Rodrigo Cortés has a certain fondness for locking people up. He put Ryan Reynolds in a coffin in Buried, and now, sixteen years later, he has locked a girl in a windowless room, inside a place called Gabaón, which doesn’t exist either, and which after reading Daughter of Heaven (Random House) I would swear I had visited. There are nuns, priests, a sea in the background and a Handsome Man who may be the devil, perhaps doesn’t exist, or perhaps is something far worse. Cortés, naturally, doesn’t think to clarify it. He is more interested in questions than in answers, in the characters when there is no way out, and in that uncomfortable zone where reason begins to run out of arguments. Cortés builds the novel on that uncertainty and, above all, on two voices: the narrator’s and the wild, limited and progressively dislocated language of the girl.
We talked about all that. Also about freedom, fear, literature and why he so enjoys locking up his creations. Although, as he himself warns, the problem lies with them.
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—While reading Daughter of Heaven I couldn’t help but think of your film Buried (Buried, 2010). Sixteen years have passed, but you place a character alone again, locked in, with very few resources. Did you also see that kinship?
—It’s true that I tend to confine characters in places, almost without realizing it. But here there wasn’t a conscious decision. Daughter of Heaven is not a genre novel nor a story of escapes. Our girl doesn’t even have a particular will to escape from that room. At most, she would like to be taken to another place or allowed to see the sea for a while and then return. We are not facing a runaway thriller against space and time.
—So the real confinement isn’t physical.
—We’re doomed to know the world only through our own consciousness. Or, in a novel, through the consciousness of the characters. And this girl doesn’t permit easy answers because she doesn’t feel like a victim of anything. She doesn’t complain. The reader’s relationship with her shifts: sometimes you feel compassion, other times you’re frightened, at other times you’d like to save her, and most of the time you’d probably not want to be left alone with her. And all those things can be true simultaneously.
—One of the great oddities of the novel is precisely its voice. It recounts awful things with the same natural ease as what she had for breakfast. And it speaks badly. It makes mistakes, repeats, disorganizes syntax…
—Because she is not an educated girl, though we perceive a very developed natural intelligence. She is capable of expressing subtle and complex phenomena with a very limited vocabulary. Like a bright child who doesn’t know the word “disappointment” but tells you: “That’s like when you’re really excited about something and then it doesn’t happen.” She doesn’t know the word, but she has explained to you perfectly what it means.
—And that language deteriorates.
—To write for the girl I had to give myself a lot of freedom. Allow her to wander off the service road, to return whenever she wanted, to be reiterative, to explain five times the same thing, as children do, or to go back and tell you something as if she had never told you before. Her syntax is dislocated and unravels as the novel progresses and as she herself unravels. The syntax builds the character.
—And there’s another obsession that runs through your cinema and your literature. In your film Red Lights (2012) we wondered if the supernatural exists or if we need to believe it exists. In Daughter of Heaven you return to that territory: priests, nuns, a possible possession, the Handsome Man… Are you still interested in that boundary between faith, suggestion, deception and what we cannot explain?
—What happens to the girl can be interpreted from many viewpoints, and the novel allows them all. We don’t know if she’s possessed, if she’s ill, if she’s a victim of something or if she’s a liar. And we’re not going to know. The novel does not answer.
—Why would answering it destroy the mystery?
—When something can mean twenty things and you reduce it to one, you’re killing nineteen. If you allow it to keep its ambiguity and you embrace the mystery, you manage to make, as poetry does, things resonant and ambivalent. Probably the only true answer is the sum of all of them.
—There are two very old fears in Daughter of Heaven. One is being buried alive, which was already in Buried. The other perhaps is worse: discovering that inside us lives someone we are not. Which one interests you more?
—Being buried alive is a cerebral fear that, fortunately, statistically happens very rarely. The fear of being inhabited by many voices is nearly a human certainty from which one must start. We are not exactly the same at ten in the morning as we are at three in the afternoon or at eight at night.
—But here there’s something more diabolical. More Jekyll and Hyde: the fear that that other inside us ends up ruling us.
