“Xairu stays silent for a moment before hanging up. He spends a few minutes with his cell phone in his hand, thinking about his father, how sad he seems, how he never showed this sadness or the opposite. He also thinks that growing up is like a race to see who will realize first: you that your parents were never happy, or them that you will never be happy. ” In hanging clothes (Anagrama, 2024) sadness is a legacy that passes from parents to children, a path that never ends and that transforms misery into small and large violences, a portrait of the way in which hatred manifests itself in one’s life and towards those others. For Óscar García Sierra, it is also an x-ray of what he sees around him. Proof of how easily a life collapses without one being able to barely realize it.
The town of Llanos de Alba, in León, has orange skies and dust-laden air. We are in the days following the demolition of the La Robla thermal power station, the same one which closed the author’s first novel, Facendera (Anagrama, 2022), and this now gives continuity not to the story, but to the landscape in which it takes place. Isidorín retired early after a life in the mine and on this morning of fog and darkness he argues with apparent normality with his wife, Milagros, who is getting ready before going to the retirement home where she works as a geriatric assistant. “Like my mother,” reveals the writer in this interview.
The daughter, Tania Tamara, has gone to town to escape the harmful dynamics of her family – the same ones her parents may never understand – and the other son, Xairu, is in trouble and will appear in the next film . elections, municipal elections with the extreme right. In this succession of life stories, in which sometimes nothing happens and other times everything happens at the same time, García Sierra explores the interior habits of a random Spanish working-class family to demonstrate that misfortune is in reality a hereditary, incalculable artifact. over time, transferable from one to another and, almost always, too difficult to reverse.
Rural literature
“Even though I have lived in this city for more than ten years, I feel incapable of writing about Madrid,” says Óscar García Sierra from a cafeteria in the capital where he meets this newspaper. The Leonese writer once again romanticizes, under the atmosphere of the mining basins, the deindustrialization and rural depopulation of his native town and its surroundings “because it comes naturally to me”, he affirms, “perhaps because I lived there so long, perhaps because of a feeling of debt.” for leaving.” Of the ten or twelve friends he grew up with, “none of them live in town anymore,” he says. Coming back from time to time allows him to see more clearly the things that have changed: “I left, but at least I can re-appropriate certain issues here with another perspective. »
For Óscar García Sierra, writing comes “from the Internet,” he explains. He began reading and writing “simple sentences and poorly crafted texts” at a very young age, and over the years he would end up collaborating on several anthologies and publishing the collection of poems. Houston, I’m the problem (Espasa, 2016), whose verses Carolina Durante would later perform in one of his songs. hanging clothes He wrote it while getting up very early in the morning, he admits, very early before starting his teleworking day as a linguist – he studied Hispanic philology – in an artificial intelligence company: “I doesn’t like to sleep,” reveals García Sierra, “and writing makes me feel good.” On its first page, we can read: “A Perla”. The book is dedicated to Perla Zúñiga, a multidisciplinary artist, poet and DJ also known as Jovendelaperla with whom the writer primarily shared “conversations about writing and music,” he recalls, and who is died a few months ago, leaving a notable void in the scene. weird of the country.
Talking about our parents’ generation is important to understand why their children are sad
Oscar Garcia Sierra
— Writer
hanging clothes Its title is a popular expression used to warn someone that others are listening to something compromised, a circumstance which, in reality, metaphorically covers the atmosphere of all the stories that compose it. The beginning of the novel is touched by the end of Facendera: Milagros calls the Civil Guard to warn that some children are partying in the school zone, the same ones who were having fun in this book with which the poet began as a novelist. The author thought it was a good wink. Talking now about “our parents’ generation”, explains Óscar, 29, seems important to him “to understand why their children are sad”, as is the case with the character of Xairu, who is around 40 years old and whose story ends in the plot of the novel from the middle of the book to the end.
Even though life in the city was different before, in reality everyone ended up in the same place.
