Sevilla Babel

In the middle of a shower of applause, a good-looking, neat and little elderly woman goes up onto the stage. She is Ana Maria Matute, the well-known Spanish writer, author of books for children and adults and Member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. She comes to answer to our question: “Who will imagine us?” Pleasant and close, just after sitting down, she warns us with a sweet smile: “I’m not hard of hearing, I’m deaf, and an absolute disaster as well, I’ve forgotten my hearing-aid again”.

This writer is not, and neither does she pretend to be, a scholar; she is, according to her own words, a writer. She tells us that she started to write because the world didn’t understand her, “I thought, if the world rejects me, then I´ll invent a world of my own; I’m the second type of writers, those who are writers against their will”. In a slow, smooth voice, she speaks about the multiple realities that surround us and how, as we get older, we start losing our ability to move among them, how we lose the magic. That’s why she’s often written for children, “Not because I like them, in fact I don’t, but because I’m interested in them, in their world, which is a round world; when you write for children, you don’t have to worry about their understanding you, because they always understand you, unlike the adults”. In spite of this, she says she’s grown tired of writing for children, now she looks for different things, she looks for the adult, who “is nothing else than what remains of the child, for good or for evil”.
She reads for us one of her stories about silly children “El niño que era amigo del Diablo (The child who was the devil’s friend)” and tells us something about her childhood of paper. Today, at 82, she continues to have two lives, a real one and another life of words, “one doesn’t exclude the other- she tells us while laughing-, having a life of paper doesn’t prevent you from entering the other life, which has such wonderful things as making love on a river of stones”. Being a person who fears nothing, she opens her heart, “sometimes I live in words, but when I leave them, I become again the little hooligan I am”. A “little hooligan” who hates getting up early, who takes naps and loves having a drink in the afternoon, surrounded by friends, a woman who “understands better an elf than a bank manager”.

After making it clear that she’s not going to answer difficult questions about the future, “How should I know, son, how should I know what’s going to happen… people think that because you are a writer you have to know everything”, she leaves us a teaching: “I love life, I love it a lot, because we only have one life …or at least, so they say”.

Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia