Verónica Boix: “We continue to reproduce roles and mandates as if it were our wish”

(By Mercedes Ezquiaga) In her new novel “The Frog’s Strategy”, the writer Verónica Boix tells the story of Lena, a married woman and mother of two girls, who leads an orderly, clean, guarded life, where everything is routine. It encompasses him, but when he resumes painting classes, his connection with art awakens passions that seemed to be hidden away and his entire world becomes disorganized.

The story begins with a typically familiar scene: the usual hustle and bustle generated by celebrating a child’s birthday with the family, a night at home, with the aunts on the couch, the excited girls running around, the crumb sandwiches, forgetting of carrying matches to be able to sing: typical, habitual details, of a certain dynamic that begins to break down when Helena, the protagonist, resumes her painting classes.

Published by Tusquets in his collection Andanzas, Boix’s second novel dives into a story that, although minimal, is still universal. A woman, a mother, the home routine, the decisive husband and the emergence of a presence, the art studio teacher, who opens a door to pleasure, to passion, to something that she can no longer stop and that generates feelings that They fluctuate, logically, between desire and guilt. “You have to be disrespectful with forms,” ​​her teacher tells Lena in one of the classes, but it’s difficult to know if she still talks to him about art.

In one scene of the play, the protagonist turns on the TV at night, cannot sleep and tunes in to a program where they show a frog about to be cooked in a saucepan: the temperature rises and the frog changes its color to adapt to the climate. new environment, he uses all his energy on it until he runs out of strength. When the water begins to boil, the small amphibian no longer has the strength to escape. Having adapted to the environment was what led to his fatal outcome. From this metaphor, Boix unravels the thoughts and actions of his anti-heroine, Lena, in her most recent work, “The Frog Strategy.”

– Télam: How would you define the personality of the protagonist, Lena, who seems to want to avoid leaving a certain routine, to comply with certain mandates, but who is passionately absorbed by painting?

– Verónica Boix: She is a woman who believes herself to be fragile, who seeks the protection of her mother, her husband, she becomes infantilized, but suddenly she encounters art again and deeply understands that there is something very true about her. Of course she is not that easy, she has an artistic spirit, but she lives her present life a little dazed, clumsy, she thinks one thing and does another, I mean, she is made of contradictions.

– T: This kind of confusion or not knowing exactly what she wants, that Lena’s character goes through, would you say it is a sign of the times?

– VB: More than confusion, I would say that Lena wants two things at the same time that are impossible together. Desire is a bit like that, isn’t it? I think desire is always antagonistic, I want to have a healthy life, but I like junk food, I want to wear a tight dress and I want to be comfortable. What seems like nonsense is projected towards the rest of our desires. On the other hand, it is true that we are in a time in which we are more aware of the social imperatives that tell us what to do, we talk about mandates and we believe that we have more clarity, that we can distinguish between the desire and aspirations of society, Maybe that’s the case, there’s just a point where there’s a lot of talk about it and in fact we continue to act, reproducing roles that we know, for example the search for a hegemonic image, the partner for life, as if those mandates were ours. desire. Lena is in that moment of hesitation, in which something inside her breaks, she senses that what she thought she wanted, deep down, does not belong to her.

– T: Through the painting classes with Santiago, the workshop that Lena attends, art occupies a prominent place in the novel and there are several references to it. How did they appear?

– VB: I confess that I didn’t have to do much because I am passionate about art. I didn’t investigate because it is already part of my life, in a very material way. My brother Leo is a poet and has been married for years to the visual artist Pablo Bronstein. They live in London, and every time I visit them, we experience art as if it were something alive. We walk, we go to exhibitions, we laugh at nonsense, we visit galleries, museums, we eat, we lie down in a park and always the painting, the forms, the artists and their lives are there. First of all, of course, it is because of Pablo and his gaze crossed by art, architecture, ornament, but it is more than that, something is put together in the conversation between the three. That inspired me to create Lena’s look.

– T: How did you arrive at the title of the novel, “The Frog Strategy”?

– VB: I had already written the first draft of the novel and I found, by chance, a video on the internet that showed a vibrantly colored frog inside a pot. The temperature of the water rose and those colors changed, she couldn’t stop looking at it, until finally, the water boiled and she couldn’t get out of it because she spent all her strength adapting. I felt like that frog was Lena, the strategy could be a metaphor for her experience.

– T: León, Lena’s husband, is a character who at times seems sweet but is rather controlling and possessive. Would you say that he displays a subtle, latent violence?

– VB: I like to see that contradiction. León is a sweet man who loves Lena and wants to give her everything, and at the same time, he is controlling, possessive. He is a man capable of generosity and violence. We are in a time in which there is a lot of talk about violence, we see it on the screens, in the street, yet I feel that it is still difficult to capture it in one’s personal life, I am referring to the micro-violence of everyday life that hurts, but they are almost not seen. We can all recognize a blow, an insult, of course, but it is much more difficult to identify the violence that is woven little by little, with wearing phrases, attitudes that limit our way of living, our decisions. León embodies that kind of invisible and painful microviolence.

– T: Another important bond appears in the novel, which is that of Lena with her mother, who in turn has a bond that she cannot, or does not dare to name, with a friend from the south. How did this addition appear during writing?

– VB: I wanted to explore the mother-daughter bond, my mother died when I was 15 years old and it made me want to experience in writing what I had not been able to experience in life. So Lena’s mom was there from the beginning, just that she was writing, and suddenly, her mom gets out of the car, runs out and turns the corner, I didn’t know where she was going and I started following her, trying to guess what she was saying. had happened, and that’s how I discovered what she had to tell, or rather, what she could tell because she is a woman full of silences.