Nerea Vallejo is talking to her father about events fifteen years ago. Is that a confession? The letter you wrote?

I’m not sure it’s a written statement, I see it as a long flow, it’s more a monologue with two objectives. On the one hand, to leave it clear to the father when and why it was interrupted between the two. With the death of my grandfather, a time is closed, this is the excuse to live the past again. And on the other hand, to do this exercise of transporting events with oneself to know what really happened. Because it often happens that when we begin to try to live something again, we enter into doubt as to whether this is what we remember actually happened or whether we have managed to preserve it because there is a need to continue living. I think this is something that the person is carrying with him. What happened will never happen again. In addition, it is also an ideal means of justifying ourselves.

Abandonment is a prominent topic in several fields. Family, for example. But also with regard to stolen children or foreigners, on the part of the institutions.

This question of not being left to deny that it is an extended evil, it is not difficult to explain, we are all or have ever been abandoned, and when it comes to administration it is not the worst. This is exactly what her daughter accuses her father of, how she left her political career aside in the first place. Abandonment here is the link, a thread of level of feeling that connects all the main characters. In any case, the accusation against my father is very obvious. Underneath this there is another layer, and that is what really interests me, that is, to realize how a society changes from compassion to contempt. In this case, and with strangers appearing to the people, it is the culture of suspicion that prevails. I have endeavored to show how the force of impatience fills us, leaving more exposed the human misery that is very much ours.

And in this impatience the father considers it as possession rather than “protecting” his daughter from the intruder.

Yeah, that's one of the engines, and if the vacuum was only my dad's, there's a change in town, too. Because the “property” is there, in eleven ways. We expect people with no money not to pay for the subway, but when they pay, then we worry. But how can they pay if they have no money! The mechanism behind this is what I've been trying to pull out, to get to that second level, to hit the bone of the human condition.

From a narrative point of view, the story comes to us in the first person and from a unique perspective. You didn't want more focus?

No, I didn't want to. I did it this way to increase the feeling of loneliness. The novel is a social drama, but narrated from the smallest “I” written in minuscule. That's why they're all unique. Both the strange sailor and the three generations of his family, his grandfather Mateo, his father and Nerea himself.

This loneliness brings pain and the reaction of pain is silence. What does he say when he is silent?

In silence, I want to punish my father. He certainly becomes an unfriendly father, but I think he is not a cruel man, he does not want to cause suffering to his daughter; the fact is that he does not invent it. He's an abandoned person, that's for sure. A change of heart. He has a job and a political career ahead of him in the competition for values, rather than solving problems at home. So Nerea’s silence is the answer that comes from her anger, because she talks to others.

You've gotten into the skin of the teenage girl and the woman, and you've made yourself believable. Can a writer reproduce the experience of any person?

I wouldn’t say anyone. For example, when a woman speaks in poetry about her inner geography, this would be impossible to reproduce. In this case it is the girl, but on the level that counts, it can be done even if the writer is a man. The affective side of it is that, affective. I don't see any difficulty in that plane.

He doesn’t want to be a lesbian.

Nerea has a relationship with a girl, there she has the support she needs, now and here, a woman gives her that bad shelter in front of the world. That's it, that's what we know. If I were heterosexual, I don’t think it would change at all with the story as it stands.

Nerea is very committed to rebuilding the past. Why, if things don't remember how they were?

Probably to strengthen himself. He needs to define, he needs to oppose his father, he's so offended by what he did to him. The past, brought to the story, is forming itself, as if it were drawing.

There is also the issue of children stolen after the war. In historical memory, there are not only the dead. What else is there?

There is intimidation. There is the social logic imposed by the winners, there are attitudes that make them feel suffering and shame. I am referring to the arrogance of controlling not only society, but the joys, sorrows and fears of it. This is the logic of child abduction, both here and in any part of the world. And the shame after the robbery, and the horror, and the silence that you want to pass from generation to generation. Bullying is a language that is made more terrible than death itself, probably because it penetrates us to the most private level.

Memory has thousands of faces. A hole in the water was also the subject of your previous novel. Of the dead after the war; of the memory of the dictatorships in Latin America. It's your source of concern.

There are obsessions that cannot be disguised. What you say is one of mine. Living the cases of both of them up close introduces the worm even more intimately. And you don't know if you've met them because you've been looking for them or if they're the ones who've been looking for you. I met Mateo Vallejo from the novel, he was close to me. He was kidnapped twice. First to her parents, and then to the woman who breastfed for up to three years. A year before he died, he found out who he was, and I experienced how the past had violated the man. I don't have it to forget. I repeat; I hate that language of power, and I say horror because it is silent, because it enters our lungs like sarin gas for observation...

Finding those responsible for the stolen children isn't sweet...

How will it be if, as in the novel, you have family members? It is the decision of all the relatives to die without saying Chinese. There's only one slot left uncovered in the novel. This is the writer’s only window to show that world. Imagine the number of stories that have gone windowless, that have been hooked forever. This is also one of the duties of literature.

Serenity Star is the freighter that's neither forward nor backward, Abran. The employees are waiting for the authorities to decide.

The crews abandoned by the companies have always been there, both in Bilbao, Pasaia and Bokal. It's enough to have eyes to see. It's not current, and it's universal. In Patagonia, I met a freighter that had been in Caleta Olivia for years in 1999. They are usually accompanied by port workers, international seafarers’ unions... With a little luck they have lived on what people have given them.

How is the reception of Basques to foreign sailors? You've said before how quickly we go from compassion to contempt.

I believe that what we feel in the face of the difference in need is the following: we are willing to help but it is enough to hate as much as we have given a small suspicion, a gesture, a trivial detail. Xenophobia is not visible, but it is not understood from equality. We are more forgiving with “us.”

“It’s a party where drama has become a spectacle,” he says. Like in the daily media?

There is no need to explain the path of morbidity. Remember that people here were going to watch the war. There is a memory book by Joxe Izurrategi, who was a priest in Peralta, where he tells how they climbed on top of Elosu to see what and how the bombs on the front exploded. The man is happy with the shots, he looks futuristic. Exactly, a war show. Now we don’t even have to sweat, just turn on the TV while we caress the children.

The Gulf of Abra is the main space of the novel. The place is deliberately chosen.

Of course, of course. It is not said, but it can be the Old Port of Algorta. I needed a 13-year-old girl who knows English well to talk to foreign sailors, an industrial port, metro and airplanes, and a community who also lives as a close-knit village. I lived that Algorta. But even if it's not, what. It's the literature.

We come to the title: the freighter. Lives are loaded. I don't know if writing lightens the burden.

Not to me. Even at the end of the story, I didn’t feel liberated. In addition to the first, the burden comes with oneself. But that's not new, is it?

Maybe it's better if you didn't write?

I wish I could! That’s why we write because we believe in telling stories like this.

And because we often have the past knocking at the door. Always the shadow and concern of the past.

I would like to write differently, without the weight of the past, believing that what we are is not their shadow, more free, falling here and now like an asteroid from the clear sky. Take the vocabulary and find all the words that hurt us deleted. I have not lost hope, but by now it will have to be after the next Big Bang.