Sworn virgin It is the first, and for the moment the only one, of the 10 books of Elvira Dones (Durës, Albania, 64 years old) that has been translated into Spanish. A dream fulfilled for the journalist and writer who dominates Spanish, although he prefers to chat in English in a central cafeteria in Madrid. He has come from Switzerland, where he lives, invited by Errata Naturae publishing house to promote the launch in Spain of the novel he originally published in Italian in 2007 and whose history led to the cinema in 2015.
Hana is an invented but very real character, based on an ancient Balkan tradition by which women made an oath of celibacy to live as men the rest of their life. “They gained freedom socially, but lost everything else,” summarizes the author, who knew this practice when she was a teenager and investigated her obsessively for years to shape her protagonist. It was after the publication that he knew some of these sworn virgins personally that are still alive in the north of his country. It was not easy for them to trust her to get the documentary ahead, he had to prove that he was trusting taking some more little sucking. “But I found my Hana.”
Ask. He has not lived in Albania for decades, how was his departure from the country?
Answer. I deserted when Albania was still a communist dictatorship. He was one of the few people who authorized to travel abroad because he spoke different languages and worked for state television, which was the only chain. They sent me to buy movies and documentaries. I went to Denmark, I met a Swiss political journalist and fell in love. My first marriage was in ruins, but I had a son, so I returned to Albania. After a year and a half, I left. They sent me to Milan and deserted. I never returned. It was a great scandal and the regime took it very bad because, as it was famous because it came out on television, they could not hide it from people. It was very difficult. I thought foolishly that they would not avenge my son, that they would give it to me, but they did not. They told me that, if I wanted to see him, he returned and made a public statement saying that he had betrayed the cause of socialism. I knew that, if I did, I would go directly to prison. Then the regime fell and recovered my son. I lived in Switzerland for 16 years, then 12 in the United States, seven in Washington and five in San Francisco. Then we returned to Switzerland. I have had a very adventurous life.
P. Spanish speaks, writes in Italian … how many languages dominates?
R. The Albanian, Italian, English, French, Spanish, some German, and I am studying Danish right now. I prefer to read the authors in the original language. In Spanish Leo to Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Eduardo Mendoza …
P. Have you read your book in Spanish?
R. Not yet, but I will. I am curious to see how it is.
P. The book is about a Albanian tradition for which women renounced their sexuality and took the role of men forever. How did he know about this practice?
R. When he was 16 he lived in Tirana, the capital. Albania was a communist dictatorship and we didn’t have much information about what was happening in the rest of the country. But some neighbors of my parents were from the north and went to a relative’s wedding; When they returned, they came to have coffee home and told how the three -day ceremony was, the typical Balkan madness. The man had taken three photos and, between the bride and the boyfriend, there was a very elegant man, very handsome. I asked who he was and said: “She is my cousin. But now she is a man, she is a virgin sworn.” I was a very curious girl and wanted to know what it meant. Was it a woman or a man? He replied that it was a long story and changed the subject.
P. What was that story?
R. Of loneliness. The oath of virginity is an eternal commitment, they cannot go back, whether they have decided them as their parents. They became sworn virgins when they were 13, 14 or 15 years. At that age you don’t know anything about love or sex, and they will no longer discover it. They mortified their body because only then were they allowed to be in the world of men, which means that they won socially – during centuries in Albania, women could not abandon their village without accompanying a man, for example – but lost everything else. And that led me to write the book about them, about freedom and lack of it.
I spent five years investigating because I wanted the novel to be faithful to reality, not mere fantasy ”
P. Years passed until he wrote it.
R. That story stayed with me for a long time. When I went to University I had fellow north and asked them if they knew some of those women. It became an obsession. Then I left Albania, I went to work at Switzerland and wrote other books. But I kept documented to do justice to its history. And a year and a half before I started writing the book, I was in the northern part of Albania recording a documentary for Switzerland public television and asked the fixer Albanese that if he saw a sworn virgin, told me. One day we lost ourselves because he snowed intensely and asked indications to a man traveling in mule with his rifle. It was one of them. I knew I had to do it, and I spent five years investigating because I wanted the novel to be faithful to reality, not mere fantasy.
P. Did you interview any of these women?
R. Yes, but after writing the book. The novelist in me had invented Hana – the main character – after a long investigation; But I wrote a fiction. The journalist that I am still curious, was a bit unsatisfied because he had not met them or spoken with them in person. I lived in the United States at that time and decided to go north of Albania to meet them. And I succeeded. I managed to convince them to trust me because they did not want to give an interview in front of a camera. It took me time to open their doors and, when they did, I felt very happy with the fiction I had written in the book because I was very close to the real world.
P. In the end he met them and recorded the movie.
R. I made a documentary. The last of the six women I interviewed, Sanie, was the youngest, at that time was 51 years old, and had a sister in the United States, where I dreamed of going. She decided to become a sworn virgin – she was not imposed by her father – because she wanted to play football with the children of the town and could not do it as a girl. Then he fell in love with a boy, but he never told anyone. I asked him if he regretted … I had found the Hana who had invented me. After 12 years we are still in contact.
P. Did he regret it?
R. Well yes. Although I wanted, I couldn’t be a woman in Albania. Not that anything happened to him, because the regime and the rules had changed. The women were much freer in 2007. But it would have been a dishonor for their family and for all the neighbors who respected her as a man. It would have been the people’s shop and the entire region. So he wanted to put distance between that world and her. He has succeeded. He lives with his sister in the US.
P. What did he tell you about this process of being a woman again?
R. He wanted to put a skirt and did it when he went to the United States. He also let his hair grow. A couple of years ago I asked him if there was any man in his life, or someone with whom he flirts. He replied: “It’s too late for that. But at least I wanted to feel free.” A conversation that made us laugh like crazy was when he told me that sex is overvalued. I asked him why he said it if he had never tried it. And he replied: “Yes, but you forget that for more than 30 years I lived and worked as a man. And as they considered me one of them, they talked about sex with their wives: that it was two minutes, without preliminary, without playing or anything. So I have not lost much.” I told her that sex is something else, but for her that was already in a modern world that was not yours.
P. Does this practice continue?
R. No. Albania is a free country and men have lost their control over women. I do not speak of equality because the situation in Tirana, the capital, with a million inhabitants, modern, where there is a revolution of women and the LGTBI movement is huge; than the north. But the sworn virgins are disappearing. There are very few alive.
Now something is changing, men have to relear and reeducate “
P. What are the challenges in terms of women’s rights in Albania?
R. There is a long way to go, especially in the north of the country. The woman there is still a kind of property of men due to honor. You cannot leave and have a relationship with someone; The brother or father have to approve it. They no longer kill you, but feminicide is still very strong in Albania.
P. Do you think we are in a boom to tell the reality of women?
R. It is being done and literature is very important. It is our moment. It is now or never. The Metoo Movement began everything, but there is still a long way to go. I do not know how it is here, but in Switzerland, which is a very civilized country, work and salaries remains great. Now something is changing, men have to relear and reeduc. And at this moment they hate us. I am a feminist, but not those who are angry, because I don’t see enemies, I believe in working together; But if we have to break any nose, we will.
P. What obsesses him now for his next book?
R. In my books always together with different worlds in which I have lived. So it is the story of two women – there are men around, of course – one is Switzerland and Danish, and the other is a Albanian who has migrated to Switzerland. Start with one death and know each other.