Luísa Villalta

Biography

Luísa Villalta was a prolific Galician writer, teacher and violinist. She wrote works in the genres of poetry, theatre, fiction and essay. Her poetry collection In Particular (2004) won the Espiral Maior Award for Poetry. Her theatre plays were brought together in a single volume, Luísa Villalta: The Complete Dramatic Works, by Edicións Proscritas in 2018. She wrote about the relationship between music and poetry, the language of sounds and poetics as a state of consciousness. In 2022, she was chosen as the figure to be celebrated on Galician Women in Literature Day. She taught Galician language and literature at a secondary school in Sada, Coruña, and played the violin in the Santiago de Compostela and the Galician Youth Orchestras. She died in 2004.

Synopsis

The Keys of Time (128 pages) is the third of four works of fiction by Luísa Villalta, the others being Silence, We’re Rehearsing (1991), Theory of Games (1997) and Wake Up from Your Sleep (2002). The Keys of Time was published by A Nosa Terra in 2001.

Sample

They call me Silence because nobody listens to me anymore. My friends spend the whole day in the castle, busy with their studies of useless things and daily activities like food, clothing, gardening, and trading with neighboring villages and castles. I would rather tell stories about what I see, what I feel, and what I remember. And to be honest, I’d rather tell them, not to people who might be here listening without paying attention to what I might say or write, but to those who haven’t even begun to grow inside their mothers, the ones yet to come, if the world doesn’t end before that. And I’m not going to speak of these things for the nobles or kings who are busy sending their men off to war, nor for the ladies who, instead of paying close attention to the words on the pages of a book, sit around sighing, often out of boredom, then doze off and don’t awaken until the princes or knights who are madly in love with them appear at their bedroom windows, so they dream on about a prince or knight who will never love them because their love must be so perfect that it can only be for the most perfect woman, the one who doesn’t exist or who is like all the rest. Thus their sighs, rather than for love of a prince or because they are bored to death by a book, are always from being bored by love and with themselves, which is the worst that can happen to them, a foreboding of what will end up happening when, fat and tired of having children, they realize how worthless the illusion of happiness is.