Sex, violence and family, the literary debut that reveals the shadows of Western humanitarian action in Bosnia: "I wanted to look into the abyss to see the truth of the world"

Sara Polo Madrid

Madrid

Updated Wednesday, April 3, 2024-21:38

It is not a fiction novel, nor is it a typical autobiography, much less a journalistic chronicle. It's something halfway. And works. But yes, the Alba who lies naked and locked up somewhere in Sarajevo fantasizing about the pectorals of her beloved captor in the first pages of

Polilla

(

Alfaguara

) is

Alba Muñoz

, author of this debut work that arrives this Thursday in bookstores , although that was so long ago that it almost feels like he's talking about someone else.

The woman from Barcelona, ​​a columnist for EL MUNDO's

La Lectura

, felt the call of the journalistic jungle in her early twenties and set out in the heart of the former Yugoslavia in search of a story to tell. She found two: one took her to the bowels of human sexuality, to the darkest and most depraved corners of the mind that sustain the international buying and selling of women, a scourge still worryingly common in the Balkans; the other, to her own depravity. "There are also impulses of possession and violence in women," she says today, three decades later.

Moth

has been written and rewritten many times throughout these years, of that adult life that was beginning then and today observes, calmly, the situation from the calm that comes with hindsight. The eureka moment, the one in which everything falls into place and suddenly makes sense, came in the most unexpected place. The first of his many times in Bosnia over two years at the dawn of the 2010s he visited, of course,

Srebrenica, "the Auschwitz of Bosnia"

.

He had read a lot about the subject, he had thoroughly studied how that city became first a concentration camp, then an earthly hell. However, when she stood in that setting, today a well-organized cemetery set by the peaceful mooing of cows, she did not feel what he was supposed to feel.

"I expected to fall to my knees, double over in pain, and it didn't happen. I guess, in some way, I had already digested it

," the writer recalls over a video call.

To know more

Siri Hustvedt, the writer of consciousness.

"Stupid obedience to authority leads nowhere"

• Editor: ANA NÚÑEZ-MILARA

"Stupid obedience to authority leads nowhere"

Carla Nyman, the author who explores female desire from the eschatological point of view.

"It has been very quiet and always described by gentlemen"

• Editor: PABLO R. ROCES Madrid

"It has been very quiet and always described by gentlemen"

The horror awaited her, unexpectedly, painted on the walls of the old battery factory that guards the tombs, an abandoned building that one day housed the headquarters of the blue helmets in charge of ensuring the safety of thousands of refugees. that they did not protect enough. The second floor, the one with the soldiers' dormitories, was just as they left it in 1995.

Between Yogi bears and brave Donald ducks, all with a cigar hanging from their mouths, "a scattered harem of women drawn in pencil and charcoal, long hair offering their asses, their mouths or their lobotomized gaze" was spread out before Alba. The composition was crowned by a tank whose barrel was a penis with a very red glans pointing at the rear of a solicitous

pin-up girl

and an inscription in Bosnian:

"The wishes of war that really come true

. "

"I was terrified by the level of dehumanization. I had read about how peacekeepers asked starving refugees for sexual favors in exchange for food, how they did it even through bars. So I felt a first shock when I discovered the fact that someone felt some type of sexual desire while patrolling an area that was under siege, full of terrified civilians, a situation that, unfortunately, has been repeated in all wars," says the writer.

"But on the other hand I felt that, in some way, I wasn't that surprised either. The men are the ones who have always been on the front. We haven't been socialized in the invasion, in the war, but deep down that savage face , that violent drive to possess the other, blood, sex, I think it's something that women also have," she reflects.

"I thought that was also the human being

. "

"Dangerous relationships are to young girls what speed is to boys, a way to put you on the ropes"

Seen with the perspective that time gives, it was exactly that instinct that took Alba Muñoz to the Balkans, fresh out of the Faculty of Journalism. "I wanted to look into the abyss in a very romantically idealized way to see what the truth of the world and our nature is," she says.

And boy did he show up.

We find her in the first pages of the book, captive of Darko, her violent and surly Bosnian boyfriend, who kidnaps her for days in the bedroom of her family home, where he inflicts pain and pleasure on her, almost in equal parts. "

Dangerous relationships are for young girls what speed is for boys

, a way to put yourself on the ropes, to know how far you can go. Women are not even aware of what our physical strength is, and I believe that "It's bad. There is a repression of some desires and an excess of precautions that make us vulnerable to future violence," he explains.

Moth

is, finally, a fictionalized biography, but it was not born as such but as a journalistic report. The author's own victimization, abused by her partner in an environment in which she was investigating the almost institutionalized structures of sexual violence, motivated her change of focus. Because

Moth

is a story of women who recognize the victim in others but never in themselves.

"I felt a certain attraction to becoming a victim, I wanted something to happen to me, I needed to hurt myself, crash into something to feel, so that consequences would occur, so

I suffered abuse, yes

, but I placed myself on a border between control and lack of control that allowed me to feel, to be free in a way that in my childhood, too protected, I had never been," analyzes Muñoz.

"I felt a certain attraction to becoming a victim, I wanted something to happen to me so I could feel"

And in the midst of that liberation imbued with violence, the young Alba finds Nikolina, the same age, the same concerns but born in an absolutely different context, whom her boyfriend sold as a sexual slave and was passed from owner to owner throughout Europe until she managed to escape. and take refuge in a secret house with dozens of women like her. A young woman finally free who ties the leash around her neck again as soon as she is left alone. The meeting between the two marks a turning point in the novel as it did in the life of its author.

If the brand new reporter was looking for a story to tell, she finds it in a phrase from her Bosnian interlocutor when describing her new boyfriend, who doesn't seem like a clean cut either:

"I really like Marko, we talked after fucking

. "

They chat in a dilapidated room, two women abused and hooked on their abusers who look at each other and question each other from absolutely different points: "I was doing the interview of my life, with my tape recorder, my notebook, and she challenged me, dismantled me, I stripped off my intrepid journalist suit to get down to earth," Muñoz recalls.

The biggest fear of the debut as a novelist of someone who was once "one of the most fruitful creators of feminist content of the digital age in Spanish" in the defunct

Playground

is that her message will be misinterpreted, so she gets ahead of the controversy with a good

disclaimer

: "

Someone may think that I am justifying or romanticizing abusive relationships. Not at all

. What I do want is to open a debate: I get the impression that young girls today are very afraid of living. Before, we were overprotected by that patriarchal gaze and now, from feminism itself, that feeling of vulnerability is established because all men are bad. And in the end, we are in the same situation."

What was going to be a great report on the survival of trafficking in women in pacified Bosnia, already with a place in the pages of a national newspaper, became something much more intimate. In that nickname,

Moth

, which her father always dedicated to him, a complicated man who had a lot to do with his Bosnian adventure, and which bothered him so much. Until he understood it. His tendency to get too close to the light. His insistence on burning himself.