In the final days of her life, exiled and nearly blind, Clara Campoamor decides to tell the truth about her struggle and her defeats. Her account rekindles the confrontation with Victoria Kent, an ally and an opponent in the defense of equality. A political and personal wound that, decades later, has still not fully healed.
In this making of Ana G. Herráez explains how she wrote Where Your Reflection Dwells (Espasa).
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The title of this text emerged spontaneously, inspired by the name of an essay that Clara Campoamor wrote around 1942. She titled it “La mujer quiere alas” and in it she spoke of how women were carving out a place in fields that had previously been barred to them. Such was the case of the American pioneers who began to work as pilots during World War II. These days, now immersed in promoting my new novel, Where Your Reflection Dwells, featuring Campoamor and Victoria Kent, the first Spanish deputies, I cannot stop thinking about them and about all those women who have given (and continue to give) their lives not only to break the glass ceiling but also to break down the walls and even the steel floor that certain sectors of society construct around them to prevent them from flying freely like those aviators.
When I began planning my narrative, I only knew that I wanted to talk about the two politicians, but I wasn’t sure what I could say about them that hadn’t already been said. I started by diving into the books written both by the Madrid-born one (The Spanish Revolution Seen by a Republican and My Mortal Sin: The Female Vote and Me) and by the Malaga-born one (Four Years in Paris). Then I devoured every article and essay I could find about them. And finally, I bought a plane ticket. With borrowed wings, I flew to Lausanne, Campoamor’s destination in two key moments of her life: when she had to leave Spain with her mother and her niece in July 1936, and in 1955, when she returned from Argentina and eventually stayed by the shores of Lake Geneva, since returning to the peninsula was impossible while the sentence decreed by the Franco regime remained in effect in absentia, thus turning her into an outlaw. During my stay in that city of steep streets and extraordinary elegance, I was moved to imagine Clara walking its streets, arm in arm with the lawyer Antoinette Quinche, who on both occasions opened the doors of her home to her, and whom the two shared until Campoamor’s death in 1972.
Afterwards, I traced Victoria Kent through Paris, to places such as the Bois de Boulogne, where she had to hide for a time while the Nazis occupied the capital. I also visited the pleasant Argèles-sur-mer beach, where a former concentration camp once stood and where many Spaniards who had fled after the 1936 coup ended their days left to their fate. Anyone visiting it today would never suspect what sort of facilities stretched across the same sands that now welcome bathers. Kent, who as a member of the Government of the Second Republic oversaw the evacuation of families from France to the Americas, fortunately did not end up interned there, although, like many of her compatriots, she suffered the agony of exile firsthand and, like Campoamor, never again resided in Spain.
But not all was pleasure during the documentation process. My next journey took me again to one of those hellish outposts that the earth bears: the Ravensbrück concentration camp, near Berlin. The idea of going there had arisen as I moved away from the most well-known historical data of the two deputies’ lives and ventured into the realm of fiction.
From then on, I knew that in order to chart the plot I would have to travel along two parallel paths that, from time to time, would converge and then diverge again. On one, History (capital H) took me through events such as the Franco uprising against the Republican Government, the fight against Nazism both in Europe and in Latin America, and the signing of the Madrid Pacts (1953). On the other, imagination, endowed with its own wings, guided my steps and let me offer these two formidable women a gift they had already lost in real life: the possibility to continue defending their ideals through activities I won’t reveal here and that could have been carried out during the years they spent outside Spain. After all, at certain moments in their (true) lives, the two ex-deputies kept such silence that it is difficult to know for sure what they dedicated themselves to, so nothing prevented me from devising a literary hypothesis about their doings.
Thus, those who approach the pages of my novel will find Campoamor and Kent (or “Clara and the Yolk,” as they were referred to in the political humor magazine Gutiérrez after their clash in Congress in October 1931) roaming the dangerous map of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s of the twentieth century, in which wars, totalitarianisms, and the struggle for freedoms and human dignity will serve as the backdrop for their life trajectories during the exile to which both were driven. And along the way you will be able to accompany not only them, but also so many other people who risked or lost their lives in their attempt to make this world a better place. Now it is our turn to pick up the baton and learn to fly, like those fearless aviators. Like Clara and Victoria.
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Author: Ana G. Herráez. Title: Where Your Reflection Dwells. Publisher: Espasa. Available at: Todos tus libros.