By Zaira Eliette Espinosa
Let’s contemplate an empty house—empty of what? What does a house lack to be considered empty? The emptiness is the absence, the space when it no longer has anything and happens to contain all the memories of what there was or the imaginary of what will never be.
As in the poem «I am my own house» by Pita Amor, and, if the emptiness is also inside our body, the presences are entangled with the memory of sensations.
There is also a way of calling a home when the loneliness left by children when they leave terrifies: the empty nest syndrome.
The novel “Empty Houses,” by Mexican author Brenda Navarro, is a story of two women’s voices united by the bridge of motherhood. The voids become abysses full of questions, especially one: Where is my son?
Navarro recreates with tremendous realism the emotional episodes a mother goes through in the absence of a child. Every second spent in uncertainty is a path of nostalgia, anger, guilt, regret, and self-esteem rooted in the most demanded femininity: being a mother.
On the one hand, in a park there is the mother of a child with autism who unexpectedly disappears, and time gradually eats away at the edges of patience and sanity, just as rust devours objects in the open.
On the other hand, there is a woman who wants to be a mother and, full of ignorance and desperation to keep the man of her life, allows her eyes to find her prey in a park she had never been to before.
The rapture of life manifests itself when in life it is emotional death that reigns. For the mother of the disappeared, not having her son means not knowing how to live. And on the margins of her life, making the lives of others around her miserable.
Women who have children also disappear. Also, some women who were never able to be mothers feel that they are disappeared, without a name, without an identity in the absence of a child to validate them as women.
“Casas Vacías” criticizes the expectations that women have of motherhood; it is an x-ray of a mother’s feelings exposed in an intimate and heartbreaking language.
These two women’s voices narrating internal and external episodes of their lives with and without children are the voices that echo in the emptiness of the countless themes of motherhood, the consequences, the efforts, and the loneliness.
“Casas Vacías” is the great novel of the woman mother and the children who disappear; that thin and ghostly line that exists between depression and lucidity, pain and its throbbing, that remind you of every heartbeat of life.
The young Brenda Navarro is already one of the main Mexican authors who must be mentioned and followed in this boom of Latin American literature written by women.
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