“Nothing to say”, a woman’s reaction to spite and loneliness

Silvia Hidalgo: It is not a portrait, it is the emotional novel of the anger of a woman who finds herself faced with uprooting, loneliness, and spite. And it is an x-ray of how the current moment affects women.

SH: Sadness is an inactive state, anger leads to talking, gesticulating, moving, confronting, it is a more active, understandable and human form of sadness. It doesn’t calm down with a relax, you’re very nervous. She has tried to do things as expected of her. She has been plowing the path that she thought was that of success, that of her dreams. And neither such success nor that of her dreams. Between society and fiction they draw us our ideal family, our ideal house, our ideal relationship. In the manner of American comedies. And when it is achieved, no satisfaction is found. It takes her a while to realize that the path that others drew for her is not the one she wants. This leads her to question the relationships she has experienced with her parents, her marriage, her motherhood, her work, her lovers.

Q.: Does your lover, who you call “tumor man” – who appears unexpectedly and you finally have to remove it – help you forget about your husband?

SH: Your husband hasn’t done anything wrong, that’s over. She, who has experienced detachment since she was little, finds a place of comfort in being with an emotionally detached man, which is neither comfortable nor comfortable, but it is familiar to her, and does not provoke great desire. She has learned that desire is not instinctive, innate, animal, but something we have constructed. Her relationship with the “tumor man” is not revenge from her husband. A woman, like a man, desire arises because she arises. She feels anxious about meeting this man, who is someone behind a cell phone. She is putting together a wonderful, perfect character. In the end, when she is already cured of all that, she realizes that it was a little adventure with a very normal guy, without anything special, to whom she attributed qualities that she is attracted to. But, when that relationship has to be cut, as in surgery, she must do it in a way that does the minimum damage, so that he disappears, but not the ability to trust, love or desire.

Q: Does the title “nothing to say” have to do with the fact that in the end everything is said or because you have finally resolved your dependency with your ex-husband?

SH: The novel has to do with words. For me the language of communication in this story is very important. How does she communicate with her ex-husband, with her daughter, with her mother, with her friends, with the “tumor man.” How we communicate through new media through a screen. How language is perverted and becomes so light and undone. How the keyboard sometimes fills in the sentence and completes it, even if you didn’t mean to. If it says good night, add affection. You give love or a like to anyone. Face to face that would cost you more. He notices that her lover uses the perversion of language to manipulate her and get what he wants from her, and since she cannot use that language, because he feels it is alien, he is left with nothing to say. To tell him what she feels, she doesn’t need the language he uses without feelings. If she tells him I love you, I miss you or she wants to see you, the words have a lot of weight; and his not.

Q: How did the story of that forty-year-old professional woman with a young daughter appear to you?

SH: As I began to write, I felt his anger, his tone, his voice, his rhythm. His anger imposes his vertigo. A rhythm that drowns you because she is drowned. This is how that cadence emerges, that lyric that accompanies the feelings of the protagonist. I prioritize prose over plot. I have a profession and if I get into this it is to aspire to a certain aesthetic, something similar to beauty. In literature, originality does not have as much value. If something seems original to you, it’s because you haven’t read enough or seen enough movies. After all, we have been telling ourselves stories for centuries.

Q: How much is autobiographical in your novel?

SH: No matter what genre it is, thriller, horror, romance, nothing is ever created from nothing. You create from you, from who you are. There are your experiences, your look, even if it is a totally opposite character. But to reach the reader you have to write without shame. I write without shame, and if I don’t write my story it is because I don’t think it is interesting. In the novel I can be there, my friends, my neighbor, my partner, the corner shopkeeper. We have a profession in common with the protagonist, we are computer engineers. I am interested in literature when it escapes the endogamous themes of writers, teachers or journalists. I am interested in portraits that come from outside, and in a computer company the woman is a weirdo, it is a complicated space that offers a blow of reality about the current situation of women and I liked giving it to the protagonist.

Q: What are you writing now?

SH: I just finished the pre-script for a film about a girl with a very limited life that she doesn’t like and who, to escape, prefers to be anyone but herself.