Author of a book of poetry, Penelope’s loomand several stories, Second home y flowers out of season; Albatros Point (Seix Barral) is the first novel by Margaret Leoz (Pamplona, 1980). Located on an inhospitable and wild coast, it makes its protagonist travel there: a voluntarily exiled doctor, although it is not known why, who goes to replace the previous doctor after his sudden and inexplicable departure. Written in two temporal planes, present and past, the writer investigates from this story the ins and outs of the passage of time, waiting, lost affections, love, infidelity and even bodily ailments. His is also a story of silences and secrets. Of the loss of happy years and the cost of maturity.
Immersed in the promotion of this fiction, Leoz enjoys the current moment when you answer us on the phone. “It is a time when you can read very little and write less –he acknowledges–, but it is also a pleasure after so many years of silent and lonely writing to be able to talk about what you have written and for people to read you. That’s what we write for.”
Ask. Previously you had already published poetry and several volumes of stories, how did you come to Albatros Point?
Response. I don’t remember very well. I had the setting, that usually happens to me. There are authors who are writers of ideas, they decide to make a novel about job insecurity and they make a novel about that subject from start to finish, which is a bit the antithesis of what I do. It’s not my way of working and I couldn’t write like that. Before I think about plots or characters, scenarios come to mind. Where would you put them? And then once I have that setting, that’s when I think about what’s going to happen there and what the characters are going to be. I think that’s how it came about. It also seemed to me very fruitful literaryly to put disparate characters to interact in an uncomfortable place without handles, where nobody felt very comfortable.
The importance of the environment and time
P. In his novel, the environment is, in fact, one more character, a state of mind. What role does Punta Albatros play and how would you define this place?
R. Punta Albatros is the name of the region in which the protagonist takes refuge after fleeing the city and also the name of the cape and Celso’s hostel, and refers to those huge seagulls typical of other latitudes that are reminiscent of albatrosses. I always give great importance to the setting and also to the weather, to the expression of plants, trees, flowers, fauna, even the creation of place names. I find it necessary that the stage is carefully recreated so that the characters can move in it. All the toponyms that appear mentioned –Punta Albatros, the island of Goz, the beach of Nobody, the beach of the Ladies, Lindes– sare completely invented, but there is a strong desire to suggest the location before which we find ourselves. The Spanish reader will find it natural to locate the novel in places very similar to the Galician or Asturian coast due to that idea of the Atlantic coast, wild, rugged, a bit isolated. But to recreate them, I was inspired by the French Atlantic coast, Brittany and the Atlantic Loire.
“When I was writing I drew a map where I was locating all the geographical points and the buildings: the hostel, the cape, the island of the ladies, the old blacksmith shop… I made a private plan for myself – Leoz continues–. The place is another character. The skies with their anger and their periods of calm, the weather, its changes throughout the seasons. The landscape and the atmosphere are changing and support, interfere or oppose the characters and their actions. The good thing about the setting is that it doesn’t always run according to human acts and this is what sometimes disorients, because it leaves the protagonists out in the open and also reveals the smallness of the human being. I really like Melville’s phrase in Moby Dickwhich says that “it is not marked on any map, the real places never are”, because everything seems more plausible and more credible to me the less solid it is.
P. He writes that waiting is the only experience we have of time, how important is time and all those stopped clocks that we found in Dr. Coroasa’s old office?
R. Time is a big reason in my writing, I think I will always write about it. It is also related to memories and the past. That time has multiple images throughout the novel: the waiting, the patients who do not arrive, the memories, the old age of the elderly on the island of Goz… The clocks are yet another image. In relation to this motif of time and the construction of the novel, what I always had very clear was that it would be articulated in the alternation of two complementary temporal planes. The plane of the past is going to reveal the plane of the present and with regard to the protagonist in particular, it is going to unravel the reasons for his flight. The first is clear, that sentimental break, that reason is known by the reader in the first pages, but to know the second cause of the flight, you have to read the book to the end. This procedure of two temporal planes that alternate interested me because remembrance, memories, explain the present and at the same time offer a new perspective to lost opportunities. The imbalance between the illusions of youth and what we end up becoming, which is also another recurring motif.
the lost affections
P. Precisely, over time it portrays the happy years of youth, how its protagonists become adults and lose something along the way, friendships, love… Does growing up have to do with losing those affections?
