Her intention was not to write a novel, but when Eugenia Ladra realized it, she had already filled 40 pages and her story was not even close to ending, so she continued with the creation of the Pueblo Chico universe. This is the hidden place where the plot of her first novel takes place, Baitwhich has just been published in Spain by Tránsito and by the publishing house Criatura in Uruguay, the author’s country of origin. The reality he describes in his book is covered in a nebula of mystery that has nothing to do with esotericism, quite the contrary: it is its earthly character that makes it unusual.
As they appear, all the characters are designated as protagonists, but none of them are because they all are. Ladra’s novel focuses on the city, on the mechanisms that a community that resides in an isolated place has to organize itself. The cast includes Marga, the teenager whom her neighbors consider lucky; Recio, the young foreigner who arrives in the city; Justa, the young woman’s grandmother; Olga, the midwife; the fishermen; the blind Godoy, who lives isolated in his house; or Luisito, the owner of the tavern La Paraíso, where the men get drunk at night with agüeta de arroz.
“I wanted to talk about what happens in isolated places in relation to violence and the rules that come from it,” Ladra explains in a conversation with elDiario.es. She was born in Montevideo, but at the age of nine she moved to a town called Nueva Palmira, where the Punta Gorda ravine is located, an isolated place where she would go with her friends. These landscapes of her adolescence were the ideal setting to develop Bait, He therefore took advantage of these memories which remained in a corner of his memory and appeared from time to time to give form to the idea he had of constructing an entire imaginary world.
The experiences of the characters are what show the norms with which this specific community is structured but, in a way, they are also universal. A clear example is Marga’s journey, which works as a story of transition from childhood to adolescence, marked by sexuality. Both because of the way she perceives herself and that of others. “At first I started writing in the first person of this character, but when I was quite advanced in the text, I felt that this voice did not suit me,” comments the author. “The third-person narration was more elastic, it allowed me to be closer to the city and to enter and exit each character to see how they moved in this setting.”
What Men Forget
The treatment of Chinese traders who dock at the port to sell their cheap and questionable products is a representation of xenophobia as well as the ritual of acceptance into the community that Recio must endure. Likewise, what happens at night inside the canteen is not discussed outside, which suggests another type of rejection. In fact, in one of the passages in the book, Olga warns Marga that she should not enter La Paraíso: “Better stay outside; it’s not that it’s a dangerous place, no, it’s that sometimes, within these walls, men forget how the world works.” It is the place where they forget the rules that they themselves have imposed and if this happened in the light of day, it would be chaos according to their concept of rightness.
The story takes place in a not so distant but analogous past. Marga was born in the 90s and the present of the novel takes place in the early years of the 21st century, traits that it shares with its creator, born in 1992. “I made Marga live the vital experience of this passage from childhood to adolescence. I could not have written it today because my relationship with technology is a bit non-existent, I recently learned to take a selfie,” he says with a laugh. “None of what I tell is real but I could not have written it if I had not lived certain experiences.”
In a world where social networks dominate reality, nothing private would be so private anymore and many situations could not have happened. A cell phone with a camera inside the tavern would have shed light on what happens in the darkness of that windowless establishment and Marga would have told her friends all the details of her relationship with Recio by message. “Cell phones appear, but they are not like the ones we have now and they are really in the background,” explains Ladra. In addition, with the Internet, the young woman could have had other emotional or sexual references than the characters of the terrible soap opera that she watched daily on television with her grandmother and Olga. “It is the sentimental education that he has, he even learns to kiss or interact with the people he loves,” explains the writer.
Moving from a short story to a long story
Before BaitEugenia Ladra had published the children’s book Ramona and Ramiro (Planeta) and the story anthologies The Nature of Death (2019) and The space might look like this (2020). Initially, this first novel was supposed to be a story, a genre that has a lot of weight in Latin American literature. More than in Spain, at least until a few years ago, where it began to enjoy greater recognition.
For Ladra, entering the “long” story meant an exercise in mental restructuring regarding the work. On the one hand, in relation to the time he had to invest to finish the story and, on the other, by the way he had to build the structure. “It was not only the image or the emotion that I wanted to tell, but it was necessary to go a little further and think about how the main characters, but also the secondary characters, were related. At one point, I remember that I had to make myself a kind of map because I was getting lost in my own imagination,” he explains. “It’s not that I’m prouder of having published a novel than a story, but I acquired new experiences that I had never had before. It was a very beautiful process, because in addition, the editing work with the two editors was very meticulous.”
Among the writers who served as a reference, he cites classics such as the short story writer Horacio Quiroga or Juan Rulfo, who has an epigraph in his book, both for his short stories and for Pedro Páramo.Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor was structural because the idea of the narrator of Bait It came from her, it seemed incredible to me. And also from The Patriarch’s Autumn by Gabriel García Márquez, I loved seeing this narrator at his best,” he says.
Finding Love for Male Characters
Likewise, he remembers that during the process of writing his novel, he read a lot of the Argentine writer Selva Almada. Her treatment of masculinities helped her a lot in the construction of certain characters such as the fishermen of the city. “I remember that it was a very beautiful discovery to meet her while I was writing, because she showed me a work on the figure of male characters that made me attach myself a little more to them.”
Memory is an essential tool in Ladra’s work. During the time he spent writing Bait He no longer develops side projects, except for some reports for a magazine. Today, he is thinking about an idea that calls him from the past. “I am currently in a literary residency and I am starting to sketch out a project that is based on a childhood memory. It is an image that I saw and it is stuck to me, I can’t get it out, it is there”, he says. For the moment, he is still assimilating his first novel because, as he points out: “It is not only the first one that I publish, but also the one that I write! And it is happy.
