The loneliness of childhood

"Monsters run around the corners, spill down the walls of your withered memory, scratch your will, tear at your voice, freeze your soul, paralyze your feet, sleep under your blankets, in the intimate and unexplored corners that no one, not even you, knows."

They don't show themselves, they lurk. They don't speak, they whisper. They don't kill, they wound, mortally.

The monsters are nothing but your fears, the fear of living, the fear of suffering, the fear of losing, of jumping, of winning, of deciding.

Niño jugando descalzo sobre el suelo húmedo y arenoso, disfrutando de un día soleado.

To kill the monster, you must probe the wound with skillful fingers and yank out its long shadows. To extirpate it, you must turn on the light and catch it mid-air, before it camouflages itself in any of your many cracks.

To kill fear, you must first lose fear. Lose it and never seek it again. Only then will you be free.

Childhood lives on in all my novels like a sacred sanctuary that must not be invaded, a primordial, newly arrived place with skin so vulnerable and delicate, so immaculate, that any wound becomes indelible, permanent, lasting. Sometimes the mark remains on the surface, visible; other times it merges with the skin and goes unseen, hidden, camouflaged, part of the whole, inalienable and definitive. This condemns you to a profound solitude, the solitude of childhood.

I treat the loneliness of childhood with care, stealthily or openly, in reality or in imagination. I paint impossible pictures and blend them with the reality of the everyday. I speak of those harsh marks, wounds that transform, unexpected and unjust acts of violence that arrive to stay, that transcend the child's self and shape what they will become as an adult. I speak of the traumatic experiences that should never have happened, of the broken home, of the startling screams that can be heard from the doorway and foreshadow the cruel scene; of the shouts that echo across the courtyard day in and day out and reach the neighbors, that strike and deafen when the child still lacks the capacity for understanding and cannot manage the anguish those screams provoke. Shouts between people they love, the shouts of those who should protect them from such things. Anger becomes blind and tramples childhood.

No blow, no tension, no hurtful or malicious word, no harm should coexist in childhood and become the norm in adolescence and even on the threshold of adulthood. The mark it leaves is like a tattoo that cannot be erased, covered up, or integrated with another tattoo to disguise it, because it is a vortex from which shadows are born that will accompany that child into adulthood and will never leave them. These kinds of anxieties are shackles, ballast that prevents them from lifting their feet off the ground.

Is it possible to recognize the wounds ?

They are visible, tattooed on the skin. The deepest wounds don't disappear; one can only observe them and skirt around them to avoid falling into their abysses. That is why I express in my writing, in many different ways, the injustice of these invasions of innocence, the atrocity of forcing that childhood vulnerability, when the home that should be a safe place, a refuge to return to, becomes the crucible of every present and future misfortune. What is left then, where to turn to feel safe? The certainty of no change, of knowing oneself trapped in that daily violence, without hope of being rescued from it, turns against the child and plunges them into an abyss like nothing else ever will.

In my works I represent childhood as something pure, exposed to the human miseries of parents or any adult in their environment or a stranger; transgressed childhood, as a cry that tries to attract attention, a cry for help.

In " The Secret of La Belle Nuit, " this is a cry that transforms its pages into a harsh, wounding journey. In " Valentine's Dream " or " The Fate of Ana H. Murria ," pain is a curse, and the story a journey of searching and healing that traverses an ocean of shadows and uncertainty, where the characters are victims of these wounds without knowing it, without understanding why. There is nothing worse than being a victim without knowing the source of the pain or its reasons. There is nothing worse than surviving in a trench without knowing where the blows are coming from. Childhood traumas, when they remain hidden, make you a castaway of yourself.