R. In part it has to do with the contrast between those illusions and what we end up becoming. In fact, a story of mine is titled like this what we’ve become. It also has to do with that clumsiness with which the characters, and in this case the protagonist in particular, sometimes lead their lives, which seems to me to be a very attractive fact because he is also very human. As I quote at the beginning paraphrasing Edith Södergran, “life is recklessly handling your own happiness.” I think in the end the passage of time, that maturity, has to do with the disintegration of illusions, that perhaps they had no solid basis other than that of the illusion itself. And not only illusions but, for example, friendship is also a theme that is in those years of the past. How the vision of friendship is changing, how two friendly couples are growing apart. Life in the end is that too, taking different paths. Something that is accentuated by the socioeconomic difference, the vital aspirations and the differences in the vital choices.
P. It also affects love in the case of its protagonist and her partner, Teresa…
R. Yes. Just as Teresa is a very hard-working woman, very tenacious, without any kind of laziness and nothing given to laziness, with hopes always high, nothing prone to fatigue; the protagonist is the opposite. That helped me, when the relationship between the two progresses, to show the differences between them, because I think love stories speak of pain and the differences between men and women. That’s what Edna O’Brien said and that’s a great topic that interests me a lot. In that case, I had to mark how the differences in that couple attracted them and at the same time they ended up disintegrating love and spoiling everything. There is also the idea of infidelity as a symptom and not as a mere consequence of an unsatisfied desire.
P. In that sense, there are also the elderly in a residence, the father who does not have much contact with his son, infidelities… Were you interested in reflecting the complexity of human relationships?
R. There are many silences, yes, many secrets. It’s like Hemingway’s iceberg theory. I am very interested in what is not said, or saying one thing to actually tell another. Doubts matter more to me than certainties. This is achieved by creating secrets that little by little the reader will reveal. I don’t work with plots or themes, because it seems to me that themes go hand in hand with ideas and ideas always offer moral certainties. I like to ask questions more and I think it is important to offer the reader a certain intrigue. I always appeal to a very active reader, who does not get too distracted. I want everything to be essence, even the smallest details. Something that interests me a lot is also giving a different meaning to everyday life. Albatros Point It is a story that could perhaps be framed within the vast world of realism, but I always seek “defamiliarization”, estrangement, giving a twist to the everyday.
A writing without makeup
P. And what is everyday in the profession of its narrator?
R. The fact that the protagonist is a doctor is not accidental. The body always interests me: its manifestations, its illnesses, the literature that is in it… It is the external manifestation of internal emotions, and it is very difficult to hide its signs: symptoms, rashes, redness, scars… This is also related to what he said about secrets and saying without explaining. Our body shows our past without explaining anything and it is a reflection of what I intend with my writing, avoid explanations, judgments, show without explaining. As with writing, I like bodies that don’t wear makeup, that don’t mask.
P. You like writing without make-up… and about authors? What writers do you have as literary references when writing?
R. I studied French Philology and Theory of Literature, so I have a baggage of classics that are always there. For this particular novel there is no exact literary influence. I documented myself extensively with texts that helped me recreate the locations and the environment, such as books by lighthouse keepers or by travelers who traveled along the Atlantic coast. But I always say that I come from classic authors like Flaubert or Chekhov. I am interested in that meticulous observation and that purity of style. I like writers who are able to observe very closely, through minimal and seemingly insignificant details, but ultimately significant. I am thinking, perhaps, of the North American school of short stories, the John Cheevers or Alice Munro. I also love James Salter, he fascinates me how he creates environments. In his novels that nostalgia for memories is perceived and I like how he treats the passage of time. He is also a very attentive author on light and love relationships. And two authors who always accompany me are Natalia Ginzburg, whose treatment of domestic ties, family and the chiaroscuro of love, I really like, and Annie Ernaux.
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