This Interior Service is a direct appeal to the reader. Katixa Agirre (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1981) envisions a voice that keeps demanding attention, as if it were a voice-over in a film, a voice designed to ensure that focus on the story is never lost. Agirre’s idea is to create a stage within a cinematic screenplay outline, where the core idea of the script is set aside to give rise to a narration that could just as well become a novel. The text constantly alludes to cinematic narrative resources, so that the impression derived from reading is that the author, emotionally involved in the narration, tells us that a story has an intention, yes, but also a series of narrative decisions that will unfold as one moves forward across the terrain.
The matter that interests Agirre so much is that of lives in which defeat is present, because defeat is what we have to write about when facing episodes of war. We are in the times of the Civil War and World War II, and we meet four women whose fate seems likely to be tragic. There is a plot, which seems to fade into a secondary role, in which these women act alongside other characters, a plot in which certain compromising information must be kept hidden, in which those outside prison promise to help causes pursued by the early Franco regime. And we say that the plot appears secondary because what dominates is the documentary distance with which the era is narrated. This point of view will help lend verisimilitude to a story in which reality feeds fiction and, perhaps, fiction feeds reality: where there was only defeat, a banner of dignity can be raised.
Agirre will speak to us about betrayal without delving fully into espionage topics, will talk about the prison and the hangmen, about the death sentences, about the chekas and torture, and even about the history of the Basque Country, about a government in exile, and about the malice of a man capable of anything to vent a hatred born somewhere unknown. In truth, she speaks about something as hard as survival and leads us to ask what the material of human survival is made of. The dignity, which is what we would like to be the substrate of the theme, is mostly desire, because it cannot fit anywhere else. Remains, probably, the matter of resignation or, in this case, of non-resignation. Like Ethan Edwards, the main character of The Searchers, one can write off the world as lost, knowing there is no turning back in one’s cause, but refuse to bow down. But, unlike what happens with the character created by John Ford, here we will emotionally identify with the losers, even come to worry about their future, which is part of the past, of our past, which creates the effect that the tale becomes a triumph.
Agirre has crafted an intriguing novel that speaks to us about that critical moment, that moment that changed the country and the world, of which there are still many things to know, especially those built on the shoulders of people involved in carrying forward projects that meant wellbeing and human lives. We will once again turn to clandestine activity and persecution to delve, with a mood that is between documentary and narrative, into the best and worst of the human condition.
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Author: Katixa Agirre. Title: Interior Service. Publisher: Tusquets. Available at: Todos tus libros.