Kiosk inspector. Advertising distributor in rich neighborhoods. Caregiver for an elderly woman in her neighborhood block. Translator of real estate brochures. Tourist accommodation receptionist. Camera operator at a funeral. Director of a poetry festival. Assistant on a tour Boney M. in Andalusia. Columnist. His girlfriend’s secretary. “I feel like I’ve been selling smoke since I set foot outside my house,” says Violeta Niebla (Málaga44 years old), whose professional career has taken paths that not even she herself suspected when, at the age of 18, her mother told her it was time to go to work. His work life is precisely the origin of Everything I did for money (Blackie Books). It is a novel that tells its truth, some lies and has a constant, the precariousnessa thread that unites all the jobs that appear on his resume and those of many others like his. “Anyone from my generation could write a book like that.”, he assures.
With a smurf mixed drink and a coffee on the table at the Flor bar, in the Malagueta neighborhood of La Malagueta, the author says that she typed the first pages during confinement. They were born from a writing workshop online with Sabina Urraca. “I wrote three stories and I realized that they all had to do with the world of work. I had had a great time and, since we still couldn’t leave the house, I decided to do some more,” he remembers. He sacrificed his work life to keep the line. And he soon realized that what was before him could be an index. Furthermore, he saw that there were empty periods in which he had worked, but they did not appear because he had done so without a contract. “I used memory. I became obsessed with filling in those gaps and I started writing,” he adds.
He did it at times for three years in Málaga, but also in Belmonte de San José —awarded by La Casa Belmonte— and in mini writing residencies —with support from the Ministry of Culture— in Los Guájares, Quesada, Sierra de Yeguas, El Borge —thanks to The Pueblo Project— or Lucerne, where she finished the work in a friend’s apartment at the end of 2023. There, 15 minutes after sending it to Blackie Books, the editor received a call Jorge de Cascante. He didn’t have to move it for more editorials. It was published on October 15. It is his first work of narrative after publishing two works of poetry —You won’t be my baby y Buy Gold— and a photobook, titled I am the source.
The book—published last October 15—is a professional anecdote full of irony, terror, humor and identity. What she has done for money makes up a unique career that has led her to live a thousand varied experiences since she started working in the Toys ‘R’ Us thanks to his uncle, responsible for the establishment in Malaga. From there his path disperses to places as different as appearing in a television series —Arrayán, from Canal Sur— or cleaning hotel rooms in Ireland, exercising public relations for bars, teaching English and teaching Spanish, curating exhibitions on the -1 floor of a municipal car park, participating in a grape harvest, writing tweets, speeches and Instagram responses for a Malaga councilor or designing crazy galas for the Malaga fantastic film festival. Jobs with or without a contract in which the salary was never what was desired: sometimes in exchange for his effort he only received a sandwich. Or not even that.
Beyond that, the work is a reflection of what anyone is and stops being by the simple fact of accepting a certain job. How much it defines people to exercise this or that job in the eyes of oneself or others when faced with the classic question of what you do. And of the many ways there are to tell what is done (or not done) during the work day and the relationship with the rest of the staff. “After being in Ireland cleaning roomsI said that I had been a receptionist there, that I traveled a lot and everything was wonderful. Nowadays, with the passing of the years, telling the truth is much easier and you even feel proud of having done things without my rings falling off,” explains the writer while finishing her sandwich. Of course, in the pages of Everything I did for money He keeps inventing to add some myth to his reality. “Who hasn’t falsified or, at least, adapted their resume?” he asks.
“I don’t know how to say no”
Although it may not seem like it, In this autofiction the author draws much more on memory what of imagination. He barely crosses characters from one job to another, enriches contexts and stretches situations until they are twisted and distanced from reality. That is why the question always arises as to whether their experiences are true, farce or a little of everything. This is exactly what he did when, at the age of 10, he wrote a diary that he embellished with fictitious situations in case his mother confiscated it. “I like my life to be interesting and I already pretended to be interesting then, even if it was a lie,” he says. So much so that at that age she went to live with her family in Córdoba and told her friends that she had moved to study veterinary medicine. “Wow,” she exclaims between laughs. Now, although their names do not appear, she fears every day the call from one of the colleagues or bosses she has had in her professional life, in case they take the words in the book wrong or believe the entire story at face value.
The review of his working life has also helped him realize that he still has no clear vocation, that he continues to doubt what it is or if it exists. It is another point in common with a good part of her generation, but there is one more shared symptom: many times she has been the one who has left work. “I don’t aspire to do the same thing all the time because I get very bored,” she says emphatically, who, at least, knows that she doesn’t want an office in an institution or a fixed working day. He prefers freedom, but he knows that, in exchange, “every month the pain in his stomach repeats when paying the self-employed fee,” acknowledges someone who still cannot say what exactly his profession is because there are many at the same time.
Writer, photographer and cultural manager, directs the Irreconciliables poetry festival with Ángelo Nestoreis putting together another book based on thousands of secrets that he has been collecting for more than 10 years, designs performance clandestine, holds a writing workshop and leads two reading clubs. Among other tasks, he is also in charge of the bureaucracy and the justification of aid for the productions he makes with his partner, the artist Alessandra García, with whom he founded Dos Bengalas and to whom, among many other things, he is united by an almost unhealthy passion for work. Meanwhile, he continues to respond with a thumbs up to almost any proposal that comes to him to be able to pay fees, expenses, quarterly VAT. “I still don’t know when the time will come to take a couple of jobs and be able to reject the rest,” sighs who, at least, can continue collecting anecdotes in case he wants to expand his novel in future editions.