889, on a carriage bound for a town called Figaligo (Adolfo mentions it in the introduction as a real place, but I was unable to find it in any of the sources I consulted), where a young woman named Galea Cervino is traveling with a secret swollen in her belly. But it also places us immediately in a turbulent time in Spain’s history, with regents, governmental alternations, and growing social tension among a population advancing from a rural, agricultural economy to industrial urbanization. It adapts to a realistic and humanistic atmosphere and language dating back to the nineteenth century and reminiscent of the immortal works of Galdós, Clarin, Flaubert or Maupassant.
In this environment, the doctor Luis Silva appears on the scene, who will care for the young woman in a complicated birth, which will result in a child who is orphaned from birth and who will respond to the name Gloria.
Luis Silva, degenerate and increasingly degraded in person, or Galia in ghostly or epistolary and reactionary guise, are the heroes on whom the plot is built, and who, like crime novels or cancers, begin to move backwards; Thus, the doctor, after adopting the newborn and leaving her in the care of a wet-nurse, undertakes a journey into the past of the young deceased mother, with the aim of finding her relatives, friends and, above all, the girl’s father. On this retrospective (and epic) investigative journey, he only has some of the deceased’s personal belongings, as well as diaries and some letters that will appear along the way. Contributions in the form of diaries, letters or some explanatory notes are good support for the narrative, giving consistency to the exciting structure.
Once the novel has been adapted to a distant time, and the approach becomes coherent and credible, García Ortega gives coherence to the whole through precise and vivid descriptions of the characters, their names (Icaro Cervino, Bergentina Lesmis, Giuliarda Humanes, Veríssimo Rubirosa…) and the spaces…one of them designed by the builder of the Eiffel Tower. But it also raises issues that were difficult to comprehend in those times, such as single motherhood or homosexuality. And in all this straightforward detective research, there is as much remorse, cowardice, guilt, pain and escape, as much as the urgent need to articulate remorse and come to terms with the harsh, fear-soaked autobiographical flashbacks.
The constant introspection, psychological reflections and even some physical clashes that the characters experience are enormous, adapted to behaviors and corsets that are difficult to comprehend today, although female characters such as Domenica Cifuentes or María Valencia express some whiffs of progressivism and freedom. But it is the dramatic score that conveys a kind of life-giving liberation to those who shine in it.
My niece got a nine and a half on her text comment. She did not achieve perfection because she forgot (or was not trained to do so) to include the conclusion. Mine is clear, I feel like I’m wearing a coat, I can see the computer screen better thanks to a pair of pincers, I’ll lean on a cane before I go out into the street and take a carriage to take me to my next destination, I treat you to a coachman and bow my head to the ladies I pass before I settle into a seat, some girl exuding the scent of lavender and singing a tune with the rustle of the silk covering her fabric. Or something like that, “Mother of the Dead Woman” is one of those novels that, because of what it tells and how it tells it, will take me a long time to abandon my body and my memory.