Oscar Garcia Sierra
— Writer
“I didn’t just want to create a sad young character, but a character whose parents are sad too, because even though life in the city was different before, they had more work and more things to do, in reality they have everything ended up in the same place,” the author thinks, and this place is nothing other than the moment in life when we realize that too many things are wrong, this moment when it is “impossible to change. distinguishing old problems from new ones,” says the narrative voice of the novel; that moment when “every night is so similar that it’s impossible to know when things happen.”
But sadness is also a bag of rage and hatred that we throw at the world as if attacking it could somehow solve the problems. Milagros takes on more work just so she can mistreat her co-workers and feel like something sets her apart from them, “behaviors that my mother says happen constantly in these jobs,” García Sierra adds, “and that actually reveal” a life of frustration.”
My friends and I talk about how all of our parents are emotionally incompetent.
Oscar Garcia Sierra
— Writer
Her husband is a man incapable of communicating with her or with her children, a portrait of a standardized masculinity that emerges in the father figure of many families: “My friends in the city and I talked a lot about the ineptitude of all our fathers. emotional. Grandparents too, parents’ parents,” thinks the philologist. “I don’t know if I could have portrayed a father in a different way, influenced by books or films instead of what I saw in a real father,” he adds.
Drugs, sadness, hatred
A complex way of telling which does not escape the character of Xairu, although in a different way: the young man takes parakeet —or cocaine – almost daily he has no job, he wanders the city’s bars and begins a relationship with Juli, whom he gradually draws into his world of addiction, delirium and violence . The idea that ideology “is something in the background,” he explains, “something that sometimes happens in groups because each person comes in hating different things and, even if they don’t don’t even share hatred, one is there because they have no other place. be,” he says.
“I focused on very depressed and very desperate characters, but the atmosphere of the town is not so sad,” adds García Sierra, who considers it very likely that he will one day return to live on his land, even if he does. I don’t think he could do it in his hometown of barely 300 people. He defends that what is at stake are problems that already exist in the city, but in rural areas the problems of work and depopulation are added “and people are trapped”, says the author, thinking particularly in the cities of Asturias, León and the Mining Basins and in this middle age group, “a very common profile of people who have tried to have another type of life and who stay there”, he says .
García Sierra believes that, although the context of his town or any other may have an impact on the situation of the family he describes in the novel, the important thing is to understand that the dysfunction of the family “could arise in any other context,” he thinks. “for example in a big city, although with different particularities”, because what the writer explores is the way in which, intergenerationally, relationships within the family nucleus become more and more uncomfortable, crossed by the individual problems which determine each one but it has also collapsed because of problems which are in reality structural.
Problems that we sometimes escape fleetingly, as if a life worth living was what we have when we party. In previous texts, García Sierra had already constructed scenes of partying, drugs and discord to deepen subjects as important as how to face reality, and in hang clothes, “Going home is death,” the character says: “The feeling of prolonging the party is the closest thing we can feel to prolonging our life. […] But that doesn’t happen in real life. When I see my grandparents who are almost ninety years old, I think they are prolonging their lives. After, “They must feel like they’re in the morning, high and watching the sunrise, seeing that it’s all over and there’s no next weekend to hold on to when it’s their turn to go home.”
People like Xairu, who wander into dead ends, who touch the limits, who are afraid; people to whom “the smell of their mother makes them want to cry” – he says in the book – but who nevertheless only have to take control of their lives through violence, are after all everywhere. Perhaps, in some way, in all of them. It’s just a matter of observation, suggests Óscar. hanging clothes It is an insinuation to look from another angle at the indestructible pieces that make up a life: the marriage that fades, the fatigue of work, the disenchantment of oneself, the abandoned desires, the search for the impossible, the silence, disorder, self-deception, pain, sadness. It is knowing that “even the future is not an escape” and nevertheless continuing to ask the endless question: “How different could life be if it were not so similar to that of our parents.”
