Sara Polo Madrid
Madrid
Updated Thursday, March 7, 2024-00:05
Sandra Sabatés "Vox's speech is to make us tremble"
The message flashed in the inbox and revealed one sentence, just one, but it was enough.
"I have been Bluebeard
. "
He was a man, just any man, but his testimony marked a before and after in the life of
Sandra Sabatés
.
Or at least, in the literary universe that she created two years ago with
Don't tell me stories
(Planeta publishing house) and that now, thanks to responses like that of that reader who called herself Barba Azul, returns in the form of a graphic novel.
«He had recognized in that character who had tried to murder his wife the attitude that he himself had had with a former partner.
The same patterns of jealousy, of control
.
"He realized to what extent he had ruined the life of the woman she loved most at that time," recalls the television journalist, who today works as a writer at the Café Comercial, in the center of Madrid.
The problem, for that man and for all of us, is that the Bluebeard that Sabatés had borrowed from Perrault in search of a metaphor more effective than reality itself, existed.
Miriam Cabrera saved her life by playing dead
.
Her partner stabbed her, tried to cut her throat and left her to bleed to death until she was left for dead in the middle of confinement in Tenerife.
Before she left, she kicked him several times, lest he stay alive.
Luckily, her death was only fake.
"I feel privileged because I can tell it
," says her testimony at the end of the chapter.
Miriam's is one of the six stories that make up
Don't tell me stories
, one of the six fictional stories born from very long conversations with real women, those who suffered sexist violence in their flesh and minds at one point in their lives and they survived.
Telling violence with stories was almost a reflex act in the mind of Sandra Sabatés when she read one of the hundreds of chronicles about the group rape of La Manada that filled the summer newspapers in 2016.
"We have changed a lot since La Manada, we no longer question the victim," says journalist Sandra Sabatés.
"At one point I thought that that girl was nothing more than a Little Red Riding Hood 2.0, the only thing that changed was the physical space, the protagonists and the plot itself, but the type of violence that both suffered was the same," he says.
«That's when I realized that all those classic stories that we have been told as children have hidden forms of gender violence that we have been transmitting from generation to generation and we have naturalized.
We tell that the wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood and we don't stop to think about it
.
That has to be stopped.
We have come a long way in these centuries, since those stories were written, but the violence that women continue to suffer is exactly the same," she explains.
Little Red Riding Hood opened his narrative
Don't tell me stories
and inaugurates again its reissue as a graphic novel, published by Planeta Cómic.
And behind her, Sleeping Beauty falls into a forced sleep and when she wakes up, she has suffered a rape;
Beauty suffers Beast's jealousy to the point of almost nullifying it;
We have already talked about Bluebeard.
"We have changed a lot since 2016. Today the victim is no longer questioned, we have seen it in the Dani Alves trial," explains Sabatés.
And that is the basis of his work, a compendium of profiles of victims who do not adapt at all to the classic idea, a kind of beacon to identify danger signs before it is too late.
And to achieve this, the best thing was to put images to the words
.
"We are very visual beings," agrees the illustrator Judit Crehuet, in charge of the graphic part of the comic, and adds: "These stories are so shocking that one cannot understand their full power just by reading them.
They are all born from news that I had come across at some point, but I never felt it like when I had to draw it.
The image makes them reach you in a much more visceral way.
"The image gives the story another dimension, it comes in a much more visceral way," adds illustrator Judit Crehuet.
The biggest challenge when converting the six testimonies into vignettes was
finding the balance between the rawness of the story and respect for the victim, without ever falling into morbidity
.
They were the ones who decided that it was better for her image to emerge from the illustrator's mind, so they never met.
Rape and child sexual abuse are narrated with a mosaic of pestilent details, which transfer the reader's imagination to the scene without giving them all the keys.
That ability to "tell without showing" was key to the signing of Crehuet.
“An epiphany,” describes Sabatés.
The two were very clear that their art is a form of communication that necessarily implies a political intention.
«I have always been told to separate my art from politics, but it is impossible to separate it.
There is a part of you that is always inevitably reflected in your work, I cannot draw something I do not believe in or hide my feminist spirit.
If it's not me, it's not my art
.
“Why am I going to draw, then?” asks the illustrator.
Don't tell me stories is, in itself, a manifesto against violence, against all the violence that women suffer for the mere fact of being women.
«I am surprised that the existence of structural violence is denied with 1,245 women killed at the hands of their partners since 2003. The data is there and cannot be discussed.
So that men come later to say that they are the ones who are discriminated against...,” laments Sabatés.
And he remembers that young girl, almost a child, who brought him a drawing with a message to the Book Fair.
She read it when she got home:
"After reading your book, the man who systematically abused me is on his way to trial
. "
And she felt that for those messages, even if it was just one of them, it had all been worth it.