—Yes, though many times fantasy is used to address real phenomena with disguises that make them more perceptible. Daughter of Heaven is not a fantasy novel nor a genre novel and, at the same time, it is not particularly interested in the laws of physics. Not to contradict the truth, but to try to express it in a still audible way. Habit makes us functionally blind. Sometimes, to get someone to listen, it’s better to tell them things by singing or hopping on one leg.
—I also return to Blackwood: girls locked up in an institution away from the world. Does isolation allow you to observe human beings more clearly?
—Probably. Many times I choose someone’s mind, I go inside it and isolate it from the surroundings, subjecting it to forces that exceed it. That strips it bare and forces a reaction. And it allows me to dissect it and observe its behavior almost like an entomologist.
—But without judging it.
—There is never a judgment about what is observed. But I also don’t want that dissection to be cold. I want it to affect the reader physically and emotionally, to provoke reactions with which you later have to cope as best you can.
—Hablemos del Hombre Guapo. Es uno de los grandes hallazgos del libro y, al mismo tiempo, quizá su personaje más incómodo. ¿Qué es?
—No tengo idea. Ni siquiera sé si existe. No sé si la niña se lo está inventando.
—Eso no se lo cree nadie.
—Sospecho que no, porque se expresa de una manera que excede las capacidades de la niña. Pero tampoco lo sé. No tengo pruebas.
—La novela, de hecho, evita cuidadosamente algunas palabras: “diablo”, “exorcismo”…
—Sí. No hay identificaciones precisas. Se trabaja a través de resonancias. Hay un momento en el gran diálogo entre el padre Alén y el Hombre Guapo en que este pasa dos o tres páginas definiéndose mediante epítetos. Algunos pueden percibirse como positivos, otros como negativos, diabólicos, filosóficos o lúcidos. No te lo pone fácil.
—Porque tampoco es exactamente la encarnación del Mal.
—No creo demasiado en esas fuerzas maniqueas. Si el padre Alén encarnara el Bien y todo lo que dijera fuese razonable, creador y positivo, mientras el Hombre Guapo encarnara el Mal y todo cuanto dijera fuese destructivo, sería muy poco interesante. Nunca funciona así. En todos los personajes escuchas cosas que te interesan y cosas que te asustan. Ninguno encarna un arquetipo puro. El Hombre Guapo tampoco.
—Y frente a tanta incertidumbre está Gabaón. Un territorio inventado que termina pareciendo extrañamente tangible: el colegio, los pasillos, las fragas, el cortado, la playa, el mar. ¿Necesitabas que el lector pudiera tocarlo?
—If you’re going to describe a place, you have to be able to invoke it. Endow it with sensory detail. I love the word and I think anything done in literature rises and stands on language itself. Tangibility is also built from language.
—Es decir, que Gabaón no existe, pero tiene que oler.
—Exactly. What you imagine you try to give it three dimensions, to give it smell and touch. That the reader feels physically affected by what they read, feels the weight of the air, its density, how it changes with the seasons. And that is achieved through evocation, sonority and the musicality of words.
—Why Gabaón? It’s a biblical name and it seems impossible to think that in a novel like this it was chosen innocently.
—Because it sounds right. It has a primary resonance, of course, but fundamentally it sounds right.
—Last question. Rodrigo Cortés, film director, would you shoot Daughter of Heaven?
—I’ve wondered whether it would be possible. At minimum there is something in it that could be translated to cinema. One would have to give up many passages and transform others using different means. But I do imagine, for example, Father Alén walking along the beach with Father Salcedo, the great dialogue between Alén and the Handsome Man, parts of the rite or some conversations with Mother Adriana. There are cinematic scenes of considerable weight there, with good performers.
—So there’s a movie.
—I’m not sure. I have the feeling I’ve already told this story and, if I’m going to dedicate two years of my life to something, perhaps I’d rather it be something else.
—Not even if a Japanese millionaire with six million to adapt it appears?
—If everything is already financed and he tells me I have a year… then maybe I would consider it.