What did that mean for that caring father who is, in addition to being a writer, a philologist? “There I understood the impact it had had on me: I heard the past come out of his mouth and I lovingly translated: ‘the car passed, the baby passed, dad passed, we will pass everything.’ Language serves to begin to negotiate with absence and loss. So what is a baby? Linguistically speaking, an absolute present, someone who lives and feels the present. The moment he names what is not there it is because he can already begin to relate to it. So, a baby ends when the past tense begins.”
– In the book you go through the moments in which your child has other linguistic advances: add prepositions, adverbs, discover the metaphor: what did you learn on that journey?
– As I wondered when a baby ends, I also wondered when childhood begins. I concluded that, with the acquisition of fiction, the concept that something can seem not to be true and be even more true in another way, or refer to things that apparently do not exist, but that have another degree of existence that goes beyond of that of material certainty. So there I thought, well, here the child begins, in full resources. And I thought it was a nice and exciting thing to take notes on that.
– Is it also a book so that Telmo can keep a record of how he learned to speak, something that is otherwise inaccessible?
– I don’t know how long I will be here in the world with my son. I lost my mother very young and I am no longer a child, so I don’t know if she would have a detailed opportunity to tell her this; So, just in case, I already told him. But it is also a book to share in general. That is, it is a record of our family emotions, because any mother or father knows that the present is so demanding and you live so much that, when I asked people who have older children what these things were like, they told me that they don’t remember. . So, I knew that they can fade, not to mention one’s own memories, at an age that in itself already means oblivion.
-Is it a way to return to your own childhood?
-Accompanying a childhood and caring for it generates a kind of chord where all the childhoods around that creature resonate. It is as if this creature radiated childhood and relived the childhoods of the entire circulating tribe, of several generations that are reread. There are memories that are unearthed, there are reconciliations that are fostered and also conflicts that are reopened. No one’s childhood remains unscathed or remains intact when we care for and accompany the childhood of another. Accompanying a childhood is a kind of shared emotion.
