A western against disenchantment by Gerard Vilardaga | Literature

I read a story by Gerard Vilardaga in 2018, when he presented it in the second issue of the one he was then co-editing with the writer Irene Pujadas and Irene Selvaggi. It was an anonymous tale about a man’s relationship with his grandmother in the phase of physical and cognitive decline that is inevitable as we grow older. We selected it because it exuded a raw tenderness: the grandmother hiding the diapers, the young man’s care for her, the strange intimacy between a grandmother and a grandson, almost incestuous without actually being. Now I have found that story improved and edited in Vilardaga’s second book of fiction, published 14 years later than the first.

Vilardaga’s western jumps from one point to another in the life of the author and protagonist narrator. In the form of a diary without linear chronology, the book collects short first-person episodes of the author’s personal and especially professional life. As soon as he shares a flat and goes to university, he is about to become a father. The diary covers the arc of early adulthood, from youthful enthusiasm to the disenchantment of middle age and the consequent fall of idealism. We see a boy who wants to fight against the injustice of the world and a man who tries to at least keep the world from destroying him. At a certain moment, the care of others bursts into his private sphere: he has a wife to take care of, and a child, and the simplicity with which he explains this phase of also taking care of those he loves most is heart-wrenching, the flip side of the working day.

Vilardaga knows how to make us laugh with the most ordinary stories, some would say that they are too sordid to be literary, anecdotes that will not surprise the people of the social workers’ union but will the rest of us. Demented grandmothers who live alone, mothers of seven children who live on their grandmother’s pension, distant relatives who want to reach into the wallet of vulnerable relatives, alcoholics with withdrawal syndrome who go armed and Moroccan teenagers walk through the pages that they lack respect for him and put him to the test. It’s a merciless scenario, only softened by the gaze of someone trying to fight against it. The task of him and his colleagues ends up being the management of the fair and necessary charity in order not to scare the fat of the taxpayers too much, to act as a buffer between the majority of people and the misery of many other people who surrounds The author got into this sector because he hoped to change the world, and his western is an x-ray of the journey towards the hells of reality and the struggle not to fall on the other end of the scale, not to become be reactionary and maintain a certain hope – which is the major challenge of growing up.

Born in Berga in 1977, Vilardaga has a multifaceted profile: he is above all a poet, and it shows in the images of the prose he spends, sometimes bright and sometimes more humble. The author, in addition to being a photographer, has directed plays such as The assistantalso in relation to his professional life and the way he transforms it. In this sense, the most interesting of La talpera they are reflections on one’s own manhood and that of others, and the role that is expected of him, a man who does a feminized job until circumstances require him to impose himself with authority and violence, always under the same title of someone who must be at the service of the helpless. He explains himself as the man he is and should be without extravagance, without resentment or sermons. If you continue to write, the narrative voice of La talpera it could grow to the point of emancipating itself from the character of its author.