Call me Teresa de Anna R. Alós

About the book

“After so many years of living off her body, she knew very well how to silence a man, how to make him happy, and even how to make him miserable.”.

This absorbing novel based on true facts is about a young woman who practiced prostitution out of her own desire at the beginning of the 20th century and whom no one, neither men nor women, could subdue. Hers was an option that she exercised voluntarily and only for pleasure.

The author, the Barcelona writer Anna R. Alós, met the protagonist, a very popular woman in Barcelona in the 1940s, when she was already an old woman. The story of the rest of the facts and events surrounding her exciting life contains half invention and half documentation, which the author has subtly handled to give shape to Call me Teresa.

Between the lines of the novel you can distinguish revenge and gratitude, real situations for which the author has used fictional characters. And sex, with explicit scenes because sex is. Seduction also intervenes, because as Anna R. Alós indicates, sex is always a fight of wills, a fight to cause and receive pleasure.

“I would say it is like a One Hundred Years of Solitude, Catalan and erotic. A rural soap opera that happens in the world, written with a lot of knowledge, because it flows, it bubbles” ElenaPitawriter and journalist.

A novel and a heroine

Written in two different voices, Call me Teresa It begins when Candela, a young Catalan journalist living in Madrid, receives a visit from her mother and aunt, twins. Both have just found in the family house on the beach a series of notebooks of what seem like someone’s testimony, which begins in the early 1900s and ends in the 80s. It is 2003 and Candela has too much work to be interested in this. discovery and for the medal of Saint Christopher that accompanies the notebooks. However, the tenacity of her mother and her aunt and her own curiosity lead her to unravel those notebooks, without imagining that there is the crux and outcome of her own existence.

The reading that Candela begins places us in the heart of a humble family, the Trabals and their eleven children, and a place, their house in Butsènit (Lleida), in 1910. Dorotea (Tea), the most intelligent of the descendants, married Ramón Solá, Treseta’s uncle. This, a very beautiful and cheerful teenager whose skin smells like coffee caramel, she will go to live with her aunt and uncle in Barcelona until something terrible happens and she will leave the capital to enter a convent as a novice. Shortly before, she had discovered her true love, whose memory of her will color all her adventures until the end of her days.

From the convent, Treseta will flee to Buenos Aires, and there, already transformed into a spectacular beauty, she will end up being part of the House of Knights (as she baptizes it herself), the best-known and most refined brothel in the city. Teresita, which is what they are beginning to call her there, will be the claim to which all the men of Buenos Aires bourgeois society will aspire. She will turn her work into a form of pleasure, which she will teach others with her unique and very personal arts. From a luxury courtesan she will go on to run the establishment, a lady respected for her authority, her cordial manners and her resplendent physique.

Teresita’s return to Spain for an unexpected reason will mark her evolution as a person, and she will demand to be called Teresa from then on, and there will be a reunion with all the secondary characters until a central one is composed: the family, where they converge and from where the secrets that illuminate the narrative. These characters will find their place in the world and in society and, what is more important, they will fit, without suspecting it, into the life of the heroine of this story. She will be the common thread of a plot forged with pain and resentment, but also with joy, honesty, resistance and faith.

The historical framework

The narrative construction of Call me Teresa It is truly a great exercise in reading architecture, because its chapters and epilogue, which jump from year to year and go back in time as necessary to remember moments and places, accelerate the reader’s curiosity and addiction.

Another of its riches is the thoroughness with which it examines the broad historical period in which the plot takes place. From the beginning of the 20th century until the 80s, when the last of the female protagonists died. With a dizzying step to the XXI, when the narrator takes up the end of the rope to finish off her own catharsis.

The birth of unionism and the rise of Catalanism, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the second great war in Europe and the Franco dictatorship run parallel to the experiences of the protagonist. From rural Catalonia, her forced march, first to Galicia and then to Argentina, to return to her origins in a bourgeois Barcelona, ​​and then to the Pyrenees besieged by the war that overthrew the Republic, the eyes of Teresa Solá will see and tell episodes fundamental in their personal future.

Anna R. Alós places the action in places she knows best, for safety and because moving through known geographies helps the story flow. So there are two predominant frames in the scene:

Catalonia

From Lérida, where poverty and hunger took turns, to the prosperous Barcelona of great businessmen, growing fortunes and the social scale based on parties and business in the glittering mansions. Even the civil war will respect certain buoyant economies, such as that of Teresa’s husband and Lolita Cernas’s prosperous pastry shop.

Canet de Mar, Pugcerdá and Roses have a notable importance in the map of Teresa Solá’s affections. In the first of her places she will find the man who will take care of her with infinite love: in the second she will find herself with the possibility of revenge for her past and the hope of staying alive. And in Roses she will find the final calm, the rest from a lifetime of escapes and reaffirmation.

Argentina

The disembarkation in the Puerto Nuevo of Buenos Aires, under the protection of the Río de la Plata, is a picture of colors and possibilities that both Alós’ writing and Teresa’s mind see as salvation from a necessary reinvention. There she will find colorful houses, noisy and dangerous neighborhoods, but also streets full of music, people and bustle, and a house where many men enter and leave happier. The House of Knights, Teresa will call it, without knowing that she will be the soul and part of that sanctuary of pleasure. The echoes of war do not reach Argentina, but rather people who cross the oceans to be safe from ruin and secrets, like Conrado Recoder and Eladio Cernas, both capital for the decisions that Teresa Solá will make in her life.