One Saturday in spring, Juan Trejo was looking for something on television to watch with his wife after eating. Their children had left them on the couch because they already knew that their parents were probably going to fall asleep as usual. However, his prediction did not come true on this occasion because smiles and tearsthe legendary musical film in which Julie Andrews plays the nun who governessed Captain Von Trapp’s seven children.
The film has a special meaning for Trejo, but he didn’t expect the tears he had when the title song started playing. But, although at that moment he told his wife that he didn’t know what was happening to him, the tears had an explanation: it was the first film he saw in the cinema thanks to his sister Nela in 1974. Five years later and after many changes in life, she died and her memory was buried. Until now.
His silhouette had already appeared in passing in a previous book, but in Néla 1979 (Tusquets) the writer tried to reconstruct the life of this older sister whom he barely knew. Her death, at the age of 21, was attributed to heroin use, which plunged her parents into deep shame. In fact, they tried to hide it and the official version of events was that the young woman had died from a perforated stomach. Trejo did not discover her relationship with drugs until many years later, because at home they completely stopped talking about it. He had not participated in conversations since he left home at the age of 17, but after her death he disappeared completely.
Digging up Nela
“One of the driving forces behind this research and writing this book was trying to find light in a story that for me was dark,” the author tells this medium in the cafeteria of a bookstore in Barcelona. Delving into a person’s life can reveal unpleasant secrets, but Trejo didn’t have that fear because what he knew was already so bad that what he found was probably good. “Yes, it’s true that I discovered things that I didn’t like, but they weren’t dark. Like everything about my sister’s death, with the most technical details, such as the medical negligence that I believe was the main cause of her death,” he explains.
Her mother, who at that time was already suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease that were making her difficult personality worse, became furious when she told him about her intention to write about Nela: “Your sister died 40 years ago. Why are you going to dig him up now?” “He’s fine where he is,” he said.
But her two brothers, Carmen and Paco, do seem to be collaborators. This may not have been the case because they, who are older, lived with her and some moments were not very pleasant. “They understood immediately what this reconstruction could involve and they were very generous. The problem is that they had very few memories, they were very buried,” he comments. “Both have already read the book and their reading was super generous, very moving, very enriching. I am extremely grateful to them.
They are less visible but their parents are very present, because explaining their life path was essential to understand the reason for many of their attitudes. Originally from a small town in Extremadura, they emigrated to Barcelona in the 60s in search of a better future than the one their land offered them (or so they thought). They settled in the Vallcarca neighborhood and for many years welcomed relatives and friends from Extremadura who came to the city with the same objective as them.
Her mother was furious when she told him of her intention to write about Nela: “Your sister died 40 years ago. Why are you going to dig him up now?” “He’s fine where he is,” he said.
There was a time when three families lived at the same time in that basement on Gomis Street. “My parents needed a little more attention, because I didn’t want the book to be understood as a story written against them or as a reproach for something,” Trejo says. “They were victims of circumstances, as my sister was, and we were victims of the rest of the things that happened, as happens to all families.”
‘The Roll’ of Barcelona
Nela, short for Manuela, was part of what was called “el roll” in Barcelona in the 70s: an alternative scene made up of young people who believed that there could be another way of life different from the one that prevailed, with Franco always present.
Through the figure of his sister, Trejo was also able to embody this generation that, according to him, is somewhat ignored. “I realized that [Nela] In a way, she represented a generation as forgotten as she had been in our family, but at a social level or in the recent history of Spain. There were epidemics in Seville, Formentera and Valencia, but Barcelona was a major focus of irradiation from 1973 until the first elections,” he says.
They were the first users of drugs like heroin, a substance reserved for people with money, before its use became the devastating epidemic of the following decade. “The counterculture had a lot to do with the upper middle class, because to use heroin you had to be friends with someone who had gone to India or Pakistan. They were excluded from the story of vice and depravity that this drug was linked to years later. There was no way to integrate them, so they were erased,” he explains. “There were some who were able to pivot to this new, more commercial idea of culture and who were successful, they even became mascots for the Olympics. But, in general, that generation was erased,” he says.
I realized that Nela represented a generation as forgotten as it had been in our family, but in social terms or in the recent history of Spain. There were epidemics in Seville, Formentera and Valencia, but Barcelona was a major source of irradiation from 1973 until the first elections.
Juan Trejo
— Writer
The origins of each one also marked the hierarchies within the countercultural movement itself. Nela lived for a time in La Floresta, a neighbourhood in Sant Cugat del Vallès that, in the 70s, was one of the residential centres of the ‘rollo’. The history of this place – which deserves a separate article – is found in the documentary La Floresta, 100 years of history by Juan A. Gamero where he tells how the ranks were established within the community. “My sister lived through that whole period when she was very young, being a very intuitive and very intelligent girl. But where I come from, I had no training,” Trejo explains. “A bourgeois I interviewed who lived at that time told me that my sister must have been one of the most thrown“.
emotional journey
It was in La Floresta that Nela met Valerio, a young Italian who became her partner and with whom she settled for a while in Genoa. He also used heroin and, in his hometown, he had contacts who could supply him with it more easily and cheaply than in Barcelona. Later, they met again in Valencia, still motivated by the need to get drugs. It was he who took her to the hospital when she began to complain of stomach pains too intense to be normal. When Trejo began to investigate his sister, he had already died but the writer managed to find some members of his family who had known her.
Writing “Nela 1979” was an emotional journey full of ups and downs for Trejo. From sadness and frustration to the excitement of receiving news from Italy. “I was crying like a cupcake, at home they have been making fun of my screams for a long time,” he says in a funny tone.
“For a long time I had to deal with the frustration of finding almost nothing. “I had two photos of my sister, a few photos that my parents recovered after her death, the few memories of my brothers and only four things from the friends I had met,” says the writer. “When I contacted the family and friends of her boyfriend, a different universe opened up to me. That’s where I found the energy and the light I needed to finish closing the book. It could have been written without that, but it would have been a much sadder book, from my point of view.” Even today, he still maintains contact with them and is very grateful to them, something he says at the end of the volume. “They changed my life because it allowed me to see my family history through her in a much more satisfying, clearer and brighter way,” he comments.
The writing of Néla 1979 It was an emotional journey full of ups and downs for Trejo. From sadness and frustration to the excitement of receiving news from Italy. “I was crying like a cupcake, at home they have been making fun of my screams for a long time,” he says in a funny tone. The flow of information about his sister continued after his work was finished because some people discovered his research some time later, as friends of his brothers. “I would have loved to include some of these stories. I suspected that my sister liked to write, but I had no details until a girl told me that she had won a school prize with a story. I discovered that I had this sensitivity,” he explains. Review smiles and tears This could be the next challenge to face, although he is cautious. “When I was with the book, in a very intense phase, I tried it and decided that it was not necessary. Now I think I can see it, but I act in a somewhat interesting way,” he concludes.
