Florencia Canale: "What always interests me is the character's wound, the monster."

It's a sunny autumn morning at the historic Café de los Angelitos , a Gardel-esque spot if ever there was one, declared a Notable Bar in the city of Buenos Aires. She sips coffee without sugar and smiles. Florencia Canale is friendly and cordial, but categorical when it comes to putting it bluntly. She's here to talk to Clarín about her most recent book , *La Cruzada * (Planeta, 2025), about the life of Catalina de Erauso, better known as *La Monja Alférez*.

The author poses with ease for photos and, in her speech, offers juicy headlines. “Don't forget that I'm also a journalist,” she says , with a knowing wink. Indeed, after a brief foray into modeling and singing, Canale attended the Faculty of Humanities, and books quickly became, for her, “more than an object of study, a vital nourishment,” she says.

She first worked as a copy reader for major publishing houses. Then, she became a journalist and began interviewing writers. “Editors constantly asked me when I was going to write, when I was going to get around to it. When I thought I had something to say, that's when I decided to do it, ” she explains.

A sixth-generation niece of Remedios de Escalada de San Martín , researching her past became inevitable. “My DNA is Argentine DNA,” she says. “My paternal grandfather, from a very young age, would sit me next to him and talk to me about this aunt, who seemed a bit of a bore to me until I went to school and found out,” the author recalls.

This is how her first book, Pasión y traición (Planeta, 2011), was born, about the life of her illustrious distant aunt, who then began to become so close to her that she was almost under her skin. “ I found my home, I found my place in the world: writing . A place I never wanted to leave because leaving means dying,” she confesses.

Mark Twin once said: "A person has two important dates in their life: the day they are born and the day they discover their purpose. And it seems that Florencia was born to write. " The novel about Remedios was an immediate hit. It sold like wildfire, quickly becoming a bestseller , and is still being reprinted today.

From then on, Florencia Canale never stopped writing. To date, she has published eleven other novels, all of similar renown , which recreate the lives, loves, battles, and other life challenges of historical figures in our country, such as Manuel Belgrano; Juan Manuel de Rosas (she wrote three books about him); Justo José de Urquiza; Damasita Boedo, Juan Lavalle's lover; Madame Perichon, Viceroy Liniers' lover; Camila O'Gorman and her stormy love affair with the Jesuit priest Uladislao Gutiérrez; Manuela Sáenz, Simón Bolívar's lover; Bernardo de Monteagudo; and now, Catalina de Erauso.

–How do you choose your characters?

–In any case, I choose the character who seems interesting to me because of their contradictions. Plain lives, soft, beautiful lives are the ones we all want to live, and we know they don't exist, but they're useless when it comes to writing. Because you need conflict to write a novel. So, a character, whether male or female, who is full of shadows… what always interests me is the character's wound, the monster…

–Hemingway said that's where the light comes from…

–And I'd say that even in real life. I'm not interested in people with a perpetual smile and constant happiness at all. I like pain.

–And Catalina, how does she appear?

–I was researching for my previous novel, about the story of Bernardo de Monteagudo, and I needed the color, as we journalists say, that other side of Monteagudo during his time in the Auxiliary Army commanded by Juan José Castelli, when the guys went north and arrived in Bolivia, Chuquisaca, La Paz…

–Of course, she was there…

–Yes, so, I needed, not the political side of Monteagudo, which I had very clear. I wanted to know what parties he'd gone to, what women he'd seduced, I needed that a bit. There was a lot of rumors circulating about the Auxiliary Army's visit, that they were partying wildly, that they were carrying mines… I wanted to know a bit about that…

–The gossip of history…

–Yes, a little more elaborate. Monteagudo had been a man very open to women, he had built up quite a reputation, and that's what I wanted. To know which women he had met, which women had opened the doors for him to enter Chuquisaca society, so I learned about Bolivian traditions. Traditions are these very interesting books, these texts with a kind of slightly expanded etchings about the customs of different peoples. We have traditions from Salta, from Tucumán…

–How did you come up with them? What's the research process like before writing your novels?

–When I decide who it is, if I can, I travel to the places where my characters have been. To write The Crusade , I traveled to San Sebastián (in Guipúzcoa, Catalina de Erauso's birthplace) and to Cotaxtla (Mexico City, where the story's protagonist died). I also like buying books; many are out of print, or even incunabula, and very expensive, and some are available online. I found Bolivian traditions by searching like crazy, because I'm a bookworm.

–How do you ensure that you write with historical accuracy?

–In this case, I work with a historian. I worked for many years with Diego Arguindeguy, a master of masters who, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago. And now I work with his wife, Graciela Browarnik, who is also a historian. I ask her where I can find this or that thing… academics are essential in that.

–And then comes the fictionalization process… you have the historical data and, from there, you outline the character, imagining what he or she is like, how he or she thinks…

–Of course, that's what a historical novel is all about. It's about having historical data at your fingertips and being familiar with it, and then I start to fictionalize it. Otherwise, it's a little novel or a history textbook. So, the feeling is that I start writing and the character in question, in this case, Catalina, is like a skeleton, like a skull, a bone without flesh, and I don't see her, and I have a hard time seeing her, even though I'm already writing, and as I write, bits of flesh begin to appear on the bone…

–At first, she's a helpless little girl who is torn from her father's arms at age 4 and locked away in a convent, and it turns out that the adult Catalina undergoes a fierce metamorphosis…

–The feeling, with this woman, is that I was also telling the story of a brutal woman, who kills people, who is bloodthirsty, and I need to understand how a person gets to that point…

–The brutal thing was that she was locked away in a convent at the age of four. And that was the fate of most women at that time…

–Exactly. Forced marriage, a virgin in a convent, or a widow, there was no other destiny for a woman of that time. Even when they were widowed, it was considered a cocard to go to a convent.

–The language you use is very traditional; you use the idioms one can sense from the era. How did you arrive at that reconstruction?

–The construction of this novel, and of all novels, is the construction of a world, and if I were to invent characters, or invent customs, and in any case, invent languages ​​or transform them into the current modernity, it would be a lousy novel. I couldn't write like that. That's what happens to me when I watch miniseries or period films and hear actors and actresses using current idioms, or even during readings. I mean, if I'm reading a period book and a word from the present comes up, I'd throw it away.

–Exactly. I'm not interested in anything else. I don't enter into those contracts. I need to establish a tacit contract with the reader, which is: "Let's travel back to that moment. We'll both try—me, as the writer, and the reader, as the reader—to explore those places and be someone else spying on those scenes, those events. Otherwise, I feel like an imposter."

–Do you already know what your next character will be?

–Yes. Not much to say…

–Whatever you can: Man or woman? Century? Country?

–Woman, 16th century. Europe, enough

Florencia Canale will present her latest novel , The Crusade, this Saturday at 4 p.m. in the Tulio Halperín Donghi room.