The narrator of this diary is locked in with two friends in an apartment in the city. For almost sixty days she obsessively and meticulously records every gesture, every meal, every attempt at making music, every sexual encounter… Thus, as the known world blurs, she reflects on her own writing.
In this making of Emilia da Silva explains how she wrote Quizá tenga forma de banana (Aristas Martínez).
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A few days ago a girl asked me
Why is it titled “Perhaps It Has the Shape of a Banana”?
I stammered.
I said something about identity or laughter or the body. Probably I said nothing.
I love that you’re like this, she replied. The girl has long hair and a beautiful voice, as befits the voices of all the girls you start to fall for.
But they don’t ask me for a text about that girl or about me, they ask for one about the writing process of the banana. In a way, they ask me to reconstruct that past, they ask me what was that like? Long ago I studied a strange and absurd doctorate in theoretical physics, that is, I love piling up information, dates, versions of the text, notes, heaps of data about the process. I know, for example, that the title of the novel did not occur to me until October 6, 2022 and that I did not dare to pronounce it aloud until an autumn afternoon with Víctor. It’s a good title, he told me. I can’t say it without laughing, I replied.
I enjoy an orderly world; but sadly, I am not capable of inhabiting that world, and perhaps the banana emerges from there. From the tear. It could have emerged like this article, a text that speaks of another and tries to imitate its origin or its form or its meaning. And the word text resembles the word sex so much.
I would say that the banana began to take shape one night in March in the damn fascist town where I lived then. It was a town with its chickens, its orchards, its goats, its shops and a neighbor who always accompanied me in the most absolute and frigid loneliness of that porch, that almond tree, and the zucchini that ended up coming from her garden. There was also an irrelevant and aggressive man who doesn’t need to appear here. And a pool full of dead mice. One night I dreamed it rained, the pool filled with water and a corpse floated on the surface. I watched the corpse float and I continued with my housework, it was cold, I was writing the banana when I still had no editor and Plan Z, my first novel, remained unpublished in a folder on my computer rejected by at least ten editors.
I have remembered the pool and the mice because I have a note that says develop the idea of the floating corpse.
I stayed in that town for eight months. In that period I began teaching writing workshops. I had a black, beautiful, enormous motorcycle, and I always peed myself with fear when getting on it. The motorcycle had the shape of a banana and I too became a little banana on it; at least in my head it was like that.
The data: the first notes for my second novel are from 2020, the first 20 pages that Víctor reviewed are from November of that year, followed by two more years of work, first in the town and then in a small room in Vallecas, then Víctor’s comments on the complete manuscript, a two-year pause, the editorial green light, the 10,000 words I managed to cut at Christmas and the work with my editor. I can assure you that we fought for every comma and that the banana would not exist without her.
But the most important moment of the process is missing. It happened during that two-year pause. I don’t remember exactly when, but a friend was presenting a book and Víctor and I were sitting at the back of the room. When it was over, a woman approached me. Are you Emilia da Silva? she asked. Yes, I replied. I am the editor at Aristas Martínez, I want to talk to you, she told me, and she invited me for a beer and at a table full of strangers she said that what I wrote was literature and that Plan Z was a great novel; though I’m sure she didn’t say it that way, who would ask a writer for fidelity to what happened?
In fact, at Aristas Martínez there is another editor, but it was simpler to fuse their figures into a single character. A few days ago I discovered that this editor always travels with a sketchbook and is one of the people who best embraces this world.
The long-haired girl has just written to me. She says the banana is over and that she wants to know how much of me there is in it. She also says it made her laugh.
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Author: Emilia da Silva. Title: Perhaps It Has the Shape of a Banana. Publisher: Aristas Martínez. Sales: All your books.