«Phisical education was born from the desire to tell the collective madness that girls have suffered up until today because they have been educated in terror, shame and guilt. And I do it through a protagonist to whom the same things happen to teenagers of my generation and which, to a greater or lesser extent, continue to happen in many parts of the world.” As the Spanish writer Rosario Villajos, 45 years oldintroduces Phisical education (Guanda, 2024, translated by Roberta Arrigoni), his new novel finalist at the European Witch Prize 2024, which will be assigned next Sunday to Readers’ club within the Book Fair. It all begins one evening in 1994 when Catalina, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of the story, decides to hitchhike home so as not to arrive home late. Her choice is a rebellion against an overly rigid education and against all those social impositions, incomprehensible to her, which are reserved solely for women.
“We wish ourselves good luck as if returning home safe and sound were like winning a lottery,” he writes. Is it the banality of evil for many women, its ordinariness?
«It has been my experience and that of many women I know, and sometimes it is inevitably linked to your social class, to the fact that you don’t have the money to take a taxi home after a night out, to the fact that there are fewer streetlights in your neighborhood, to the fact that you don’t have someone to pick you up. But if you are also in the same situation as my protagonist, not even social class saves you from being left without a phone on a street in the middle of nowhere. It’s not banality, but black humor.”
What role do you think a book can have in educating people about non-violence, hospitality and respect for others?
“Nobody. We read If this is a man by Primo Levi, shocked us, but if you look at what is happening in Gaza you will notice that we have learned nothing. Maybe it happens that the people who need to read the most don’t read, and it’s a shame, because it’s the best way to understand the world. Not to change it, but at least to know how we are made and how we have evolved, if we have evolved.”
In your novel you also speak to men, because “not all are wolves”.
«Let him read Phisical educationhe will like it.”
How much talking about women victims is also talking about migrants, homosexuals, victims of racial discrimination?
«I’m not sure that violence against women arises from the same humus that leads to violence against every other fragile, marginalized and different subject. Firstly, because I don’t find women weak, even though we’ve been made to believe we are. We were domesticated to be of service to others. Secondly, because violence against women is structural and is also favored within marginalization itself, and even among women themselves. Misogyny abounds everywhere. Fear and hatred of women are different from fear and hatred of homosexuals or migrants. It’s quite sad that in 2024 we still talk about fear and hatred towards those who are different from you. How I wish my book would one day be seen as something isolated that happens to a teenage girl, or a simple narrative fiction…”
How do you survive the violence of others?
«Everyone tries to find their own formula for doing it. There are even bodies that, in order to move forward, forget what happened. Catalina’s strength is that she is a teenager and she asks questions that challenge the system, the authorities, her own parents. We all do it at that age and then forget that we were once like that.”
