An exclusive interview with WOODWORM author Layla Martínez

Layla Martínez: Initially, Woodworm was a short story. It was summer, I was spending a few days at my grandmother’s house, which is the house that appears in the novel, and I was in my bedroom, about to go to sleep, when the wardrobe door opened. In that wardrobe are not everyday clothes, but special clothes for the family, like my grandmother’s wedding dress, the habit my uncle wears during Holy Week or the dress my grandmother wants to be buried in. The door opened by itself and it was quite scary, and in that moment I knew I wanted to write about the history of that closet, the history of the house and the history of the women who had lived in it. In that part of Spain there is a unique death culture and it is not uncommon to see the ghosts of dead relatives. My grandmother has seen her mother’s ghost twice in that house, and no one wants to stay alone there, especially at night, so I thought there was a story to tell. Also, I wanted to tell the story of my grandmother and great-grandmother and how they survived the class and gender violence they suffered and the repression of the early years of the dictatorship. But they had been victims of all that violence and I didn’t want to re-victimize them, I wanted them, at least in fiction, to be able to take revenge, to be able to get the justice they never had. So those were my two main sources of inspiration: the desire for justice for the women in my family  and the culture of death and the ghost stories of that area.

LM: That area of the country experienced a very hard repression during the first years of the dictatorship, in the forties, because they had fought against Franco’s army. When the war ended many people had to flee to avoid being killed and many men fled to the mountains to form guerrillas and continue fighting from there. Most of the members of these guerrillas were killed in the mountains by the police and by the rich families, who organized hunting parties and invited their friends from the city to hunt people, as an exotic amusement. Their bodies were never found and those responsible for the dictatorship and those crimes were never tried. Those fighters for democracy have never had an official tribute nor has the dictatorship been symbolically condemned, so I think their ghosts are still haunting, waiting for justice. Also, today it is still a very isolated area, very sparsely populated and very poor, with unique customs and beliefs that are being lost. 

As for the women in my family, they had to survive in those hard years, in the midst of poverty and violence. My great-grandmother was killed in the war and my great-grandmother decided that she was not going to serve in the house of the rich family and that she was not going to marry anymore because she did not want to continue living that violence, so she learned to sew and learned to cast curses and spells to get the justice she had not had. 

LM: Revenge is important because it is the only way for the protagonists to get justice. When you have no power and no voice, when you are persecuted and repressed and cannot turn to formal justice, the only thing left is revenge. The spells and curses in the book are also part of that revenge. It is the only thing they have to deal with the injustices and repression they experience. 

LM: In Western tradition, a ghost is a person who has died a violent death and left something unfinished. This person cannot rest in peace because he or she has something to resolve. In that area of Spain where the novel is set, many people died like that: violently and without justice for their murders. So their ghosts continue to haunt the houses of the town. In Woodworm the relationship with the ghosts that inhabit the house evolves: at first they are afraid of them but then they understand that they should not be afraid of them because those ghosts are on their side, they are their allies because they died for the same violence that the protagonists suffer. 

The horror genre seemed to me the most appropriate to tell a story like this because in horror stories of ghosts and haunted houses generally speak of open wounds, of inherited traumas. Added to that is the culture of death in that area, where until a few years ago it was common to bury bad and cruel people upside down and to tie the legs of the corpses so that they could not return from the tomb. Besides, horror is the genre I like the most and the one I grew up with, so it’s the most natural for me. 

LM: I don’t see a relationship with my work as a journalist but I do see a relationship with my previous non-fiction book, with the essay I wrote before Woodworm. This essay is about utopias, about how we currently see the future and about the need to collectively believe in a better society in order to move towards it. The essay looked to the future and the novel looks to the past, so it would seem that they don’t have much to do with each other, but I think they do because I believe that historical memory is fundamental to build a better society and to fight for our rights. It is important to know what those who fought before us did, what they achieved and what they didn’t achieve, and why they didn’t achieve it, what worlds they dreamed of that perhaps we can make a reality. Everything that is achieved now was dreamt before.