Theodor Kallifatides: "Europe has made old age a disease"

• Greece: Ruin and survival of a country

When he turned 75, the agony of not knowing how to continue blocked the writer Theodor Kallifatides (Mololai, Greece, 1938). The language adopted for 50 years did not work. No longer. He had been writing his work in a foreign language for half a century, Swedish. And at some point everything fell apart. We had to find another alphabet from which to continue breathing. You had to open new groove. Break and lift again.

He sold the old studio where he wrote about twenty novels. The refuge every morning, almost every afternoon since he arrived in Sweden in 1964. The den where to lock yourself in writing. He sold it because everything had to be stripped. If there were no words, it makes no sense to keep the playroom. His Swedish publishing house offered abundant economic advances for him to rewrite. But there was nothing to tell .

The nudity of having nowhere to go, beyond the perimeter of the house itself, activated an unexpected mechanism in it: the psychic return to its Greek reality, the nostalgia of the original world , the anxiety of recovering it.

Theodor Kallifatides wanted to return for a time, with his wife, to his village in the Peloponnese. I had never felt an urgency of that size. And in 2015 he started a trip with an echo of exorcism. That bewildered experience was in the form of fright. To return is to inhabit the shadows. But, furthermore, Greece was devastated in that year. The economic crisis and the successive (and fierce) financial bailouts had dried up any stimulus, any option for the future, any demand for normalcy. The reality of that time gave him a precise clue: if he wrote again it could only be in Greek . And from there comes Another life to live (Gutenberg Galaxy). A small treaty of intimacy.

Just over 150 pages of a naked and vibrant prose, endowed with a fibrous humanity, almost fragile, revealing and beautiful in rage against the raging stage of a country that is (was) his. Strolling through Athens certified an obvious brutality. «I had never seen my city like that. Poverty was an old companion, but that poverty was not. He had seen the barracks of the Ponto and Asia Minor refugees in neighborhoods such as the Polígono and Ilísia. Poverty, yes, but all clean and well kept ... For the first time I didn't feel comfortable walking alone at night in Athens. That was the greatest humiliation, the ultimate banishment. Be afraid of others , and that others are afraid of you. We have ceased to be isolated individuals to become tribes. On the one hand, we; on the other, foreigners ».

Europe wanted its money and Thedor Kallifatides, more than half a century in Sweden, was experiencing a different way of being Greek. Very different from that day when he left Athens pushed by his father: «This is no place for you. If you want to be a writer, go out, go, travel ». That night he could not sleep.

- Do you consider yourself an exile?

-No, I'm just an immigrant. One more foreigner outside his country. A man who writes and who, upon returning to his homeland, has felt a new wound.

A clear indignation runs through the gestures, which slow down to strong. Never fast, but more dry. This book that made a single gallop is a way to restore an identity crossed by a tradition that has been beaten. «On that trip to Greece something extraordinary happened. Perhaps the starting point of all the emotions that came together. Walking through my town I heard some children reading fragments of Esquilo's works as one of their school activities. Listening to their voices, and in Greek, activated my memory ». Theodor Kallifatides understood that to rewrite he needed the language he learned from his parents, that of first friends, that of dreams, that of adolescence poems.

“The only Greek that had not changed in me had been the language. He is my heart ». This cannot be understood by those who have not lived outside their land long enough to need to reappropriate their own credentials. But the return was not only the recovery of an original fire, but it split in two, somehow, the old age of Kallifatides. At 81 he has not gained skepticism, but a renewed conscience as he peeks at the bottom of his past. «Walking through Athens and inside the Peloponnese I watched people my age, I tried to understand their realities. And there was something bleak in that exercise: Europe has made old age a disease . The old man is no longer a citizen. That is brutal.

Thin, tall, with the furrows of age on the noble face, nothing indicates that this man lodges a gram of tiredness. And yet, in the medium and gentle eyes a certain disappointment appears. «Many forget that being free is a privilege of age. And Another life to live is part of that privilege ».

- Be free, he says ...

- Albert Camus warned us that freedom is built from goodness, and that is what we do not have today. In Lesbos I saw hundreds of Greeks overwhelmed by the waves of immigrants dedicated to helping, opening their homes to those who arrived at the coast. Then I understood that only poor people really turn to the help of their fellow men , for they know the weather well.

In the last two years, Kallifatides wrote again. A white letter was given in his language and he set up another novel, The Trojan Site , which in March will publish the Gutenberg Galaxy in Spain. He recovered his speech, and in that reappropriation he returned to rummage through the folds of memory. Now he works in a volume about his youth years, when he left his country in the 70s and life acquired manners of vertigo. The foreigner and love will title it . "As you will see, searching deep inside of me, at the origin of my language, led me to a new beginning ."

In Another life to live , a man is clearing demons and feels before reality as if he had just been born. Not for metamorphosis, but for help. You just had to let your eyes decipher in and out. And that words find their place, without too much strategy, without being overcome by irremediable emotions. So these pages were taking shape, with a few questions suspended throughout the trip: what will happen to me now? What will happen to these people?

The experience of such a book saved in Kallifatides in what could still be saved. «These pages, the first ones that I write directly in Greek after half a century, are my late thanks to those who returned me to my language, the only homeland I still have left and the only one that wouldn't hurt me. When you know what you want to say, you can say it in all the languages ​​you know. You can also keep silent in all the languages ​​you know. But when you have nothing to say, you say it better in your language ».

Kallifatides expresses an unwavering respect for the Swede. But he always felt that something was missing. This was. They were his original words. While writing he thought this was going to be the final book. Maybe the final one. Then, happily, he betrayed himself. Another life to live is exactly what at the age of 81 he wanted. Say house .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Greece
• literature
• culture

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